Also Reality and the Weight of Conjunctions

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 »

Letter to the Washed Away

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 »

Interpretation Contra Structural Reading

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 »

Anti-Hauntology & the Semiotics of the End

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 »

Escaping Post-Sellarsian Marxism

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 »

The 1968 Venice Biennale & Boycotting the exhibition: An account of three extraordinary days

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 »

Kunstwollen* Minus the Human (Painting in the Age of Machinic Will to Art)

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 »

Blood and Oil in the Orient: A 2023 Update

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 »

Ruangrupa, Contemporary Art or Friendship Industry?*

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 »

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 »

Postponing the Union of 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 »

Postponing the Union of 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 »

Postponing the Union of 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 »

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 included in the 2015 edition of Venice Biennale of Art. The most recent wartime Christmas in New York in 1941 was as cold and… 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 »

Cosmotechnics & 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 »

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 »

Stellar Bile, Terrestrial Extraction & Carrie Blast Furnaces

  INTRODUCTION The following analyses are hypothetical entries into Karen Pinkus’ Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary, a dictionary which itself ought to be read as a work in perpetual progress.[1] Drawing upon Pinkus’ work—cross-referencing, if you will—I want to introduce two entries (themselves, necessarily works in perpetual progress) into Pinkus’ registry; one site-specific, one ‘generic’: “Carrie Furnace”… Read More »

Interfacing Materials: An Experiment with Self-Organized Writing

      – Ana Paula Silva & Digital Symbiotic Interface & Matheus Ferreira[1]    I: Hello, there, I’m the selected object-interface for this co-authored conversation-essay. You may call me cyborg, or the interface of internet conversation, or whatever. I am the standard medium and interface, as that which is between the faces of the other authors… Read More »

The Summer Exhibitions of Discontent

From Venice to Berlin, Kassel, and… Davos There’s little that the art world has missed during the pandemic more than airport lounges. I was no exception and, despite having made a series of gloomy predictions about art’s return in a diminished yet more self-satisfied form, I was eager to chase my hits of aviation fuel… 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 »

Second-order Design Fictions in End Times

This conversation on Second-order design fiction is part of an ongoing collective research project by Fry and Perera on Technology, Cosmotechnics, Design and Resistance. In their conversation Fry and Perera explore the concept of second-order design fiction (SoDF) as an emergent means of addressing how design is understood and practiced in the context of the… Read More »

Documenta 15: Captured & Content

Documenta 15, heterogeneous, accessible, resplendent in-process and incomplete, present-here-and-now, and affirmative, is soft-imperialist, globalist art at its apex. New Edge — it’s gentle, loving, soothing, and light, art for the righteous decline of the Western enlightenment project and paean for the rise of the Global South, salvaging what it finds useful from Western ruins, vainglory,… Read More »

Hito Steyerl: Context is Everything, Except When It Comes to Germany

Intro from Zeit Newspaper, Germany Does the upcoming Documenta exhibition in Kassel promote anti-Semitic tendencies in art? Are some female artists too close to the BDS movement? Should the curators have paid more attention to the fact that Israeli-Jewish artists are also present – ??and not just those who are themselves opposed to the country’s… Read More »

Hermeneutics of Ether: Immanuel Kant’s thing in itself in the Opus Postumum

  “Some see the glass as empty, I see a glass full of ether.” — J. Cole We are entangled in a love-hate relationship with Immanuel Kant. Throughout the last two centuries, those who have an affinity for the philosophical task have directly or indirectly been involved with his postulations, mainly those pertaining to his… Read More »

Of Bartleby & Blockchain: Digital Scriveners in the Age of Cryptocurrencies

Herman Melville wrote a story about a curious fellow, a scrivener: a clerk for his employer upon Wall Street, a “conveyancer and title hunter, and drawer-up of recondite documents”.[1] Bartleby’s disinclination to do any work was, repeatedly and almost without variation, couched in a phrase of maddening brevity and disturbing ambiguity. The man wasn’t quite… Read More »

