Dear David I have been re-reading our letters. And what an interesting discussion we had this week, about the writing that one does for a singular reader; the ‘one other’ with whom one is thinking. So there has been much dialogue about representation; about performance, and sentiment and sincerity, each thinking to the self through thinking with a companion. And our question returns, often enough, to this: what limits are placed on thought, in the moment that it aspires to be understood from outside itself? This is not a lover’s discourse; it is though interested, and it is interested in the lover’s discourse. Our ...

Sometime in 1971, Harald Szeemann visited Turin in preparation for the documenta exhibition he was curating for the following year. Among the people he tried to meet in the city was Alighiero Boetti, but when Szeemann visited Boetti’s studio, the Italian artist wasn’t there. All indications are that somebody took the curator through the studio and showed him around, and that, mistakenly, Szeemann forgot a small piece of paper with a list of artists’ names. Several weeks might have passed before Boetti returned to Turin (that year he took two long trips to Afghanistan) and found the piece of paper ...

Sahar Muradi and Zohra Saed are two Afghan American poets. This is a lyrical conversation between Sahar who returned to retrace footsteps in Afghanistan and Zohra who remained ensconced in longing for mythic cities of her birth.

For his notebook, Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas has compiled excerpts and notations from his personal sketchbook, as well as associative photographs. Cruzvillegas playfully picks up notions of sense, sensibility, reason, and fantasy—the four basic terms of the “human mind and soul” on which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe built his chromatic circle of 1809—and combines them with handwritten thoughts about the structural and creative aspects of artistic production. This notebook is a colorful collage of ideas opposing the appropriation of art by capitalism, against which Cruzvillegas reacts with collective, living, and “definitely unfinished” social sculptures—involving people, animals, and things—that come to ...

In his letter to Ada Augusta Lovelace of July 2, 1843, Charles Babbage writes: “I like much the improved form of the Bernoulli Note but can judge of it better when I have the Diagram and Notation.” He is referring to the last in a set of notes written by Lovelace that interpreted the Analytical Engine, the first fully automatic and universal computer, invented by Babbage in 1834, although never actually completed during his lifetime. She appended these notes to her translation of an article written by Luigi Federico Menabrea after he had heard Babbage present a paper on the ...

But we can understand Descartes’ premise of equality far more basically and radically, not as an assertion of fact, but as a presuppositional act: equality is a supposition we must make in advance. For it has nothing to do with the socially acquired capacity of reason (in which we are unequal, and about which we disagree). Equality pertains to a presupposition of reason. It does not refer to a capacity of reason that we possess, but to the potential for practical training in reason, for its acquisition. In that and that alone—in this potential—are we equal. Equality is an equality ...

Afghanistan: A Lexicon uses the form of a lexicon to present a nonlinear narrative of twentieth-century Afghan history as a recursive loop of modernization attempts, revolts, collapses, and recoveries.The lexicon covers seventy-one terms, most illustrated by archival and original images, including: vocabulary unique to Afghan politics, like bi-tarafi, jirga, and nizamnamah; terms that have specific meanings or resonances in the Afghan context, like “infidel,” “martyr,” and spetsnaz; key players and places, from Bacha-i-Saqqao to Hizb-i-Islami and from the Bala Hissar to the Microrayan; and special entries on recurrent events and themes that form the weft and warp of the century, ...

Hunger, the third episode of the series Ages of Receivership: On Generous Listening, is based on an online conversation by xwélmexw (Stó:lō/Skwah) artist, curator, writer and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University Dylan Robinson with Quinn Latimer. Dylan Robinson’s work spans the areas of Indigenous sound studies and public art, and takes various forms, offering him a space to integrate the sonic, visual, poetic, and material that are inseparable in Stó:lō culture. The series Ages of Receivership: On Generous Listening emerges from the spring 2022 Master Symposium at the Institute Art Gender Nature, moderated by Chus Martínez and ...

Labour of Listening by Kate Lacey is the first episode of the new podcast series Ages of Receivership: On Generous Listening, based on the 2022 symposium with the same title. In her contribution the author and Professor of Media History and Theory at the University of Sussex talks about the act of listening as a form of labor, about listening out and listening in and what it means to create a space, where speech and listening can take place. The podcast series Ages of Receivership: On Generous Listening emerges from the spring 2022 Master Symposium at the Institute Art Gender Nature, ...

Repetition, the fifth episode of the series Ages of Receivership: On Generous Listening, is based on a talk by artist Nour Mobarak. In her talk she shares the composition Father Fugue which is composed of conversations with her father, a polyglot who has a 30-second memory, and improvised a capella songs by Nour Mobarak. The series Ages of Receivership: On Generous Listening emerges from the spring 2022 Master Symposium at the Institute Art Gender Nature, moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer, in collaboration with Vuslat Foundation.

The sixth episode of the series Ages of Receivership: On Generous Listening, Score for Bellapais Abbey by Berlin-based writer Jazmina Figueroa, is based on her online performance with the same title. Score for Bellapais Abbey includes instrumental music and ambient sounds intermingled with spoken word. The series Ages of Receivership: On Generous Listening emerges from the spring 2022 Master Symposium at the Institute Art Gender Nature, moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer, in collaboration with Vuslat Foundation.

Sirens, the second episode of the series Ages of Receivership: On Generous Listening, is based on a talk by artist Aura Satz. She speaks about the sound of sirens and emergency signals and about turning bodies and things into speakers, transducers, antennaes or musical instruments. The series Ages of Receivership: On Generous Listening emerges from the spring 2022 Master Symposium at the Institute Art Gender Nature, moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer, in collaboration with Vuslat Foundation.