Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University

Ingo Niermann

"The Monadic Age”

[Response: Beatriz Colomina]

Tuesday, October 29, 2024 @5pm ET

N107 (School of Architecture)

The world is marked by deepening conflicts—between democracies and autocracies, woke and populist identity politics, rich and poor, continued environmental exploitation and harsh complications like climate change. Ingo Niermann argues that, stirred by rapid developments in automation and AI, these manifold crises are about to culminate in a new paradigm of self-sufficiency—monadism—that overturns the liberal era and forces a reinvention of all social parameters. To interact safely with consent and care, monads tend to segregate in communities of like-minded people—voluntary tribes. Even when living as crowded urbanites, monads avoid the implicit violence of random encounters.

Ingo Niermann is a writer and the editor of the speculative book series Solution (Sternberg Press). Recently published books include The Monadic Age: Notes on the Coming Social Order (2024) and Solution 295-304: Mare Amoris (2020). Niermann is Lecturer at Institute Art Gender Nature in Basel (Switzerland).

Beatriz Colomina is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture. Her most recent books are X-Ray Architecture (Lars Muller, 2019)and Radical Pedagogies, ed. with Ignacio Gonzalez Galan, Evangelos Kotsioris, and Anna-Maria Meister (MIT Press, 2022).

M+M strives to make everyone feel welcome. If you are concerned that room N107 will not provide adequate physical accommodation for you, please contact us in advance to discuss it.