a kind of forever present that takes the form of a theatrical script to perform a fictitious conversation among cultural theorists that considers what ever happened to postmodernism. The script culls parts of seminal texts by Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, Jürgen Habermas, Clement Greenberg and Jennifer Allen and combines them into a discussion about the transformation of postmodernism into a hybrid, constant stream of social media and digital technology that inherently changes our relationship with time.

In these interviews dating from 1998, Châtelet amplifies the major themes of To Live and Think Like Pigs, discusses his method of dramatisation and the crucial importance of style; and touches on subjects from dialectics to dope smoking, from Yoplait to slavery, along the way introducing some of the book’s key concepts: cybercattle, the average man, the tapeworm-citizen, and of course the pitiful couple Cyber-Gideon and Turbo-Bécassine.

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.

Based on Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Author as Producer,” an array of theorists have developed approaches towards an aesthetics of production. The texts of this issue investigate how Benjamin’s arguments may serve as a ground for reflecting and theorizing current art practices. What are the consequences of political art’s function of “supplying the capitalist production apparatus, not changing it”? How can artistic methods subvert cooptation following Brecht and Tretyakov? Where are there new models of artists/intellectuals as producers and “specialists” rather than experts for the universal?

The New Creative Paradigm FACING THE LAST STAGES OF LATE CAPITALISM, WE PREDICT THE DAWN OF A NEW WAY OF WORKING FOR THE CREATIVE CLASS. The landscape that fostered post- modern cultural creation is in flames. If we are able to evolve, this fire will raze a forest whose dead roots cling to a dead system, and from its ashes will rise a new creative paradigm. If we refuse, we will be left speaking a dead language, to no one, in the dark. The internet has ushered in a new age, a faster digital reality that speaks to more people more loudly. For ...

In the face of ecological emergencies, this book explores and experiments with the meanings and implications of being and organizing in a relational world. From a position of vulnerable optimism, it attempts to engage in accessible ways with the typically inscrutable ideas of sociomateriality and posthumanism. The perspective of entanglement that is developed, and associated dilemmas considered, involve searching for possibilities of giving voice to voiceless more-than-human others. This book is about prompting imaginings of possibilities for responsible being and collective flourishing that can be hopeful for us all.

In the introduction to Ben Davis’s new book, a bracing and perspectival collection of essays titled Art in the After-Culture (Haymarket Books), he reflects that “the only thing that has grown faster than the demands on art has been doubt that art can respond adequately to those demands.” In a generous and thoughtful conversation with Sky Goodden, Davis expands on those cultural tensions that exacerbate an already fraught cultural dialogue, and touches on other central themes to this collection of writing, including the economic structures that inform contemporary art and its technologies, the roots of cultural appropriation, the context collapse ...

The teach-in and festival will focus on the term communisation that recently have become a term for debate within ultra-left revolutionary theory and practice. The days we spent together will consist of a combination of theoretical and practical workshops and film activities, such as screenings and a communist film production workshop. “Communism is not a set of measures to be put into practice after the seizure of power […]. All past movements were able to bring society to a standstill and waited for something to come out of this universal stoppage. Communisation, on the contrary, will circulate goods without money […] ...

What is the history of disability-accessible design? And how does this history get written? In this episode of Contra*, I continue to talk to historians Elizabeth Guffey and Bess Williamson about this topic. We focus on the ways that law and design shape understandings of disabled people, whether as consumers, workers, or activists. And we get to hear more about Guffey and Williamson’s new book, where they propose a “disability theory of design”!

This publication provides a dialectical conception of Relational Aesthetics (Nicolas Bourriaud, 2002), by focusing on the ‘value form of participation’ and the ways in which this gets subsumed into capitalist circuits to fit its purpose within culture. One of the original contributions of this research project within the field of political art, or art that aims to be political, is its in-depth critique of relational art’s political economy from the perspective of an engaged practice. The publication also provides insights into the role of the curator as the interlocutor of this exchange. By combining Marxist and Lacanian perspectives, Kontopoulou conceptualises ...