“You who listen to me are in a better position to judge about the French Revolution than I am. Your descendants will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain. And in time…there will come a generation…which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.” E.M. Forster wrote his one work of dystopian science fiction, The ...

Written in 1733, Memoirs of the Twentieth Century is widely regarded to contain the earliest known conception of time-travel and, in particular, the first cognitive leap that would allow for a historicized image of the present as seen from the point of view of a distant future. Intriguingly, it is the text itself which is claimed to have traveled back in time and Madden has used this conceit to satirize his own period – tracing out its bureaucratic absurdities into a strange yet pointed vision of the late 20th century: a world politically fraught, overwhelmed with corruption and struggling to ...

The iPhone 3G, this innocuous and already slightly outmoded little cluster of minerals and marketing, is an emblematic meeting point for the material and symbolic processes shaping the contemporary entanglement of social and geologic stratifications: both product and engine of the great cleavages of the global economy, those geopolitical fractures that Marxist critics refer to with euphemistic kid gloves as “uneven development;” a treasured possession bound up with resource wars and environmentally destructive extraction practices driven by a rapacious global system of neo-colonial corporate-feudalism; the consumer excretion of a world where exhausted Chinese factory workers are driven to suicide satisfying ...

“Weep no more, citizens; they breathe, these celebrated men for whom we cry; our patriotism reanimates them” Presented in honor of Marat and Le Pelletier, “Citizen Sade” wrote this memorial address at the height of violence during the French Revolution, just after the start of the Reign of Terror. The text, effusive and cloyingly patriotic, brings to question the Sade’s own political position – a provocative impulse all the more remarkable given the addresses audience: the gathered Section des Piques, amongst the most hardline Jacobin districts of Paris. Though frequently cited and made infamous as the inspiration for Peter Weiss’ influential ...

Time is like that — both point AND duration. This is how it can bend and warp. A week, a second, a season: all are specific and discrete, but none are the same. The present can be cut to any number of lengths, from a single electric pulse of an electronic circuit to the display period of a digital timepiece. Wyoscan is a reverse-engineered clock. It has been programmed to slowly render the current time from left to right, scanning across the screen, completing 1 cycle every 2 seconds (0.5 hz). You’ll notice that reading this clock requires more attention than usual, ...