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 ambivalent ...

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 ...

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 ...

This publication accompanies FUTURE LIGHT, including the exhibitions “Escaping Transparency” at the MAK Vienna, “Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Loving, Repeating” at Kunsthalle Wien as well as four off-site commissions within the framework of the VIENNA BIENNALE 2015: IDEAS FOR CHANGE (11 June−4 October, 2015).

A super-computational grid overlaying the earth’s surface, an all-seeing, oating ecosystem, an Uber-planet, an internet of things in which the things are us, is recording and storing our every movement. We subscribe to it—willingly providing it with our data. By the same token, our immersion in the permanence of the informational mayhem is flooding us with fictions. On the one hand, theoretically, the permanent input channel of billions of facts per second—GPS coordinates, heartbeats, selfies, currency fluctuations, etc.— into the super-computational megastructure, is always pushing for a transparent world. In that world “truth” would cease to be a word because there would be ...

Strelka Press is a digital-first publisher of new writing on architecture, design and the city. Reviving the essay as a popular form, we publish critical writing in digital and print editions.

The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda) Two unknown men speak on the phone. They discuss their involvements in military operations in eastern Ukraine, accompanied by images of a chaotic stroll through a nightly, Russian forest.A plane passes through the moonlit night sky, and a voice recites a poem by Anna Akhmatova, while a woman, in near darkness, looks at herself in the black mirror of her computer screen. Then, she looks at us. Enter the strange and deceptive world of “The Sprawl,” Metahaven’s feature debut film.Silent sword fighters stare at us. Silent actors look at us. They gaze at their screens, and at ...

The future never felt closer than it does today. A series of environmental, technological and social shifts are affecting today’s world and the human’s role within it. Continuous urbanization, the impact of the anthropogenic activity on the natural environment, the increasing use of algorithmic systems in all sectors of life, and the growing asymmetries of power among territories and populations, are all central issues at stake. How possible is it to address the future and the changes already taking place?