Due to physical distancing measures under COVID-19, we are finding ourselves in what can be identified as an increased condition of gathering on- line. This condition includes learning situations, as well as moments to share and exchange our views, analyses, approaches, results, prototypes and proposals in a wide spectrum of academic and para-academic situations. Through the imposition of closed, proprietary, exclusive and over-optimised commercial formats for so-called “webinars”, this situation is rapidly resulting in the settlement of a monoculture in mediated gatherings. GAFAM & co are taking over research and educational ecosystems, while turning all interactions into business transactions. It ...

A Euro is a Euro is a Euro: Fieldwork in European Realism appears online in issue 2 of Fictional Journal and is reproduced in the Propaganda pdf document. As a singular embodiment of matter and representation, the Euro-skulptur is as abstract as money, as tangible as cash. An essay and animations analyse the sculpture as a material symbol of the European Union. Euro cash is European Realism, it is a representation of things as they actually are, it is the sincere, un-idealised rendition of contemporary life in the EU. we normally look at architecture, or more broadly at the built environment, as the interface ...

Scaling is to move across different dimensions: a firm might be scaling down, nearing bankruptcy—its new dimension is to reach rock bottom; a doll house might be a scale model, where dimensions are kept proportional but decreased compared to a real house; a hand touching a map is, to paraphrase Tom Holert, a scaling device, where the graspable dimension of the map makes available the experience of exploring, traveling and possessing lands. For this publication of Taming the Horror Vacui, which includes content from three different sessions in the program, we put the wind and its manifestations through a process of ...

Dean Johnson, futurist and head of innovation at Brandwidth, explains how the Internet of Things relies on continuity of experience. 2:02 — About Dean Johnson and what he does 5:14 — Mobile technologies 8:50 — How we developed our first gadget 20:27 — How does an iBook work 21:05 — Urban environments 23:50 — Libraries 25:42 — How do we actually interact with content 37:26 — Why the iPad was so popular and successful 42:19 — Back to the future

Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice is an accessibility guide geared toward small-scale arts nonprofits and the potentially expansive publics these organizations serve. It details specific ways in which disabled people are excluded from cultural spaces and offers possible solutions to those barriers. Moving away from historical and juridical definitions of accessibility, this guide considers the unique capacity of small scale arts organizations to meet the needs of disabled communities. It engages principles of disability justice to think through what can urgently be done to create more equitable and accessible arts spaces…

“Reading inquisitively over each others’ shoulders, the poems, meditations, analyses and experiments in this volume respond with audacity and adventure to the challenge of characterizing what reading, this most familiar yet renewedly strange occupation, has been and may yet become.”

In 2016 the Aerocene Foundation was invited to Exhibition Road for an interdisciplinary artistic project co-produced by members of the Exhibition Road Cultural Group: a partnership of the leading cultural and educational institutions in London, among them Serpentine Galleries, Imperial College London and The Natural History Museum. Between October and December 2016, the Aerocene Foundation activated a collaborative research platform between Exhibition Road members and wider communities by organizing two hackathons and the ‘Aerocene Campus’ in which participants engaged in debates on metabolic, social and environmental dimensions of the Aerocene epoch. During this period, experts as well as developers, designers, artists, ...

In September, unusual flying objects rose above the Olympiaberg, creating astonishment. The Aerocene Festival unfolded impressively within the air above Munich and with it the artistic vision of limitless, pollution-free aerial mobility. From 6-11th September 2019, it was possible to experience the floating sculptures, test the technology in Pilot Courses or predict and undertake virtual flights. Aerocene was initiated in 2015 by the Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno, who works at the interface of art, architecture, technology and science. In the meantime, it has become an international community that seeks to achieve a transformed ecological awareness through artistic action. Aerocene stands for the ...

Aidan Quinlan is a designer who also teaches “A Handmade Web.”

This next-to-last issue of Taming the Horror Vacui, titled Air Aggregation, brings together artworks and air. Haseeb Ahmed’s art installation at Rib and the wind tunnel at its center have been used for experiments and workshops throughout the entire long-term artist’s program. Expanding on this approach, this publication collects annotated images of artworks brought to Rib by Piero Bisello to be tested in Ahmed’s wind tunnel in June 2021. If wind and air are the mediums of choice in Ahmed’s art, the aggregation of different practices can be seen as his modus operandi. The outlook of Rib as an institution hosting ...

The purpose of this workbook is not to tell you how to write alt- text. There are many existing resources that provide guidelines and how-tos (you can find a few listed in the Tools section). Our primary intent is to put alt-text on your radar (if it wasn’t already), to get you thinking about it creatively, and to explore a few of the key questions that come up when translating images into text. We hope these exercises make clear that, like all accessibility practices, writing alt-text requires ongoing practice, learning, and collaboration. The needs and wants of blind and low vision people ...

Ancestors and Algorithms appears online in issue 2 of Fictional Journal and is reproduced in the Propaganda pdf document. In 2000, Dan Greaney, the writer of The Simpson’s cartoon, imagined Donald Trump as the president of the United States in the episode Bart to the Future, and he admits that the idea “was pitched because it was consistent with a vision of America going insane.” The show creates an unimaginable scene, the embodiment of its viewer’s worst nightmare and hilarious fantasy that has since become reality. A global dissatisfaction with liberal democracy has cleared the political stage for right-wing populists such as Trump and ...