The ​art world​, as it is known today, can be understood as an enormous ecosystem. Or, more accurately, as a series of ecosystems, incorporating artists, cultural institutions, funders, collectors and many others. This publication series is intended for those with an interest in the development of future art ecosystems. Each issue will provide strategic analysis and recommendations in areas where new actors and processes are emerging. This inaugural issue of FAE focuses on practices that artists are developing in their work with advanced technologies and the new infrastructure being built around these practices. The view presented here is based on the ...

“Web3” is now part of our collective imaginaries, even if the specifics of what the buzzword entails remain murky and inaccessible to many. Originally coined in 2014 by Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, to describe “a decentralised internet ecosystem based on blockchain,” the term took off after the NFT boom of 2021, catalysed by the embrace of the crypto ecosystem by the likes of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Like other social technologies, the swirl of narrative, attention and capital around web3 are as much part of its utility as the tools themselves. Mainstream discourses around “the web3 ...

What we know today as ‘the internet’ has historically been accompanied by a particular class of high-definition visions for its future. In this luminous world, a boundless 3D space, digital beings would interact through new forms of collectivity and partake in new modes of making, sharing, learning and trading. The idea of the metaverse—broadly defined as an always-online and persistent spatial virtual world—is being resurrected through a fundamental shift in digital infrastructure. This development includes the relatively recent advent of consumer-level technologies such as video game engines and immersive hardware, and is accelerated by a bearing within the games industry towards ...

Where did the critical tradition of art go? Maybe that’s the wrong question. Because we know the answer. It went into spectacle. It went into finance. It got privatized, democratized, scrutinized, defunded, bureaucratized, then professionalized. The critical stick became a seductive carrot. But maybe we don’t have to see this only in terms of a fall from grace. Maybe this is the time for a long-overdue realism that an art field still in the thrall of modernist humanism struggles to avoid recognizing. Isn’t it strange how we are subjected to the most extreme aspects of this new order and yet ...

The first issue of this journal, as well as Glass Bead’s project at large, is directed towards rethinking art as a mode of rational thought. It starts from the assumption that any claim concerning the efficacy of art—its capacity, beyond either its representational function or its affectivity, to make changes in the way we think of the world and act on it—first demands a renewed understanding of reason itself. The site on which this issue focuses is Castalia, the fictional province imagined by Hermann Hesse in The Glass Bead Game (1943). Set in Central Europe some five hundred years in the future, ...

In Outer Space as Extreme Scenario, a range of specially-commissioned and previously published pieces have been collected which investigate how the exploration of outer space has inspired and challenged artists, designers, thinkers, and the general public. This eBook, the seventh in the series of Blowup readers released by V2_, explores the extreme scenario that is outer space. It forms part of the ongoing research into Innovation in Extreme Scenarios carried out by V2_Lab…

This short introduction to the 2012 discussion event with Giuseppe Longo and Benedict Singleton sketches out the theoretical positions of the two contributors and the common threads of the discussion.

This series of interventions on the ramifications of Speculative Realism for aesthetics ranges from contemporary art’s relation to the aesthetic, to accelerationism and abstraction, logic and design. From varied perspectives of philosophy, art and design, participants examine the new technological mediations between the human sensorium and the massive planetary media network within which it now exists, and consider how the aesthetic enables new modes of knowledge by processing sensory data through symbolic formalisms and technological devices. Speculative Aesthetics anticipates the possibility of a theory and practice no longer invested in the otherworldly promise of the aesthetic, but acknowledging the real force and ...

In this episode of Urbanomic’s Yarncast series, strategist Benedict Singleton discusses the longstanding suspicion of design as a practice of illicit manipulation, the concept of the trap, and the difference between plots and plans.