Call the Bronze Age… they forgot their pictograms!

“In the preceding chapter we discussed the development of technoeconomic organization and the establishment of social machinery closely connected with the evolution of techniques. Here I propose to consider the evolution of a fact that emerged together with Homo sapiens in the development of anthropoids: the capacity to express thought in material symbols. (…) As… Read More »

Interferential Axiology: Excess & Disruption

What is tragic about choice is no longer fundamental if choice is no longer what establishes communication between an independent city and an independent individual as substances. —Gilbert Simondon1   Excess and disruption are different modes of systemic interferences, providing differing sets of axiological implications. This essay seeks to explore their tragic interface in the… Read More »

Shades of Green in Praxis

Introduction  EcoMuvi is a film production protocol set in place by Tempesta Films studios in 2014. Its approach implies a consciousness of the environmental  impact of film production and seeks to mitigate the overall harm done to the Earth. The protocol has a list of requirements which must be met in order for a film to… Read More »

Here & Elsewhere, at War, & Into the Future

The Middle East continues to painfully be a primary site for the blood-drenched transformations of our planetary geopolitical system. However, about ten years ago and during another Israeli operation in Gaza, an uncanny timeliness opened an unexpected connection between global contemporary art and geopolitics in August 2014 when, following the escalation of Israel’s Gaza operations,… Read More »

Artext: What Postpones the Union between Symbolic Systems & Language? – Part III

[Due to space constraints, the foregoing essay was be published in three instalments. Parts I and II can be found here and here.—Ed.] Struggle between Symbol Equality and Logocentrism  The way out of the irrationality of imagery—understood as a united symbolic system—lies precisely opposite to physical objects, in reason. None of the philosophers mentioned earlier… Read More »

Zionism Reconsidered

The seminal essay below by Hannah Arendt, spanning 15,000 words was first published in the Menorah Journal in October 1944. This work was inspired by the meeting of the World Zionist Organization’s American section in Atlantic City. This congress was notable for its assertive call for a Jewish state covering the entire territory of Palestine,… Read More »

Artext: What Postpones the Union between Symbolic Systems & Language? – Part II

[Due to space constraints, the foregoing essay will be published in three instalments. Part I can be read here.—Ed.] From Object to Image through Displacement In art history there is an implicit belief that human intuition is limited by external physiological mechanisms. The encounter with an object may thus be seen as a traumatizing event.… Read More »

Artext: What Postpones the Union between Symbolic Systems & Language? – Part I

[Due to space constraints, the foregoing essay will be published in three instalments.—Ed.] Introduction The author of this text is confident that none of these reflections are timely during the war, and harbors doubts about their subsequent significance. It is difficult to escape a common remark about the impossibility of poetry after Bucha—with all kinds… Read More »

Spaces & Places, an Interview with Bastian Gehbauer

Memories of A Place I Have Never Been… Part II is the title of the most recent solo exhibition by Berlin-based artist Bastian Gehbauer. The exhibit was open for viewing from August 25th until October 7th, 2023 at Hoto Gallery—a repurposed former cinema situated in Bergmannkiez. The exhibited series represents an extension of the initial… Read More »

Some Brief Notes on Reza Negarestani’s Intelligence & Spirit

Synopsis Reza Negarestani’s “Intelligence and Spirit”1 stands as an intersectional exploration of philosophy, mathematics, logic, and computer science. The work is an intricate tapestry weaving together threads from various disciplines in order to present a comprehensive understanding of intelligence, in both its human and artificial manifestations. Negarestani draws from category theory—a branch of mathematics that… Read More »

Franz Boas & the Founding of New York’s American Museum of Natural History, A Never Published letter

Before the establishment of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), displays at museums of nature, science and culture involved their preparation and arrangement in glass boxes by those who had never seen the subjects in their actual habitat and who had little interest in acquiring related ecological or cultural information. From its beginning, however,… Read More »

The Case for Artplay

01 Let me present a compelling perspective: Games and art exist as distinct entities on an ontological level, fulfilling different needs. Art, in its purest form, flourishes without requiring interactivity, while games engage players through their inherent interactive nature. However, this does not imply a complete dichotomy. A space for compromise exists, and I call… Read More »

Creative Groundlessness: A Rehearsal in Self-Translation

Is this a rehearsal for dying? –Vilém Flusser, “The Bed”[1] Flowers in a vase, on the dinner table, are examples of absurd life. If we wish to intuit these flowers, we can feel their tendency to sprout roots, and to push them into any soil. The rootless flowers’ tendency is the climate of groundlessness. –Vilém… Read More »

Crisis, what Crisis: 21 Notes on the Difficulties of What Needs to be Done

The worst thing about the two dominant and intellectually popular conceptions of the future – either as pure capitalist utopia where private property and technology deliver us from politics or pure communist utopia in which the fall of capitalism and the emergence of communism is inevitable – is that they have engendered lethargy in regards… Read More »

A Black is Not a Man: Fanon, Sartre, and Racial Metamorphosis

In the Introduction to his Black Skin, White Masks (BSWM), Frantz Fanon makes the claim that ‘a Black is not a man’.[1] To understand what Fanon means by the claim that the Black is not a man, a claim that he admits is ‘at risk of angering [his] black brothers’, we must explore the construction… Read More »

Notes on Hypervision

Theory-fiction is a genre of thought in the process of making and becoming. And, as any genre of that kind on such a stage, what it needs for thriving is methodology: not from the side of ‘theory’ — for there are a lot of possible ways of theoretical inquiry present at hand today (which is,… Read More »

The Dead God, A short story in two parts

Things had been getting strange at the firm, since the boss had come back from holidays. The black cape and the pile of Crowley books strewn about the office were the first clue. What was Hardeep, the Singaporean tech bro CEO, doing with all this, mused Pierre, a level 7 sales executive, en route to… Read More »

Of Contradictions Between Sociology & Neoliberalism

Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), one of the founders of sociology as a science, undertook a great effort for this area of knowledge to overcome its so-called ideological burdens. For him, “it is necessary to free oneself from the false evidence that dominates the common spirit” (Durkheim, 2004: 64). Sociology should become a science of empirical strength,… Read More »

Not Giving Up On Humans

There have been rumors about the disappearance of desire from cinema and even museums or art spaces in general, leaving us with a sheer mirror of what reality is, or feeding us with constant information about the world being an unsavory place: climate catastrophes, migrant crisis, Taliban in Afghanistan, the rise of nationalism throughout the… Read More »

The Purist

Filipe Felizardo is a philosophy student, artist and musician from Lisbon, with an informal education in film, comics, and musical pedagogy. Currently a Researcher on Critical Philosophy at the New Centre for Research & Practice, Felizardo focuses on systematic reconceptions of learning and alienation, as understood from the workspaces of inferentialism, Marxist activity-approach, and anti-vitalism.

Pyromaniac Research Unit Manifesto

§0 “Lo que el hombre no sabe, o no ha pensado, vaga en la noche por el laberinto de la mente”. [“What man does not know, or has not thought of, wanders in the night through the labyrinth of the mind.”] —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe §1 The kids who played with fire: Pyromania, play and… Read More »

Retinol: A Mode of Action

“Condensed in a formula, the Technological Civilization can be characterized as the transition from ratio to generativity, from matter to process, from nature to the hybrid.” –Davor Löffler If we follow the self-avowed German Accelerationism and deep futurology of Davor Löffler (Löffler 2021), we can posit that everything is co-evolutionary and that there are no… Read More »

Manifesto for Uchronic Gardens, pt. I

A speculative atlas: to dilate the geography of the imagination with our hands, like clay. That which now sits on nowhere and nowhen. Which simply lies there. We must recover it. It will soon become a sort of labor, this hyperlucid craft. An engineering of worlds in chimerical diagrams of nylon allure. The task is… Read More »

The Narcissist Image

In his course Deleuzian Aesthetics Fares Chalabi presents an extended typology of mutually exclusive, rigorously defined image-types, or what I like to call aesthetic structures or aesthetic logics. An image-type or aesthetic logic is a form that structures the entirety of a work of art – take, for example, the ‘series’. The logic of series,… Read More »

