A conversation with Steven Warwick aka Heatsick about his March 2016 show Neutral at Exile in Berlin, followed by the text of his play Neonliberal, in which a gaggle of animated superfoods travel around Fortress Europe seeking the hip and the accelerated; and an exclusive Heatsick track, StaylienZ.
Art and Music, Artists, Queer Culture
01. INTRODUCTION: On the Conjuncture 1. At the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, global civilization faces a new breed of cataclysm. These coming apocalypses ridicule the norms and organisational structures of the politics which were forged in the birth of the nation-state, the rise of capitalism, and a twentieth century of unprecedented wars. 2. Most significant is the breakdown of the planetary climatic system. In time, this threatens ...
Communism, Cybernetics, Historical Materialism
Andrej Škufca, Maks Valenčič, Tisa Troha et al.
We are not sure whether they already exist, but we know we need to build them. Artificial objects, bound together with their surroundings into a string infrastructure. Spreading into their surroundings by employing the entropy of their materials, the topology of their location, the vegetation, the changing weather patterns, and other such variables. Objects forced into adapting by the changes in the atmosphere. Something that is compelled to conform if it ...
Biology, Cosmology, Critical Theory
Caroline Busta, Daniel Keller, Lil Internet et al.
Cultural savants Shumon Basar (The Extreme Self & The Age of Earthquakes) and Dean Kissick (NY editor of Spike Art Magazine) join the show during Berlin Art Week for a sprawling, late-night convo on communication and creative production in year 2022. Along the way, we note the accelerating pace of decades, revisit Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 mass-media glow-up, log a veritable dictionary of neologisms, consider whether the art market as we know ...
Art and Technology, Art Market, Social Theory
Marek Poliks, Roberto Alonso Trillo, Helena McFadzean et al.
Émile P. Torres is a philosopher of the end times. You’ll most likely associate their name (and that of collaborator Timnit Gebru) with developing the acronym TESCREAL, a grab-bag of ideologies that undergird the romance between venture capital and Silicon Valley. We strongly recommend their podcast Dystopia Now! (w/ Kate Willett) and their newest book Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation. The T in TESCREAL is ...
Biopolitics, Philosophy
Ruth Pilston, Rózsa Farkas, Emii Alrai et al.
For the eighth issue of How to Sleep Faster, Arcadia Missa has brought together work—in a variety of forms—responding to the theme of Autonomy and Automation. The increased use of automated processes has often been considered a threat to personal and political autonomy, yet traditional notions of automation are changing, with movements such as Accelerationism (and its right-wing variant espoused by neo-reactionary thinkers like Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin) and ...
Art and Technology, Automation, Critical Theory
Mattin, Miguel Prado, Ray Brassier
We’re incredibly honoured to be joined by Ray Brassier, a hugely formative thinker for both of us and one of the most important philosophers of the past 20 years. We talk about his upcoming book Fatelessness: Freedom and Fatality After Marx and, the contemporary condition of The Wretched of the Earth. Ray also gives an absolutely brilliant takedown of Nick Land and the speculative inhuman. Hope you enjoy it.
Communism, Historical Materialism
Marek and Roberto wrote the opening chapter of Choreomata, a thought-experiment about what happens to subjective experience when it is fully subcontracted out by the various routines of datafication and computation that comprise contemporary digital society. Academics and researchers constantly worry about the extent to which we are constructing AI in our own image, but in reality the reverse feels truer: we are constructing ourselves according to machine protocols. This episode ...
Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, Automation
Marek Poliks, Roberto Alonso Trillo, Mohammad Salemy
We’re joined by Mohammad Salemy, organizer and facilitator of the New Centre for Research and Practice, fierce critic, social media (@inhumansofberlin) hyperstitionist, artist, personality, and force. This episode provides a lot of background into how the New Centre came to be. If you’re unfamiliar with TNC, it’s one of the main places where theory happens today. While we spend time on the New Centre, we also spend time on Mo and ...
Critical Theory, Geopolitics, Philosophy
Bogna Konior, Anna Greenspan, Vincent Garton et al.
In anticipation of the publication of Machine Decision is Not Final, we present some short extracts from some of the texts in the collection.
Artificial Intelligence, Cosmology, Cybernetics