The Substitution of John Cage

For this brief essay, I suggest running a simple thought experiment. As suggested in the header, it will concern one avant-garde composer, about whom one biographical fact will be substituted. In the first part of the essay, I’ll explain my interest in Cage’s practice and its reception — after that, the experiment itself takes place. Hopefully, by… Read More »

Planetary Scale Art

It’s well known that when people venture into the far reaches of consciousness, they do so at the peril of their sanity, that is, of their humanity. But the “human scale” or humanistic standard proper to ordinary life and conduct seems misplaced when applied to art. It oversimplifies. If within the last century art conceived… Read More »

Mathemetaphysics Exordium*

Preface Through my Prolegomenon, I am attempting to create a «transcendental method» which is arrived at from self-evident axiomatic truths (‹truth› with lowercase t) of mathematics and de-ontologized without a necessary background ontology (for examples of «background ontologies» see how the realm of the virtual supports the realm of actuality in Gilles Deleuze, or how… Read More »

Secret Origin

You can read the full comic in higher quality here.

Styles of Misanthropy

I like DeLanda’s abstract machines (1) – more precise, more concrete than metaphors, but still loose and capable of creativity. But what’s the point of writing anyway? Who reads the words and thinks the thoughts instead of simply filling something else in the vacuum – you look and see but do not see, still and that… Read More »

Misleading Projectiles

1. To outdraw the introduction… (1) ‘The kill-chain can be thought of as a dispersed and distributed apparatus, a congeries of actors, objects, practices, discourses and affects, that entrains the people who are made part of it and constitutes them as particular kinds of subjects(2).’ … one has to think about where the fired shots… Read More »

Retrievals of the Lost Past: Jewish Mysticism and Cinema

  In common sense, history is considered as a series of events that follow one another in a one-dimensional, irreversible, and forward-looking direction. This is the familiar understanding that considers history as chronological. In this case, which requires imagining a timeline, past events are separated from future events by the present moment. Each of the… Read More »

Shannon’s Demon

Consider an information sponge so vast it amasses a billion suns—absorbing all surrounding structure and pattern, its interior would converge on a maximal entropy state. Matter succumbing to its gravitational spell would find itself drawn into a gaseous vortex, a chaotic collapse of form and order, approaching a singularity in which spacetime itself is infinitely compressed. An accretion disk would form a nebulous halo around this dark region, marking it out as an indiscriminate attractor of light, its sheer density trapping matter in a photonic cell of its own making. Such galactic nuclei, namely black holes, serve as the principal discursive site of information theory in physics, setting the stage for contested claims regarding the nature of encoding.

To Write with Blood: Discursive Authorship and Inner Experience

In ”On Reading and Writing”, a chapter in his seminal work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche speaks through his prophet Zarathustra, who declares: “Of all that is written I love only that which one writes with his blood. Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit. It is not easily possible to understand the… Read More »

A Walk in the Park, Revisited

Let’s take a walk in the park. I began my last series of work with this phrase as my guide. Appropriating the name from a set of choreography a collaborator and friend of mine, Nikima Jagudajev, uses in multiple dance-based works, and has taught me. It involves choreographed, pedestrian-like movements that are meant to be… Read More »

On Soaring Gas Prices & Neo-Authoritarianism

Vancouver Russian Community Centre vandalized with blue and yellow paint. It shouldn’t have to be said that millions of Russians are against this war. It shouldn’t have to be said that you can stand with the people of Russia and the people of Ukraine at the same time. Alas, this is the problem with liberalism:… Read More »

Post Scriptum: Art After Ideology

In one of his well known essays, Art After Philosophy, (1) Joseph Kosuth presents several propositions regarding the function of art, arguing that it only has obligations to itself. He declares that, after Duchamp, the value of certain artists should “be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art; which is another way… Read More »

Reform the Social Sciences – Or Burn Them Down

Recently I have been thinking about what would happen if all the sociology departments in the world would suddenly burn down. Would anyone besides the staff really miss them? Do they really provide any value to society and by extension, to people? While having these ponderings, I discovered a group of scholars in management studies,… Read More »

