Wind Tunnel

Alain Badiou, Ph.D., born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, holds the Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School EGS. Alain Badiou was a student at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1950s. He taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) from 1969 until 1999, when he returned to ENS as the Chair of the philosophy department. He continues to teach a popular seminar at the Collège International de Philosophie, on topics ranging from the great 'antiphilosophers' (Saint-Paul, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Lacan) to the major conceptual innovations of the twentieth century. Much of Badiou's life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolt in Paris. Long a leading member of Union des jeunesses communistes de France (marxistes-léninistes), he remains with Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel at the center of L'Organisation Politique, a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues (including immigration, labor, and housing). He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works.

Emily Bills received her PhD in the history of architecture and urban planning from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Her work on telephone infrastructure and Los Angeles received a Graham Foundation Carty Manny Award. She’s also received fellowship and grant support from the Smithsonian, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Huntington Library, and the Society of Architectural Historians. Recent curatorial projects include Pedro E. Guerrero: Photographs of Modern Life, Catherine Opie: In & Around L.A., and Héléne Binet: Fragments of Light. She is currently working on a book about Marvin Rand. Emily is Coordinator of the Urban Studies Program in the College of Transdisciplinarity at Woodbury University.

For more than a decade, Estudio Teddy Cruz has been claiming the urgency to radicalize the specificity of the political at local scales in order to rethink current global dynamics and their macro institutional frameworks. The Tijuana-San Diego border has served as laboratory from which to re-think current politics of surveillance, immigration and labor, density and sprawl, the polarization of informal and formal systems of housing and urbanization and the expanded gap between wealth and poverty. As a research-based practice, Estudio Teddy Cruz has amplified urban conflict as a productive zone of controversy leading to constructive dialog and new modes of intervention into established politics and economics of development and marginal neighborhoods as sites of artistic experimentation.

Teddy Cruz received the prestigious Rome Prize in Architecture in 1991 and in 1997 recieved a Master in Design Studies from Harvard's University Graduate School of Design. In 2005, he was the first recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture On The City Prize, by the Canadian Center of Architecture and the London School of Economics. In 2008 he was selected to represent the US in the Venice Architecture Biennial, and was part of the important exhibition Small Scale, Big Change; New Architectures of Social Engagement at The Museum of Modern Art in Nrwe York in 2010. In 2011, he was a recipient of the Ford Foundation Visionaries Award, the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture by the French National Museum of Architecture and was named one of the 50 MOst Influential Designers in America by Fast Company Magazine. Teddy Cruz is currently a professor in public culture adn urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San Diego, and the co-founder of the Center for Urban Ecologies.

Tim Durfee directs Tim Durfee Studio, and conducts his design research through amp - a studio he operates through Media Design Practices at Art Center College of Design. Previously, he taught architectural design at SCI-Arc, where he was Director of Visual Studies. His work engages a range of subjects and media – including buildings, constructed objects and spaces, video, interfaces, maps, and writing. He has an M.Arch from Yale University.

Keller Easterling is an architect, writer and professor at Yale University. Her most recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure networks as a medium of polity. Another recent book, Subtraction (Sternberg Press, 2014), considers building removal or how to put the development machine into reverse. An ebook essay, The Action is the Form: Victor Hugo’s TED Talk (Strelka Press, 2012) previews some of the arguments in Extrastatecraft.

Other books include: Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) which researched familiar spatial products in difficult or hyperbolic political situations around the world and Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999) which applied network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure.

Easterling is also the co-author (with Richard Prelinger) of Call it Home: The House that Private Enterprise Built, a laserdisc/DVD history of US suburbia from 1934–1960. She has published web installations including: Extrastatecraft, Wildcards: a Game of Orgman and Highline: Plotting NYC. Easterling’s research and writing was included in the 2014 Venice Biennale, and she has been exhibited at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Rotterdam Biennale, and the Architectural League in New York. Easterling has lectured and published widely in the United States and abroad. The journals to which she has contributed include Domus, Artforum, Grey Room, Cabinet, Volume, Assemblage, e-flux, Log, Praxis, Harvard Design Magazine, Perspecta, and ANY.

