TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

Contemporary art died a while ago, and all we have these days is the ongoing display of mostly decaying corpses presented as living bodies, while the exceptional living practices have to hide as corpses amongst the rest. Surely good art survives the contemporary art paradigm, but it stays buried until someone finds a way to liberate it from the chokehold of the morgue attendants we call curators, who have no frame other than contemporaneity with which to talk about art. This edition of the Venice Biennale can function as the light at the end of this dark tunnel, since the exhibition’s main curator Koyo Kouoh sadly passed away before the show started to congeal. OK, I am not suggesting here that all curators must die for art to be free, or, as Suhail Malik put it a decade and a half ago, to “exit” from the contemporary, but that art and artists cannot wait for curators and institutions to initiate their liberation. All of those who truly love art, and at least respect it as a form of historical objectivity and an objective history of passing time, must do whatever they can to start this process.

Transitive social action, which has a social impact and engages the issues of the present, is part of what makes art contemporary, yet it has become rare in today’s artworks. Much artistic production across many fields is still driven by intuition, experimentation, and aesthetics (rooted more in immediate understanding than in mediated interpretation) and remains enframed within conventional institutional art, where it poses no question to power structures and prompts no change in public attitudes. Categorizing, enframing, and artistic determination are themselves methods of analysis and control. Such works are produced through the repetition and reproduction of forms, technical prowess, or heavy economic investment; they descend from the legacy of modernism without exerting any real influence on authority or the public. The market and the cycle of consumption absorb them, and capitalism profits from them because they never escape its discourse. Practitioners who persist with this approach have stripped art of its relevance to the present and have taught audiences to take art and the artistic process for ornamental, decorative, tradable things, that is, for tangible objects aligned with capitalist methodology, while they hold on to the outdated notion of “high culture” and its ties to modernist ideas.

To Share a Stomach ran from August 8 to September 19, 2026, at The Brick, the Los Angeles non-profit art space formerly known as LAXART.

Aram Moshayedi curated the exhibit around proposals, instructions and letters sent by 25 artists living in Iran and carried out in Los Angeles by 24 American artists acting as their proxies. The press release dates the project to March 2026, when, in its words, the country was under daily bombardment and living through the longest internet shutdown ever recorded, and it describes the Iranian artists as people held back by “circumstances not of their making.”

Moshayedi does not hide the complications of the arrangement, acknowledging the unequal conditions under which the works were produced and asking what happens when one artist proposes a work and another executes it. These are the questions the exhibition permits itself to ask, but they are not the questions that matter the most after what has happened in Iran since January.

The internet shutdown Moshayedi’s press release attributed to the war was in fact imposed by the Islamic Republic much earlier than the beginning of combat. On January 8, 2026, the twelfth day of nationwide protests, the state cut the country off from the global internet; human rights organizations have described the blackout as an attempt to hide the mass killings that followed.

Never having fully subsided, the shutdown went into high gear again on February 28, the day American and Israeli strikes hit Iranian territory. The passive voice in the press release politely sidesteps these facts. In reality “circumstances not of the artists’ making” were very much of someone else’s. The exhibition’s founding sentence credits the war with the blackout, and everything else that is wrong with To Share a Stomach follows from this substitution.

The question shared by my paper Deep Objects, Broken Metabolism and The Superdark Factory pertains to the fate of agency once cognition is distributed across organizations whose tempo and differentiation outstrip individual apprehension.

In the deep-object argument, its stronger locus is geistic and historical rather than zoological propriety. Intelligence exercises agency insofar as it can reconstruct enough of its conditions to discriminate contingent inheritance from structural constraint, then alter the former without impairing the functions it sustains. Freedom, on this account, takes architectural form through the capacity to treat the conditions of its realization as objects of reconstruction and redesign rather than as inherited jurisdiction. As the metabolism reproducing those capacities is exhausted, formal discretion can survive after substantive agency has been hollowed out.

This also elucidates the relation to Intelligence and Spirit, whose account centers on rational agency rather than generic causal efficacy or autonomous operation. A system can act and reconfigure itself without entering a normative space in which commitments can be justified, criticized, and revised in light of reasons. That account still holds as a criterion of rational or general (qualitatively understood) artificial agency, although its developmental picture should no longer be construed as the likely trajectory of contemporary AI. Contemporary systems evince another trajectory along which operational agency can intensify without the rational integration associated with sapience.

The Superdark Factory radicalizes this divergence insofar as its architect cedes internal command and admits an organization whose development outruns descriptive mastery. Agency is initially concentrated in the Stackelberg move, which establishes the conditions of self-organization, and later continues at the boundary through the charter.

