A conversation with Diedrich Diederichsen about non-human labor, time and value. Made in the context of Resonance at Goethe-Institut in New York. (fall 2013)

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 ...

This set of five pamphlets documents a seminar given recently by Alexander R. Galloway at the Public School New York, a self-organizing educational program where class ideas are generated by the public. “French Theory Today” explores a new generation of French voices—Catherine Malabou, Bernard Stiegler, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Quentin Meillassoux, and François Laruelle—whose work has, to varying degrees, only recently emerged in the English-speaking world. Each night of the seminar consisted of a lecture followed by questions from and discussion with class participants. As Galloway suggests in the online class proposal, the goal was “not to set in aspic a new ...

After development of Masdar was halted in 2011, the world’s first zero-carbon city was prounounced a failure by the media—as the first green ghost town. Anthropologist Gökçe Günel wanted to understand what else was happening there.

In the summer of 1975, NASA recruited architects, artists, and urban designers to envision, alongside engineers and physicists, large-scale cities in space. Fred Scharmen revisits the imagery of this older future.

“Weep no more, citizens; they breathe, these celebrated men for whom we cry; our patriotism reanimates them” Presented in honor of Marat and Le Pelletier, “Citizen Sade” wrote this memorial address at the height of violence during the French Revolution, just after the start of the Reign of Terror. The text, effusive and cloyingly patriotic, brings to question the Sade’s own political position – a provocative impulse all the more remarkable given the addresses audience: the gathered Section des Piques, amongst the most hardline Jacobin districts of Paris. Though frequently cited and made infamous as the inspiration for Peter Weiss’ influential ...

“Rosa Barba’s Somnium (…) draws together many of the key concerns that have emerged in the artist´s oeuvre over the past decade. Its point of departure is a short story by the German astronomer Johanner Kepler. Although framed as a dream, this tale of a lunar voyage was devised to validate the radically seditious thesis of a heliocentric universe. Published posthumously in 1634 and only rarely reprinted over the next three centuries, his text was finally rescued from obscurity when translated into several European languages. Soon gaining a reputation among devotees of science fiction, today it is widely recognized as ...

The exhibition The Future of Memory is accompanied by an e-book, available as a free download here. The publication introduces essays by Clint Burnham, Michael Connor, and Nicolaus Schafhausen, alongside a detailed presentation of the works exhibited in the show, written by co-authors Marie Egger, Emilie Lauriola and Vanessa Joan Müller. Digital communication and virtual interlacing shape our world today and influence our collective memory. Remembering the past, experiencing the present and imagining the future all meld to become part of a seemingly equivalent imagery in digital space. The Future of Memory critically challenges constructions of reality and investigates the conditions ...

In this epic osteogeographical podcast recorded entirely on location, we go back to the future and take a tour around Cornwall with author Thomas Moynihan to discuss his book Spinal Catastrophism. In the last section Shaun Lewin joins us at Plymouth station to talk railway spines. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:06:34 Pencallenick Obelisk 00:12:00 The Creepy Recurrency of a Peculiar Idea 00:14:30 German Idealism and Trauma 00:16:15 Copernicanism, Deep Time, Organic and Inorganic 00:18:55 Unconscious as Indigestion of the Idea 00:20:52 Wakefulness as Retrograde Amnesia 00:22:04 Wrongmindedness, Methodology, and Theory-Fiction 00:23:23 Desiring-Theory and Metaphorology 00:25:50 A Cave, Trevaunance Cove 00:26:44 Into Eternity, the Mines of Falun, Slowtime 00:30:15 Xenocommunication 00:31:54 Depth as Memory, Nicholas Steno 00:34:13 ...

Time is changing. Human agency and experience lose their primacy in the complexity and scale of social organization today. The leading actors are instead complex systems, infrastructures and networks in which the future replaces the present as the structuring condition of time. As the political Left and Right struggle to deal with this new situation, we are increasingly wholly pre-empted and post-everything. The contributions in The Time Complex. Post-Contemporary re-localize the present as part of a changed, speculative time complex and draw a precise diagnosis of the situation in order to negotiate speculative predictions of a future presence.

This full-spectrum audio trailer for Audint—Unsound:Undead features some of the sonic phenomena explored in the book, and pays tribute to some other spectres still close to us.