Books

Open for the plurality of all forms of imagination and knowledge, DIAPHANES MAGAZINE connects an interest in current tendencies with deep-rooted research, the power of fiction with nuanced judgment, aesthetic excitability with essayistic sharpness.

art
contemporary art
contemporary culture
discourse
literature
art criticism
avant-garde

Discourse

Donatien Grau, James Spooner

“Fuck that thing.” That’s all punk needs.

“The thing about punk is that you’re allowed to talk about anything. Kids can talk about whatever they want. There’s nobody saying, ‘No, you can’t do that, it’s not punk.’”

Humanities

Hauke Branding (ed.), Julian Volz (ed.)

Theoretical perspectives in conversation with artistic perspectives on Queer liberation in a transnational context.

queer theory
orientalism
desire
contemporary art
Postcolonial Studies
contemporary art

Magazine

Surrogacies

Myths and visions of motherhood and fathering, brings together artistic and theoretical positions on reproduction and communication, gender and genus, addressing and conception.

aesthetics
mother figure
father figure
motherhood
gender
body
feminism
queer theory
contemporary art

Magazine Online

News + Events

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:<br>Art, Magazine, Books

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Art, Magazine, Books

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New releases

Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback (ed.), David Payne (ed.): Breaking Grounds

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger: In Touch: Encounters between Art and Research

Hauke Branding (ed.), Julian Volz (ed.): Radical Desires

Kevin B. Lee (ed.): The Future of Survival

Choreographing multitudes

Anthology

Social Media—New Masses

Mass gatherings and the positive or negative phantasms of the masses instigate various discourses and practices of social control, communication, and community formation. Yet the masses are not what they once were. In light of the algorithmic analysis of mass data, the diagnosis of dispersed public spheres in the age...

Inge Baxmann (ed.), Timon Beyes (ed.), Claus Pias (ed.)

Social Media—New Masses

Article

Zombies, Panic Prevention, Crowd Simulation

Calculating disasters today means to coalesce empirical data of past catastrophies, observational data of mass events, and the computer-based experimentation and scenario-building with virtual ABM models of realistic agents and spatial environments. It thus combines analytical and synthetic approaches, supported by advanced visualization techniques, in the areas of crowd simulation,... ABO

Sebastian Vehlken

After Affects

Article

Facebook's Open Graph Protocol: a medial promise

Facebook’s Open Graph protocol is the basis of a conglomerate in which the technical functionalities of addressing and distribution go hand in hand with categorization, staging, and user activity. A fundamental aspect to all of this is the fact that Open Graph can only be thought about in terms of... ABO

Irina Kaldrack, Theo Röhle

Creating Subsets of the Masses

Article

Computer Games and the Distraction Economy

Digital culture promises a business model that oscillates between blockbusters and niche products. This model leads to upheavals in the market that directly affect, for instance, the quality and availability of computer games. Just as we rely on cognitive models in our interactions with individuals, our understanding of complex social... ABO

Peter Krapp

Between the Madness and the Wisdom of Crowds

Clémentine Deliss

A coffin to bury the statues of the ancestors

I was initially slightly sceptical of the ramifications and undertones of Renzo Martens’ project in central Congo…

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Africa
colonialism
sculpture
contemporary art
museum
colonial history

Current Texts

Ute Holl

Dream, Clouds, Off, Exile

“Communism will be when we understand something of love.”

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film
exile
Karl Marx
communism
monotheism

Current Texts

Dodie Bellamy

A stupid tweet by a nobody, meant as a parody, somehow goes viral and the internet offers up death threats. OPEN
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What is the problem with solutions? Blind or deaf? Which faith? What knowledge? Duchamp or Warhol? East or west? OPEN
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Tyler Coburn

However convincingly space agencies justify the enormous budgets, there’s one gratuitous expense: training astronauts for free fall. ABO

Stephen Barber

Twenty-four hours in state of unconsciousness

Now this spectral city will become the site for execrations and lamentations, now time itself will disintegrate and void itself… ABO

New releases

Allison Grimaldi Donahue: The History of Breathing

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Last Writings of Antonin Artaud

Anna Kipke (ed.), Iryna Kovalenko (ed.), ...: Drafts in Action

Eyal Weizman, Ines Weizman: Before & After

Thomas Köck: un gran casino (ta pissà adoss l’ürocc)

Arts

Matrices porteuses – Surrogacies

DIAPHANES Magazine No. 11

This issue explores practices of human and non-human substitution.

What claims the place of the nuclear family in the face of hybrid kinships and social freezing? What could new elective kinships be in times of chatbots and pseudonymisation? Is this the time for surrogate mother tongues and extra-human rhetorics of surrogation? Sophie Lewis claims a gestational communism and hunts our grannies. Barbara Vinken reflects on spiritual motherhood, Luciana Parisi on human automata and gendered proxies. For Zuzana Cela, language is a foreign body that can be invaginated. Werner Hamacher strolls...

gender
motherhood
body
contemporary art
mother figure

Arts

To lay a hand on the shoulder of future victims…

Donatien Grau, Pierre Guyotat

»By using voices I have rediscovered what we call humanity.« OPEN
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Zoran Terzić

Symbolical transplants are necessary

Strangeness is everywhere, but strangers are only where we define them. ABO DE FR

When life’s hard, time’s a motherfucker going slow

Soham Gupta

In his photographs and texts, Calcutta-based Soham Gupta forces the tension that arises between fiction and real-life conditions in as yet unseen ways. ABO DE FR

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

The key to survival will lay in female hands. OPEN
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Arts

Elena Vogman

Ornamentation is the body of our thought

With Bely, a continuum is continuously produced between visceral organic states, political states of society and meteorological states of the world.

