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Behind the Great Firewall . . . . . HER . . . . . Artificial and Other Intelligences . . . . . Quaddie . . . . . L’œuvre d'art n’a pas d’idée, elle est idée . . . . . THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CLOUD NAMES . . . . . How to Pilot an Aeroplane . . . . . LISTMANIA . . . . . Charlemagne Rides through Paris . . . . . BIG BUGS . . . . . TWELVE DRUMMERS DRUMMING . . . . . Mário Gomes . Brandsatz & Ästhetik . . . . . Marcus Quent . Ohne Halt . . . . . Self-portrait . . . . . Barbara Basting — The Algorithm and I . . . . . Hermal . . . . . Pierre Guyotat . The Prison . . . . . I remember . . . . . Human Oddities . . . . . The Transversal Shelf of Printed Books in Times of Accelerated Opaque Media . . . . . Ute Holl . Dream, Clouds, Off, Exile . . . . . 12 Feb 2011 — 12 Feb 2017 . . . . . Facebook’s Just a Nail Studio . . . . . American English . . . . . Donatien Grau, Pierre Guyotat . Conversation . . . . . 12 May 2011 – 12 May 2017: On Non-Digital Storage Media . . . . . I remember… . . . . . GUANAJUATONOVIEMBRE . . . . . Mike Wilson . Rockabilly . . . . . Boutiques on the Bosporus . . . . . ABT. DIE DUEMMSTEN BERLINER FRISÖRNAMEN . . . . . Paradox I: That all things kill themselves . . . . . Pierre Guyotat . Unabhängigkeit . . . . . Custom Creates Law . . . . . Peter Ott . Die monotheistische Zelle oder Berichte aus der Fiktion . . . . . Problem IX: Warum haben Hurenkinder das allermeiste Glück? . . . . . I remember . . . . . Tyler Coburn . Ergonomic Futures . . . . . Ich erinnere mich… . . . . . Je me souviens… . . . . . This is not your blood. . . . . . Michael Heitz . Noch ein neuer Gott in Teilen . . . . . Exodus. Gods and Kings . . . . . China frisst Menschen . . . . . Michael Heitz . Another New God in Parts . . . . . Mike Wilson . Rockabilly . . . . . Julien Maret . IN EXTREMIS . . . . . Peter Ott . The Monotheistic Cell Or Reports from Fiction . . . . . Marcus Quent . No Respite
Web Magazine
The future has never looked older

Tyler Coburn

However convincingly space agencies justify the enormous budgets, there’s one gratuitous expense: training astronauts for free fall. ABO

Marcus Quent

Critical thought that amounts to nothing more than questioning given positions, in negotiating existing conflict between parties, is none. OPEN
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Part Dieu. The Painting of Francisco Sierra

Michael Heitz

You have to imagine Francisco Sierra as a cheerful painter. ABO DE
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DIAPHANES No. 11
DIAPHANES Magazine No. 11

On Gestational Communism

“If you love your family, you want family abolition for them!” ABO DE

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

Surrogate Abolition

Bang Bang Baroque

On the first gaze the works of Emma Waltraud Howes seem incongruously out of time. Visiting her studio, one enters... ABO

Emma Waltraud Howes

Questionnaire Emma Waltraud Howes

Pregnancy is the weirdest condition

The seahorse is the chosen metaphor for pregnant trans men ABO DE

I.V. Nuss

The Love in the Convex, in Absolute Roundness and the Sluttification of All Men West of the Bosporus

DIAPHANES No. 10
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 10

The Disobedience of the Word

“He always read Priam instead of ‘prime’.” OPEN
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Sina Dell’Anno

Punk / Philology

Punk’s raptures are mystical.

Iggy showed the error of human existence, the breathless nearness of death, and the lure of fun and action. He... ABO

Simon Critchley

Learning to Eat Time with One’s Ears

Sex creates love and love creates sex

“I don’t believe in progress, no.” OPEN
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Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, Richard Hell

"I’d rather live in a book"

“Fuck that thing.” That’s all punk needs.

“The thing about punk is that you’re allowed to talk about anything. Kids can talk about whatever they want. There’s... OPEN
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Donatien Grau, James Spooner

Afropunk Philology

Capitalism sucks. Tag everything.

it seemed like we’d just been in some horrible dream OPEN
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Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Junk Philology. An Anti-Commentary

DIAPHANES No. 8/9
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 8/9

Upending meanings and rewriting sanity

When it all burns you’ll know – a writer was there at the first… ABO DE FR

A. L. Kennedy

What is an Author?

Towards a Theory of Magic Materialism

Becoming the translator rather than the careless exploiter of nature might be the ad­venture of humankind in the years to come. OPEN
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Claire Fontaine

Towards a Theory of Magic Materialism

Artificial and Other Intelligences

Facebook’s picture tumbler is currently reminding me of my first visit to China a year ago. I was impressed: so many skyscrapers, so many people, so much technology! And such wonderful noodle soups! I put a few impressions on my Facebook timeline, even though Facebook is blocked by China’s Great...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 7

Subjectivation and Authenticity

It is human selection that turns a machine selection that is meaningless because of its compilation criteria into a (potentially)... ABO DE

Felix Stalder

Feedback as Authenticity

Each showroom has a couple of “managers”.

