Nicolay Boyadjiev on media and design as inquiry

We catch up with the creative director and strategist to talk about his new role at Antikythera, an r&d lab for the evolution of intelligence.

If there is a connecting thread to the work of Nicolay Boyadjiev it might be institutional design. When Nicolay was on the show last year (episode 263), we spoke about Practice Lab, the platform he ran for the architectural non-profit re:arc that developed new ways of funding architectural practice in service of climate action. It’s a conversation about design, architecture, strategy, and climate but it’s also a conversation that imagines new forms of design and new ways of practice.

Since that episode, Nicolay has taken a new role as the design director at Antikythera, an “r&d institute for planetary computation and the evolution of intelligence” led by philosopher and theorist Benjamin Bratton. As a fan of both Boyadijiev and Bratton, I was curious to hear about this new organization (which reunited the two, who previously worked together at Strelka) and what they are working on so I caught up with Nicolay to chat about Antikythera, artificial intelligence, publishing, design, Strelka, and more. Our conversation is published here, with some edits for clarify.

Antikythera is described as an “r&d institute for planetary computation and the evolution of intelligence.” What does that mean and what form does that work take?

Antikythera operates on the premise that we are living through a moment where technology has literally outpaced the conceptual vocabulary available to make sense of it. In many ways, the proliferation of genuinely new technical features and cognitive possibilities we still group under the over-extended label of “AI” is truly something like an industrial revolution arriving before its own “thermodynamics”; i.e. the machine works, but we are still scrambling for meaningful theories to explain the kinds of intelligence, agency, selfhood, society etc. that are being produced and revealed in real time before our eyes.

The other foundational premise is that what the institute describes as “planetary computation” — the “accidental megastructure” of satellites, fibre optic cables, data clouds and sensor networks that now constitutes a kind of cognitive exoskeleton around the planet — not only enables this process, but also fundamentally discloses how intelligence is not a property of individual brains but rather a social, “planetary” phenomenon evolving through the scaffolding interaction of genetic, biological, and now technological and linguistic systems accumulated over time. By “evolution of intelligence”, Antikythera’s focus isn’t on AI as a product or an industry but rather on its implications as a new substrate of cognition, woven into much older substrates that have been running since the Cambrian explosion...

As such, you can probably say that Antikythera’s work is primarily philosophical and unapologetically so: working through conceptual frameworks, speculative models, meta-narratives and foundational questions across its various publication platforms. But I think this work also carries extended implications for design, especially institutional design, given that under the circumstances the real bottleneck isn’t necessarily bounded by the optimisation of technical benchmarks as much as the creative formulation of alternative epistemic and organisational forms around these new systems. This is why the work takes the form of pop-up R&D labs or “studios” surfacing and collaborating with multidisciplinary creative polymaths, where philosophy becomes a way of doing design and design becomes a way of doing philosophy.

Tell me about your role as design director. What is design’s role, both in Antikythera, but also in planetary computation more generally?