It is the poststructuralist verbiage that reduces the Kantian subject to the supposed fallacy of an (absolute) sovereignty or autonomy. Kant does not postulate the Subject in such a manner. When the so-called (speculative) realists attack poststructuralism as post-Kantianism, they adopt the poststructuralist framing of Kant: “it’s all in our heads,” reality is but the… Read More »

Since the release of the A24 film The Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons, earlier this year, the obsession with liminality has moved from semi-underground web lore into the mainstream. The lore began in May 2019 with a single image posted to 4chan’s /x/ board, in a thread asking for “disquieting images” that felt “off”: a… Read More »

Every theory of the internet is almost a theory about online attention and, above all, surveillance and visibility.

Bogna Konior’s The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet says something about the subject that most Western media writing won’t admit, that the lights online were never for seeing but for being seen. The book interprets the internet, and then AI, through Liu Cixin’s Three-Body trilogy, a universe where civilizations hide because getting noticed gets you killed.

In this text, I ask, from where does this picture emerge and where is Konior positioned when she writes about it? The short answer is that the dark forest she borrows from Liu grew straight out of communist one-party states, and that her book makes the most sense once it is read that way.

Liu’s trilogy begins in 1967, at the height of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in Beijing during a “Struggle Session,” where a young astrophysicist watches Red Guards beat her father to death for refusing to take back his scientific claims, killing her faith in humanity. What grows in its place is the certainty that humans can’t be trusted with themselves. That certainty is what makes her respond to the alien signal and invite a hostile civilization to come and wipe Earth out.

This is why Liu’s dark forest rule that shows up in his second volume about staying silent because anything that spots you will assume the worst and shoot first, is just the struggle session blown up to the size of the galaxy.

The first time I stood before Lee Ufan’s From Line (1978) series was at Museum MACAN in Jakarta. The museum framed Ufan’s work as offering an Asian post-war critique of Eurocentrism and as belonging to the Mono-ha movement. The series’ lines and intervals were here cast as refusals of Western painterly gesture, a resistance to fullness or plentitude. Six years later at Tate Modern in London I stood before another work from the same From Line series—the institution having completely recontextualized it. Here Ufan was placed within a Western narrative of painting’s evolution, cited alongside Richter as fitting into or exemplifying a different genealogy of restraint. What had clearly changed was the field of articulations or legibility surrounding this series, and with it the work’s temporal address.

My dear friend Ina replied to the photo of the Tate collection I posted online—I had quietly wondered whether anyone would recognise this same series in Jakarta. She implied that I did not have to go so far to see this particular series for we can see it at home, in Indonesia: “This exists even in Museum MACAN, haha.” She recognised Ufan’s work, and we did not have to name either the series or the artist in the chat. In this instance of intersubjective beholding, recognition is named through the encounter of shared memory—having stood before the same object in the same institution, in the same city, by grace of the same proximity.

Were I to define “institutional,” I would include those who build and inhabit such public spaces: the curators, educators, guards, critics, and the public itself—all of whose habits and styles of looking give those rooms their precise temporality.

Sophie Xeon, the most inventive and imitated music producer of the last decade, has been invoked, more than ever since her death in 2021, as a symbol for new music, new freedom, and new identities. She took the cold artifice that has permeated electric and electronic music since the beginning, making it sound natural. In… Read More »

In her book Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture, Irina Aristarkhova discusses how the progress of feminist thought on pregnancy has often been impeded by its struggle against the oppressive hierarchies surrounding it: “Often, in feminist research, pregnancy was represented in the context of an impending struggle between mothers and medical and socio-cultural institutions that treated it as a means to an end: the child.” The task of her study is not to keep pregnancy within this “problematic” context for feminist politics, but to find ways of describing it that would make the process of species reproduction emancipatory for those who participate in it—primarily mothers, but also a multitude of other actors. This task is realized nonlinearly, and it runs through several stages. One needs, first, to see through the philosophical presuppositions of the pregnancy-organizing discourses of embryology and immunology, in order to dismantle the hostility toward mothers embedded in them. Conceptualizing reproductive practices in terms of hospitality rather than competition demands, next, a deep inquiry into how the foundational phenomenological relation of the self toward the other is modeled—for the oppressive realities women face within reproductive institutions build up from an under-conceptualized psychic economy. Art projects such as Virgil Wong and Lee Mingwei’s Male Pregnancy then exemplify reproductive practices modeled on the relation of hospitality. And finally, biotechnological capabilities and their material realities directly inform pregnancy as a discursive practice.

The dead keep surfacing on the interface. A social media profile reappears under People You May Know, a birthday reminder fires for someone buried in the spring, a subscription renews against a card nobody thought to cancel, a playlist refreshes itself for no one.

The systems are not being callous, requiring a death already registered and then overruled. Strangely, nothing has yet registered. The addressee was never the one who died. It was the profile, the behavioral outer form, assembled from years of signaling, and the profile is now in perfect health again.

