The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology
19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia
Antikythera × MIT Architecture
May – Nov 2025
Between certainty and contingency, decisions and evolution, The Next Earth coheres—with or without us. How we address our own planetary agency is the subject of this exhibit; a conversation between Antikythera’s and MIT Architecture’s current research on climate, cosmology and computation.
Antikythera examines the Earth as an ever-evolving and increasingly artificialized reality, as expressed through its own research, new commissions, as well as artifacts from the winding history of early Modern philosophy, astronomy and cosmology. In conversation with this planetary focus, MIT Architecture presents a kaleidoscope of thirty-seven different takes on what it has meant and what it might mean to practice with an eye to the planetary ramifications of architecture and design. The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology presents the questions we may ask to compose and inhabit the next Earth, together.
Antikythera
Curators: Benjamin Bratton, Nicolay Boyadjiev
Exhibition Design: Nicolay Boyadjiev, GIGA Studio
MIT Architecture
Curators: Nicholas de Monchaux, Ana Miljacki, Calvin Zhong
Exhibition Design: Bisa Associati (Sandro Bisa, Silvia Lupi, Annachiara Sartor) with assistance from Sloan Aulgur
The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology was made possible through the generous support of the Berggruen Institute, Berggruen Arts and Culture, MIT Architecture, MIT School of Architecture and Planning, and MIT’s Center for Art, Science and Technology.
The Noocene
Antikythera
The “Noosphere” is the sphere of thought that emerges from other physical and biological layers of Earth through the interaction of minds. It is not metaphysical; it is the cumulative result of matter becoming cognitive, and partially aware of itself. Crucially, the evolution of intelligence at planetary scale is also the cause of a comprehensive terraforming of Earth: the Noocene.
This epoch is defined by a paradox. At the same historical moment that complex intelligence begins to grasp its own evolution, it also begins to recognize that its success may undermine the foundations of its future. What is the role of computation and cosmology in both recognitions? How might this epoch come to better understand itself and thus orient itself?
At least as far back as the Antikythera mechanism in 200 BC, artificial computation has been a tool of cosmology. That mechanism was both a calculative and navigational tool, and like computation today, it oriented intelligence in relation to its planetary condition. Despite significantly clearer and more precise astronomical awareness, our grasp of what that computation implies for the composition of the next Earth remains cloudy and contradictory.
As part of The Next Earth, The Noocene is an exhibition of ideas, both ancient and new. It links the present moment at which artificial intelligence emerges – “the fire apes have made the rocks think fast” as we say – with the deep evolutionary history of human intelligence, computational intelligence and planetary intelligence, which are, in the end, all part of the same story.
The pieces presented in this exhibition are curated and created by Antikythera, a philosophy of computation think tank directed by Benjamin Bratton that organizes interdisciplinary research with a leading international network. Antikythera’s work is published by MIT Press in a book series and an online journal.
The Antikythera Monolith recalls the black obelisk from 2001, a beacon that called out to HAL9000, an early AI which reluctantly brought astronauts on its journey to answer the aliens’ call. The Monolith features selections from the archive of Antikythera’s work presented as a generative matrix of cinematic source materials overlaid with key concepts of the school of thought. It is a movie to be read and an architectural surface to be absorbed.
The Monolith is not presented as a work of art, nor even primarily of Design, but as a physical mechanism for the compressed presentation of ideas, to be both seen and read, both scanned and contemplated. Humans have now learned to produce and ingest information at scales and at speeds that would frighten our ancestors. This new literacy is based on information abundance rather than information scarcity. The main matrixed work is drawn from Antikytheras studios, projects, lectures, and publications and includes contributions from 50+ affiliate and studio researchers and collaborators. It features excerpts from Accept All Cookies, a book by Benjamin Bratton published in concert with the exhibition. Interspersed in the flow are four specially commissioned films derived directly from work in the Antikythera journal with MIT Press.
Planetary Vision
Earth Watches the Black Hole, The Black Hole Watches the World
Black holes prefer to remain invisible. They reflect no light, emit no light—the biggest and brightest ones are so far away that they carve out an angle about the same as an atom held at arm’s length. It would take a planet-sized telescope to see it. In April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (EHTC) did just this. Some 200 collaborators, and telescopes in five continents synthesized such an earth-sized instrument. Exploiting the spinning of the earth as part of the apparatus, the EHTC recorded the billion-degree plasma around the horizon: the first image of a black hole. Some of us started asking: what if we had a virtual telescope larger than the planet? Could we peer deep into the doughnut-like image to glimpse not hot gas, but a thin bright ring of pure light orbiting the black hole—light gathered from all parts of the universe that the black hole could see? In this sense, the black hole watches us while we watch it. The tantalizing possibility of detecting and measuring the photon ring has set in motion planning for a space mission (The Black Hole Explorer) that would launch a radio-telescope in a 25,000 km orbit around the earth, integrated with terrestrial radio-telescopes. It would produce the highest resolution images in the history of astronomy.
