Welcome to the inaugural issue of &&&: Issue 000.
Issue 000 accentuates and renders visible the divergences and unexpected overlaps between “tachophobia” (fear of speed) and “tachomania” (obsession with speed), in the ongoing debates over accelerationism that have followed the publication of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics”.
This piece, initiated and commissioned by Marten Spangberg, is part of a larger project called “When The Museum is Closed” at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva. All ideas are bad ideas. They are bad not insofar as they are impractical, useless, or lacking in any such respect. They are bad in that… Read More »
In memory of Cassia Siqueira, a brilliant young researcher whose promising career was tragically abbreviated… Her work, featured in the 2023 volume Model Is the Message published by &&&, showcased her exceptional talent and innovative approach to research. Her dedication, intellectual curiosity, and vibrant spirit left an indelible mark on colleagues and the scientific community.… Read More »
[Due to space constraints, the foregoing essay was published in two instalments. Part I can be found here.—Ed.] 2. A Desperate Marxist’s Attempt We need but a moment of reflection to realize that the problematic of real abstraction in Marxism is the tortuous issue of the transposition of the language of normativity onto that of… Read More »
In time for the opening of Art Basel on June 13 and the release of Eduarda Neves’s Minor Bestiary next month as a more recent critique of contemporary art, we are publishing Reza Negarestani’s “The Human Centipede: A View From The Artworld.” Only delivered once in lecture format at e-flux, New York, in November 2013,… Read More »
Found in the Hyperstition archives, “Other Endings” is the never-published preface to Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia by Nick land, the controversial former Instructor of philosophy at The New Centre which in light of the author’s recent public declaration of his faith in Allah and Islam becomes more than just a premonition but an essential part of… Read More »
Determinant meaning within the English language exists by virtue of the glue that is conjunctions. Sticky little words like “but” and “also” join together, compartmentalize, and disjoint our speech, thoughts, social structure, and reality, in the mathematics of meaning. Even the American legal system depends upon conjunctions like “either/or” and the contrasts they create. Both… Read More »
Dear Lee, I texted you earlier today about how Ava went missing during the fires. I’m going up the coast to look for her in a yacht I’ve stolen that belongs to friends of my parents who are away in the Austrian Alps until Christmas. Did you know that the term “yacht” comes from the… Read More »
This article is an extension of “The Narcissist-Image,” departing from Fares Chalabi’s presentation in “Deleuzian Aesthetics.” Much of Chalabi’s Deleuzian Aesthetics is based on a critique of interpretation, which for Chalabi, is a procedure for reading art where “this means that, and that means this,” that something like the color black points to a feeling… Read More »
A ghost haunts the end: the ghost of the future. Mark Fisher writes in What is Hauntology? that “the future is always experienced as a haunting: as a virtuality that already impinges on the present, conditioning expectations and motivating cultural production.” But the future is no longer what it was. The future is not future… Read More »
Due to spatial constraints, the foregoing essay will be published in two installments.—Ed. Introduction For picturings to picture the pictureds; at the very least, for descriptions to index the world, the framework of picturing or the descriptive language of the sciences have to be committed to a worldly ontological complexity, causal uniformity, or an immutable “dimension of givenness… Read More »
Italy, too, experienced the events of 1968—a year marked by protests against the establishment and its institutions. Against this background, the student movement attacked the Biennale aiming to bring down a pillar of the Italian art establishment which, in their eyes, combined art and money in an unholy alliance. The malaise surrounding the Venice exhibition… Read More »
1 Imagine describing the series of Jeff Perrott’s paintings New Construction (Pharmakon, Subject, Natural, Denatural, Door, Sublime, Red Interior, and Cosmic) to an AI or a blind person. How would you start? By listing which elements come first, and how the layers of lines in each painting are ordered? Describing an artwork is deconstructing or… Read More »
1. The Hamas-Israel War The 2023 war between Hamas and Israel elicits many different explanations. As with previous regional hostilities, here too, the pundits and commentators have numerous overlapping processes to draw on—from the struggle between the Zionist and Palestinian national movements, to the deep hostility between the Rabbinate and Islamic churches, to the many… Read More »
In the past two decades, more than in the past hundred years, authoritarian regimes have risen to power globally. Today, fascist parties are occupying seats in many countries’ governments, such as in the Israeli Knesset, the Dutch Tweede Kamer, the American Congress, and the German Bundestag. Meanwhile, the collective memory of European fascism and its… Read More »
“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 »
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 »
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 »
[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 »
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 »
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 »
[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 »
[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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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.
§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 »
“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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »