This title will be available soon. Sometime in 1971, Harald Szeemann visited Turin in preparation for the documenta exhibition he was curating for the following year. Among the people he tried to meet in the city was Alighiero Boetti, but when Szeemann visited Boetti’s studio, the Italian artist wasn’t there. All indications are that somebody took the curator through the studio and showed him around, and that, mistakenly, Szeemann forgot a small piece of paper with a list of artists’ names. Several weeks might have passed before Boetti returned to Turin (that year he took two long trips to Afghanistan) and ...

To celebrate the release of Chronosis, Keith Tilford and Reza Negarestani join Robin Mackay to talk about their collaboration and the ideas that fuelled the time-twisting plot of the comic. Creative tension and backchannel bickering, cat monks, Boltzmann brains, cosmic body horror, Bertrand Russell the armchair stoner, the Harold Lloyd theory of time-reversal, psychopaths, AGI monkeys, and The Mortiloquist all make an appearance. Music: ‘Dionysus’, by Herman Polsus aka Drew Flieder, and ‘Timeshift’ by Eschaton.

Assembling a Black Counter Culture is a general history of techno and adjacent electronic music with a focus on Black experiences in industrialized labor systems, and explores the development of on-the-ground culture in relation to a unique American art form. Revisiting Detroit’s techno roots through the 1980s, writer and musician DeForrest Brown, Jr. follows the extended thinking and techniques behind key early players and places them in conversation with the African American working class in the historically emblematic Motor City. From The Belleville Three to today’s international club floor, Assembling a Black Counter Culture illuminates the mechanics of American mainstream cultural ...

In the age of global capitalism, vaporwave celebrates and undermines the electronic ghosts haunting the nostalgia industry. Ours is a time of ghosts in machines, killing meaning and exposing the gaps inherent in the electronic media that pervade our lives. Vaporwave is an infant musical micro-genre that foregrounds the horror of electronic media’s ability to appear – as media theorist Jeffrey Sconce terms it – “haunted.” Experimental musicians such as INTERNET CLUB and MACINTOSH PLUS manipulate Muzak and commercial music to undermine the commodification of nostalgia in the age of global capitalism while accentuating the uncanny properties of electronic music ...

In the introduction to Ben Davis’s new book, a bracing and perspectival collection of essays titled Art in the After-Culture (Haymarket Books), he reflects that “the only thing that has grown faster than the demands on art has been doubt that art can respond adequately to those demands.” In a generous and thoughtful conversation with Sky Goodden, Davis expands on those cultural tensions that exacerbate an already fraught cultural dialogue, and touches on other central themes to this collection of writing, including the economic structures that inform contemporary art and its technologies, the roots of cultural appropriation, the context collapse ...

For this PILOT issue, we have posted PDFs, bound and printed the publication over the first six months of 2011 in advance of launching. From now on, bulletins will be posted to this website as they are ready. If you would like to be told when a new season is complete, and the printed version available, you can join our mailing list. We begin with a plea to remember dead media by Bruce Sterling; an 8-part examination of the Octopus Vulgaris as a metaphor for post-symbolic communication (whatever that might mean) by Angie Keefer; a zero-sum conversation about Libraries and ...

Call to Wait is a super-long-term project by Aaron Arntz. It’s a phone line that puts callers on hold for seven years. Holding callers are subject to listening experiments, until they hang up. On next phoning Call to Wait, callers will be re-identified, and before they are reconnected to the audio stream, automatically notified of their remaining time on hold. For example if a caller has been on hold for twenty-one minutes, she will hear that she has thirty-nine minutes, twenty-three hours, one day, fifty-two weeks, and six years remaining. The Call to Wait website keeps track of the numbers that ...

Where is the present when the computer pulses at the wrist every day, when we’re globally inter-connected in real time but don’t take in our selves for a single moment, just bits and pieces, just snatching a few intensities, when neurons plus communication already makes a consciousness? Is it nothing but a hallucination, in permanent crisis? Does it stand still, get wider, poorer? How does the past change when systems record every second, saving them for the right moment or for all eternity, when contacts, mails, and calendar and movement data evaporate like spam in the cloud? Is it forgotten, does ...

The New Normal think-tank student, activist, and philosopher Joy Zhu reinterprets the concept of affordance in terms of the Chinese concept of yuanfen, which contains critical moments that turn two mutual but mismatched needs into one that is matching, creating an immanent, productive relation of cooperative subsistence. Based on this interpretation, Joy reveals a new concept of efficiency, different from the naturalistic one, demonstrating it through the preservation of outdated technologies in Siberia.

Underground nuclear and military materials have been the subject of international commissions, tribunals, and wars. Yet subterranean facilities also commonly inventory a similarly volatile, though less noxious, resource: information. SubTropolis’s central location, solidity, and security have drawn technology companies, who host data centers in the mine’s massive pillared rooms. Many underground garrisons and command centers of the Cold War era have likewise become “data bunkers.” Given that industrial metaphors of “mining” and “smithing” have long pervaded the discourses of intellectual labor, it should be no surprise that we’re now data mining inside our mines. And alongside the subterranean servers and ...

Mecca is the holiest city in the Islamic religion and the birthplace of the prophet Mohamed. Located just off Saudi Arabia’s western coast, all Muslims are required to visit at least once in their life if they are physically able to. With air travel becoming easier, the number of pilgrims has been rising rapidly over the last few decades, with a record number of 3 million people visiting Mecca simultaneously during the 2012 Hajj. More recently, visa regulations have been made more strict to keep the situation under control. In this episode, we discuss with various experts how this rising number ...

In this collection of mediations on what Baudelaire championed (and Michael Fried chastised) as presentness, Lavin investigates the convergence of notions such as liveness, the provisional and the obsolete in revealing qualities of the contemporary. Three sets of essays explore different forms of architectural time, particularly as they shape the differences between history, theory and criticism as genres of writing.