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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...
  • photographic images
  • forensic science
  • photography
  • History of photography
  • war
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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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Current Texts
From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

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  • semiotics and semiology
  • linguistics
  • communication media
  • communication
  • utopia
  • science fiction
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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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Topics
  • The Subject of Capitalism

    The Subject of Capitalism

    • subjectification
    • capitalism
    • cognitive capital
    • migration
  • Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    • ignorance and non-knowledge
    • idleness
    • potentiality
    • poetology of knowledge
    • astonishment
    • poetics
    • literary studies
    • history of knowledge
    • experiment
    • epistemology
  • Autofiction—Metafiction

    Autofiction—Metafiction

    • fiction
    • Theory of fiction
    • memory
    • autofiction
    • autobiography
  • Color and meaning

    Color and meaning

    Who is afraid of Red, Yellow, Blue…?

    • chromatics / colour science
    • image and imagery
    • semiotics and semiology
    • color
    • monochrome

 

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...
  • epistemology
  • media theory
  • computer science
  • historic documents
  • computational sciences
Current Texts

Jean-Luc Nancy

Ζένοι και Zah και Zuh

Ξένος extraneus του έξω όχι του μέσα (intraneus) όχι της οικίας unheimlich όχι του heim όχι της εστίας της άλλης πλευράς της πόρτας – fores, foreigner όχι υπερβολικά στον ρυθμό, odd όχι κανονικός όχι συνήθης σπάνιος ιδιάζων seltsam παράξενος besherat γενναίος κομψός απρόβλεπτος στραβός verschroben

λοξός αναπάντεχος εξαιρετικός εκπληκτικός

 

Είναι εκπληκτικό πόσες λέξεις εκφράσεις τρόπους διαφορετικούς έχουμε για να μιλήσουμε για τον παράξενο ξένο τον ausländer τον έξω από τη χώρα και όχι «pays avec nous» όπως λέγαμε κάποτε στη Γαλλία «c’est un pays à moi» για να πούμε κάποιος από το χωριό μου τη γειτονιά μου την περιοχή μου την πατρίδα μου

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