What does it mean to possess a deep understanding of the material world around us? When so many of us spend countless waking hours engrossed in screens, “material intelligence” feels hard to come by these days. The most recent champion of the term, craft scholar Glenn Adamson, demands nothing short of a literal call to arms to “recover our literacy in the ways of the physical world”: do things with your hands, farm, weave, build furniture, construct a house! In Adamson’s historical thinking, our practical detachment from the environment is implicated in an ongoing denigration of manual skills and trades ...

Sabrina Ratté’s Activated Memory is a video based on animated photographs of different Montreal parks. Activated Memory is a journey through a serene landscape where the trees and fields are at once surreal and familiar. Through the use of video feedback, 3d animation and color manipulations, the pictures render a new kind of space, a virtual world where only fragments of “reality” subsist. Music composed by Roger Tellier-Craig.

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 ...

After the loss of a counter-model for capitalism—which socialism, in its real, existing form had presented until its collapse—alternative concepts for economic and social development face hard times at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the industrial nations, broadly discussed are only those “alternatives” that do not question the existing power relations of the capitalist system and representative democracies. Other socio-economic approaches are labeled utopian, devalued, and excluded from serious discussion if even considered at all. This edition of the republicart web journal presents transcriptions from 13 videos from Oliver Ressler’s thematic installation Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies focusing on diverse ...

American Cypher is a suite of projects that respond to American stories about race and DNA. The first module of this project was a sound installation commissioned by Bucknell University, inspired by Thomas Jefferson (the 3rd US president) and Sally Hemings (his slave and, as DNA tests confirm, mother to his children). The piece that we’ve made for the Download series is a performance score. The image in the video was recorded in the basement of Jefferson’s plantation, Monticello, in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Descartes famously believed that animals were living machines; he was said to beat, torture, and vivisect dogs simply to demonstrate that they had no feelings. He interpreted the sounds emerging from the dog’s mouth as mere physical reactions, just the mechanical result of air passing through a windpipe, not indicative of emotional self-expression. According to Descartes and many of his followers, animals were inferior to humans because they lacked the capacity for language. While scientific evidence as well as popular opinion about the emotive actuality and potential of animals has proven that they have inner lives, most do not speak ...

This week on the show we’re in the artist’s studio visiting the one and only Arthur Jafa. From his extensive work in cinema, to his video art, sculpture, and other mixed media work shown in a contemporary art context – AJ’s work is often an embodiment of Black identity in America, and he is often cited with being a leader among a generation of artists creating defining a distinctly Black cinematic language. This extends as well into current projects on the more infrastructural / business side of the film industry in the form of his project Sun Haus. Visiting with ...

“Foreword” by Matilde Soligno “About 2016. End of Year Notes” by Vincenzo Estremo, Flaka Haliti, and Studio Miessen (Berlin) “2016’s TOP 5” by Luca Panaro

This week on the show our guest is the one and only Barbara London. Since she began her career at MoMA in 1973 and collected the museum’s first video art in 1975, Barbara has had an immeasurable impact on the field of time-based media art – from her 1979 exhibition Video from Tokyo to Fukui and Kyoto to her phenomenal new book Video art: the first fifty years. Listen in on our conversation to hear Barbara’s story, and her relationships with artists such as Laurie Anderson, Joan Jonas, Nam June Paik, Teiji Furuhashi, Bill Viola, and more, that have formed ...

When first launched the Biosphere 2 was sold by the media to an eager public as crucial scientific research that would save us when the earth became uninhabitable.  This was easier then explaining the complicated fact that many of its central ideas had come from an avant-garde theater troupe. But these performative roots were mirrored by Barbara T. Smiths “21st Century Odyssey.”  When Smith’s boyfriend, Dr. Roy Walford, went into the Biosphere for two years she traveled around the world doing performances and communicating with him through then cutting-edge tech like faxes and video chat. While he and the other ...

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 ...