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 ...

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 ...

ARPA is an artefact reflecting on the progressive transformation of labour and the socio-economic consequences linked to the introduction of automation in production processes. Despite all reservations, automation might be considered to substantially contribute to the construction of a socio-economically sustainable paradise, freeing humanity from the fatigue of labour through an ecosystem of machines. ARPA is shaped as an instrument of propaganda, a device as part of a larger communication strategy staged in the city of Oslo, informing the public about a forthcoming technological revolution. The collision between the two media involved – still images and scrolling video-texts – unveils ...

It is the summer of 2013. Inside an empty news studio, a teleprompter rolls messages on its screen narrating the events that led to the closing of the Greek public television network (ERT) as a consequence of the European crisis and its austerity-ridden economy. It reads: “ERT may have been the last television channel to ever broadcast, the first and last television signal to be interrupted.” With the shutdown, 2,700 ERT employees were sacked. ERT’s ending was broadcast live, and its last report was an image of the people that had gathered outside the station, protesting against its closure. At the ...

Playwright, poet and activist Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) was known for his theory of the Epic Theatre and his attempts to break down the division between high art and popular culture. The Threepenny Opera, his collaboration with composer Kurt Weill, was a milestone in musical theatre, and plays like Mother Courage and Galileo changed the course of modern drama and aesthetic theory. Framed by two world wars, the Weimar Republic and a global depression, Nazism and exile and East German socialism, Brecht’s own life became a project, illuminating and intervening in the ongoing crisis of modern experience, shaped by capitalism, nationalism and visions of social utopia. Brecht ...

These are serious times, or so our governments keep telling us. Strangling economies with their austerity policies, they assure us that they have no choice. In a world where “there is no alternative”, how do you dissent? Once upon a time, graphic designers would have made political posters and typeset manifestos. Today, protest has new strategies. Enter the internet meme. With its Darwinian survival skills and its viral potential, the meme is a way of scaling up protest. Hackers and activists have learned to unleash the destructive force of a Rick Astley video. They have let slip the Lolcats of ...

CAPS LOCK uses clear language and striking visual examples to show how graphic design and capitalism are inextricably linked. The book contains many case studies of designed objects related to capitalist societies and cultures, and also examines how the education and professional practice of (graphic) designers supports the market economy and how design practice is caught within that very system. The content of CAPS LOCK is structured in chapters with titles of professions that designers can occupy (such as Educator; Engineer, Hacker, Futurist, Activist, etc.). These titles respond to the importance of not just how designers make work, but also ...

This publication marks the first results of the Tactical Media Room Ukraine project, launched in February 2022 in Amsterdam after the shocking Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Tactical Media Room is a network of activists, journalists, scholars, and artists linked by the exchange of ideas and practices—all aimed at supporting Ukrainian media and confronting Russian state propaganda. Together, the network of experts initiated a screening and a series of meetings that took place mainly in Amsterdam. Based on these meetings, Dispatches from Ukraine: Tactical Media Reflections and Responses showcases initiatives, critique, and essays that provide insights into the ways information circulates ...

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 ...

The notion that public space is for everyone, a place where we are all equal, has been used ambivalently to legitimize the exclusion of marginalized and vulnerable populations and to defend their presence in these spaces. Authorities and other social groups, uncomfortable with the presence of the homeless, loitering teenagers, street vendors, sex workers, and protesters, among other ‘undesirables,’ tend to justify their expulsion from public space by appealing to the “public good” or the prevention of “social harm.” The use of public space as a strategy for either “social justice” or “social order” led geographer Bernd Belina to question ...

Prologue When I first proposed curating this exhibition on the subject of paranoia, it was September 2016, a little over a month before the United States presidential election. Donald Trump couldn’t possibly win, and we were about to see the momentous election of our first woman President. I had long been interested in paranoia—as an affliction, a strategy, and an ontological system. I took it seriously, very seriously, but it also felt like something outside of me, a symptom of something kept at a distance. Both during the campaign and in its aftermath, things began to swing out of control. Incidents like ...

The internet has broken our brains. This report answers why. We feel exhausted, confused, even frightened by changes in our world. But if one thing is certain, it’s that the genie’s out of the bottle and it’s not going back in. Therefore, we face a choice. Accept reality will only get weirder and we will only get more confused. Or develop a new model for how the post-social media world works. To forecast the future, we have to analyze the present at a higher resolution. Gonzo Culture is the inaugural issue of 8Ball, a Los Angeles-based trend consultancy founded by Sean ...