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Arts

Matrices porteuses – Surrogacies

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

gender
body
motherhood
contemporary art
mother figure
poetry

Fiction

Fatal Conjunctions

Everything is connected to everything else, says Lenin, as do the finance gurus…

art
art criticism
literature
contemporary culture
discourse
contemporary art

Discourse

Curriculum Vitae in Pictures

portrait
autobiography
1950s
archive
photography
1930s
History of photography
Siegfried Kracauer
Paris
memory
biography

Humanities

Visual Theorization of Value

A phantom that has haunted the imagination of many filmmakers, historians, and writers to the present day,

cinematography
culture industry
Karl Marx
film theory
cinema

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.

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

Magazine Online

News + Events

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

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:
Art, Magazine, Books

diaphanes_net

New releases

Kieran Aarons (ed.), Reiner Schürmann, ...: The Place of the Symbolic

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

Daniel Berndt (ed.), Susanne Huber (ed.), ...: ambivalent work*s

Sabine Gebhardt Fink (ed.), Andrej Mircev (ed.): Revolving Documents—Narrations of Beginnings, Recent Methods and Cross-Mappings of Performance Art

Thierry de Duve: Come On, Men, One More Effort …

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

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

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

»This is not my blood.«

What is the problem with solutions? Blind or deaf? Which faith? What knowledge? Duchamp or Warhol? East or west?

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performance art
Video art
human–animal communication
identity

Current Texts

Dream, Clouds, Off, Exile

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

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exile
monotheism
Karl Marx
film
communism

Current Texts

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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Corona Park, Hub of theWorld

Facebook’s picture tumbler is currently reminding me of my first visit to China a year ago.

Symbolical transplants are necessary

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

New releases

Marie Sophie Beckmann (ed.), Petra Löffler (ed.): Sub(e)merging: Experiences, Practices and Politics from below

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Watchfiends and Rack Screams

Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira: Invented Skins

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

Arts

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

Afropunk Philology

“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.’”

“If I could have one selfish wish, it would be that I could sing or play an instrument. I played bass for eight years, and I suck. It just doesn’t work with my brain, but art always has.’”

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Arts

Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, ...

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

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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Arts

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

The future has never looked older

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

ABO

Authors

Books

Donatien Grau, Sylvère Lotringer: I Was More American than the Americans

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

Fiction

It was another 75° day in LA.

The Pitch

Where do you go when you disappear?

It was another 75° day in LA. The kind that can either make you gloriously happy to live in such perfect warmth in February or want to make you want to go home and lay down and turn on the TV for a little feeling of connection to life outside of Cali. Those goddamn Santa Ana winds were beginning to whip around. I know the clichés about them creating madness. As I walked around the garage I couldn’t help wonder what her...

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Fiction

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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Maël Renouard

On Memory Atrophy

How can we remember the way we used to remember? OPEN
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Raphaëlle Milone

Old-school publisher, avant-garde dandy, undisputed expert on the global history of Dada: Raphaëlle Milone paints an intimate but unsparing portrait of a man who belonged perhaps to a dying breed but is still remembered vividly. ABO FR

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

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

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…

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,...

ABO

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

Authors

Books

Marion Muller-Colard, Clémence Pollet: Hannah Arendt's Little Theater

Maria Zinfert (ed.): Kracauer. Photographic Archive

Yan Marchand, Vincent Sorel: Diogenes the Dog-Man

Jean Paul Mongin, François Schwoebel: Mister Descartes and his Evil Genius

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

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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Sina Dell’Anno

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

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s closeness to fascism has put him in a dubious light. Barbara Basting tells of her personal fascination with futurism and her dehabituation from its aura and central figure. ABO DE

Discourse

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

On Gestational Communism

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

ABO DE

communism
community
family
birth
motherhood
social movements
critique of neoliberalism

Discourse

From xenolinguistics to cephalopods

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable?

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utopia
communication media
science fiction
semiotics and semiology
linguistics
communication

Books

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

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

Sami Khatib (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...: Critique: The Stakes of Form

Shusha Niederberger (ed.), Cornelia Sollfrank (ed.), ...: Aesthetics of the Commons

Humanities

Hurrah!

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

A Diary of my Encounters

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

Evreinov was occupied with the spectacle’s theatrical, dramaturgical side. Due to its immense size, the production was directed collectively: Evreinov was the director-in-chief, followed by Kugel, Petrov, Derzhavin, and myself. I also designed the scenery and the costumes. My stage sets spanned the entire width of Palace Square and reached up to the third floor of the General Staff. They consisted of two huge platforms (a White and a Red one), connected by a steep bridge. There were around 8,000...

ABO

Humanities

Guy Debord was the avant-garde’s Christ.

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem looks back and ahead in the light of the spectacle of aesthetic capitalism, which has become even more unfettered since Debord’s death. ABO FR 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

Sandra Frimmel

What does it mean? ABO DE

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

Humanities

Maria Filomena Molder

So many egoists call themselves artists…

Words are human things; a great obscurity saturates them…

“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