Manuel de Landa

Manuel De Landa (born 1952), is a Mexican-American writer, artist and philosopher who has lived in New York since 1975. He is presently the Gilles Deleuze Chair of Contemporary Philosophy and Science at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland; a visiting professor at the University of Southern California School of Architecture in Los Angeles; a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and an adjunct professor at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture in Brooklyn, New York. He was previously an adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University and a lecturer at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. De Landa has a BFA from New York's School of Visual Arts.

He is the author of War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997), Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002) and A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006). He has published many articles and essays and lectured extensively in Europe and in the United States. His work focuses on the theories of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze on one hand, and modern science, self-organizing matter, artificial life and intelligence, economics, architecture, chaos theory, history of science, nonlinear dynamics, cellular automata on the other.

Alongside his intellectual work, De Landa made several short Super 8 and 16mm films in the 1970s and early 1980s. He pulled them from circulation after the original negatives were lost. In 2011, Anthology Film Archives restored and reissued them. Cited by filmmaker Nick Zedd in his Cinema of Transgression Manifesto, De Landa associated with many of the experimental and art filmmakers of this New York based movement. Much of De Landa's film work is inspired by his interest in philosophy and critical theory; one of his best known films, Raw Nerves, has been described as a 'Lacanian thriller' by at least one critic.

His latest book (as of March 2011) is Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason, which explores simulations of emergence in systems of different scales, from the atomic to the social.