Do I really know the person I’ve watched every day on screen for months? I know many things, like where... ABO DE

Present.Perfect.

DIAPHANES No. 6/7
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 6/7

When life’s hard, time’s a motherfucker going slow

In his photographs and texts, ­Calcutta-based Soham Gupta forces the tension that arises between fiction and real-life conditions in as... ABO DE FR

Soham Gupta

Angst

Why should this be art?

I Hate the Avant-Garde. When an artist as self-ironic and self-reflective as Yuri Albert makes such a statement about art, then skepticism is called for. Like his overall series Elitist-Democratic Art, the title deliberately plays with simple affirmations and negations, and at the same time exhibits the inherent receptive dilemma... ABO DE

Sandra Frimmel

I Hate the Avant-garde

How could Dante be avant-garde?

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers

What is the Meaning of the Avant-garde’s Death?

Guy Debord was the avant-garde’s Christ.

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem looks back and ahead in the light of the spectacle of aesthetic capitalism, which has become even... ABO FR DE

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem

Tomb for Guy Debord

Based on a brilliant trick

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s closeness to fascism has put him in a dubious light. Barbara Basting tells of her personal fascination... ABO DE

Barbara Basting

Marinetti Detox

DIAPHANES NO. 5
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 5

Blood!

Thérèse ayant douleurs menstruelles could be a beginning. OPEN
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Ines Kleesattel

Art, Girls, and Aesthetic Freedom Down Below

Be Jack!

Like no other actor, Uma Thurman bears a face as a trace of itself. The most recent emanation of this... OPEN
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Michael Heitz, Hendrik Rohlf

Uma’s Face—Thurman’s Voice

»Self-censorship is the worst.«

»Three hundred people left The House that Jack Built. I think that’s very good, and it wasn’t Cannes.« ABO DE

Lars von Trier in Conversation with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem & Raphaëlle Milone

Saturnaaaaalia

The rebellion of the signifiers against their semantic taming OPEN
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Sina Dell’Anno

Oratio Soluta

Artificial and Other Intelligences

Facebook’s picture tumbler is currently reminding me of my first visit to China a year ago. I was impressed: so many skyscrapers, so many people, so much technology! And such wonderful noodle soups! I put a few impressions on my Facebook timeline, even though Facebook is blocked by China’s Great...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 7

DIAPHANES No. 4
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 4

I remember

So wie geplant kommt es ja selten, meistens ergibt sich etwas halt so. Das ist weniger der Zustand der Welt als eine mutlose Haltung und Rechtfertigung, dafür, dass man sein Leben nicht selbst forsch in die Hand genommen hat. Es sind die höheren oder die hinterhältigen Mächte, Schicksal. Die Suche nach...

Fritz Senn

Das Leben besteht aus gestrandeten Konjunktiven

Your story begins with a tunnel.

I’m standing in my perfectly fitting uniform with its freshly-pressed swastika armband in a long line at an American office. I’m waiting to submit my Application for Total War. Then, after standing in line for hours, the friendly clerk tells me that I need The Application for Foreign Aggressions in... OPEN
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Angelika Meier

Who I Really Am

From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable? OPEN
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Xenolinguistics

Behind the Great Firewall

I sit in the lobby of a hotel in China where I am accommodated along with other guests of an academic colloquium. Set in the middle of a vaguely Tuscan landscape, it includes a golf course, a thermal spa, and an extensive colony of holiday homes. Skyscrapers and the Yellow...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 5

Black Panther is an American, not an African story

In another era, the mish-mash presentation of Africa would have been the focal point of criticism. But this is not... OPEN
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A.K. Kaiza

An Annotated History of Wakanda

DIAPHANES NO. 3
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 3

­Pioneering!

"Trying to compete in the economy of attention from the field of contemporary art is a naive goal in the... OPEN
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Manuel Franquelo

An interview with Manuel Franquelo

Bang Bang Baroque

On the first gaze the works of Emma Waltraud Howes seem incongruously out of time. Visiting her studio, one enters... ABO

Emma Waltraud Howes

Questionnaire Emma Waltraud Howes

Ornamentation is the body of our thought

With Bely, a continuum is continuously produced between visceral organic states, political states of society and meteorological states of the... OPEN
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Elena Vogman

Dynamography, or Andrei Bely’s Rhythmic Gesture

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... OPEN
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Stephen Barber

A War of Fragments: World Versus America

On Memory Atrophy

Externalized memory had always proceeded by contractions, summaries, reductions, selections, breaks in flow, as well as by organization, classification, boiling down. Card catalogues reduced thousands of works to a few key notions; tables of contents contracted the hundreds of pages in a given book. The sign itself was the first... OPEN
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Maël Renouard

The Twilight of Classi­fication?

