Join the UB School of Architecture & Planning in Hayes Hall 403 for the Mark Shepard, UB associate professor of architecture and media study, for the launch of his award-winning book, There Are No Facts, examining the uncommon ground we share in a post-truth world.

The event features a reception and panel discussion with Shepard and three internationally recognized scholars working across the field of architecture and media. The book will be available to purchase at the event through local bookstore affiliate, Fitz Books.

There Are No Facts: Attentive Algorithms, Extractive Data Practices, and the Quantificiation of Everyday Life (MIT Press, 2022) unpacks how attentive algorithms and extractive data practices are shaping space, influencing behavior, and colonizing everyday life. Articulating post-truth territory as an architectural and infrastructural condition, it shows how these spatial architectures of attention and data mining are in turn situated within broader histories of empiricism, objectivity, science, colonialism, and perception. These entanglements of people and data, code and space, knowledge and power are considered across scales ranging from the trans-locality of the home to the planetary extent of the COVID–19 pandemic, with stops at the corner bodega, a neighborhood for the proverbial 1%, a waterfront district in Toronto, and a national election. The book probes how these socio-technical systems bracket what we know about the world, how they construe our agency to act within it, and how they shape these spaces that, in turn, shape us. Shepard was awarded a 2022 Graham Foundation grant for the book in recognition of its contribution to diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society.