A Germ Theory
The Germ Theory (2020)
video, Super 8, 35mm, HD, 1'
produced by Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Rivoli
In The Stack. On Software and Sovereignity, Benjamin Bratton analyzes digital changes in the context of a review of political philosophy. From cloud platforms to mobile apps, passing through the connectivity that increasingly crosses contemporary cities, Bratton proposes to frame the different computational systems that act in everyday life no longer as forms that exist independently, linked by contingent interactions, but as a coherent whole; an entity with soft edges that Bratton defines as an "accidental megastructure", at the same time a computational infrastructure and a new government architecture. This infrastructure takes the form of a stack structured by six interconnected levels: Earth (the raw material that digital technology uses), Cloud (the weight of global corporations such as Google, Amazon and Facebook on the sovereignty of states), City (the daily experience of the cloud-computerized urban space), Address (identification as a form of management and control), Interface (the interfaces that connect user and computer, such as apps), User (human and non-human agents such as bots and some types of social accounts). Paraphrasing Bratton, the data from individuals shape the megastructure. At the same time, the megastructure shapes the data of the individual and the space in which it moves.
Exhibitions
2020 Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Cosmo Digitale, The Digital Trauma curated by Giulia Colletti, Turin
2022 Germination curated by Ilaria Bernardi, Studio Barn, Ghent, New York
