Introduction: Socio-Techno-Environmental Entanglements

Our present condition urges those critically and creatively engaged with it, to address the transformative potentials that are brought about by a highly intertwined triad of changes. As the posthuman philosopher Rosi Braidotti notes, these three changes can no longer be addressed in isolation or in the context of singular disciplines. At an...

Annotate This!: Semiotization, Automation and the Recursive Causality of Images

It is common enough question: What is the human? Sure enough, it is also a question that has troubled some of the greatest minds to walk this planet. Nevertheless, one might wonder, is it really a good question in its own right? To show our allegiances from the outset, we categorically declare it an extremely bad question – in the sense of being...

An Athens yet to Come

The massive and ongoing influx of refugees to Athens that started in the beginning of the century would meet a radical change that occurred after the Olympic Games of 2004, producing the germ that would transform the Athenian urban ecologies: an absolute retreat to the private, understood not in financial or market terms but in terms of...

Ananke's Sway: Architectures of Synaptic Passages

Philosopher Gilbert Simondon claims that what one perceives is neither outlines nor shapes, but thresholds of intensity. Therefore, Simondon points out that sensation is nothing but intensive and differential; it is the ‘seizure of a direction, not of an object.’ However, the issue is how one can examine the sensation of a direction that does...

Tracing the Intensive: On Assemblages, Technicities and Urban Pedagogies

Nowadays, emerging technologies continuously shift our understanding of human evolution as well as influence the understanding of the built and urban environment. It is evident that architectural and urban pedagogies are equally impacted by the so-called digital turns. On the one hand, digital technologies introduce a great variety of technical...

An Introduction to Design Commons

The reasons for a dedicated edition on “design and commoning” are twofold. First, the recent surge of renewed interest in the social conditions of design remains atheoretical. A deeper theoretical and philosophical foundation will help problematize the link between commoning and design, and in doing so define the operative theories, concepts...

Pings and Hups

Etymologically unattested yet artistically long praised, there is a profound relation between life and light; next to both, the almost self-evident (and scientifically undisputed) relation between light and flow, lux and flux. Would it be correct then to understand life as an issue of perception and manipulation of flows? Surprisingly, this is a...