Translation is imitative yet transformative. It can and routinely does establish a semantic correspondence and a stylistic approximation to the source text. But these relations can never give back that text intact… Change is unavoidable.

Mecca is the holiest city in the Islamic religion and the birthplace of the prophet Mohamed. Located just off Saudi Arabia’s western coast, all Muslims are required to visit at least once in their life if they are physically able to. With air travel becoming easier, the number of pilgrims has been rising rapidly over the last few decades, with a record number of 3 million people visiting Mecca simultaneously during the 2012 Hajj. More recently, visa regulations have been made more strict to keep the situation under control. In this episode, we discuss with various experts how this rising number ...

Archives have become a nexus in the wake of the digital turn. This book sets out to show how expanded archival practices can challenge contemporary conceptions and inform the redistribution of power and resources. Calling for the necessity to reimagine the potentials of archives in practice, the three contributions ask: Can archives fulfill their paradoxical potential as utopian sites in which the analog and the digital, the past and future, and remembrance and forgetting commingle?

Founders of nonfood, Lucy Chinen & Sean Raspet discuss contemporary food supply chains and sustainable food futures, including the R&D of their own algae-based nonbar. Along the way, we address: monocultures, fear, skeuomorphic flavor, cellular agriculture, and the real cost of “all-natural.” (w/ Caroline Busta, Daniel Keller, @LILINTERNET)

James Bridle (one of Wired magazine’s 100 most influential people in Europe) is an artist and writer working across technologies and disciplines. In 2018, he curated the exhibition and conference Transnationalisms, produced by Aksioma in the framework of the international cooperation project State Machines. Bridle has spent the recent years researching citizenship-by-investment and related technologies: special economic zones and free trade areas, freeports and seasteads, blockchain and other supposedly emancipatory but inhuman and asset-based protocols for identity management. At every level, the mass movement of peoples and the rise of planetary-scale computation is changing the way we think and understand ...

Episode 10: Somatic Knowledge Sonia Fernández Pan in conversation with artist Ania Nowak about the intimate connection between feeling and thinking, different forms and manifestations of love, as well the ambiguity of care, the situation of women in performing arts, and female bodies where illness and disease could also be a social symptom and not only a personal condition.

It’s Me! is science fiction in the literal sense. As modern science seems to be incapable of explaining consciousness – specifically, the binding of distributively processed, neuronal microexperiences into unitary, experiential objects apprehended by a unitary phenomenal self – David Pearce argues that we will need to revise our notions of both the intrinsic nature of the physical and the quasiclassicality of neurons. As a consequence, his essay “Nonmaterialist Physicalism“ gives a novel, experimentally testable prediction of quantum superpositions (“Schrödinger’s cat” states) of neuronal feature-processors in the central nervous system at sub-femtosecond timescales. In Ingo Niermann’s companion piece “How the ...

New Models speaks with Z, founder of Black Socialists of America (BSA) about the organization’s recently launched DUAL POWER MAP: a critical tool for building a new economic order in America within the existing capitalist structure, starting with black worker-owned businesses and co-ops

Model and Countermodel is a reader of collected texts about practitioners who have proposed risky yet rigorous alternatives to conventional wisdom across art, design and architecture including exemplary attitudes, frameworks, methodologies and methods. In November 2016, a printed and comb-bound edition was featured in Practices of Enquiry, an exhibition of experimental enquiry-based learning by students, graduates and staff of University of the Arts London.

Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design is an exhibition showcasing rare photographs, film, high-quality reproductions, and interactive software reconstructions examining the formative period of numerical control and Computer-Aided Design technologies, along with a selection of experimental work by computational designers working today.

Kristen Alvanson’s XYZT is a genre-busting collection of tales probing the complex relationship and cultural differences between the US and Iran, threaded along a speculative science fiction thriller plotline. Much of the novel is based on Alvanson’s years living in Iran, but in XYZT she reworks her experiences into myriad different styles, perspectives and genres ranging from the quotidian to the fabulous. In this interview with the author we talk to her about her time in Iran, the unconventional structure of XYZT, and the common threads between the novel and her work as a visual artist.