Work by Peter Galison, in close collaboration with Robert G. Pietrusko and Stewart Smith
Director/Producer: Peter Galison
Lead Designers, Animators: Robert G. Pietrusko, Stewart Smith
Associate Producer: Lukas Gianocostas
Composer/Performer: Zoe Keating
Black Hole Sonification: Daniel Palumbo
Latent Spacecraft
Latent Spacecraft is a series of visualizations targeting the latent space of spoken and written communication. Latent space is a term used to indicate an unobserved space that is not normally experienced in written or vocalized outputs. It can nonetheless be examined in various ways, including with artificial intelligence (AI). Latent Spacecraft consists of three main parts. The first is a time-series visualization of the so-called fiwGAN by computational linguist Gašper Beguš. FiwGAN is an AI model designed to closely parallel the patterns that emerge in the brain when we utter words, using random noise as input. Most outputs of this GAN (short for Generative Adversarial Network) are sounds that do not correspond to existing words. Some of the fiwGAN’s concatenations make “sense,” though. The outputs of the model coincide with points in the model’s underlying mathematical vector space, which Latent Spacecraft is hovering through using the idea of a thick, cloudy, nebulous cursor. We experience a parallel to the “babbling” that is observed in infants across various animal species. The latent space from which these utterings emerge has no clearly drawn line between sense and nonsense. The capture of the visualization presented in Venice is a short film that translates fiwGAN’s vector space into a potential interface. The utterings of the GAN are subtitled in handwritten type, alluding to the writer James Joyce’s noted dislike of typewriters. The soundscape interminingling with fiwGAN’s outputs records birdsong, coinciding with interfacial configurations flickering through the model’s navigations through the latent vector.
As a project, Latent Spacecraft consists of two further visualizations that are under development. One of them is a combined GAN/Large Language Model, trained on respectively an audio book version and a plaintext version of the 1939 novel, Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce (1882-1941). In Finnegans Wake, “nonsensical” words—seemingly representing a latent space—are densely interwoven into the (extremely long) narrative. This visualization draws on the linguist Nina Beguš’s work on artificial humanities, embedding AI into our ideas about literature and poetry in nonobvious ways. A third visualization as part of Latent Spacecraft starts with audio recordings of Alex (1976-2007)—a grey parrot cared for and trained by animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg on various advanced cognitive tasks, including speech. This visualization iterates on nightly tape recordings of Alex, during which he can be heard exercising words without supervision, and occasionally, misspeaking—in yet another sign of the latent space.
Work by Metahaven with Riccardo Petrini, in close collaboration with Gašper & Nina Beguš
Studies in Artificial Life
“Studies in Artificial Life” presents a series of experiments and visualizations of digital artificial life, showing evolutionary phase transitions in computational and reproductive complexity within informational ecologies. Software used includes Brainfuck, among the most elemental programming languages invented. Developed as part of Google’s Paradigms of Intelligence research group, this work explores the foundations of life, computation and emergent intelligence arising from simple interactions building upon one another through increasingly complex replications. Unlike many other "artificial life” experiments, these do not set initial conditions that determine paths of evolution. The experiments show spontaneous computation/ evolution occurring, growing and maturing. The system begins in an entropic state and moves toward increasingly rich order as clusters capable of replication both survive and perpetuate themselves as components in yet more complex forms. The implications are profound. They suggest that evolution itself is computational in a sense that fractures our definitions of “computation” and indeed of life itself. Works included: Z80 Life: An Emergent Digital Ecosystem, DeepDreams (are made of this), BFF phase transition: order from chaos and The Digital Heartbeats
Work by Blaise Agüera y Arcas with Alexander Mordvintsev
Omophagy
Omophagy is the eating of raw food. The term is ferally associated with the Roman god Baccus in that it is a departure from technological and organized society. It is a frenzied turn toward consuming what is left of the natural world in the face of its imminent erasure. The piece "Omophagy", which takes place over 7 short movements, is an industrial, ambient, synth pop and post industrial musical homage to the pent up desperation that leads us as inherently confused humans towards the release of Baccus. We have given ourselves an excess of power but we are too animalistic to wield it constructively. The work is situated as framing the explorations of computation and cosmology, referencing the chaos that ultimately precedes and exceeds life’s work of life’s fight against entropy. The work reminds us that the boundary between the raw and the cooked, the atechnical and the technical, is always and forever blurred by the violence of life itself. The world eats itself and only thereby is it a living world.
Composed and performed by Xiu Xiu
