This development of this book was honed largely through invited lectures and conference presentations to varied disciplinary audiences, including art, architecture, design, computer science, economics, international relations, literature, media studies, philosophy, and political science. My thanks to those responsible for invitations to present and discuss interim versions of this work at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London; proto/e/co/logics 2 conference, Rovink, Croatia; École-Normale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais; Parsons/The New School, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; University of Michigan; Berlage Institute, Rotterdam; Studio-X, Columbia University, New York; Princeton School of Architecture; Moscow State; St. Petersberg State; Institute for Higher Economics, Moscow; Carnegie Endowment, Moscow; Knowlton School of Architecture, Ohio State University; e-flux Main Space, New York; Winchester School of the Arts, University of Southampton; Strelka Institute of Architecture, Moscow; The Fall Semester, Miami; The Summer Forum, Joshua Tree, California; Simon Fraser University, Vancouver; Incredible Machines conference, Vancouver; California Institute of the Arts, Valencia; University of Buffalo; University of Southern California; The Guardian Summit, New York; University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario; Sonic Acts, Amsterdam; TBA21-Augarten, Vienna; Kazan State University, Kazan, Tartarstan, Russia; European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland; Duke University; UCLA; UC Santa Barbara; UC Irvine; and others.
The material in the book is previously unpublished, save for a few passages drawn from articles and book chapters I have published over the past few years. In most cases, I have reworked these here, but the cores of the ideas are in the original versions, and I acknowledge them with thanks. Sections of the “Earth” chapter appeared in New Geographies 7: Geographies of Information, ed. Ali Fard and Taraneh Meshkani (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2015). Sections of the “Cloud” and “Interface” chapters draw from “On Geoscapes and the Google Caliphate: Except #Mumbai,” Theory, Culture and Society Annual Review 26 (2009): 329–342. This original article in many ways was the seed material around which this book evolved. My thanks to Ryan Bishop for his invitation to contribute, and also for setting The Stack in motion. Sections of the “City” chapter draw from “Ambivalence and/or Utopia,” in Bracket 2: Goes Soft, ed. Neeraj Bhatia and Lola Sheppard (Barcelona: Actar, 2013), from “Megastructures,” in Entr’acte, ed. Jordan Geiger (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015), and from “Parametricist Architecture (Would Be a Good Idea)” in The Politics of Parametricism, ed. Matthew Poole and Manuel Shvartzberg (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Sections of the “Interface” chapter draw from “iPhone City (v.2008),” Digital Cities AD: Architectural Design, ed. Neal Leach, volume 79, no. 4 (2009): 90–97 (London: Wiley, 2009), and from “On Apps and Elementary Forms of Interfacial Life,” in The Imaginary App, ed. Paul D. Miller and Svetlana Matviyenko, 3–16 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). Sections of the “Earth” and “User” chapters draw from “What We Do Is Secrete: On Virilio, Planetarity and Data Visualization,” in Virilio and Visual Culture, ed. Ryan Bishop and John Armitage, 180–206 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Parts of the concluding chapter draw from “The Black Stack” e-flux journal, no. 53 (March 2014), with special thanks to Julieta Aranda. This e-flux piece was a reworked version of a co-keynote at Transmediale 2014 with Metahaven; thanks to Ryan Bishop (again), Jussi Parikka, and Sean Cubitt for the invitation to Berlin. Finally, special thanks to Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk of Metahaven for their ongoing friendship and collaboration (and for the excellent book cover). Many of the key ideas of this book developed in relation to our dialogues, some published and others not.