In 1985, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard curated a groundbreaking exhibition called Les Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The exhibition showed how telecommunication technologies were beginning to impact every aspect of life. At the same time, it was a material demonstration of what Lyotard called the post-modern condition. This book features a previously unpublished report by Jean-François Lyotard on the conception of Les Immatériaux and its relation to postmodernity. Reviewing the historical significance of the exhibition, his text is accompanied by twelve contemporary meditations. The philosophers, art historians, and artists analyse this important moment in the history of media and theory, and reflect on the new material conditions brought ...

Catastrophe arrives, traditionally, in the manner of an accident: from the Latin accidens, meaning accident or chance; from accido, to fall out, come to pass, happen, occur. The accident is, in short, that which happens to us: it comes from without, and takes us by surprise.3 “We are passive with respect to the disaster,” writes Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster, “but the disaster is perhaps passivity.” To experience catastrophe is to enter into the condition of passivity. This passivity is directly linked to the externality of the catastrophe: that it appears to arrive from outside the system. That ...

This collection of digital objects scratches the surface of some of the questions we like to puzzle over the most: What are the possibilities for public speaking now? How is learning something we do with our bodies? What is the materiality of acquiring knowledge? And what is important about being in a room with others, watching something together? We hope these 10 works offer some methods for reconsidering the possibilities of showing each other things in public.

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 ...

We had the great pleasure of being joined by techno-animist and Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Leckey. We discuss UK Bikelife; commodity fetishism and how trainers and fashion are tokens of class with magic-like attributes; the repertory of spells the left still has against KeK’s Meme Magic; TechGnosis and conspiritualism in the age of Elon Musk. AND Lana Del Rey’s White Dress! You won’t want to miss this!

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.

Similarity has long been excluded from reality in both the analytical and continental traditions. Because it exists in the aesthetic realm, and because aesthetics is thought to be divorced from objective reality, similarity has been confined to the prison of the subject. In The Being of Analogy, Noah Roderick unleashes similarity onto the world of objects. Inspired by object-oriented theories of causality, Roderick argues that similarity is ever present at the birth of new objects. This includes the emergent similarity of new mental objects, such as categories—a phenomenon we recognize as analogy. Analogy, Roderick contends, is at the very heart ...

“An Argument about Beauty” by American writer and cultural theorist Susan Sontag serves as a basis for examining relationships between contemporary art and a historical responsibility for painting to portray beauty through representation. Calling Beauty is organized around four conventional pillars of reflection: still life, landscape, nude and portraiture. It includes work that draws on these traditional genres and their associations with beauty only to emphasize the retreat from that tradition and thus renewed engagements with a history of art and painting today. Sontag’s essay is reprinted in full in this book.

Memes are bastards, and we love them for it. But memes are bastards in the sense that they are born from two seemingly incompatible ontological registers: an unholy matrimony of semiosis and virality, sense and nonsense, signification and circulation. More on that later. First, let’s acknowledge that the meme is also an infantile and laughable term, as are all words that repeat themselves. Yet—encountering its own stupidity, and making this into its generative principle—it is not ashamed; like any self-respecting idiot savant, it never ceases to persist in its own convoluted wisdoms. ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and ...

She, a dancer, is attuned to my in-sync silence: the concordance between the motionlessness of my lips and the absence of an interior monologue in my head; I, an aphoristic writer, find her occasional out-of- sync silence in the realm of altered body, movement, time, sound, and silence into which dance projects her, as her lips continue briefly to move before the falling silence-over freezes her, arresting. A woman dancing alone is the figure of fidelity—of the music to her. The dancer practices assiduously each movement. These rehearsals to the music are to release a subtle body that moves perfectly without any ...

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. ...

DIAPHANES is a publisher and an international print and online magazine with a focus on contemporary art, critical discourse, and multilingual fiction. Open for the plurality of all forms of imagination and knowledge, DIAPHANES MAGAZINE connects an interest in current tendencies with deep-rooted research, the power of fiction with nuanced judgment, aesthetic excitability with essayistic sharpness. Equally committed to art and thought, critique and production, DIAPHANES MAGAZINE wishes to correlate positions that seek new politics of text and image in the face of conformist regimes of meaning, and to contribute to a renewal of the means of critical apprehension and ...