Tonight we are discussing quarantine as a peculiar kind of human-exclusion zone. We will refer to such questions as including the diagnostic technologies, algorithmic modeling, and automated infrastructures that will determine its future.
The spaces under quarantine are used to separate one thing from another for the purpose of preventing infection. Travelers exposed to pandemic diseases are often placed in quarantine; spam emails can be quarantined; even rock samples returned from the moon have been held in quarantine since their arrival back on Earth. The need for quarantine has shaped international boundaries, led to the invention of new documents segregating the healthy from the sick. Indeed, the first thing a migrant or asylum seeker might be forced to do upon entering a new country is to undergo a period of quarantine, a time of interminable waiting and spatial closure.
Geoff Manaugh. He is a writer and the author of A Burglar’s Guide to the City, on the relationship between crime and architecture, which was a New York Times-bestseller for two months, and, in 2016, was optioned for television by CBS Studios. In 2004 Manaugh launched a widely acclaimed BLDGBLOG (“building blog”). Because of BLDGBLOG, Wired named Manaugh one of “the 18 people who will tell you everything you need to know about design”. Manaugh regularly covers issues related to cities, design, crime, infrastructure, and technology for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, New Scientist, The Daily Beast, and many other publications.
Nicola Twilley. She is a contributing writer at the New Yorker, co-host of the podcast Gastropod, co-director of Studio-X New York. She is also the author of the blog Edible Geography, co-founder of the Foodprint Project, designer, and curator with exhibitions installed at Storefront for Art and Architecture and the Pratt Manhattan Gallery. Her works were published in The Atlantic, Volume, Domus, Landscape Architecture, The Architects’ Newspaper, Dwell, Business Insider, and Wired UK.