Over the past decade, a growing number of artists and critical practitioners have become engaged with algorithms. This artistic engagement has resulted in algorithmic theatre, bot art, and algorithmic media and performance art of various kinds that thematise the dissemination and deployment of algorithms in everyday life. Especially striking is the high volume of artistic engagements with facial recognition algorithms, trading algorithms and search engine algorithms over the past few years. The fact that these three types of algorithms have garnered more responses than other types of algorithms suggests that they form a popular subject of artistic critique. This critique addresses ...

Inspired by the scholars, activists, and everyday citizens who spoke out, marched, and protested against police killings of African-Americans, we present this collection of short essays that put Black lives at the center of our thinking about architecture and its history.

Social change does not simply result from resistance to the existing set of conditions but from adapting and transforming the technical apparatus itself. Walter Benjamin in his essay ‘The Author as Producer’, written in 1934, recommends that the ‘cultural producer’ intervene in the production process in the manner of an engineer. The term ‘engineer’ is to be taken broadly to refer to technical and cultural activity, through the application of knowledge for the management, control and use of power. To act as an engineer in this sense, is to use power productively to bring about change and for public utility. ...

“Today one may complain that life has been reduced to points in a matrix of relations—cities, territories, and historical narratives prematurely refined into categories of known and unknown, real and virtual, concrete and abstract space.” At the time, we could not have imagined the mass migration into abstract space that would soon follow. Today, living through the planetary pandemic, the imperative to navigate the world and our own lives through computational tools has been radicalized to the extreme. The last months of Skyping, Zoom conferencing, and collaborative Google Docs writing make us feel we have no choice but to exhaust ...

In opening the book The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (2015), Aileen Moreton-Robinson leads with an epigraph: “The problem with white people is they think and believe that they own everything.” In terms of a critique of the seven-centuries-long rollout and contestation of European dispossessive power, this citation is the alpha and the omega. It is incredibly hard to add anything that isn’t captured within its succinct analysis. Nevertheless, this special issue of e-flux journal goes to work amid the breadth of this statement—seeking greater insight into its truth and the counter-tactics therein through aesthetic study in particular. The essays, ...

If all things in the world can be considered as sources of aesthetic experience, then art no longer holds a privileged position. Rather, art comes between the subject and the world, and any aesthetic discourse used to legitimize art must also necessarily serve to undermine it. Following his recent books Art Power and The Communist Postscript, in Going Public Boris Groys looks to escape entrenched aesthetic and sociological understandings of art—which always assume the position of the spectator, of the consumer. Let us instead consider art from the position of the producer, who does not ask what it looks like ...

This title will be available soon. Where the rituals of academic life are concerned, there are few exercises as rudimentary, at once essential and banal, as taking notes. A student goes to class and reflexively pulls out a spiral-bound notebook, scribbling furiously to keep pace with the lecture. A scholar produces copious marginalia in an essay or book: in this sense, his or her library is not so much a collection of volumes on a shelf as an archive of palimpsests. Field notes are the preferred literary genre of anthropologists, linguists, and sociologists venturing beyond the walls of the ivory tower; ...

Why does it matter that a building looks one way and not another way? Architectural historian Timothy Hyde considers the role of aesthetic judgments in shaping the way that society acts.

This title will be available soon. Recent writings about art have tended to focus on the intention of artists and the effect their artworks have on viewers, as well as the social consequences of these effects. Often, these writings do not speak about the artworks themselves, but about curatorial positions in art today, constituting a meta-artistic discourse. A question, then, might be how to reconnect with the visual, structural, and phenomenological analyses of the twentieth century without sacrificing the political and social dimensions of recent art theory…

This title will be available soon. Tiresias the diviner was turned into a woman by the supreme goddess Hera, having committed the sacrilegious act of killing two copulating snakes. After serving seven years as a priestess and a prostitute, and giving birth to a daughter named Manto (a diviner herself), Tiresias was permitted by the goddess to become male again. One day, Hera and her husband, Zeus, asked Tiresias who had more pleasure in sex, men or women, since he had experienced both womanhood and manhood. He replied that feminine pleasure was infinite, whereas male pleasure was finite, the opposite of ...

