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 ...

On episode 13 of Hidden Noise, hosts Abby Sandler and Rebecca Siegel visit the Met Breuer for this week’s Go See: “Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300-now).” Then the hosts are joined by Peter Russo, director of Triple Canopy for the Even 8.

Sing Sing Penitentiary opened in 1826 to serve New York City’s growing population and crime rate, and was known in its early days for its stringent code of conduct. In the prison’s early days, warden Elam Lynds invented the lockstep style of moving inmates in closely interlinked lines, as well as the striped inmate uniforms used for easy identification — both of which would come to define the popular view of prison aesthetics for centuries.