A Bridge & a Sunset

The purpose of this contribution is not to provide a philologically accurate reading of Nietzsche’s writings. That is notoriously a daunting task. What we are going to discuss here is a particular reading of Nietzsche, which inevitably carries its own peculiar type of misinterpretation, a reading that develops within a specific political and philosophical context,… Read More »

We Deserve Better Than NFTs

Having emerged from the relative obscurity of crypto enthusiasts’ niches, thanks to some major corporate push and celebrity endorsement, NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) now regularly feature at the forefront of mainstream publications, and they are already moving millions of dollars in cryptocurrency transactions each month. NFTs generated over 23 billion dollars in trading volume over the… Read More »

Parasites, A Biennale Manifestation

This is the concept text for the 36th Youth Salon, a biennial manifestation organized by the Croatian Association of Visual Artists (HDLU), that his year will be curated by the KUCCA collective. The Salon will open in April 2022 in Zagreb. The parasite is an infectant. Far from actually transforming a system’s nature, its form, elements, relations, and paths,… Read More »

The Weird Elephant

For Object-Oriented Philosophy, there is no direct access to the outside reality. Instead, this access is indirect, allusive, or vicarious. Since traditional Islamic thought is not strange to OOP, this text uses Rumi’s fable “Elephant in the Dark” to place the use of metaphoric language in a central means of the technology of speculation so crucial for… Read More »

Style & Thought Rerouted

“and the matron mourns, forlorn and forsaken, like Hecuba:” Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason 1. INTRODUCTION “Bring something incomprehensible into the world(!)”. The rallying cry of Deleuze & Guattari resounded across the field of poststructuralism and theory, and then faded off into the distance. The field of theoretical practice today, while cognisant of… Read More »

A Vertiginous Enlightenment
(On James Webb Telescope)

In tandem with the launch of James Webb Space telescope and its journey to Lagrange point 2, we decided to republish this essay by Reza Negarestani from 2012. It was originally published in Savage Objects, ed. Godofredo Pereira (Guimarães: 2012). __ The James Webb Space Telescope (sometimes called JWST) is a large infrared telescope with a 6.5-meter… Read More »

Shadows of a Utopia:
Debugging of a Reoccuring Dream

The global political crises of the last decade have renewed a call for the consideration of decolonial strategies as an effective response. As peripheral the place and voice of art in these debates might seem, from the time of the Paris Communes to the present, art has been corresponding to revolutionary and transformational developments around… Read More »

Signifying Nothing: The Dialectical Rope-a-Dope

The space of the virtual Thursday May 20th 2019 Categories: Pop, Boxing, Transcript Ladies and Gentlemen a very good evening to you and welcome to the Zenith Hall in Toronto Ontario as we present the featured round of the evening brought to you by Ataraxia starring Bill Murray in Theatres March 15th, Dion5 the official… Read More »

The Energy of Dwelling

The environmental crisis we are living through has colored the thinking of ecology with reactive hues. We grow worried about dwelling when it is on the verge of expelling us altogether from its midst. Not only in ecological discourses and practices but also in politics and civil society (particularly, virtual civil society fomented by the… Read More »

Manifesto for Post Pandemic Politics by Aelita Collective

1. Where We Are Now 1. In Spring 2020, the world was plunged into a new kind of crisis. This crisis necessitated a decision. The capacity of COVID-19 to inflict mass death, it quickly became clear, rendered comparison to SARs—or worse, the common flu—disingenuous. If nothing was done, millions would die unnecessarily. Yet while the… Read More »

As If a Planet is a Camera Obscura of Itself

01 Burrowed somewhat deep in the human ocular globe lies what will, for the sake of this essay, be called a bottleneck or a gate which functionally delimits the liminal zone between thought and cognition, between self and alien, between globularity and planetarity, between being and worlding. Punctum caecum is the scientific name of that… Read More »