Look at Hazards, Look at Losses developed out of a series of conversations, exchanges and visits between kuda.org, Anthony Iles and Marina Vishmidt over 2015-2017 through which different approaches to common problems of cultural production in early-21st century Europe and its peripheries were debated and conceptually probed. Setting out from Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of ‘the aesthetic relations of production’, these discussions proceeded to explore problems bearing upon organisation in small groups in the field of culture, philosophical idealism and materialism, poetry, error, and crisis. The anthology assembled reflects these concerns through engagement with the writing of others who have helped ...

Media Do Not Exist: Performativity and Mediating Conjunctures by Jean-Marc Larrue and Marcello Vitali-Rosati offers a radically new approach to the phenomenon of mediation, proposing a new understanding that challenges the very notion of medium. It begins with a historical overview of recent developments in Western thought on mediation, especially since the mid 80s and the emergence of the disciplines of media archaeology and intermediality. While these developments are inseparable from the advent of digital technology, they have a long history. The authors trace the roots of this thought back to the dawn of philosophy. Humans interact with their environment ...

Commissioned by Dia, Daniel Lefcourt’s web project, Modeler, focuses on systems of signs and interferences. The starting point is a grid composed of grayscale stock images of industrial objects and spaces, a seemingly infinite dataset suggestive of what Lefcourt deems “The pleasure of sameness and repetition.” Extending from his current body of work, which emphasizes observation and detail, Modeler invites the visitor to investigate the complex nature of virtual perception. Daniel Lefcourt was born in New York, and received his MFA from Columbia University. Over the past ten years, he has had solo exhibitions at Taxter & Spengemann in New York, ...

Cultural analyst TOBY SHORIN takes us into the Hellmouth of “authenticity” and “originality” production, discussing how the Cthulhu of platform capitalism and distributed networks is evacuating the value of creative work.  

The black notebook marked “LAK 529” contains two periods of note-taking by György Lukács, written two years apart, which constitute part of the bequest that was recovered from the so-called Heidelberg suitcase. In 1973, with the help of a current biography, an employee of the Deutsche Bank in Heidelberg identified the owner of the material as Lukács, who had deposited them in 1917, prior to his return from Germany to Budapest. In addition to 1,600 letters and text fragments, this material also contained Das Gericht, which was presumably written in 1913 and dedicated to his first wife, Ljena Grabenko, as ...

In this book, Rosa Menkman brings in early information theorists not usually encountered in glitch’s theoretical foundations to refine a signal and informational vocabulary appropriate to glitch’s technological moment(um) and orientations. The book makes sense of recent glitch art and culture: technically, culturally, critically, aesthetically and finally as a genre. The glitch takes on a different form in relation to noise, failure or the accident. It transitions between artifact and filter; between radical breakages and commodification processes. Menkman shows how we need to be clearer about the relationship between the technical and cultural dimensions of glitch culture. Honing in on the ...

This title will be available soon. In this text I will try to understand some of the intentions of dOCUMENTA (13) according to my particular point of view, which is based on the belief that the current agony of capitalism will be a deadly trap for human evolution unless we adapt our culture and life- style to exhaustion, the dominant trend of our time. I will also try to understand how some of the works presented and assembled by dOCUMENTA (13) express propositions for emancipation and autonomy through withdrawal, exodus, and a proliferation of morphogenetic processes of recombination. I am writing and ...

This book began as a two-part issue of e-flux journal devoted to the question: What is contemporary art? First, and most obviously: why is this question not asked? That is to say, why do we simply leave it to hover in the shadow of attempts at critical summation in the grand tradition of twentieth-century artistic movements? A single hegemonic “ism” has replaced clearly distinguishable movements and grand narratives. But what exactly does it mean to be working under the auspices of this singular ism? Widespread usage of the term “contemporary” seems so self-evident that to further demand a definition of “contemporary ...

Fall Semester presents WINTER BREAK, its third iteration of online publications and visual contributions. WINTER BREAK talks about the broken nation using Venezuela as example, the territory, the idea, and what seems to come with it. What is Venezuela today apart from a contradiction between its gross political reality and an enlarged fictitious self-image? Within this contradiction, WINTER BREAK imagines ways of relating to the current socio-political machinery without just opting for the one-dimensional immersion in the politics that has plagued its recent times. The regime in power has introduced a new form whose tactics are close to artistic practice, ...