These past few years, the fairly ancient concept we call “truth” has been bandied about the place quite a bit. Our social trust barometers, for a long time calibrated with “politician” on one side and “scientist” at the other, have been thrust into stormy weather. People like Donald Trump and Richard Dawkins have buried the needle into extremes of rhetorical squall, political uproar and techno-scientific demand, operationalising belief and fact in excessive ways — destructive of both self and others. The rest of us, muddling through this other ancient concept we call “modern life”, try and poise ourselves somewhere in ...

Jaffer Kolb guides us through the artificial and natural, real and imagined, human and other-than-human with Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem; Kelema Lee Moses confronts the ongoing tactics of imperial hospitality on the shores of Waikīkī; Diana Martinez considers the Philippine supermall as a fundamental physical and affective infrastructure of migration; and Ginger Nolan redirects Andrew Yang’s election-year policy proposal away from the individual and toward the urban.

Lori A. Brown parses legalese to uncover how the state wields spatial barriers to abortion access in Garza v. Hargan; Elisavet Hasa traces the “archive of resistance” assembled by solidarity heath care initiatives in Athens; David Hurtado unpeels Okinawa’s imperial layers through the photographs of Mao Ishikawa; and Isabelle A. Tan reflects on various encounters with the Belt and Road Initiative in Jakarta’s past, present, and future.

What do Agent Katsudon, Agent Yeni Raki, The Countess Vodcula, The Albatross, The Sicilian, The Chef de Cuisine, Mr. Bernard, Agent Bobcat, The Buddha and the “WAH” have in common? They all belong to a mysterious fraternity of darkly bespectacled agents and clandestine radio/signal operators who navigate a maze of shifting loyalties and alliances while risking their lives in sensational car chases. They send encrypted messages into the foggy ether of the night sky and then have a savory snack baked in a concealed kitchen, embedded with a piece of micro-film alluding to future covert affairs. Allies could potentially be enemies. ...

Based on Daniel F. Galouye’s novel Simulacron Three, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 2 part TV production is a science-fiction classic that explores the notion of a computer-generated other world, pre-dating The Matrix by 26 years. Since its original broadcast in 1973 it has rarely been seen and following increasing demand the Fassbinder Foundation have restored this remarkable film. Reader published to coincide with a two-part screening of Welt am Draht / World on a Wire (Parts I and II) directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1973), screening Sunday 31 March 2013.

Beyond performative resistance and melancholic complicity with the existing order, a crucial strategy emerged in the 1980s from a collective of artists in Yugoslavia who used complicity as its most lethal weapon. Inke Arns and Slavoj Žižek have respectively described the activities of NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) and its sub-groupings (the band Laibach and the artist collective IRWIN, and Scipion Našice Sisters Theatre, among others) variously in terms of over-identification or subversive affirmation, as performing the “hidden reverse” of state ideology. From Laibach’s nationalism in drag to the issuing of a passport for an imagined “NSK state,” NSK is perhaps ...

AI ethics has never been far from the industries it sought to critique. While originally designed to bring values such as fairness, accountability and transparency to Big Tech and its products, the lines between Big Tech’s PR initiatives and AI ethics funding has never been clear. In practice, AI ethics now operates as a means for the co-option of critics and to enable regulatory capture. It is used by corporations to create legitimacy and to further accumulate value. The result is that ‘ethics’ has now become a high-valued industrial commodity, and AI ethics its foundry. This anthology is a collective response ...

In the summer of 2016, a suite of hacking tools appeared for auction from a previously unknown group called “The Shadow Brokers,” who claimed to have hacked these tools from another secretive organization: the “Equation Group.” This folder of firewall tools (downloadable below) were released for free as proof of the hack’s overall legitimacy; The Shadow Brokers asked for one million Bitcoin (about 570 million dollars) for the rest of the tools. The free folder featured exploits (components of a larger attack that leverages security vulnerabilities), implants (covert software developed for targeted attacks on a particular device, usually for surveillance), ...

The second season of Overmorrow’s Library is dedicated to world-building, world-ending, and travel across worlds. Federico Campagna presents a new selection of books that might help us to appreciate the fragility of ‘worlds,’ and the art of creating new ones through a particular use of our imagination. This episode is a journey through the many shadows and many lights of German writer Ernst Jünger’s long life. From revolutionary conservatism to individualist anarchism, passing through LSD, mescaline and the many possible “approaches” to different stages of consciousness.

Tracklisting Part 01: 1. Devo: Devo Corporate Anthem 2. Kraftwerk: Computerwelt (Computer World) 3. Talking Heads: Don’t Worry About the Government 4. Keith Hudson: Class and Subject 5. Ewan MacColl: Dirty Old Town 6. John Cooper Clarke: Dumb Row Laughs 7. John Fahey: The Portland Cement Factory at Monolith, California 8. TV Personalities: Paradise Estate 9. The Fall: Fit and Working Again 10. El-P: Stepfather Factory 11. Ghostface Killah: Kilo 12. Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht: Pirate Jenny (from The Threepenny Opera) 13. McCarthy: The Procession of Popular Capitalism 14. Stereolab: Laissez Faire 15. This Heat: A New Kind of Water 16. The Flying Lizards: Hands 2 Take 17. Throbbing Gristle: I.B.M. (edit) 18. Country Teasers: It is ...

Three presentations from the 2015 event explore the historical and contemporary relationship between choreography, technology, control, and subjectivation.