Cognitive Architecture questions of how evolving modalities – from bio-politics to noo-politics – can be mapped upon the city under contemporary conditions of urbanization and globalization. Noo-politics, most broadly understood as a power exerted over the life of the mind, re-configures perception, memory and attention, and also implicates potential ways and means by which neurobiological architecture is undergoing reconfiguration. This volume, motivated by theories such as ‘cognitive capitalism’ and concepts such as ‘neural plasticity’, shows how architecture and urban processes and products commingle to form complex systems that produce novel forms of networks that empower the imagination and constitute the cultural landscape. This volume rethinks the relations between form and forms of communication, calling for a new logic of representation; it examines the manner in which information, with its non-hierarchical and distributed format is contributing both to the sculpting of brain and production of mind. Cognitive Architecture brings together renowned specialists in the areas of political and aesthetic philosophy, neuroscience, socio-cultural and architecture theory, visual and spatial theorists and practitioners; the contributions elucidate original ideas for thinking the city as a framework for possible gestations of noo-politics.

Warren Neidich is an Amercian artist and street philosopher living and working between Los Angeles and Berlin. He utilizes multiple mediums to express a wealth of ideas with a variety of practices. Beginning with photo based works in the late 1990’s his work has expanded today to include video, installation, performance and painting. Recently his fundamental query has shifted to ask how the history of art may be read as a product of the mutating conditions of culture which art production itself elaborates and how these ensuing changes, in the cultural landscape, sculpt the material and immaterial conditions of the Brain and Mind. This is what he considers to be the true power of Art. His work has been exhibited internationally at such institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art, PS 1 MOMA, LACMA, Museum Ludwig, Koln and the ICA-London. Upcoming exhibitions 2011 include The Cultural Center Belgrade, MUHKA-Antwerp, Extra City, Antwerp, and Gallery Moriarty, Madrid. He is the 2010 recipient of Vilem Flusser Theory Award, Berlin. Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics, 2010, his most recent co-edited collection of essays published by 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, is a testament to these beliefs. He is former artist-in-residence at Goldsmith College London in the Department of Fine Arts and the Center for Culture, Computation and Cognition. Currently he is research fellow at the Delft School of Design at TU Delft School of Architecture.