Dominic Pettman
Over the course of a year, Shifter hosted a series of public discussions, each concentrated on unraveling a keyword – a term that carries with it both a sense of urgency and agency in our present climate. By inviting artists, writers, activists, philosophers and others to propose terms and lead discussions, we opened up our editorial process to the motivations of others. The yearlong series culminates in Shifter’s 22nd issue Dictionary of the Possible. This dictionary catalogs the keywords taken up for discussion over the course of a year, accompanied by a list of questions provoked during each discussion. Rather ...
The word “geography” literally means “writing the Earth,” and the short pieces collected in this volume represent a wide variety of ways in which this can be accomplished. Each one, in its own way, is a testament to the miraculous coherence which can crystallize within incoherence.
Flugschriften was the name given to small pamphlets at the beginning of the 16th century, not long after the invention of the printing press allowed such texts to be distributed quickly throughout Germany and the rest of Europe. Literally translated as “Flying Writings,” this term speaks of the speed with which information could now be packaged, distributed, and consumed.
Media scholar Ronald J. Deibert has noted that Flugschriften were “ideal for circulating a subversive message,” since they were light, disposable, and easily hidden in pockets or other places that large tomes could not hope to escape to. Our series intends to ...
This set of five pamphlets documents a seminar given recently by Alexander R. Galloway at the Public School New York, a self-organizing educational program where class ideas are generated by the public. “French Theory Today” explores a new generation of French voices—Catherine Malabou, Bernard Stiegler, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Quentin Meillassoux, and François Laruelle—whose work has, to varying degrees, only recently emerged in the English-speaking world. Each night of the seminar consisted of a lecture followed by questions from and discussion with class participants. As Galloway suggests in the online class proposal, the goal was “not to set in aspic a ...
Until recently, there has been a subtle but firm stigma around speaking against the Machine. (Specifically, the Internet.) Since the successful counter-revolution of neoliberal capital, launched in the 1980s against the organicist counter-cultural experiments of the 1960s and 70s, any voices raised against the digital revolution have been dismissed as romantically nostalgic at best, and conservatively neo-Luddite at worst. (Never mind that Ned Lud’s followers, protesting against weaving machines at the beginning of the 19th century, were not necessarily our first “technophobes” but rather an activist group especially attuned to the economic consequences of outsourcing labor to automated contraptions.) In ...
Mind the Screen pays tribute to Thomas Elsaesser, a pioneering and leading scholar in the field of film and media studies. The contributions present a close-up of media concepts developed by Elsaesser, providing a mirror for all types of audiovisual screens, from archaeological pre-cinematic screens to the silver screen, from the TV set to the video installation and the digital e-screen, and from the city screen to the mobile phone display. The book is divided into three ‘Acts’: Melodrama, Memory, Mind Game; Europe-Hollywood-Europe; and Archaeology, Avant-Garde, Archive.
Paper Tiger Television is a video collective. We look at the communications industry via the media in all its forms. The power of mass culture rests on the trust of the public. This legitimacy is a paper tiger. Investigation into the corporate structures of the media and critical analysis of their content is one way to demystify the information industry. Developing a critical consciousness about the information industry is a necessary first step towards democratic control of information resources.