Sorry You Can’t Pass a Turing Test But I’m Different 

Five hundred million individuals tried to monetize their social media last year, according to a recent Linktree survey. As a lucky member of this esteemed group, I recently found myself surfing through the entrepreneurial side of TikTok, captivated by a video titled “How to make money with Chat GPT”. The clip tells you to go… Read More »

Unthought Apparitions

In this video essay, Brent Cox works through the poetry of Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite and his Sycorax Video Style, which he developed in the early 1980s using a Mac SE/30 and which offers myriad compelling extra-linguistic or extra-conceptual ideas in relation to citationality, literary convention, the constative/performative distinction, the temporality of neologisms, and the… Read More »

The Work of Art in the Age of Cybernetic Criticism

Walter Benjamin’s seminal 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” wrestled with the effects of powerful technologies upon culture, and presaged much subsequent writing, e.g. Martin Heidegger and Italo Calvino. Here I want to consider not the artwork-qua-object as in Benjamin, but rather the work of art as an active force, in… Read More »

Modern Art: A True Conspiracy

*Originally delivered as a response to Gertrude Stein’s “The Making of Americans” on Day 27 of Superconversations, a collaboration between e-flux and The New Centre for Research & Practice in 2015. The most recent wartime Christmas in New York was as cold and bright as any other holiday season had ever been in the city. As usual, a… Read More »

Cosmotechnics and the Multicultural Trap

1. Although still a young writer and researcher, it is probably not an exaggeration to say that Yuk Hui is already one of the most influential contemporary thinkers of technology working today. This position is certainly warranted by the strength and scope of his work, the expansive drive and breadth of which is inspiring, especially… Read More »

Pandemic, Time for a Transversal Political Imagination*

I: Symptoms With the omnipresence of the term “symptom” these days, it seems that a plausible escape from the deep horror of this pandemic would be to conduct a symptomatic reading of it. Attributed to Louis Althusser, this method of reading literary and historical texts focuses not on what a text evidently expresses, but on… Read More »

Generation Z: Invincible, Angry & Radical*

*Originally published by BBC Persian, to read the original, please click here.  Following the protests that are taking place in Iran after the killing of Mahsa Amini by the forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the attention of the people and the media has been drawn to the role, and strong presence of the… Read More »

A dialogue on Law & Platform Architecture

Note: This piece was co-produced as a dialogue in the manner of a feedback between the authors. They reacted to each other’s thoughts on Law about Space while having as a single rule that each would use a different language as a tool of communication. Zé would use written text, whereas Artemis would use visual expressions. When… Read More »

Arriving from the Future: Sinofuturism & the post-human in the philosophy of Nick Land & Yuk Hui

Modernity and technics “If you think about the Silk Road in the past, there’s this idea of eastern and western people meeting on some kind of big road and maybe selling and buying things. I think this history repeats itself, and some kind of new and interesting phenomenon is happening.” —Kim Namjoon, member of the group… Read More »

Dimes is of the Essence: Gardeners of the creative

Editor’s Note: This piece, written by several authors, oscillates between plural and singular voices, with the intended effect of collaging three perspectives together in a unified décollage. “I’ll never forget the time I went to Dimes Cafe at 4 am for an after party in 2015. Max Brand was there, and I was trying to… Read More »

Artist as a Formal System: Towards a general theory of art

For the past few years, I’ve been engaged with writing a footnote to an essay with an attempted theoretical explication of what is meant by the word “art”. For a much longer time, I’ve pursued a very abstract but also very specific direction in my own art practice – like any other artist. One little… Read More »

On Daniel Hölzl’s Grounded

“Oil is the undercurrent of all narrations, not only the political but also that of the ethics of life on earth. This undercurrent material, petroleum narrates the dynamics of planetary events from macroscopic scales such as hot and cold wars, migrations, religious and political uprisings, to micro or even nanoscopic scales such as the chemical… Read More »

The Future History of Skills

We become what we behold. We shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us. — John Culkin (1967) “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan” (The Saturday Review) Human creativity is often driven by lateral thinking, which according to Margaret Boden has a weakness. She posits that AI can introduce better “standards of rigor, […]… Read More »

