In digitized, interconnected, post- and trans-human times, judgment becomes ‘justment.’ Once online, criticism diffuses into the channels of the social networks, it is commented on, ironized, parodied, corrected. Individual criticism has turned into dividual criticism. A response to Engaged Art Criticism — 7 Propositions by Ines Kleesattel and Pablo Müller.

To celebrate the release of Chronosis, Keith Tilford and Reza Negarestani join Robin Mackay to talk about their collaboration and the ideas that fuelled the time-twisting plot of the comic. Creative tension and backchannel bickering, cat monks, Boltzmann brains, cosmic body horror, Bertrand Russell the armchair stoner, the Harold Lloyd theory of time-reversal, psychopaths, AGI monkeys, and The Mortiloquist all make an appearance. Music: ‘Dionysus’, by Herman Polsus aka Drew Flieder, and ‘Timeshift’ by Eschaton.

In his long-term artistic project Theatrum Botanicum, Uriel Orlow considers plants as actors on a political stage: protagonists of colonial trade, flower diplomacy, or bio-piracy. As such, they serve as a prism through which environmental colonial history can be re-negotiated. Theatrum Botanicum can be read as an attempt to decolonize both, history and nature. And for decolonizing nature, it is crucial how plants are considered as acting and living beings. If they tell stories about colonialism, how are they brought to speak?

An extract from Inigo Wilkins’s long awaited Irreversible Noise unwraps the black box of sonic perception to reveal the phenoumenodelic delights within.

Space is a technology. Buildings and the cities they inhabit have become infrastructural – mobile, monetized networks. For the world’s power players, infrastructure space is a secret weapon, and the rest of us are only just beginning to realize. If Victor Hugo came back to give a TED talk, he might assert that architecture, which he once claimed had been killed by the book, is reincarnate as something more powerful still – as information itself. If this space is a secret weapon, says Keller Easterling, it is a secret best kept from those trained to make space – architects. Meanwhile, ...

With the term chrononormativity, Elizabeth Freeman describes a timeliness that is following a normative regime. A “deviant chronopolitics,” she says, is one that envisions “relations across time and between times” that upturns developmentalist narratives of history (Freeman, 58, 63). Lorenza and many others have become agents in a deviant chronopolitics and the cripping of art history. Crip Magazine collects artifacts of this transhistorical crip (sub)culture. It relates to historical struggles, aiming to create trans-temporary connections and communities across time. Desire, time traveling, and fragmented bodies are some of the themes that connect the different pieces in this volume…

Aesthetic Programming explores the technical as well as cultural imaginaries of programming from its insides. It follows the principle that the growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural thinking — and curriculum — that can account for, and with which to better understand the politics and aesthetics of algorithmic procedures, data processing and abstraction. It takes a particular interest in power relations that are relatively under-acknowledged in technical subjects, concerning class and capitalism, gender and sexuality, as well as race and the legacies of colonialism. This is not only related to the politics of representation but also nonrepresentation: ...

But we can understand Descartes’ premise of equality far more basically and radically, not as an assertion of fact, but as a presuppositional act: equality is a supposition we must make in advance. For it has nothing to do with the socially acquired capacity of reason (in which we are unequal, and about which we disagree). Equality pertains to a presupposition of reason. It does not refer to a capacity of reason that we possess, but to the potential for practical training in reason, for its acquisition. In that and that alone—in this potential—are we equal. Equality is an equality ...

Theorising a World of Video, after.video realizes the world through moving images and reassembles theory after video. Extending the formats of ‘theory,’ it reflects a new situation in which world and video have grown together. This is an edited collection of assembled and annotated video essays living in two instantiations: an online version – located on the web at http://after.video/assemblages, and an offline version – stored on a server inside a VHS (Video Home System) case. This is both a digital and analog object: manifested, in a scholarly gesture, as a ‘video book.’ We hope that different tribes — from DIY hackercamps ...

ARTISTS SPACE Center for Experimental Lectures: Amalle Dublon and Aria Dean February 2, 2020, 6pm Amalle Dublon and Aria Dean present new work for the Center for Experimental Lectures, an artist’s project based in New York that engages with the public lecture as form. Amalle Dublon will play and discuss Mariah Carey’s song “Honey,” relating it to concerns of dependency, growth and decay, and culinary sound. In Aria Dean’s lecture, To the Ringdown, two become one, bound by a third. As a part of a series of lectures co-commissioned by Montez Press Radio, their lectures will be broadcast live from Artists Space and ...

Drawing on his book Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature, Ben Carver examines the figures and functions of evolution, isolation, and entanglement in the imaginary Utopias and Uchronias of speculative fiction, and plots some unsuspected paths between early counterfactual histories and the dark underworlds of contemporary conspiracy theory.

It is a story known only too well by readers of Doctor Faustus, but not, perhaps, by other mortals. A gentlemen’s duel with the always-thorny issue of artistic plagiarism as its backdrop, played out by two giants in the history of literature and music, swords drawn: Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg. Their pride wounded, the pair argued, barely managing to contain their indignation and rage. It was as if they had emerged out of Joseph Conrad’s outstanding novel The Duel, in which two Hussar lieutenants in Napoleonic times struck up a protracted private contest, one that was to last their ...