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How can withdrawal be represented?
How can withdrawal be represented?

Sebastián Eduardo Dávila (ed.), Rebecca Hanna John (ed.), ...

On Withdrawal—Scenes of Refusal, Disappearance, and Resilience in Art and Cultural Practices

How can withdrawal—meaning either that which withdraws itself, or which is being withdrawn—be represented, thus made visible and negotiable? This publication takes this paradox as its starting point, which remains present as a tension throughout. The book aims to draw constellations of different instances of withdrawal, ranging from passivity, failure, and refusal to disappearance and remembrance and to resilience and resistance. Understanding withdrawal as a concept that encompasses both cutting ties and reaffirming relations, the contributions collected here trace the...
  • resistance
  • protest movements
  • contemporary art
  • artistic practice
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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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From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

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  • science fiction
  • communication media
  • semiotics and semiology
  • linguistics
  • communication
  • utopia

 

Topics
  • Choreographing multitudes

    Choreographing multitudes

    • social networks
    • protest movements
    • crowd psychology
    • swarm model
    • social movements
    • crowd
  • Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    • astonishment
    • experiment
    • ignorance and non-knowledge
    • poetology of knowledge
    • literary studies
    • epistemology
    • idleness
    • history of knowledge
    • poetics
    • potentiality
  • Color and meaning

    Color and meaning

    Who is afraid of Red, Yellow, Blue…?

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

    Observing the Spectator

    • mirror
    • gaze
    • observer
    • optical illusion
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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Between Segregation, Cooperation, and Craziness
Between Segregation, Cooperation, and Craziness

Sebastian Vehlken

Ghetto Blasts

Even if it became popular in the context of the algorithmitization of the behavior of social insects, the birthplace of the term Swarm Intelligence is in robotics. Even engineers are subject to discourse dynamics: When Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang gave a short presentation on Cellular Robots at a NATO robotics workshop in 1988, that is, on “groups of robots that could work like cells of an organism to assemble more complex parts,” commentators allegedly demanded a buzzword “to describe...
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  • interdisciplinarity
  • robot
  • swarm intelligence
  • interface
  • Computer graphics
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Alexander García Düttmann

What does “emancipatory” mean today?

Pretending one more time that the world can still be saved and asking whether art contains an emancipatory potential can be a meaningful endeavour only if illegitimate attempts at appropriating this emancipatory potential are thwarted. Its usurpation, which amounts to its abolition, must be prevented. Critique that deserves its name must first and foremost struggle against false pretenders, not against those who do not even claim to be pretenders. The efficiency of critique’s propaedeutic character should be sought in this struggle against false pretenders. If one fears that its negativity may entail a dangerous impotence and if for this reason one wishes to supplement it with a justifying and constructive “affirmationism”, mindful of the fact that it was once meant to prepare the outline of a metaphysics purged of precritical dogmatism, then one risks forgetting that critique ceases to hurt and can no longer trigger an impulse the instant that...

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  • morals
  • critical theory
  • contemporary art
  • political aesthetics
  • aesthetics