Learning from Renningen: On the Perceptual Architectures of Self-driving Cars

Public lecture reflecting on my three month research fellowship at Bosch Research Campus, 1 August – 31 October 2017.

If 'Learning from Las Vegas' (Brown, Venturi, Izenour, 1972) defined the second half of the 20th century as an urban text primarily addressing the car-bound observer, how will the built environment speak to the newest members of the perceptual community, autonomous vehicles? Addressing a range of collateral visual cultures emerging from the rise of automated driving, the talk explored how a media archaeology of autonomous vehicles intersects with the history of photography, a test track at the Bosch facility and the geometry of vision first articulated by Johannes Keppler in 1604.