---
title: "Nicolay Boyadjiev on media and design as inquiry"
description: "A written interview with Nicolay Boyadjiev by Jarrett Fuller for the design podcast Scratching the Surface, published in April 2026 after Boyadjiev became Antikythera's design director."
type: "reading-notes"
authors:
  - "Jarrett Fuller"
published: "2026-04-21"
original_url: "https://surfacepodcast.substack.com/p/nicolay-boyadjiev-on-planetary-computation"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/discourse-surface-boyadjiev-on-planetary-computation"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/work/media/discourse-surface-boyadjiev-on-planetary-computation"
last_updated: "2026-09-03"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Nicolay Boyadjiev on media and design as inquiry

> Independent, unofficial reading notes from Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki). Written with AI from the published text, with citations; not by the work's author and not affiliated with Antikythera (https://antikythera.org). Read the original at the link below.

- **Authors:** Jarrett Fuller
- **Published:** 2026-04-21
- **Kind:** Essays, talks & interviews · Interview
- **Venue:** Scratching the Surface
- **Original:** https://surfacepodcast.substack.com/p/nicolay-boyadjiev-on-planetary-computation
- **Length:** 3.0k words
- **This page:** https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/discourse-surface-boyadjiev-on-planetary-computation
- **Notes generated:** 2026-09-03

## Summary

A written interview with [Nicolay Boyadjiev](https://antikythera.wiki/people/nicolay-boyadjiev) by [Jarrett Fuller](https://antikythera.wiki/people/jarrett-fuller) for the design podcast Scratching the Surface, published in April 2026 after Boyadjiev became Antikythera's design director. Six questions cover what the institute is, what a design director does inside it, how it continues and departs from the Strelka programmes Boyadjiev ran with Bratton, why it publishes the way it does, what he carried over from re:arc's Practice Lab, and what comes next. The through-line Fuller proposes and Boyadjiev accepts is institutional design: the work is building the organisations in which other people think, and the thesis is that this, not technical benchmarks, is the unaddressed design problem around AI.

## The argument

Boyadjiev states Antikythera's two premises at the outset. Technology has outrun the vocabulary for it, so that what is still grouped under "AI" is an industrial revolution arriving before its own thermodynamics: the machine works and the theories of the intelligence, agency, and selfhood it produces are improvised after the fact. And planetary computation, Bratton's accidental megastructure of satellites, cables, clouds, and sensors, is a cognitive exoskeleton around the planet that both enables this process and discloses that intelligence was never a property of individual brains but a social, planetary phenomenon layered up from genetic, biological, technological, and linguistic systems. The institute's work is therefore philosophical "and unapologetically so." But if the bottleneck is the invention of alternative epistemic and organisational forms rather than the optimisation of benchmarks, the work has consequences for design, above all institutional design, which is why it takes the form of pop-up studios where philosophy becomes a way of doing design and design a way of doing philosophy.

The rest of the interview works out what design means under that premise. A design director at Antikythera defines conceptual briefs at least as much as he answers technical ones: coining neologisms, shorthands, and provocations that become shared reference points for a research theme. Boyadjiev calls this concept design in the literal sense and design as "designation," the upstream act of naming and framing the parameters of engagement rather than the downstream act of giving visual shape to decisions already made. Because the megastructure is accidental, emerging from interlocking infrastructure, protocol, capital, and contingency with no author, nobody designs it. One reads its disposition, detects latent potentials, and intervenes where the faders and toggles of organisation are available. That, he says, changes what the agency of design means.

The lineage from Strelka supplies the method. Strelka normalised design as a mode of inquiry positioned between architecture, graphic design, computer science, philosophy, political theory, and science fiction rather than within any of them, and it refused two traps: solutionism that reduces problems to participatory puzzles stripped of history, and critique-as-performance that deconstructs without risking a proposition. Antikythera keeps both refusals and the studio model. It diverges by dropping the school container altogether and organising a non-profit R&D institute around a single thesis, which makes it directional in a way Strelka could not be, and by shifting purpose from diagnosis of the present condition of cities to foundational work on what planetary computation is and what it is for.

Publishing is treated as part of the research rather than its promotion. The journal with [MIT Press](https://antikythera.wiki/people/mit-press), the book series, and the Venice exhibition's generative cinematic engine occupy slow, medium, and fast positions in one supply chain, and together define a voice Boyadjiev calls operational rather than ornamental, indexical, and relational. Since the economics linking knowledge production to funded distribution have collapsed, publishing becomes the construction of a conceptual vocabulary through which the research becomes legible, a battle for "the means of legibility." Audiences are conjured rather than catered to, at the accepted cost of fewer potential readers for more actual reading. And a growing share of the audience is not human: publishing is now also the deliberate composition of training data for agents, so institutions that produce rigorous, carefully composed work become upstream sources of disproportionate influence, both because they resist the attention economy and because the machines treat institutional provenance as a quality signal.

Practice Lab shows the same thesis applied to architecture and climate. Architecture's problem is not only what it does but what it does not do, namely address the institutional inertia that keeps alternative architectures from being realised. Community-led adaptation projects go unbuilt not because they are expensive or unknown but because the funding models to commission them do not exist, so Practice Lab was designed as a structural space between philanthropy and practice to fund studios directly. Boyadjiev formulates the general problem as creating the organisations we lack, to support the processes we want, in order to realise the projects we need. Antikythera is the same move applied to epistemic institutions that universities, policy institutes, and think tanks are structurally unable to be at the speed the moment requires.