Metamorphoses of Crypto Capital

  His favourites received contracts under conditions whereby they, cleverer than the alchemists, made gold out of nothing. – Karl Marx, Capital Vol.1   Introduction The spread of distributed ledger technologies in the Information and Technology sector has been the cause for much speculation and hype. The modern blockchain is rooted in the work of… Read More »

Copy, Object & Matter in 3D Printed Historical Monuments

The deployment of 3D modeling and 3D printing techniques in historical heritage is nothing new. 3D modeling has been used in creating digital environments since the mid-1990s. These models were created mainly to situate its users among the reconstructed ruins of historical landscapes, especially from antiquity and the Middle Ages, such as Ancient Rome, Egypt,… Read More »

Babylonian Neo-mustaqbal: Continental Vibe and the Metaverse

My aim here is to venture a scholarly definition of the Continental Vibe, but allow me to arrive there via an anecdote, or an impression, really – one of my earliest memories of viewing the world as a cast of signs and symbols. A somersault of senses: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory. A sum of building blocks and a bevy… Read More »

More Articles from &&&

Call the Bronze Age… they forgot their pictograms!

“In the preceding chapter we discussed the development of technoeconomic organization and the establishment of social machinery closely connected with the evolution of techniques. Here I propose to consider the evolution of a fact that emerged together with Homo sapiens in the development of anthropoids: the capacity to express thought in material symbols. (…) As… Read More »

Interferential Axiology: Excess & Disruption

What is tragic about choice is no longer fundamental if choice is no longer what establishes communication between an independent city and an independent individual as substances. —Gilbert Simondon1   Excess and disruption are different modes of systemic interferences, providing differing sets of axiological implications. This essay seeks to explore their tragic interface in the… Read More »

Here & Elsewhere, at War, & Into the Future

The Middle East continues to painfully be a primary site for the blood-drenched transformations of our planetary geopolitical system. However, about ten years ago and during another Israeli operation in Gaza, an uncanny timeliness opened an unexpected connection between global contemporary art and geopolitics in August 2014 when, following the escalation of Israel’s Gaza operations,… Read More »

Zionism Reconsidered

The seminal essay below by Hannah Arendt, spanning 15,000 words was first published in the Menorah Journal in October 1944. This work was inspired by the meeting of the World Zionist Organization’s American section in Atlantic City. This congress was notable for its assertive call for a Jewish state covering the entire territory of Palestine,… Read More »

The Dead God, A short story in two parts

Things had been getting strange at the firm, since the boss had come back from holidays. The black cape and the pile of Crowley books strewn about the office were the first clue. What was Hardeep, the Singaporean tech bro CEO, doing with all this, mused Pierre, a level 7 sales executive, en route to… Read More »

The Purist

Filipe Felizardo is a philosophy student, artist and musician from Lisbon, with an informal education in film, comics, and musical pedagogy. Currently a Researcher on Critical Philosophy at the New Centre for Research & Practice, Felizardo focuses on systematic reconceptions of learning and alienation, as understood from the workspaces of inferentialism, Marxist activity-approach, and anti-vitalism.

Retinol: A Mode of Action

“Condensed in a formula, the Technological Civilization can be characterized as the transition from ratio to generativity, from matter to process, from nature to the hybrid.” –Davor Löffler If we follow the self-avowed German Accelerationism and deep futurology of Davor Löffler (Löffler 2021), we can posit that everything is co-evolutionary and that there are no… Read More »

The Narcissist Image

In his course Deleuzian Aesthetics Fares Chalabi presents an extended typology of mutually exclusive, rigorously defined image-types, or what I like to call aesthetic structures or aesthetic logics. An image-type or aesthetic logic is a form that structures the entirety of a work of art – take, for example, the ‘series’. The logic of series,… Read More »

Sorry You Can’t Pass a Turing Test But I’m Different 

Five hundred million individuals tried to monetize their social media last year, according to a recent Linktree survey. As a lucky member of this esteemed group, I recently found myself surfing through the entrepreneurial side of TikTok, captivated by a video titled “How to make money with Chat GPT”. The clip tells you to go… Read More »