Jesse LeCavalier is an award-winning designer, writer, and educator. His book, The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in 2016. In 2015, he was the recipient of the New Faculty Teaching Award from the Association of the Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). He was the 2010–11 Sanders Fellow at the University of Michigan and a Poiesis Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU. His research has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the New York State Council for the Arts, and the BMW Foundation. LeCavalier's work has appeared in Cabinet, Public Culture, Art Papers, Monu, JAE, and Architectural Design.

Shannon Mattern is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at The New School. She teaches and writes about media infrastructures, media aesthetics, libraries, archives, and other media spaces. She’s a columnist for Places, a landscape and urbanism journal, for which she’s recently written a series of articles about data and cities; and she’s currently working on books about the longue durée of the mediated city, and the design of “intellectual furnishings”—the structures we create to house and store media.

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Edward A. Shanken writes and teaches about the entwinement of art, science, and technology with a focus on interdisciplinary practices involving new media. He is Associate Professor in the Digital + Media MFA program at Rhode Island School of Design and a member of the Media Art History faculty at the Donau University in Krems, Austria. Prior academic posts include Visiting Associate Professor of Digital and Experimental Media Arts (DXARTS) at University of Washington, Dorothy Kayser Hohenberg Chair of Excellence in Art History at University of Memphis, Universitair Docent of New Media at University of Amsterdam, Executive Director of the Information Science + Information Studies program at Duke University, and Professor of Art History and Media Theory at Savannah College of Art and Design. Fellowships include National Endowment for the Arts, American Council of Learned Societies, UCLA, University of Bremen, and Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Shanken earned a Ph.D. and MA in Art History at Duke University, an MBA at Yale University, and a BA at Haverford College.

Recent and forthcoming publications include essays on art and software, art historiography, land art, investigatory art, sound art and ecology, and bridging the gap between new media and contemporary art. His book, Inventing the Future: Art, Electricity, New Media was published in Spanish in 2013 as Inventar el Futuro, with Portuguese and Chinese translations forthcoming in paper and E-text. He edited and wrote the introduction to a collection of essays by Roy Ascott, Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness (University of California Press, 2003). His critically praised survey, Art and Electronic Media (Phaidon Press, 2009) has been expanded with an extensive, multimedia Online Companion: www.artelectronicmedia.com. He is editor of Systems (Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2015).

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Lorie Velarde is a GIS Analyst with the Irvine Police Department in Irvine, California and an instructor in the spatial analysis of crime. During her 29-year law enforcement career, she has designed and implemented a department-wide geographic information system (GIS), instructed over 30 law enforcement courses, and published in the area of geographic profiling. She holds a Master of Science degree in Criminology, a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Ecology, a California State Multiple Subject Teaching Credential, and California Department of Justice Certification in Crime and Intelligence Analysis. Lorie has received several awards for her work, including the prestigious International Association of Chiefs of Police/ChoicePoint Award for Criminal Investigative Excellence and 2011 Southern California Crime and Intelligence Analyst Association's Crime Analyst of the Year.

Mark Vallianatos is Policy Director of the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College, where he works on and teaches about land use, transportation, streets and food policies. Mark is interested in the history and potential of policy to reflect and to shape "how we should live." He serves on zoning advisory committee to the re:code LA process and is researching the policy history of two Southern California icons: food trucks and detached, single family houses.

Richard Wheeler is an artist. He investigates locations, tools, methods, and cultures of observing, representing, and interacting with the world around us.

Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles-based critic, editor, and curator. Her work is situated at the intersection architecture and media cultures. She is the West Coast Editor of the Architects Newspaper and she is the 2015 recipient of the Bradford Williams Medal for excellence in writing about landscape architecture. Zeiger is author of New Museums, Tiny Houses and Micro Green: Tiny Houses in Nature, and the forthcoming Tiny Houses in Cities. In 1997, Zeiger founded loud paper, an influential zine and digital publication dedicated to increasing the volume of architectural discourse.

She teaches in the Media Design Practices MFA program at Art Center College of Design and is co-president of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design.