DIAPHANES NO. 2
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 2

Is drama out cold? Is theatre?

Can contemporary theatre recognize itself in the boxing ring so that its fist, the fist of the past, strikes a... ABO DE

Alexander García Düttmann

Can There Be a Society Without Ceremony or the Critical Question of Theatre

A for Anomie

A for Anomie The idea that terrorism and other forms of political violence are directly related to strains caused by strongly held grievances has been one of the most common explanations to date and can be traced to a diverse set of theoretical concepts including relative deprivation, social disorganization, breakdown, tension,... OPEN
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Eric Baudelaire

Abecedarium

A swansong. Death in Venice, reenacted

I have rarely left the Biennale so dissatisfied and tired as this year. No, it wasn’t the endless kilometers.

Barbara Basting

Dear Paolo Baratta

Hurrah!

We rehearsed the crowd scenes in the Winter Palace, in the Throne Room and the Armorial Hall. ABO

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

A Diary of my Encounters

“Poetry must be made by all. Not by one.”

“Nuestro Norte es el Sur” = “Our North is the South.” OPEN
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Mário Gomes

The Poetics of Architecture

DIAPHANES No. 1
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 1

I remember…

I remember during the frozen Tokyo winter of 1997: I took long walks in the dead of night through the Shinjuku Kabuki-cho district of endless bars, subterranean clubs and abandoned cinemas with Donald Richie, the American writer and film-maker, already in Tokyo for over forty ­years at that moment and...

Stephen Barber

I remember (Stephen Barber)

Je me souviens…

Je me souviens de l’étymologie du mot « souvenir ». En latin impérial subvenit mihi ­signifiait : « il me vient à l’esprit ». Le verbe avait eu les sens de survenir et de soutenir, de venir en aide. Le français en a fait « souvenir », terme qu’emploient parfois...

Jean-Luc Nancy

Je me souviens (Jean-Luc Nancy)

Charlemagne Rides through Paris

Facebook’s algorithm has served up memories of my Turkish travels often enough, but now it’s taking countermeasures and suddenly presenting quite different entries from my so-called timeline. For example, this blurred photograph of an equestrian statue of Charlemagne, unfortunately barely visible, with vassals. I had noticed him a few years ago...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 6

Reports from Fiction

Around 2007 I had the idea of making a feature film about a German woman who is kidnapped in Iraq.... ABO DE

Peter Ott

The Monotheistic Cell Or Reports from Fiction

The Transversal Shelf of Printed Books in Times of Accelerated Opaque Media

Raucous time capsules, rare jewels, and indispensable bulky goods from all epochs, languages, and genres.

The Transversal Shelf of Printed Books in Times of Accelerated Opaque Media

 

The Transversal Shelf of Printed Books in Times of Accelerated Opaque Media

As an eminent medium of slowness, printed books appear to some as the deadwood, to others as the driftwood, of the intellect, the finding and gathering of which not only fills the shelves. As the veritable bearers of latency they hold the possibility of tracking down—unobserved and at odds with the zeitgeist — what stimulates the senses and thought in unattained present or future long past. The best examples (often discarded from libraries around the world or barely known) shine from afar like messages in bottles on the banks of time. DIAPHANES seeks out the raucous time capsules, rare jewels, and indispensable bulky goods from all epochs, languages, and genres.

Materiality and corporeality

Kári Páll Óskarsson, 03.07.2017

The Three Marias is a highly interesting work of feminist literature, although it’s now largely forgotten outside of its native Portugal. In the early 70s, while the country was still...

Eine wahre Wundertüte

Nikola Duric, 03.07.2017

In Jugoslawien wurde viel publiziert und wenig weggeworfen. So hatte man die Möglichkeit, in staatlichen Galerien und Museen Ausstellungskataloge und Kunstzeitschriften für Pfennige zu schießen. Einen besonderen Platz in meinem...

Human Oddities

Oliver Hendricks, 11.04.2017

Bearded Ladies, Dwarfs and Giants, Hermaphrodites, Siamese Twins (see Heng and Chang on the book cover), the Mule-headed Lady, The Serpent-Woman, The Amazing Half-Boy (famous for his appearance in Tod...

Other columns
Magazine Special

Ute Holl

Dream, Clouds, Off, Exile

“Communism will be when we understand something of love.”

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  • monotheism
  • film
  • exile
  • communism
  • Karl Marx
Magazine Special
To lay a hand on the shoulder of ­future victims…

Donatien Grau, Pierre Guyotat

To lay a hand on the shoulder of ­future victims…

»By using voices I have rediscovered what we call humanity.«

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»Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, MAESTRO DI COLOR CHE SANNO. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.


Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: DELINE THE MARE.


Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. BASTA! I will see if I can see.


See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.«


James Joyce

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