Architecture—as both a discourse & discipline—has evolved a studio culture in which speculative and experimental modes of research are given a degree of autonomy from direct professional application, allowing it to explore ideas and literacies by working through projective models. Today, the software and hardware infrastructures of planetary computation require the same kind of studio culture: one that focuses on foundational questions of what computational systems are and could be, examines what is necessary and what isn’t, maps scenarios to test and chart trajectories accordingly, and considers the path towards applications as a function of new categories.

Research Studios surface counterintuitive concepts and develop key research themes through propositions that move technological speculation beyond simplistic utopian and dystopian agendas. This approach recognizes that technologies are never simply good or bad, but rather mechanisms that reveal things about the world and reposition the agents, environments, protocols, materials, and infrastructures that compose and organize it. Research studios focus on first-principles and pre-category thinking, resulting in foresight media specific to the arena of focus (i.e.papers, propositions, and films) published in the Antikythera journal.