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 and 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 »

Shadow 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 »

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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 »

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 »

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 »