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Arts

The Architecture of Disaster

How can the gap between images become a site of critical counter-reading rather than a symbol of erasure?

photography
forensic science
History of photography
photographic images
war
history of media

Fiction

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

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.

Discourse

Specters of the Avant-garde

DIAPHANES 6/7 stellt sich ins harte Licht ästhetischer Trauer, träumt von einer Nachhut der Vielen, konjugiert Vergangenes im Futur 2.

contemporary art
photography
France
avant-garde
Modernism
contemporary literature

Humanities

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

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

orientalism
desire
contemporary art
contemporary art
queer theory
Postcolonial Studies

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.

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

Magazine Online

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

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:
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

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

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

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

Crowds in augmented space

He must have had a long night. Now, at a quarter past eight in the morning, the young man is standing in front of the mirror with disheveled hair and a crooked tie and preparing himself for another day at the office. Beyond typical bathroom activity, however, this routine also... ABO

Roland Meyer

Augmented Crowds

All that pent up terror and rage

A stupid tweet by a nobody, meant as a parody, somehow goes viral and the internet offers up death threats.

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Current Texts

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

The key to survival will lay in female hands.

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feminism
performance
spiritism
ritual
ceremony
Africa
colonialism
body

Current Texts

Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, ...

“I don’t believe in progress, no.” OPEN
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Sina Dell’Anno

“He always read Priam instead of ‘prime’.” OPEN
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»Three hundred people left The House that Jack Built. I think that’s very good, and it wasn’t Cannes.« ABO DE

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...

body
motherhood
gender
mother figure
contemporary art

Arts

A coffin to bury the statues of the ancestors

Clémentine Deliss

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

What is the problem with solutions? Blind or deaf? Which faith? What knowledge? Duchamp or Warhol? East or west? OPEN
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Dan-el Padilla Peralta

it seemed like we’d just been in some horrible dream OPEN
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Arts

Eric Baudelaire

A for Anomie

We cannot assume that all government/terrorist interactions will take the form of a two-person zero-sum game.

A for Anomie

The idea that terrorism and other forms of political violence are directly related to strains caused by strongly held grievances has been one of the most common explanations to date and can be traced to a diverse set of theoretical concepts including relative deprivation, social disorganization, breakdown, tension, and anomie. Merton (1938) identifies anomie as a cultural condition of frustration, in which values regarding goals and how to achieve them conflict with limitations on the means of achievement.

Gary LaFree and Laura Dugan, “Research on Terrorism and Countering Terrorism”, Crime and Justice, Vol. 38, No. 1, 2009.

B for Block or Blocked

If terrorism in each of its expressions can be considered an indicator of the existence of a political block (of an impossibility of reacting if one wishes to react differently), this influences its real ability to modify the situation. Terrorism has been historically more successful when it was not...

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

Authors

Books

Wolfgang Brückle (ed.), Fred Truniger (ed.): Display, Distribute, Disrupt

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): The Human Face and Other Writings on His Drawings

Donatien Grau (ed.), Christoph Wiesner (ed.): After the Crisis

Maria Zinfert (ed.): Kracauer. Fotoarchiv

Fiction

To end GOD’S JUDGEMENT

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.)

Radio Works: 1946–48

Everything must be arranged to a hair in a fulminating order.

Artaud’s work is performative in the sense that it never simply describes, but actively produces the events it enacts. As Austin characterises performative language, ‘the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action’.3 Artaud’s work, performed correctly, is magical, finding its power in ritualistic chanting. Intonation is key to this, recalling what he wrote about metaphysical language in The Theatre and its Double, where the aim is ‘to deal with intonations in an absolutely concrete manner, restoring their...

literature
radio

Fiction

Diane Williams

How about some string?

I said “Would you like a rope? You know that haul you have is not secured properly.” ABO DE

Maël Renouard

On Memory Atrophy

How can we remember the way we used to remember? OPEN
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The limp, voluptuous decadence of the place

Bruce Bégout

I’m not going to talk about my profession here. ABO FR DE

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

We are bodies. It makes no sense to debate this. OPEN
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Fiction

Pierre Guyotat

The matrix for »Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats«

“This text was written at the end of 1962, after my return from Algeria. For me the text is the matrix for Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats.” P.G.

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war experience
war

Fiction

A. L. Kennedy

Upending meanings and rewriting sanity

When it all burns you’ll know – a writer was there at the first…

ABO DE FR

Authors

Books

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

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Antoine d’Agata: Diagonale du vide

Miriam Henke, Jérôme Meyer-Bisch: Lao-Tzu, or the Way of the Dragon

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Artaud 1937 Apocalypse

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

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

“If you love your family, you want family abolition for them!” ABO DE

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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Alexander García Düttmann

Can contemporary theatre recognize itself in the boxing ring so that its fist, the fist of the past, strikes a forceful and violent blow? ABO DE

Helmut J. Schneider

A Phenomenology of Compassion

How to make the strange person our “neighbor”? ABO DE

Discourse

From xenolinguistics to cephalopods

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable?

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communication
utopia
communication media
linguistics
science fiction
semiotics and semiology

Discourse

Stephen Barber

An immodest proposal

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. As Ballard emphasises several times in the World Versus America notebooks, he is utterly serious in his concerns and visions.
Although the Ballard estate declined permission for any images of pages from the World Versus America archival notebooks to accompany this essay, any member of the general public interested to do so can readily visit the British Library and view the notebooks in their entirety in the freely-accessible manuscripts collection there.

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Authors

Books

Gertrud Koch: Breaking Bad, Breaking Out, Breaking Even

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

Mathias Denecke (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...: Liquidity, Flows, Circulation

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

Humanities

Ornamentation is the body of our thought

Elena Vogman

Dynamography, or Andrei Bely’s Rhythmic Gesture

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

The experience of the Russian Revolution transformed both the perception and the epistemic notion of time. It challenged artistic and scientific modes of production with the invention of new models of temporality. Nonlinear, morphological, and materialist models of time seemed to correspond more precisely to the irruptive event of the revolution. These echoed more the new political constellation than a historicist or purely philosophical notion of a homogeneous time as a condition a priori to any experience. New theories in...

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Humanities

Jean-Luc Nancy

Ζένοι και Zah και Zuh

αποξενωμένοι αποκλίνοντες από ποιο αόρατο οικείο; OPEN
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Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers

Like no other journal, Tel Quel was an outstanding arena of literary innovation and intellectual revolution. In this conversation its founder and publisher, Philippe Sollers, provides intimate insight and polemical hindsight into some of the most important milestones of its still-resonating era. ABO DE

Each showroom has a couple of “managers”.

Do I really know the person I’ve watched every day on screen for months? I know many things, like where he is, where he comes from, what his home looks like, when he gets up and sleeps, etc. But do I really know him? ABO DE

Ines Kleesattel

Thérèse ayant douleurs menstruelles could be a beginning. OPEN
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Humanities

Nothing is at home

Philosophy is found wanting. It is considered anachronistic, some say dead. The tradition is in ruins.

ABO

art theory
phenomenology
Modernism
art
aesthetics

Humanities

Zoran Terzić

Critique of generic rationality

The programs “sense” how the clients function, but not because AI is becoming more human—rather because clients now function as generically as programs.

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Authors