# Design and Existential Risk. A series of lectures at Parsons
“These are the oldest memories on Earth, the time-codes carried in every chromosome and gene. Every step we’ve taken in our evolution is a milestone inscribed with organic memories- from the enzymes controlling the carbon dioxide cycle to the organization of the brachial plexus and the nerve pathways of the Pyramid cells in the mid-brain, each is a record of a thousand decisions taken in the face of a sudden physico-chemical crisis. Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs. The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurons and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time.”
Ballard, J. G., The Drowned World & The Wind From Nowhere, (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1965), p. 39
Ed Keller is the new Associate Dean and Professor at Parsons the New School for Design and he has concocted a pretty interesting series of lectures from October to December that would be gathered under the title: Design and Existential Risk.
More information can be found on the official blog.
October 21 Robin Hanson, Associate Professor, George Mason University; Research Associate, Oxford Future of Humanity Institute
October 28 Keller Easterling, Professor, Yale University; author, Enduring Innocence
November 4 Benjamin H. Bratton, Director, Center for Design and Geopolitics, UCSD in conversation with McKenzie Wark, Associate Dean, Eugene Lang College, The New School
November 11 Jeffrey Inaba, INABA, C-Lab
November 18 Kazys Varnelis, Director, Network Architecture Lab, Columbia Univ. GSAPP
Date TBA Elizabeth Ellsworth, Associate Provost for Curriculum and Learning and Professor, Media Studies, The New School; smudge studio / Jamie Kruse, smudge studio and David Gersten, Professor of Architecture, The Cooper Union; Visiting Professor, RISD
Date TBA Bruce Sterling, author, Tomorrow Now
December 2 Mark Wigley, Dean, Columbia University GSAPP in conversation with Joel Towers, Dean, Parsons
December 9 Michael Chen and Jason Lee, Pratt Institute School of Architecture, Crisis Fronts Design Research, with Annie Kwon and Adriana Young, The New School, GPIA Crisis Networks
An important information is that Ed Keller is very likely to also organize a symposium in March 2011 at Parsons around the incredible book of Reza Negarestani: Cyclonopedia which I wrote about in a previous article. The symposium's title would be Leper Creativity
...to be continued...