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Arts

Artur Zmijewski

About ‘how we treat the others’

“There is something deeply humiliating in such a situation.”

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propaganda
contemporary art
gift
Poland
ethics
political aesthetics
migration
documenta
National Socialism
concentration camp

Authors

Books

Georges Didi-Huberman, Mira Fliescher (ed.), ...: The Cube and the Face

Philippe Despoix (ed.), Siegfried Kracauer, ...: The Past's Threshold

Maria Zinfert (ed.): Kracauer. Photographic Archive

Dieter Mersch: Epistemologies of Aesthetics

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): “Here Lies” preceded by “The Indian Culture”

Fiction

Born too late to see the war, too soon to forget it.

Reiner Schürmann

Origins

Why this past? Why is this past mine? A past which I did not even know?

"This is a book about the power that a past War holds over a German growing up in the 1950s and 1960s: born too late to see that war and too early to forget it. The narrative shows how painfully public events — the shadows, rather, of events gone by — intrude upon a life and shape it. The English translation appears at a moment when most of the key issues have radically changed. Germany has signed what amounts to a...

autobiography
emigration
1968
homosexuality
memory

Fiction

Dietmar Dath

Do you want to believe in language?

The index calculates everything. Announcements of awards, mostly false, light up then die. His dopamine balance feeds the list. Limbic structures support it. Brain means house, should have windows. OPEN
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Julien Maret

Track the clouds

heal slowly… when the deed is done… when coming back is nowhere… we slide our hands through sloping fountains… ABO

Axel Dielmann

“Can you imagine something like that?”

The curators were probably worried that someone would stumble carelessly up the stairs while looking at the exhibits… OPEN
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Mike Wilson

Mike Wilson’s literature is a fast trip through the American night, drawn in melancholy images of great beauty. ABO

Fiction

Maël Renouard

On Memory Atrophy

How can we remember the way we used to remember?

Externalized memory had always proceeded by contractions, summaries, reductions, selections, breaks in flow, as well as by organization, classification, boiling down. Card catalogues reduced thousands of works to a few key notions; tables of contents contracted the hundreds of pages in a given book. The sign itself was the first abbreviation of experience. An epic stitched of words was an abbreviation of the war, the long years of which were reduced to a few nights of recitation; the written text that recorded the epic was a contraction of the oral narration which pushed aside its sensory richness, melody, life in a thousand details. In accumulating, every level of abbreviation reconstituted an infinite flow, a new dilation that would be contracted in its turn. From the plurality of pages to the index and the table of contents; from the plurality of books to card catalogues.

The abbreviated elements were further arranged, situated...

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Fiction

Kim Gordon

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear?

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Authors

Books

Gleb J. Albert (ed.), Nikolaj Evreinov, ...: The Steps of Nemesis

Marion Muller-Colard, Nathalie Novi: Dr. Freud, Fish Whisperer

Frédéric Morlot, Anne-Margot Ramstein: Albert Einstein's Bright Ideas

Donatien Mary, Ronan de Calan: The Ghost of Karl Marx

Discourse

Digital disrupture

Dieter Mersch

Digital Criticism

The machine remains alien to any mechanical limitation.

We really need an analysis of algorithmic conditions and their paradoxes and ambiguities that gives them an adequate framework and horizon. But instead we currently seem to be finding an algorithmic solution of the algorithmic, much as digital solutions are being offered for the problems of the digital public sphere, in the way that IT corporations, for example, use exclusively mathematical procedures to evaluate and delete “fake news,” inappropriate portrayals, or the violation of personal rights. This tends to result...

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Discourse

Slavs and Tatars

To what extent can a revolution of the inner world impact the external, material world surrounding us? OPEN
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Michele Pedrazzi

Cosa porterà il prossimo bit? Sconvolgenti novità? Semplice ridondanza? OPEN
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Black Panther is an American, not an African story

A.K. Kaiza

In another era, the mish-mash presentation of Africa would have been the focal point of criticism. But this is not the age for facts. OPEN
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Stephen Barber

J.G. Ballard’s self-declared ‘Immodest Proposal’ for a global war-alliance to exact the destruction of America demonstrates the provocatory zeal of his last fiction plans, as well as their enduring prescience. OPEN
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Discourse

Sina Dell’Anno

The Disobedience of the Word

“He always read Priam instead of ‘prime’.”

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Discourse

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

Hurrah!

We rehearsed the crowd scenes in the Winter Palace, in the Throne Room and the Armorial Hall.

ABO

Authors

Books

Liza Mattutat (ed.), Roberto Nigro (ed.), ...: What’s Legit?

Liliana Gómez (ed.), Fabienne Liptay (ed.): Eco-operations

Alexander Kluge, Joseph Vogl: Soll und Haben

Sebastián Eduardo Dávila (ed.), Rebecca Hanna John (ed.), ...: On Withdrawal—Scenes of Refusal, Disappearance, and Resilience in Art and Cultural Practices

Humanities

Aesthetic Practices in the Global South

Liliana Gómez (ed.)

Performing Human Rights

How arts perform human rights and how aesthetic engagements with human rights violations testify to art’s capacity to create alternate worlds.

This book aims to show how arts perform human rights and how aesthetic engagements with human rights violations testify to art’s capacity to create alternate worlds, which with their creative modes do provide alternate semantics to the legal failures and the state’s official silence. This book shares the conviction that, after all, artistic articulations allow ethico-aesthetic considerations of “questions that are broader than the law and the institutions of the political, precisely because they are prior to law … and...