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Fatal Conjunctions
  • discourse
  • literature
  • contemporary culture
  • art
  • contemporary art
  • art criticism
Essays on Photography by Siegfried Kracauer
  • photography
  • film
  • History of photography
  • media theory
  • Siegfried Kracauer
Other Topics
The Cultural Logic of Environmentalization
The Cultural Logic of Environmentalization

Mathias Denecke (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...

Liquidity, Flows, Circulation

Today, it has become a truism that capital circulates, that data, populations and materials flow, that money offers liquidity. These terms appear crucial for any description of our contemporary situation, whether in economics, media studies, or contemporary art. This book asks whether the preponderance of talk of flow, liquidity, and circulation is an expression of the cultural logic of today’s environmental capitalism.
  • cultural critic
  • art
  • digital media
  • digital culture
  • capitalism
An immodest proposal
An immodest proposal

Stephen Barber

A War of Fragments: World Versus America

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...
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Fiction

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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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
On Gestational Communism

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

On Gestational Communism

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  • birth
  • community
  • social movements
  • communism
  • family
  • motherhood
  • critique of neoliberalism
The biggest bite out of the fruit of Knowledge
The biggest bite out of the fruit of Knowledge

Claus Pias (ed.)

Cybernetics

Although aspects of cybernetics can be traced back to various points in history, the proceedings of the so-called Macy Conferences, which have been edited for this volume, represent its modern foundational document. Held between 1946 and 1948 under the cumbersome title “Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems,” the papers delivered at these conferences were soon thereafter, at least as of 1949, referred to as contributions to cybernetics. Sponsored by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation (which was...
  • historic documents
  • media theory
  • epistemology
  • computer science
  • computational sciences
Humanities

Maria Filomena Molder

So many egoists call themselves artists…

“So many egoists call themselves artists,” Rimbaud wrote to Paul Demeny on May 15, 1871. Even though that is not always obvious, ‘I’, the first person, is the most unknown person, a mystery that is constantly moving towards the other two, the second and third persons, a series of unfoldings and smatterings that eventually gelled as ‘Je est un autre’. That is why ‘apocryphal’ is a literarily irrelevant concept and ‘pseudo’ a symptom, the very proof that life, writing, is made up of echoes, which means that intrusions and thefts (Borges also discusses them) will always be the daily bread of those who write.

Words from others, words taken out of place and mutilated: here are the alms of time, that squanderer’s sole kindness. And so many others, mostly others who wrote, and many other pages, all of them apocryphal, all of them echoes, reflections. All this flows together into—two centuries...

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Humanities
Humanity is a metahuman concept.

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

Humanity is a metahuman concept.

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  • realism
  • postmodernism
  • art theory
  • re-enactment
  • artistic practice
  • transhumanism

 

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