In this interview by Léopold Lambert, Mpho Matsipa describes the spirit and contents of the exhibition she curated in 2018. Entitled “African Mobilities: This is not a Refugee Camp Exhibition,” this powerfully-curated gathering of artworks provides the bases of a conversation about the notions of mobilities and temporalities in the context of the African continent, from the mind-expanding maps of the Chimurenga Library and the cartographic entanglements by Dana Whariba, Thembinkosi Goniwe and Nolan Oswald Dennis to the futurist vision of Olalekan Jeyifous and Wale Lawal. Mpho Matsipa received her PhD in Architecture from UC Berkeley. She is Adjunct Assistant Professor ...

From TIFF files to TED talks, from book sizes to blues stations—the term “format” circulates in a staggering array of contexts and applies to entirely dissimilar objects and practices. How can such a pliable notion meaningfully function as an instrument of classification in so many industries and scientific communities? Comprising a wide range of case studies on the standards, practices, and politics of formats from scholars of photography, film, radio, television, and the Internet, Format Matters charts the many ways in which formats shape and are shaped by past and present media cultures. This volume represents the first sustained collaborative effort ...

The idea of making use of spaces, transforming existing ones, creating new ones, making a living and a change, very much carries through the following pages. The importance to have, maintain, and organise places, frameworks, and opportunities that allow a continuity to negotiate and fight over common grounds. Making spaces vibratory. To imagine a restaurant or a nightclub in Manchester or London in the 1930s as a business proposition but at the same time as a safe space in which to conspire to liberate Africa; to imagine a restaurant as an art gallery—while working as a waitress—and proceeding to turn ...

Like the world which it served to bind together, heterosexuality is in crisis. This is not for the first time, but it may be the last. This crisis is not a passing “sex panic,” but represents a more fundamental rupture. In the grim shadow of biosphere collapse and climate fascism, who could believe heterosexuality’s promises of eternity? No one can agree any longer on what this world is for. The sexual or gender freedom we currently possess is nothing but the freedom to reproduce the current social order. The family and the workplace have undergone a profound transformation in the past ...

Why do we have such a difficult time coming up with a reliable definition for “technology”? For one, just when we think we’ve pinned it down, it refuses to stand still. Do we have any real way of maintaining a truth about a category that is constantly updating, innovating, and mutating in relation to every other concept we might use to define it? We frame technology as an other, somehow alien to our humanity. This problem of recognition becomes even more complex when we speak of the relationship between art and technology, two poorly defined terms with deeply intertwined applications. ...

Grounded Urban Practices → are projects, initiatives or offices who use space as a key agent of change → are rooted in communities, social movements or local areas → are critical of the status quo → experiment with legal, financial and organizational models as well as strategies, methods and tools A wave of Grounded Urban Practices has emerged in Cairo after the 2011 revolution and in Amsterdam/Rotterdam during the 2008-2012 financial crisis. After almost a decade of experimental research and interventions challenging business-as-usual spatial production, many GUPs in both contexts face several difficulties today. In Egypt, the regime has managed to restore order, while in ...

The 2019/20 issue of The Serving Library Annual is entirely devoted to the late Italian designer, artist, inventor and polymath Bruno Munari. The core of the annual is the first English translation of Obvious Code, the 1971 collection of Munari‘s own writings, sketches and poems about his own work, published by arrangement with Corraini, who issued the book’s anastatic edition in 2017. It includes iconic design objects such as the Abitacolo, ground-breaking artworks such as his 1952 series of hand-made projection slides, and little known rhymes about the art market, as well as an original piece from his “unreadable books” ...

Computer Program as an Artefact At first, the computer program is neutral and exists only in terms devoid of any reference other than to itself. The program is its function. It is a tool. It does something; it instructs a computer to perform a task. Its working is often imperceptible beyond the surface of its interface – screen based or physical – the material extension to the inner depths of its digital structure, the code. Focusing solely on a functional aspect of software limits our engagement with its wider assemblage of connotations beyond technical analysis. Beyond the functional and ostensible neutrality ...

It’s so amazing how a single piece of music can become so powerful in so many different versions That’s the case with “This Woman’s Work” by the great Kate Bush, which was released over 20 years ago and still going strong! She had success with it in 1988 when John Hughes used it in a critical scene in his She’s Having a Baby and again when it was released as a single in 1989. Then Maxwell released his amazing male version of the song, which led to its use in the incredible dance tribute to breast cancer awareness on So You Think You Can Dance Countless dance acts have ...

The symposium “Revisiting Black Mountain College: Cross-Disciplinary Experiments and Their Potential for Democratization (in Times of Post-Democracy)” asked questions in relation to anti-democratic tendencies in many countries worldwide. How can education still hold up democratic values, while at the same time presumably measuring its success by careers in the market? This issue brings together contributions from participants of the conference and adds further contributions by Andres Janser, Olga von Schubert, Caroline Adler, Boris Buden, Lucy Bayley, Sascia Bailer, Simon Fleury, Gilly Karjevsky, Asli Uludag, and Mieke Matzke.The interview by Ronald Kolb with Bitten Stetter, Brandon Farnsworth, Dorothee Richter, Jochen Kiefer, Martin ...

Invisible flying machines are in the skies above us, remotely controlled, led by software, suspended between wonder and terror. For the artist and writer James Bridle “the drone stands in part for the network itself: an invisible, inherently connected technology making possible sight and action at a distance”. To be aware of “the cloud” we are living in is a matter of power and to make the network visible is a recurrent concern in Bridle’s work. Writer and critic Mirthe Berentsen starts from here to write a fictional futuristic short story about drones, death and digital post mortem life. Can we ...

Today, we live in a world where every time we turn on our smartphones, we are inextricably tied by data, laws and flowing bytes to different countries. A world in which personal expressions are framed and mediated by digital platforms, and where new kinds of currencies, financial exchange and even labor bypass corporations and governments. Simultaneously, the same technologies increase governmental powers of surveillance, allow corporations to extract ever more complex working arrangements and do little to slow the construction of actual walls along actual borders. On the one hand, the agency of individuals and groups is starting to approach ...