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Claire Fontaine

Towards a Theory of Magic Materialism

We call this method “materialist” in reference to the wonder, thaumazein, experienced by the early Greek philosophers, who observed nature with an emotionally scientific approach, looking for resemblances and connection between every form of life but keeping close to the phenomena they studied. We call it “magic” because we believe that this term will help us fight the intellectual and perceptive ravages of a capitalist vision of the world, helping us rediscover the power of the living and the cultural...
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  • nature
  • materiality
  • contemporary art
  • political aesthetics
Current Texts

Dieter Mersch

Digital disrupture

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 in a circularity that leaves the drawing of boundaries and raising of barriers solely to programming, instead of restoring them to our ethical conscience and understanding of what the social could mean today. The machine, by contrast, remains alien to any mechanical limitation—just as its inability to decide lies in the impossibility of self-calculation. The nucleus of digital culture should instead be sought where the cultural of culture is located:...

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Topics
Current Texts
About ‘how we treat the others’

Artur Zmijewski

About ‘how we treat the others’

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  • National Socialism
  • documenta
  • migration
  • ethics
  • political aesthetics
  • propaganda
  • Poland
  • gift
  • contemporary art
  • concentration camp
Current Texts
On Gestational Communism

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

On Gestational Communism

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  • community
  • critique of neoliberalism
  • motherhood
  • birth
  • family
  • social movements
  • communism

 

Capitalism sucks. Tag everything.
Capitalism sucks. Tag everything.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Junk Philology. An Anti-Commentary

whole blocks of avenues in all directions | The verse snaps tight around the dynamic contrast of geometric uniformity and omni-directional spread, with north-south avenue grids stretched across the crest of human sound. From solid blocks to liquid (“we got a drink”) to gas “(As if the fog lifted”): the metamorphosis of phase-states. But when I read BLOCKS, I hear Lil Wayne: “tha block is hot, tha block is hot… Dodging cops and burning blocks.” And I remember the boys...
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