## Section by section

Fuller's introduction recalls his 2025 episode with Boyadjiev on Practice Lab and re:arc, and gives the occasion: Boyadjiev's move to Antikythera as design director, which reunites him with Bratton after Strelka. The first answer, on what the institute is, sets out the two premises and the case for design summarised above.

The second answer, on the role of design director, distinguishes the title from its agency equivalents and describes the job as invented "at the intersection of lorem and ipsum," meant without irony. Its two halves are making the work legible across articles, films, presentations, and software prototypes, and the freedom to meander on the philosophical side, crafting the terms a research theme is conducted in. The passage on the accidental megastructure closes with a deferral to Bratton and Keller Easterling as the theorists who could take the point further.

The third answer, on Strelka, credits Rem Koolhaas's programme before Boyadjiev's own with normalising design as inquiry, states the dual refusal, and defines design as the active misuse of ideas from elsewhere, broken apart as analytic tools and reassembled with cultivated ambiguity. The structural divergence is that Strelka remained legible as a school with cohorts and a pedagogical frame, however deliberately weird, while Antikythera is directional and foundational.

The fourth answer, on publishing, dates the launch of the journal and the first [MIT Press](https://antikythera.wiki/people/mit-press) book to 2025, alongside the Venice Biennale exhibition whose engine renders the studio archive as a self-composing stream, a "research organism" that has partly automated the institute's social feeds since. It then makes the arguments about the collapse of publishing economics, the means of legibility, conjured audiences, and agentic readers. Boyadjiev says plainly that composing training data is part of the rationale for a peer-reviewed journal with [MIT Press](https://antikythera.wiki/people/mit-press).

The fifth answer, on Practice Lab, insists that the through-line across re:arc, Strelka, and Antikythera is straightforward despite their different surface aesthetics. It reports the Lab's record of over thirty projects in eighteen countries, mostly in South America, between 2023 and 2025, and contrasts the unglamorous work of rewiring architectural processes with a field that engages climate through identity rather than infrastructure. Boyadjiev declares himself allergic to moral sloganeering and branding that stands in for structural change, and states his rule for people and institutions alike: you are what you do.

The sixth answer names two projects. Hemispherical Stacks began as a workshop with science fiction writers on the fragmentation of global computation into geopolitical blocs and became a publication platform that required inventing scenario fiction as a genre and, he suggests, its own rendering pipeline and composite file format. The second, unnamed, starts from the premise that non-human cognitive agents now outnumber human minds by a hundred to one, which he dates as true of March 2026, a trillion disembodied, plural, illegible minds alongside eight billion humans. This parasociety of a trillion minds will inform the next studio, whose object is not better individual agents but better agent institutions: the scaffolds, protocols, and governance structures for a mixed society neither side designed from scratch.

## Key concepts

- **[Cognitive Exoskeleton](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/cognitive-exoskeleton)** — Boyadjiev's gloss on planetary computation as a cognitive prosthesis wrapped around Earth, which both enables and reveals planetary intelligence.
- **[Accidental Megastructure](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/accidental-megastructure)** — Bratton's term for planetary-scale computation as an unplanned, distributed whole, which Boyadjiev uses to argue that design reads the structure's disposition rather than authoring it.
- **Design as designation** — the upstream act of naming and framing the parameters of a research problem, as distinct from giving visual form to decisions already taken.
- **Institutional design** — the design of organisations and epistemic forms rather than objects; for Boyadjiev the unaddressed design challenge of the generation, and the common thread of Strelka, Practice Lab, and Antikythera.
- **Means of legibility** — Boyadjiev's borrowed phrase for what institutions now contest through publishing: which questions get asked, whose answers feel authoritative, and what world model is composed through the outputs.
- **[Scenario Fiction](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/scenario-fiction)** — the genre invented for Hemispherical Stacks, blurring scenario planning and science fiction while rejecting the assumptions of both.
- **[Parasociety](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/parasociety)** — the society of non-human agents whose divisions and hierarchies will hybridise with those of human society; here framed as a trillion minds and as the object of the next studio.

## Connections

The two premises condense the programme statement in [Antikythera](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/research) and Bratton's account of the megastructure in [A New Philosophy Of Planetary Computation](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-a-new-philosophy-of-planetary-computation) and [The Stack](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/the-stack). The studio model that Boyadjiev traces to Strelka is the one that produced [Cognitive Infrastructures](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra). The account of scenario fiction and its rendering pipeline is given in his own words in [Rendering Scenario Fiction](https://antikythera.wiki/work/substack/2026-01-20-rendering-scenario-fiction) and applied across [Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/hemstacks). The closing premise of a trillion non-human minds and the turn from agents to agent institutions is the programme of [Agentworld (Research Brief)](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/agentworld-brief), whose seventh theme is agent institutions. Boyadjiev's other 2026 interview, [Discourse™ X Nicolay Boyadjiev](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/discourse-giga-boyadjiev-interview), covers the same ground on institutional design at greater length and adds the argument about designing for expenditure rather than scarcity. On publishing as the composition of training data, the interview agrees with the treatment of models as readers in [The Model Is the Message](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-the-model-is-the-message), though it draws an institutional rather than a philosophical conclusion.


## Terms used

- [Cognitive Exoskeleton](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/cognitive-exoskeleton)