The living are currently addressed in the same form; death simply makes the separation of the thing and time easier to observe. A feed never overlaps perfectly with a whole life lived; it meets the signal, then rewards whatever performance it can classify. Users learn the lesson without needing to understand it. Some versions travel, others stall or disappear. Over time, this creates pressure toward a self that can revise itself at the system’s speed.

That training takes place inside an infrastructure (platforms, models, attention routes, finance, law), and the means of reproduction is owned. No one has to command the trajectory. Platforms set out to maximize engagement and predict conduct, which requires many users who can be addressed at scale. Because some forms of subjectivity are easier to measure and route than others, optimization selects for them effortlessly, almost as a side effect.

I wish I could write an objective review of this movie, but the first third to half of it was a straight-out portrayal of a continental Western European working class subculture (teknival/French hardtek) that myself and many others grew up intimately familiar with, on a visceral, physical level: the complete illegality of it, the walls… Read More »

“In SEAWORLD VENICE, the promise of progress unfolds as a ‘Frankensteinesque’ dystopia: robot dogs wade through the rising water behind glass, acting as mechanical Cerberuses guarding a central sacrificial altar. Here, a performer lives within a tank sustained by body fluids contributed by the audience.”  -Austrian Pavilion, Nora-Swantje Almes’s curatorship   After the online introduction… Read More »

You must love our country. […] as we approach this magnificent anniversary, we see our American identity under a renewed attack, a generation after we fought and won the Cold War against the menace of communism. There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country […]… Read More »

Before I went to Venice I thought I’d try a travel diary, but that’s not how I like to write and it’s what everyone does, i.e. deferring the responsibility of coming to any conclusion about the Biennale as a whole by giving a first-person account of how utterly chaotic preview week was. I wasn’t at… Read More »

There is this letter Althusser wrote in 1962, to a woman he was seeing, where he just trashes Lenin. He is rereading Lenin on philosophy and he is basically going: god, this is weak. Amazing guy when it came to reading an actual situation, reading what was in front of him, but the second he… Read More »

Nuqtavism was a heretical, atomist cosmology that emerged from within Islamic mysticism while simultaneously pushing it toward its limits. The endgame of Islamic esotericism was always the horrifying announcement that the mystic, through infinite cycles of ascetic self-creation and self-annihilation, had finally reached the highest point of abstraction, or tajarrud: the final release from materiality.… Read More »

Introduction The last thing most progressives think we need is another male writer complaining about “wokeism.” Why not talk about more important things? Wokeism has become somewhat of a floating signifier. Wokeism can mean different things to different people, with many people throwing the term around as a pejorative in highly inconsistent ways. However, many… Read More »

1. To Sort I find myself at a furniture factory, in the seaming department, surrounded by the pneumatic humming of sewing machines. All around me, industrious hands are swift in joining odd parcels of hide, textiles and other soft surfaces according to flat templates. Although the individual steps they carry out are familiar to me,… Read More »

In the spirit of dialogue, I am responding to the observations in Conrad Hamilton’s recent expansive review of my book The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. I will be concentrating on Hamilton’s three main claims, that there is a gap between the form and content of socvialism, invoking Marxist theories of struggle before coming down… Read More »

ARTISTS: Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Kelly Akashi, Kamrooz Aram, Ash Arder, Teresa Baker, Sula Bermudez-Silverman, Zach Blas, Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien, Leo Castañeda, CFGNY, Nanibah Chacon, Maia Chao, Joshua Citarella, Mo Costello, Taína H. Cruz, Carmen de Monteflores, Ali Eyal, Andrea Fraser, Mariah Garnett, Ignacio Gatica, Jonathan González, Emilie Louise Gossiaux, Kainoa Gruspe,… Read More »

This essay argues that natural language semantics admits no global orientation—no ‘view from nowhere’—but only local positions within psychoanalytically and sociologically embedded discourse communities. Drawing on Derrida’s concept of différance, I demonstrate that meaning is constitutively deferred across the differential play of signs, precluding any meta-linguistic standpoint from which all local meanings could be adjudicated.… Read More »

Matthew McManus’ The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism is a powerful attempt to merge two disparate traditions, parlaying reformist compromise into a coherent political program. It also rests on the assumption that socialism is inherently illiberal, an assumption that deserves to be questioned. While often hailed as the single-minded son of America, perhaps the best… Read More »

[This text was previously published by the author in Portuguese on Contemporânea Magazine — Ed.] I don’t want to work with fashion. Beauty must be preserved from capitalism. Fashion favours the escape into personal, private, selected, chosen space, as a form of false self-determination. Fashion reflects the fear of losing’ identity. — Thomas Hirschhorn The purposelessness… Read More »

With recent articles in &&& concerning the status of what is or is not Marxism, I took it upon myself to write a piece that I consider firmly placed in that tradition. I am not being paid by the CIA, I promise. Furthermore, despite appearances, my article is not an article in the “ethics of… Read More »