Benjamin H. Bratton is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, and on the Cultural Studies faculty at SCI_Arc
(the Southern California Institute of Architecture)

He is also Principal of The Culture Industry, a design research and planning consultancy focusing on how physical and virtual interfaces. CI links artists and engineers from a wide range of disciplines to working with a small number of committed clients to envision, model and plan the impact that planetary computation will have on their organizations and their markets. To link , a pervasive computing consultancy to link physical and virtual interfaces into common transformative strategies.

Bratton's Doctoral work was in Sociology. Bratton is a social theorist working within and across multiple institutional contexts --academic, artistic, corporate, theoretical, projective, literary-- experimenting with their systems of production, and with how the means allowed by each can work in strong and weak relation to each other.

His research, writing, and practical interests include contemporary social theory, the perils and potentials of pervasive computing, architectural theory and provocation, inverse brand theory, software studies, systems design and development, and the rhetorics of exceptional violence.

Since 2001 he has taught design and theory in the graduate program at SCI_Arc, one of the world's most progressive and experimental architecture schools, from 2004-08 co-directed the Brand Lab at UCLA Department of Design|Media Arts, and is a Founding Fellow of the Center for Software Studies at CAL-IT2 at U.C. San Diego.

"Parallel to contemporary artists who produce significant theoretical and critical works, Bratton is a theorist who intervenes within multiple institutional contexts: art, design, computer science, architecture, in order to, like those others to enact new connections between aesthetics and technology and how each works for the social. In his practice, the membranes between cultural, technological, and economic discourses are not just challenged they are fully breached." -- JBF.

Among his most recent writings, "The Logisitics of Habitable Circulation," Bratton's introduction to the new edition of Paul Virilio's Speed and Politics was recently published by Semiotext(e)/MIT Press. Suspicious Images/ Latent Images (with Natalie Jeremijenko) is available for download and purchase from Situated Technologies.

Bratton has published widely, from AD and Volume to BlackBook and 34, and has been an visiting lecturer and critic at Columbia, Pratt, Yale, Architectural Association of London, Penn, USC, UCLA, Art Center College of Design, Brown, the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, among many others.

He was also co-chair of ambient:interface, the 54th (and final) International Aspen Design Conference. This venerable institution was run by for many years by Reyner Banham, among others, and closed with the theme for our third machine age: 'all design is interface design'

email: benjamin (at) bratton.info