Diaphanes
What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a ‘pirate’ library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art can play an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic; that art has the possibility to not only envision or proclaim ideas in theory, but also to realize them materially.
Aesthetics of the Commons examines a series of artistic and cultural projects—drawn from what can loosely be called the (post)digital—that ...
Every world view is linked to aesthetic decisions, every thought to its form, every judgment to perception and affect. The fact that this always requires an intermediary, a conveyor, is—given the omni presence of multi and mass media—both a trivial and a profound insight, the finest shoots of which range from Aristotle’s “the diaphanous” through Joyce to the present, in which one thing is blatant: what is made visible, and how, shouldn’t be left to either the techno or other ideologies.
For what seems far too present today, not least in the form of conflicts about images and bodies, and as ...
Everything is connected to everything else, says Lenin, as do the finance gurus, and the more it breaks down, the better it works, says Deleuze, as do the winners of the “crisis.” It’s many strokes that make up the big picture, and nets are made up of knots. It’s equations that found exclusions and force us into regimes: it’s small words that make the difference. The form and direction of movement is articulated at the joints; the shared, the collective, any talk of “we,” is upheld or torn apart by bands and bonds.
Communism as the “free association of free individuals”? ...
Where is the present when the computer pulses at the wrist every day, when we’re globally inter-connected in real time but don’t take in our selves for a single moment, just bits and pieces, just snatching a few intensities, when neurons plus communication already makes a consciousness? Is it nothing but a hallucination, in permanent crisis? Does it stand still, get wider, poorer?
How does the past change when systems record every second, saving them for the right moment or for all eternity, when contacts, mails, and calendar and movement data evaporate like spam in the cloud? Is it forgotten, does ...
Was there ever anything inherent? Or wasn’t there always something different—appropriated? The narratives of identity: exhausted among undead restoration and the fragmented dis courses of equality. Every self-image forecasts
its own disappearance. The longer you look at it, the more alien its returning stare. Even a square centimeter of mucous membrane or the thin nest of biofilms reveal the body as a transitory space, the individual as a colony: I am I and all my microorganisms—and those of my ancestors and their genotypes formed through ages of adaptation. Mutation and migration—from micro to sociobiome: we are we and all our languages, ...
Art has always been the site of struggle: it’s forms obscure, it’s freedoms pure fiction. And the territory is currently being resurveyed. While identities blur, the terrain is being fractured. Old and new forces are intervening, speculating for various interests, claiming their share in the visible and invisible—the accursed share.
What some ignore, others must delete. What mustn’t be shown can be read in a deeper darkness under a stronger light. Blinded, baited, ensnared in finely woven nets, our eyes are like those of tamed animals, first wild, then sore, often dulled: overstimulated, tired, and yet very desirable beasts. But who ...
This double issue summons the specters of the avant-garde, dissects its corpse, which was never found, but still radiates the black light of its visions and phantasms.
Was the failure of the avant-gardes unavoidable? What remains of their goal of eliminating art in a revolution of life? What can be learned from the tension between a radical urge to form and political action, between bright visions of progress and dull resentments?
Avant-garde in the 21st century? Nothing more than borrowed gestures, appropriated knick-knacks? A vintage label for art collectors and leftist veterans, material for the latest turncoats? And what can “transgressive ...
DIAPHANES 8/9 looks into curious loops of reproduced present, the integral of circular I-effects, the other side of the social Möbius strip.
Is the self nothing but an echo? An effect without cause? The human being a message, an autoreply in the jargon of social-memes? Who or what massages the backchannel so astoundingly self-similarly, like an invisible hand?
Tom McCarthy makes a plea for the inauthentic, for an ethics without subjects. Shengze Zhu tells of intimacy and loneliness in the live-streaming communities of China, and Zoran Terzić asks about strategies against grand generalization by generic rationality. Christopher Meerdo consigns Bin Laden’s ...
In the mid-1970s Sylvère Lotringer created Semiotext(e), a philosophical group that became a magazine and then a publishing house. Since its creation Semiotext(e) has been the place for stimulating dialogue between artists and philosophers, and American artistic and intellectual life for the past fifty years has largely depended on it. The model of the journal and the publishing house revolves essentially around the notion of the collective, and its creator Sylvère Lotringer has rarely divulged his personal journey: his existence as a hidden child during the Second World War; the liberating and then traumatic experience of the collective in the ...
Inventory and Hinge provides an overview of the research projects performed over the last two decades at the Institute for Contemporary Art Research (IFCAR) of Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). It is an inventory because it presents all the projects realized during this period with many figures and illustrations. It is a hinge because links and QR codes grant access to nearly all publications and websites that were created by the individual projects.
Artistic work interconnects multiple competencies and areas of knowledge, ways of life and working, and the IFCAR research projects are thus organized in correspondence with this transgressive ...
For over sixty years Tom Bishop has contributed to shaping the literary, philosophical, cultural, artistic, but also political conversation between Paris and New York. In his position as professor and director of the Center for French Civilization and Culture at New York University, he made the Washington Square institution one of the great bridges between French innovation and a New York scene that was then in full transformation. Tom Bishop was close to Beckett, championed Robbe-Grillet in the United States, befriended Marguerite Duras and Hélène Cixous, organized historic public encounters—such as the one between James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. He ...
Since its beginnings in the 1990s, “artistic research” has become established as a new format in the areas of educational and institutional policy, aesthetics, and art theory. It has now diffused into almost all artistic fields, from installation to experimental formats to contemporary music, literature, dance or performance art. But from its beginnings—under labels like “art and science” or “scienceart” or “artscience” that mention both disciplines in one breath—it has been in competition with academic research, without its own concept of research having been adequately clarified. This manifesto attempts to resolve the problem and to defend the term and the ...
