Åzone Futures Market is a Guggenheim online exhibition that enables you to take a position on the future of a world increasingly shaped by emerging technologies. New technologies are challenging our social foundations and destabilizing the ethics, practices, institutions, and worldviews that have structured our collective experience for centuries. The accelerating rate of this flood of transformations exceeds the limits of our capacity to understand the consequences and to create the lives we want to live. We need new cultural forms to help make sense of the situation. The Guggenheim is testing a new exhibition architecture in the form of an online ...

Artists have continually questioned their status and place in society. The widespread vision of the artist as an outsider from the peripheries of social life, a utopia seeker, a celebrity selling works for millions or an erudite nonconformist who voices his or her opinions in the public debate, has spawned many myths concerning their privileges and obligations in the contemporary world. The exhibition formulates a question about the way artists define their status and position in the realm of an ever-widening economic gap: that of the possibility to reconcile dreams of social justice with the needmof artistic freedom and autonomy. At the same time, the show highlights the tension between artists’ rather ...

These are serious times, or so our governments keep telling us. Strangling economies with their austerity policies, they assure us that they have no choice. In a world where “there is no alternative”, how do you dissent? Once upon a time, graphic designers would have made political posters and typeset manifestos. Today, protest has new strategies. Enter the internet meme. With its Darwinian survival skills and its viral potential, the meme is a way of scaling up protest. Hackers and activists have learned to unleash the destructive force of a Rick Astley video. They have let slip the Lolcats of ...

City Rising from metahaven on Vimeo. This short video is about “the internet” and the global spread of affective, precarious labor, captured in the notion of love. It is also an homage to Constant Nieuwenhuys, architect of New Babylon. New Babylon was a utopian city for which Constant developed models, plans, and writings throughout the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. New Babylon would give free reign to a life of play, as people would be liberated from the obligation to perform productive and manual labor. Models of New Babylon were filmed as bizarre, beautiful shapes in the foreground of the image. Now ...

Following the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai, doctor and New Age guru Deepak Chopra commented on CNN that perhaps the worst thing for terrorist groups would be for someone like President-elect Obama to befriend the Muslim world and turn them against terrorists—simple as that! Such a statement is symptomatic of the idea that power today should, whenever possible, be exercised through attraction and seduction rather than through direct coercion. Joseph Nye, one of the intellectual fathers of neoliberalism, has termed the genteel, salesman-like diplomacy that emerged after the Cold War “soft power”: the ability of a political body such as ...

There is a certain plasticity of meaning inherent in any use of language. If that weren’t the case, poetry and literature would not exist. There would only be contracts, scientific formulas, shopping lists, and so forth. Journalism would be properly factual—there would be no fake news or disinformation. All utterances would document isolated events, never evoking larger patterns or tapping into hidden desires. But then the question arises: Even if language could be cleansed of all ambiguity and spin, what role would images play? If language is the problem, images can only be worse. Against a backdrop where postmodern slippages in ...

On November 7, 1929, the Museum of Modern Art “opened in a five-room rented space with an ‘historical’ exhibition of (European) Post-Impressionist art, titled ‘The First Loan Exhibition: Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat, Van Gogh.’” MoMA’s founding director, Alfred Barr, had the idea that modern works that passed a test called “Torpedo in Time” would, after some fifty years, be considered historical and transfer to the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the time, Gertrude Stein also famously quipped that the very idea of a museum of the modern was an oxymoron. In short, MoMA was more of a kunsthalle ...

It is hard to avoid the feeling these days that the future is behind us. It’s not so much that time has stopped, but rather that the sense of promise and purpose that once drove historical progress has become impossible to sustain. On the one hand, the faith in modernist, nationalist, or universalist utopias continues to retreat, while on the other, a more immediate crisis of faith has accompanied the widespread sense of diminishing economic prospects felt in so many places. Not to mention the ascension of populist and sectarian orders that now mire many of the popular revolutions of ...

To get rid of violence, you have to get rid of people, Tariq Ramadan once said in an interview. Of course, Ramadan meant this as an impossibility and a warning against overzealous idealism. But what an idea! By getting rid of people completely, we could have totally frictionless surfaces for exchange. Removing the human factor would effectively erase the difference between ethical and unethical behavior, visible and invisible infrastructure, finally relieving the increasingly tedious obligation to explain how political orders function, how economic transactions are guided. Those still living would only need to deal with the end products of systems ...

It’s worthwhile to question the field of art from time to time, to demand to know its basic motives and intentions. Where is all this production actually heading? How do we locate the work of the work, as it were?.. Editorial Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle Concerning Matters to be Left for a Later Date, Part 2 of 4 (Guest-Starring Pia Rönicke) Michael Baers Sleepwalking in a Dialectical Picture Puzzle, Part 2: A Conversation with Thomas Keenan Natascha Sadr Haghighian Don’t Stop: Doing Art Potluck Style Carol Yinghua Lu Europe Sans: History, Politics, and Protocol in the EU Image Metahaven Positively Counter-Publics Revisited Simon Sheikh Disobedience in Byelorussia: Self-Interrogation on “Research-Based ...

Dear Readers, welcome to the fiftieth issue of e-flux journal. It marks our official five-year anniversary. It’s hard to believe. To celebrate this, we invite all of you who happen to be in New York next Tuesday, December 17, to a party we are organizing at China Chalet. Join us for drinks and music, we will be there from 9pm until the night ends… Editorial Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle From the Blue Planet to Google Earth Ursula K. Heise Entering the Flow: Museum between Archive and Gesamtkunstwerk Boris Groys Towards the Possible Film (A Script with Some Notable Interruptions) Shezad Dawood If You Prick Us, Do We Not Bleed? No Jalal Toufic Captives ...

METAHAVEN’S VAST BODY OF WORK ACROSS ART, DESIGN AND FILM speculates on what the shifting status of truth might mean emotionally, technologically and geo-politically, and asks who and what enables this condition. Since 2007, the Amsterdam-based collective has unbraided, examined, and worked on the borders between information, fantasy, fiction, and noise. Design Hub Gallery presents their exhibition Field Report at a time of unprecedented public concern about the construction of truth in politics and the media.