Benjamin Bratton is the Knowlton School’s Spring 2015 Herbert Baumer Distinguished Visiting Professor. Bratton joins a long list of prominent practitioners and scholars as Baumer Professors since the program’s inception in 1996, including Sylvia Lavin, Stan Allen, Zaha Hadid, Steven Holl, Eric Owen Moss, Greg Lynn and last autumn’s Baumer Professor Preston Scott Cohen. During the course of their time at Knowlton, Baumer Professors lead a graduate design seminar and present a public lecture as part of the School’s Baumer Lecture Series. 

Bratton is a theorist whose work spans philosophy, art and design. He is Associate Professor of Visual Arts, faculty coordinator of the MFA program and Director of The Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego. Bratton is also Professor at The European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. His research is situated at the intersections of contemporary social and political theory, computational media & infrastructure, architectural and urban design problems, and the politics of synthetic ecologies and biologies. Current work focuses on the political geography of cloud computing, highly-granular universal addressing systems, and alternate models of ecological governance. His next book, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, is forthcoming from MIT Press.

Most recent selected texts include: "On Apps and Elementary Forms of Interfacial Life", "What We Do is Secrete: On Virilio, Planetarity and Data Visualization", "Geoscapes & the Google Caliphate: On Mumbai Attacks", "Root the Earth: On Peak Oil Apohenia" and "Suspicious Images/ Latent Interfaces" (with Natalie Jeremijenko). Rrecent selected lectures online include "We Need to Talk About TED" at TEDx San Diego; "2 or 3 Things I Know About The Stack" at Bartlett School of Architecture, London and at WSA at University of Southampton; "On the Nomos of the Cloud" at Berlage Institute, NL and MOCA, Los Angeles; "Accidental Geopolitics" at The Guardian Summit; "Ambivalence and/or Utopia" at University of Michigan and UC Irvine; and "Surviving the Interface" at Parsons School of Design. More lectures here. Recent Interviews with Bratton include: in The Guardian, with Metahaven in Print, with Calit2.

Before coming to U.C. San Diego in 2009, Bratton taught theory and design for a decade at SCI-Arc and from 2003-08 in the UCLA Department of Design|Media Arts. Bratton has lectured widely, and is the author of many articles, book chapters, in both academic and popular publications,  and has been an visiting lecturer and critic at Columbia, Pratt, Yale, Architectural Association of London, Penn, USC, UCLA, Art Center College of Design, Michigan, Brown, the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Bauhaus-University, Moscow State, among others. He was also co-chair of ambient:interface, the 54th (and final) International Design Conference in Aspen.