Premiering for the first time in Mexico, the new series Continuous Variations marks Manuel de Landa's historical comeback as a filmmaker. The work consists of forty-minute long digitally filmed videos distorted by custom made machine learning algorithms, creating generative fractured city landscapes; envisioning face recognition distortions and material populations that will make you question the relationships between technology, perception and surroundings. Rendered with psychedelic virtuosity, these startling new digital works most definitely pick up from where he left off more than 30 years ago, expanding his previous body of cinematic expression.
Manuel DeLanda (b. 1952) holds the Gilles Deleuze Chair of Contemporary Philosophy and Science at The European Graduate School / EGS and is a lecturer in Architecture at Princeton University. He is best described as a theorist and is considered one of the most creative and thought-provoking thinkers in Anglo-American academia. DeLanda began his practice as an artist, working first in film, then digital media, including software design and programming, before developing his work in theory and philosophy. His theoretical and philosophical background, and influence, is primarily based in, and derived from, a fusion of the work of Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze. DeLanda is probably best known for his current research on the effects of architecture, or the city more generally, and his materialist studies in history and science.
Traversing art, architecture, and theory, DeLanda has taught and lectured across many disciplines in the United States and Europe. From 2004 to 2012, he taught at the School of Art and Design at the University of Pennsylvania, and was a visiting professor at University of Southern California’s School of Architecture, where he taught a course on self-organization and urbanity. He was also an adjunct associate professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, an adjunct professor at Cooper Union’s Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, and an adjunct professor at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture. Before becoming a lecturer in Architecture at Princeton University, where he teaches a seminar investigating the importance of material culture and historical agency in understanding a city, DeLanda was also a fellow at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Among his significant books, Manuel DeLanda has published: War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997), Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002), A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006), Deleuze: History and Science (2010), Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason (2011), and Philosophical Chemistry: Genealogy of a Scientific Field (2015).