Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion (1982–84) is a video essay populated by punk and rock performers (Patti Smith, Jim Morrison, Black Flag and Glenn Branca) and historical figures (including Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers). This coming together of several narrative voice-overs, of singing and shouting voices, of jarring sounds and text overlaid onto shaky, gritty images, proposes a historical genealogy of rock music and an ambitious thesis on the origins of America. In this illustrated book, Kodwo Eshun examines this landmark work of contemporary moving image in relation to Graham’s wider body of work and to the broader culture of ...

“Today one may complain that life has been reduced to points in a matrix of relations—cities, territories, and historical narratives prematurely refined into categories of known and unknown, real and virtual, concrete and abstract space.” At the time, we could not have imagined the mass migration into abstract space that would soon follow. Today, living through the planetary pandemic, the imperative to navigate the world and our own lives through computational tools has been radicalized to the extreme. The last months of Skyping, Zoom conferencing, and collaborative Google Docs writing make us feel we have no choice but to exhaust ...

Organized in collaboration with Antje Ehmann and Doreen Mende, this issue of e-flux journal pays tribute to Harun Farocki (January 9, 1944–July 30, 2014) with a series of essays and reflections on his work and life by friends, collaborators, film scholars, and admirers. Those who knew Harun personally remember not only the epic influence of his work, but also his generosity as a friend and collaborator. As for us, we have never before dedicated a full issue of e-flux journal to a single artist… Editorial—Harun Farocki Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle A Question They Never Stop Asking Kodwo Eshun Also of Things: Notes for a Film Remembering ...

In what ways could we imagine a world different from the one in which we currently live? This is the question addressed by the essays and conversations in Futures and Fictions, which explore possibilities for a different “political imaginary”. With discussions around decolonization, new Afro- and other futurisms, post-capitalism, science fiction, and new kinds of social movements – and the intersections of these with contemporary art practice and visual culture – Futures and Fictions creates a space for alternate narratives and image-worlds that might be pitched against our neoliberal present. With contributions from Mark Fisher, Ursula Le Guin, Kodwo Eshun ...

The multi-layered research and exhibition project Women on Aeroplanes seeks to change the parameters of how we see and listen to the achievements and practices of women in a multitude of moments, being part of a transatlantic and transnational history, with a focus on the struggles for independence and their after effects. The transition from mobilizing all possible forces to win a battle and its hangover, the disenchantment of not being part of any negotiation concerning the future, seems to crystalise a history lesson about power politics. The disappearance of women in politics after their strong visibility during the times ...

The figure of the woman on aeroplanes summons the idea of the itinerary of stopovers—in London, Bombay, Calcutta, Accra, Colombo, Paris, Port-au-Prince and Washington DC—that not only speaks of the insufficiency of historiography but requires thinking through the relations between the international, the intra-national and the transnational. Women on Aeroplanes confronts us with the intermittent transmission of interrupted networks that sustain the negotiation between inter, intra- and trans-nationalisms. To turn towards magazines and publications is to think through the implications of world form entailed by periodicals that seek to thematize the work of collectivisation. We turn to magazines so as ...

It was a weirdly long process …. Everything about it. The compiling of this issue #6, but also sorting out what precisely it was about. It has already been two years since we arrived in Cape Town and Johannes- burg with some broad questions around and about notions of law: how did the Constitution lay the legal foundation for and shape the transition process to- wards the “new South Africa”? And how would its initial promise be assessed from today’s perspective, especially with regard to women’s rights? What happened? What went wrong, and how? What’s gone right? These were questions ...

In Outer Space as Extreme Scenario, a range of specially-commissioned and previously published pieces have been collected which investigate how the exploration of outer space has inspired and challenged artists, designers, thinkers, and the general public. This eBook, the seventh in the series of Blowup readers released by V2_, explores the extreme scenario that is outer space. It forms part of the ongoing research into Innovation in Extreme Scenarios carried out by V2_Lab…