Political Economy of Postmodernism & the Spirit of Post-Bourgeois Capitalism

Abstract* If there still is a hegemony of postmodernism in today’s leftist academia, and if it can be analysed as the spirit of contemporary capitalism, then this poses a problem for nowadays’ leftist academia itself. I start with the premise that the just mentioned hegemony exists and present its analysis in neo-Marxist historical-materialist fashion (1).… Read More »

Engauzements of Sky Rivers in Finnegans Wake

What follows is an exposition and a conceptual experiment around James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, with attention directed at what we might call the work’s ambient logic, or its atmospheric sense-field. I wish to examine FW as a turbid medium, as the written rendering of a tropospheric river, a filamentary water vapor conveyance channel also called… Read More »

Statelessness: Forms of Life Without Worlds & Spatial Interpretation of Logic

As has been noted in discussions of Nelson Goodman’s theory of worldmaking, for Goodman worldmaking is always a product of various operations on pre-existing worlds—worlds are made from other worlds,[1] a stance which I will refer to as his ‘worldmaking thesis’. Moreover, Goodman’s orientation is marked by a skepticism (or perhaps an agnosticism [2]) about the difference… Read More »

Lumbung: The Return of the Barn
by Jan von Brevern

The members of the Indonesian artist collective Ruangrupa presented the concept for the Documenta 15 (official spelling: Documenta fifteen) that they curated. The world’s largest exhibition of contemporary art, at least in terms of visitor numbers, which is scheduled to open in Kassel in summer 2022, will be titled lumbung. What is “lumbung”? A traditional… Read More »

Memes, Capitalism and Desire:
An Interview with Mike Watson

M. S. Yániz: Titled The Memeing of Mark Fisher: How the Frankfurt School Foresaw Capitalist Realism, your new book focuses heavily on how the internet derails any attempt at cogent responses to the biggest crises of our time. In so doing, it recalls the work of Adorno, Benjamin and Marcuse, who identified similar processes in… Read More »

A Foray into the Ecology of Possible Worlds

1. An Ecology of Possible Worlds I am often amazed to have access to satellite images with thundering evidence of our species’ capabilities to transform the environment. It is an Earthrise-like aesthetic experience that naturally calls for a philosophical inquiry about the ontology of the human self as part of the Earth’s systems. This essay… Read More »

Planetary Health Stack

The Planetary Health Stack is a metaplatform, or platform of platforms, which incorporates the planetary model of perceiving Earth. It articulates the different living and nonliving, human and nonhuman entities that inhabit the planet. This is a prompt to conceive a geopolitical infrastructural model of planetary governance to solve or at least deal with emergencies… Read More »

Is Art Made of Green Chips?

“…It feels strange. In a way […] you would think it would be strange to do it every day, but you get this kind of feeling that it feels strange actually just the first time you do it. The second time it’s still exciting and the third time it becomes work. Because you have to… Read More »

How to Kill Monsters with a Plasma Cutter

Initially, when I started writing about monstrosity mechanics in computer games, I expected the idea of “reverse horror” to become my guiding notion. The recent release of reverse horror game Carrion plus older games like Plague Inc or Prototype offer a unique opportunity to take a closer look at the phenomenon of inhabiting a monstrous… Read More »

Moralism & Its Uses

“Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void.” –Robespierre It would not be controversial to say that, over the past few years, the socialist left in the United States has… Read More »

The Learner

I. Mania «Recently my thoughts have been pointillistic: timeless markers, like an old prison tattoo, a program for a learning addiction. You see, friend, I have been trying to compose myself, tentatively, as an archetype for a Learner, the archetype to kill all archetypes. This is based on my intuition or the real possibility that… Read More »

Desertification of Silence

In the epistemic context of terraforming, geoengineering, and geophilosophy, this essay navigates the literary ecosystem through certain poetic devices, derives a conceptual trajectory, and applies it to its own architectonical posture. In it, we attempt to formulate an understanding of new experimental domains in the terrains of literary ecologies, specifically the surface of the desert,… Read More »

