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Diane Williams

How about some string?

I said “Would you like a rope? You know that haul you have is not secured properly.”
“No,” he said, “but I see you have string!”
“If this comes into motion—” I said, “you should use a rope.”
“Any poison ivy on that? ” he asked me, and I told him my rope had been in the barn peacefully for years.
He took a length of it to the bedside table. He had no concept for what wood could endure.
“Table must have broken when I lashed it onto the truck,” he said.
And, when he was moving the sewing machine, he let the cast iron wheels—bang, bang on the stair.
I had settled down to pack up the flamingo cookie jar, the cutlery, and the cookware, but stopped briefly, for how many times do you catch sudden sight of something heartfelt?
I saw our milk cows in their slow...

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The Architecture of Disaster
The Architecture of Disaster

Ines Weizman, Eyal Weizman

Before & After

History is increasingly presented as a series of catastrophes. The most common mode of this presentation is the before-and-after image—a juxtaposition of two photographs of the same place, at different times, before and after an event has taken its toll. Buildings seen intact in a “before” photograph have been destroyed in the one “after.” Neighborhoods bustling with activity in one image are in ruins or under a layer of foulwater in the next. Deforestations, contaminations, melting icebergs and drying rivers...
  • History of photography
  • forensic science
  • photographic images
  • war
  • photography
Born too late to see the war, too soon to forget it.
Born too late to see the war, too soon to forget it.

Reiner Schürmann

Origins

"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...
  • homosexuality
  • autobiography
  • emigration
  • memory
  • 1968
Fiction

Stephen Barber

Twenty-four hours in state of unconsciousness

Now the dead will no longer be buried, now this spectral city will become the site for execrations and lamentations, now time itself will disintegrate and void itself, now human bodies will expectorate fury and envision their own transformation or negation, now infinite and untold catastrophes are imminently on their way —ready to cross the bridge over the river Aire and engulf us all — in this winter of discontent, just beginning at this dead-of-night ­instant before midnight, North-Sea ice-particles already crackling in the air and the last summer long-over, the final moment of my seventeenth birthday, so we have to go, the devil is at our heels… And now we’re running at full-tilt through the centre of the city, across the square beneath the Purbeck-marble edifice of the Queen’s ­Hotel, down towards the dark arches under the railway tracks, the illuminated sky shaking, the air fissured with beating cacophony,...

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Digital disrupture
Digital disrupture

Dieter Mersch

Digital Criticism

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
From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

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  • communication media
  • linguistics
  • utopia
  • semiotics and semiology
  • science fiction
  • communication
How can withdrawal be represented?
How can withdrawal be represented?

Sebastián Eduardo Dávila (ed.), Rebecca Hanna John (ed.), ...

On Withdrawal—Scenes of Refusal, Disappearance, and Resilience in Art and Cultural Practices

How can withdrawal—meaning either that which withdraws itself, or which is being withdrawn—be represented, thus made visible and negotiable? This publication takes this paradox as its starting point, which remains present as a tension throughout. The book aims to draw constellations of different instances of withdrawal, ranging from passivity, failure, and refusal to disappearance and remembrance and to resilience and resistance. Understanding withdrawal as a concept that encompasses both cutting ties and reaffirming relations, the contributions collected here trace the...
  • resistance
  • artistic practice
  • protest movements
  • contemporary art

 

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