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.

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?

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 is a historically bound concept, and ask if we’ve possibly reached the end of clear-cut, market-ready “generations.” Also: mid-ification, zentrism, eNFT portals, and adult drainers.

This week we are joined by Alex Williams, co-author of #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics, “Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work”. We discussed Boogaloo Bois latest fashion trends, the coming of the Big Igloo, what’s the role of the Dirtbag left within the hegemonic discourse, and the electoral prognosis and transformation of contemporary socialism. All this in light of Alex’s most recent book “Political Hegemony and Social Complexity. Mechanisms of Power After Gramsci” (2019).

We can now say with some certainty that one advantage of the Cold War was that it placed many of the complexities and contradictions of economic problems within a clear and singular binary between capitalism and communism. On top of that, arguments in favor of one or the other had massive geopolitical blocs backing them, and the sheer scale alone was enough to draw any economic argument into the tide of one side or the other. This made it only natural for dominant narratives following the dismantling of communism to profess the triumph of capitalism. However, it is only now ...

As we continue to reflect upon the chain of political upheavals of 2011, it may be interesting to consider a particular shift in the status of information technology, now that it has been deployed as such a powerful force in facilitating the rise of a new popular voice. But first, how did this happen? How did a form of communication—developed in the late 1950s with a well-funded US Defense Department initiative in response to the Sputnik threat, then blossoming in the hands of engineer-entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley of the 1970s into the center of accelerated hyper-capitalism in the 1990s—evolve to become ...

The films of Adam Curtis—a BBC journalist by vocation, but a filmmaker and information archeologist in practice—appear as conspiracy theories wrapped in historical facts wrapped in social desires. These films remind us that dominant historical narratives are not only subject to rewriting but also sites of intense confusion, ideology, and intrigue. By fusing together narrative and reportage, Curtis’s films enter an ecstatic and playful sphere where themes of power, coercion, technology, morality, and freedom assume a life of their own. This issue of e-flux journal features a rare in-depth interview with Curtis by Hans Ulrich Obrist, coinciding with the filmmaker’s first ...

Where did the critical tradition of art go? Maybe that’s the wrong question. Because we know the answer. It went into spectacle. It went into finance. It got privatized, democratized, scrutinized, defunded, bureaucratized, then professionalized. The critical stick became a seductive carrot. But maybe we don’t have to see this only in terms of a fall from grace. Maybe this is the time for a long-overdue realism that an art field still in the thrall of modernist humanism struggles to avoid recognizing. Isn’t it strange how we are subjected to the most extreme aspects of this new order and yet ...

One common explanation for why intellectual property makes no sense in an era of file-sharing uses the example of what happens when you copy a file on a computer. Copy-Paste: a second file has been produced, but the original is unaltered. Now it has a sibling, a partner, a twin. And if they keep reproducing themselves in this way, no problem. Which is to say that, at least in the digital domain, the entire calculus of scarcity is very different from the material domain. The difference between a single entity, two entities, or a billion is almost nil. Under these ...

Art cannot solve the problems of 2017, Alexander Kluge says to Hans Ulrich Obrist in this issue, but it can start solving the problems of 2036. Though it may begin in the affective work of mourning, art moves towards a rational archeology and a realistic anticipation. We could call this “futurist realism,” a vision of the coming decades as a series of problems to be solved, rather than as a source for transcendent salvations or damnations of whatever fashion. Unlike the ecstatic or dispirited futurisms we are accustomed to, futurist realism looks forward with no false regrets. Bad-faith futurism, by ...

Revolutionaries are people who need to run around in circles. Revolution is a cycle of toppling and replacing, of killing God and building a Church, as Camus says. It is nothing if not intense… Editorial Editors The Intense Life: An Ethical Ideal Tristan Garcia “This Is a Story About Nerds and Cops”: PredPol and Algorithmic Policing Jackie Wang Notes on Blacceleration Aria Dean The Common Before Power: An Example Antonio Negri Productive Withdrawals: Art Strikes, Art Worlds, and Art as a Practice of Freedom Kuba Szreder Self-Destruction as Insurrection, or, How to Lift the Earth Above All That Has Died? Irmgard Emmelhainz The Glory Hole Karen Sherman On the Concept of Beauty Theodor W. Adorno Lounge Act at Thek Lounge Wayne ...

Egress is the first book to consider the legacy and work of the writer, cultural critic and cult academic Mark Fisher. Narrated in orbit of his death as experienced by a community of friends and students in 2017, it analyses Fisher’s philosophical trajectory, from his days as a PhD student at the University of Warwick to the development of his unfinished book on Acid Communism. Taking the word “egress” as its starting point — a word used by Fisher in his book The Weird and the Eerie to describe an escape from present circumstances as experiences by the characters in countless examples ...