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Skin marks us in the world
Skin marks us in the world

Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira

Invented Skins

You never know how many skins you have had by having a single skin. However, this skin has an inseparable memory of the future. Its vital movement depends on this dynamic that inserts it in a specific present. Thus, if skin makes us human, it is also a set of points that mark different ways of feeling. We feel the world through the fragility of our skin. Microorganisms exist in this skin. The most human portion also contains inhuman matter...
  • avant-garde
  • Think Art
  • intertextuality
  • aesthetics
  • Brazil
Yes, magic exists!
Yes, magic exists!

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.)

A Sinister Assassin

Antonin Artaud’s very last work, prior to his death in March 1948, is the most extraordinary element of his entire body of work – and is the element now most enduringly inspirational, for contemporary artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers, choreographers, and others inspired by Artaud – through its fiercely exploratory, extreme and combative forms, along with its dissolutions and negations of forms, focused above all on the human anatomy, as well as on sonic experimentation and on provocations for innovation in...
  • avant-garde
  • poetry
  • literature
  • Modernism
  • autobiography
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

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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The Dance of All Things
The Dance of All Things

Georges Didi-Huberman, Laurent Mannoni, ...

Movements of Air

It would be futile to resist the feeling that the marvelous curls of smoke, photographed by Étienne-Jules Marey between 1899 and 1901, first elicit from us. We have the impression of witnessing a pure beauty in the process of making, unmaking, and remaking itself incessantly before our eyes. It is a supreme flow—images of flow and a flow of images all at once—from which approximately fifty instants have been randomly “drawn,” all formed differently and likewise admirable. Such simple beauty...
  • history of science
  • History of photography
  • history of media
  • photography
  • artistic research
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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