Recovering Dreams: Studio Ghibli, Avatar & Manifestations of the Unattainable

“It was in the scenario of the dream that we first received, as children, the lesson that things can be other than how they manifest” Vicente Ferreira da Silva “These dreams, it is necessary to inhabit them in order to convince ourselves they were ours” Gaston Bachelard “Dreams burn / but in ashes are gold”… Read More »

Notes on Unilinear Time

  “…in order to overcome modernity, it is necessary to go back to the question of time and to open up a pluralism which allows a new world history to emerge, but one which is subordinated neither to global capitalism and nationalism, nor to an absolute metaphysical ground.”1 – Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology… Read More »

A Diplomat Bomber, His Mysterious Notebooks & Disturbing Dreams

Published today in the news service Iran Wire, Kambiz Ghafoori’s investigative report is translated and presented here for the first time to shed light on the illegal and murderous activities of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Europe. — In the hot July of 2018, in a Peugeot 308 car with license plate number VJU061,… Read More »

Ceremony

“An early winter moon was rising in front of them, and chill wind came with it, penetrating feet and hands. Tayo held the bundle tighter. He felt humbled by the size of the full moon, by the chill wind that swept wide across the foothills of the mountain. They said the deer gave itself to… Read More »

mBRANE, by Spec.Æ

(A design reimagining and reenacting Superstudio’s THIRD CITY: NY of BRAINS 1971. Invited by Storefront for Art and Architecture & exhibited in October 2012 as part of “Past Futures, Present, Futures: 101 unrealized visions of New York City.”) “…they ate to integrate…” “Why did the monad cross the road? T’was the other side.” When they left,… Read More »

Horizonal Machinery & the Sites of Non-Anthropocentric Worlding

Since Heidegger first raised the issue of an end to philosophy in light of the auto-completing feedback loops of cybernetics as the logic to ground all “appearance of the totality of the world and the position of man in it” (Heidegger, 1972), this exact problematic continues to shape the forefront of philosophical anticipation. As technological… Read More »

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More Articles from &&&

The Fold, the Grid & the Void

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 »

Why The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet Is as Red as Communist China

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.

Lust to See: Rasa & Time-Given Beholding

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’s Choices: Freedom or Annihilation?

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 »

A Mother Is Never Enough for Life on Mars: On Post-Planetary Ectogenesis

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.

You Died, Subscriptions kept Renewing; You’re an Influencer Now!

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.

Sirat, Exocapital & Europe’s Beautiful Souls

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 »

NO SHIT: Notes from Venice Biennale 2026

“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 »

On Trump Defeating Communism, Again!

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 »

Death in Venice

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 »

Who Is Western Marxism Really For?

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 »

Occult Perso-Punkism of Cyclonopedia

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 »

Genealogy of Wokeism

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 »

Paratypology: Towards a Scrap Theory of Form

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 »

Socialism after Socialism, A Response to Conrad Hamilton

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 »

Biennialese Blues: Review of Whitney Biennial 2026

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 »

No View from Nowhere: On Discourse, Différance & Functorial Semantics of Micro-Communities

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 »

Liberalism Is Dead, Long Live Liberalism!

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 »

Luxury Activism: Art, Fashion & Capital

[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 »

The Questions Concerning the Ethics of AI

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 »

The Best Ever Art Basel Review that Qatar Money Can Buy

During the Art Basel Qatar’s VIP preview of Sweat Variant’s durational performance My Tongue is a Blade on February 4, two special seats up in front of the stage stayed empty for a while.  Empty with intent.  People hovered, looked, and reconsidered occupying them in their head at the last minute like they were about… Read More »

SUPPORT THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION 2026!

SIGN THE STATEMENT HERE The past several weeks have borne witness to a bloodbath in Iran amidst images of systematic massacre and horrific abuses of power by the Iranian government against its own people. As a united front, we stand together to uphold the following convictions: 1- That the Islamic Republic of Iran must come… Read More »