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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...
  • artistic research
  • photography
  • history of science
  • history of media
  • History of photography
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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The Moses complex’s place is exile.
The Moses complex’s place is exile.

Ute Holl

Introduction

The unkind and inhuman God of Moses in Exodus reveals himself as a terrifying media agent. This is why the Moses figure insistently returns in the arts and sciences of the twentieth century. It corresponds to the fact that the media initially remain concealed when new laws come in with them. When Moses climbs the mountain, the tablets on which the caesuras of writing will turn out to be there already, while the people are still camping in the desert,...
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  • Jean-Marie Straub
  • community
  • exile
  • Arnold Schönberg
  • Danièle Huillet
Current Texts

Mengia Tschalaer

The sexual asylum story

Successful asylum claims generally require generating a racialist, colonialist discourse that impugns the nation-state from which the asylum seeker comes. While to impugn the asylum seeker’s place of origin may well be a necessity for the purpose of asylum, it is problematic if it serves to confirm the moral and political superiority of the West through the myth of the ideal victim. In order to avoid the cookie-cutter victimhood framework that refers to idealizations around “Us” and “Them,” Europe must adopt a reflexive approach to queer asylum that allows for recognizing its own stereotypes in regard to homosexuality, race, and gender, so as not to reproduce colonial and imperialistic narratives of vulnerability, sex, and desire through Eurocentric asylum regimes.

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  • performativity
  • gender
  • migration
  • queer theory
  • identity