“Reading inquisitively over each others’ shoulders, the poems, meditations, analyses and experiments in this volume respond with audacity and adventure to the challenge of characterizing what reading, this most familiar yet renewedly strange occupation, has been and may yet become.”

The blockchain is Janus-faced. On one side its traits of transparency and decentralization promise much in terms of fairness and accountability, but on the other its monetary roots born as a financial payment system, albeit grounded in open-source software, mean its implementations are often stridently capitalistic. Furthermore, those involved in its development seem to oscillate between radical ethical standpoints and reductionist technological determinism. The blockchain engenders what has been called a “digital metalism” with the ability, like a modern philosopher’s stone, to transmutate life through a distributed ledger. That such a pecuniary minded technology is being touted as a new ...

Torque brings together a diverse collection of essays and artworks, many newly commissioned for the project, that reflect upon the plasticity of the brain, the adaptability of technology and the malleability of language, and their twisting together through past, present and future cultures. The contributors and their work each offer unique models of navigating this territory, making their own artefacts, writing their own scripts, forging critical space and examining the blind spots. Torque#1: Mind, Language and Technology is the result of a wide range of cross-disciplinary conversations, taking place across symposia, online forums, live events and workshops, produced by the book’s editors: ...

War Primer 2 inhabits the pages of Bertolt Brecht’s remarkable publication War Primer (Libris, 1998). The original was published in German in 1955 under the title Kriegsfibel. While the first War Primer was concerned with images of the Second World War, War Primer 2 updates Brecht’s piece with images of the conflict generated by both sides of the so-called “War on Terror”. This item is publicly available as part of the Library Stack Public Branch at NN Contemporary Art.