The way we conceive the human today is particularly affected by the shifts in media technology during the 20th century. Affect emerges as the new liminal concept that renders the body compatible in novel ways with the technology and politics of media. By ways of a relational reorganization the organic end technological life is condensed in a new, intense way to an ecology of affects.

An organic notebook is as good a way as any to commit events and objects to memory. Fallen leaves, bark, twigs, and decaying branches are records of the past. Glistening water moves through grass-lined channels, emerging in bubbling rivulets that slow and subside over terraces, briefly creating a mirror of the sky that soon tarnishes as the earth drinks. The flow, measured by the shadows, is directed by the gardeners’ long-handled shovels. Imagine it as ink, while fallen leaves and twigs form words, and the earth provides pages around which enclosing mud walls form a robust binding. Like the worn cover ...

Human life can be described as a prolonged dialogue with the world. Man interrogates the world and is interrogated by the world. This dialogue is regulated by the way in which we define the legitimate questions that we may ad ­ dress to the world or the world may address to us—and the way in which we can identify the relevant answers to these questions. If we believe that the world was created by God, we ask questions and wait for answers that are different from those that we ask if we believe that the world is an uncreated “empirical ...

1928: Monetary tightening in U.S. produces deflationary shock in European markets. 1929: Collapse of FAVAG, Germany’s second-largest insurance company, followed by a stock-market crash. 1931: Creditanstalt, Austria’s largest deposit bank, fails. Austria, Britain, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, and all of Scandinavia leave the gold standard. 1933: Vast European unemployment. Europe divides into currency and trade blocs. Hitler installed as chancellor of Germany by President Hindenburg. First concentration camp installed and opened in Dachau. 1935: The share of military spending in German national income increases from 1 to 10 percent. 1936: The European economy shows signs of full recovery. “Modernity—it is hell,” wrote ...

Initially associated with the Rio de Janeiro-based Neo-Concretist group, Hélio Oiticica later became one of the key figures of Brazil’s Tropicália movement. During his stay in New York, and in collaboration with film-maker Neville D’Almeida, Oiticia conceived Block-Experiments in Cosmococa – program in progress (1973–74), a series of nine ‘supra-sensorial’ environments, each incorporating slide projections, soundtracks, cocaine powder drawings and a set of instructions for visitors. The work is the epitome of what Oiticica called his ‘quasi-cinemas’ and constitutes his desire to merge individual ‘life-experience’ with art. In this book, Sabeth Buchmann and Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz consider the influence the ...

In the year 1974, the United States of America was in crisis. We had lost an ill-conceived and disastrously mismanaged war in Vietnam and were about to withdraw in defeat. Following the Yom Kippur War, the Arab oil-producing states initiated an embargo on oil shipments to the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan, in retaliation for their support of Israel, and this triggered an energy crisis in most of the industrialized world. Economic growth in the U.S. slowed to near zero. In August of 1974, Richard Nixon would become the first U.S. president to resign in disgrace, and his successor Gerald ...