Unthought Apparitions

In this video essay, Brent Cox works through the poetry of Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite and his Sycorax Video Style, which he developed in the early 1980s using a Mac SE/30 and which offers myriad compelling extra-linguistic or extra-conceptual ideas in relation to citationality, literary convention, the constative/performative distinction, the temporality of neologisms, and the… Read More »

The Work of Art in the Age of Cybernetic Criticism

Walter Benjamin’s seminal 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” wrestled with the effects of powerful technologies upon culture, and presaged much subsequent writing, e.g. Martin Heidegger and Italo Calvino. Here I want to consider not the artwork-qua-object as in Benjamin, but rather the work of art as an active force, in… Read More »

Modern Art: A True Conspiracy

*Originally delivered as a response to Gertrude Stein’s “The Making of Americans” on Day 27 of Superconversations, a collaboration between e-flux and The New Centre for Research & Practice in 2015. The most recent wartime Christmas in New York was as cold and bright as any other holiday season had ever been in the city. As usual, a… Read More »

Cosmotechnics and the Multicultural Trap

1. Although still a young writer and researcher, it is probably not an exaggeration to say that Yuk Hui is already one of the most influential contemporary thinkers of technology working today. This position is certainly warranted by the strength and scope of his work, the expansive drive and breadth of which is inspiring, especially… Read More »

Pandemic, Time for a Transversal Political Imagination*

I: Symptoms With the omnipresence of the term “symptom” these days, it seems that a plausible escape from the deep horror of this pandemic would be to conduct a symptomatic reading of it. Attributed to Louis Althusser, this method of reading literary and historical texts focuses not on what a text evidently expresses, but on… Read More »

Generation Z: Invincible, Angry & Radical*

*Originally published by BBC Persian, to read the original, please click here.  Following the protests that are taking place in Iran after the killing of Mahsa Amini by the forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the attention of the people and the media has been drawn to the role, and strong presence of the… Read More »

A dialogue on Law & Platform Architecture

Note: This piece was co-produced as a dialogue in the manner of a feedback between the authors. They reacted to each other’s thoughts on Law about Space while having as a single rule that each would use a different language as a tool of communication. Zé would use written text, whereas Artemis would use visual expressions. When… Read More »

Arriving from the Future: Sinofuturism & the post-human in the philosophy of Nick Land & Yuk Hui

Modernity and technics “If you think about the Silk Road in the past, there’s this idea of eastern and western people meeting on some kind of big road and maybe selling and buying things. I think this history repeats itself, and some kind of new and interesting phenomenon is happening.” —Kim Namjoon, member of the group… Read More »

Artist as a Formal System: Towards a general theory of art

For the past few years, I’ve been engaged with writing a footnote to an essay with an attempted theoretical explication of what is meant by the word “art”. For a much longer time, I’ve pursued a very abstract but also very specific direction in my own art practice – like any other artist. One little… Read More »

On Daniel Hölzl’s Grounded

“Oil is the undercurrent of all narrations, not only the political but also that of the ethics of life on earth. This undercurrent material, petroleum narrates the dynamics of planetary events from macroscopic scales such as hot and cold wars, migrations, religious and political uprisings, to micro or even nanoscopic scales such as the chemical… Read More »

The Future History of Skills

We become what we behold. We shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us. — John Culkin (1967) “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan” (The Saturday Review) Human creativity is often driven by lateral thinking, which according to Margaret Boden has a weakness. She posits that AI can introduce better “standards of rigor, […]… Read More »

Babylonian Neo-mustaqbal: Continental Vibe and the Metaverse

My aim here is to venture a scholarly definition of the Continental Vibe, but allow me to arrive there via an anecdote, or an impression, really – one of my earliest memories of viewing the world as a cast of signs and symbols. A somersault of senses: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory. A sum of building blocks and a bevy… Read More »

Telos at the End: A Meditation on Dysteleological Superintelligence

I proceed from an actual fact. For all the scenarios of existential risk from Artificial Intelligence/Superintelligence, there’s always been the same thing. There’s always been this aspect, put tacitly or implicitly, either merely enlisted, or considered to be decisive. And what is it? It is the presupposed teleology. Varying in movements and outcomes, all AI-concerned… Read More »