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Maël Renouard . Modifications infimes et considérables . . . . . I say . . . . . Marcus Quent . Verrinnen der Zeit und Glaube an die Welt . . . . . . . . . . Elena Vogman . Dynamography, or Andrei Bely’s Rhythmic Gesture . . . . . Dieter Mersch . Digital Criticism . . . . . Dietmar Dath . Your Sprache Never Was . . . . . Maël Renouard . The Twilight of Classi­fication? . . . . . Drag-nets . . . . . Manuel Franquelo . Manuel Franquelo im Gespräch . . . . . Bang Bang Baroque . . . . . BELISAR by François Gérard . . . . . Lieber Paul 3 . . . . . Corporate Love . . . . . Facebook’s Just a Nail Studio . . . . . Stephen Barber . A War of Fragments: World Versus America . . . . . . . . . . After This Comes That Before That Comes This . . . . . Maël Renouard . Fragmente eines unendlichen Gedächtnisses . . . . . Manuel Franquelo . An interview with Manuel Franquelo . . . . . Dietmar Dath . Your Sprache Never Was . . . . . Stephen Barber . Krieg aus Fragmenten: World Versus America . . . . . Marcus Quent . Elapsing Time and Belief in the World . . . . . Dieter Mersch . Digital Criticism
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Maël Renouard

On Memory Atrophy

How can we remember the way we used to remember? OPEN
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Marcus Quent

Belief in the world is what we most lack.

Is it possible to regain a lost belief? Is it possible to do as we will with belief? OPEN
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Digital disrupture

Dieter Mersch

The machine remains alien to any mechanical limitation. OPEN
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DIAPHANES No. 11
DIAPHANES Magazine No. 11

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

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

DIAPHANES No. 10
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 10

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"

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear? OPEN
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Kim Gordon

The Pitch

The abandonment of the centrality of the subject

Philology keeps it possible to open a space for the minority. OPEN
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Donatien Grau

A Life in 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

All that pent up terror and rage

A stupid tweet by a nobody, meant as a parody, somehow goes viral and the internet offers up death threats. OPEN
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Dodie Bellamy

Plague Widow

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

Practice in collective destruction

We recklessly count on ethics coming from somewhere other than a practice only offered by party politics or activism, from which the majority population excludes itself. The panic invocation of Christian values shows the extent of the dilemma here: please come up with something, anything, that will make people behave... OPEN
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Kai van Eikels

Do in What's Doing, Democracy in!

Ecstasy of inauthenticity

The question of authenticity and I go back some way; we’re old sparring partners – frenemies. It’s been a fraught relationship, shot through with paradox and misconstruing. My first novel, Remainder, does turn around its protagonist’s obsession with becoming ‘real’, inhabiting his era or his city, building, skin, movements and... ABO DE

Tom McCarthy

Toke My Asymptote – or, The Ecstatic Agony of Appearance

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.

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... OPEN
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Mengia Tschalaer

Queer Spaces

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

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

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

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

He would say “Never work!”

Old-school publisher, avant-garde dandy, undisputed expert on the global history of Dada: Raphaëlle Milone paints an intimate but unsparing portrait... ABO FR

Raphaëlle Milone

Dachy Alive

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

DIAPHANES NO. 5
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 5

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

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

Drag-nets

Luc Meresma

Drag-nets

The yoke of being, noteworthy dis-position

It wasn’t nature and its dangers that forced domestication and enabled the economic shrine. Temple and funerary cult, sacrifice and distribution of the meat—for Homer all sacrificial animals were still hieria, holy creatures—and the containment of wildness led to symbolic and socio-cultural change, which became the vector and motor of... OPEN
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Andreas L. Hofbauer

Yoke

Blood!

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

Art, Girls, and Aesthetic Freedom Down Below

DIAPHANES No. 4
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 4

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

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

Il testo ignoto è una promessa

Cosa porterà il prossimo bit? Sconvolgenti novità? Semplice ridondanza? OPEN
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Michele Pedrazzi

The Next Bit. Corpo a corpo con l’ignoto

On Trees, Neophytes, and Druids

The beech, the opponent of the druids, should be disestablished! OPEN
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Damian Christinger, Monica Ursina Jäger

Homeland Fictions

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

DIAPHANES NO. 3
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 3

Drag-nets

Luc Meresma

Drag-nets

I say

Nicole Bachmann’s latest work, I say, has the performer practice a text, sense a word in the mouth, calling it... ABO

Nicole Bachmann

Questionnaire Nicole Bachmann

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

Do you want to believe in language?

Asleep, Patrick sees what he doesn’t believe while he’s awake. The index calculates everything. Announcements of awards, mostly false, light up then die. His dopamine balance feeds the list. Limbic structures support it. Brain means house, should have windows. But they’re slow shutter pictures of the past.   Five minutes past four, Patrick... OPEN
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Dietmar Dath

Your Sprache Never Was

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,... OPEN
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Dieter Mersch

Digital Criticism

DIAPHANES NO. 2
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 2

“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

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

Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

The key to survival will lay in female hands. OPEN
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Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

Venice, Lagos, and the Spaces in between

About ‘how we treat the others’

“There is something deeply humiliating in such a situation.” OPEN
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Artur Zmijewski

Conversation on “Glimpse”

Twenty-four hours in state of unconsciousness

Now the dead will no longer be buried, now this spectral city will become the site for execrations and lamentations, now time itself will disintegrate and void itself, now human bodies will expectorate fury and envision their own transformation or negation, now infinite and untold catastrophes are imminently on their... ABO

Stephen Barber

Futurama Nights, October 1978

DIAPHANES No. 1
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 1

LISTMANIA

Vonceptually sensory bills of fare, enumerations and selections…

LISTMANIA

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

GUANAJUATONOVIEMBRE

Setlist: 1 Luminous Procuress 2 Zero 3 Brass Canon 4 Mexican Tea Party 5 Jaguar 6 New Earth 7 Gas Giants 8 Evil Love On stage: 10pm – 11pm Zuschauer, gefühlt: ca. 3.000 Zuschauer, gezählt: 5.000 Klima: abendlich auffrischend, leichte Brise, zur Nacht hin schwer abkühlend Bühnensound: zupackend Publikum: euphorisch bis euphorisch verwirrt Vor uns: Atom TM Hinter uns: Ada Backstage: Wagon Sonstiges: Fotos, Autogramme, ankuschelnde Fans

Andreas Reihse

LISTMANIA: GUANAJUATONOVIEMBRE

A fast trip through the American night

Mike Wilson’s literature is a fast trip through the American night, drawn in melancholy images of great beauty. ABO

Mike Wilson

Rockabilly

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

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.

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...

How to Pilot an Aeroplane

Luc Meresma, 11.04.2017

Capt. Norman Macmillan:
How to Pilot an Aeroplane,
George Allen & Unwin LTD: London 1942,
first edition, 110 pages

 

This book told me just what I had to know before...

Other columns
Magazine Special

Stephen Barber

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.

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 the Ballard ­estate declined permission for any images of pages from the World Versus America archival notebooks to accompany this essay, any member of the general public interested to do so can readily visit the British Library and view the notebooks in their entirety in the freely-­accessible manuscripts collection there.

OPEN
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Magazine Special
Ornamentation is the body of our thought

Elena Vogman

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 world.

OPEN
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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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