Due to physical distancing measures under COVID-19, we are finding ourselves in what can be identified as an increased condition of gathering on- line. This condition includes learning situations, as well as moments to share and exchange our views, analyses, approaches, results, prototypes and proposals in a wide spectrum of academic and para-academic situations. Through the imposition of closed, proprietary, exclusive and over-optimised commercial formats for so-called “webinars”, this situation is rapidly resulting in the settlement of a monoculture in mediated gatherings. GAFAM & co are taking over research and educational ecosystems, while turning all interactions into business transactions. It ...

As many of us are currently confined at home in many places of the world, and while we keep in our minds and in our hearts those who have no choice but to be at risk from the ongoing worldwide pandemic, because they’re doctors, nurses, cashiers, workers, homeless, incarcerated, or in any other precarious situation, we wanted to provide you with a daily podcast to use this time to reflect and organizing without talking about the pandemic itself — there might be already enough about it. The concept is very simple. Every day, we ask one person the same question: “what ...

The wave of protests brought about by the Black Lives Matter movement, coming after the lockdown imposed by the spread of the coronavirus, invites a comparison between this political and epidemical moment and the context that prevailed in the late 1980s, when AIDS was causing so much death in Western countries. The art and activism of the period have been thoroughly revisited over the past few years by art institutions. In the following text, I have freely adapted the disidentification methodology of the American artist Bradley Kronz to navigate recent works, exhibitions, and institutional trends. The aim is to create ...

Volume I. Quarantine explores the hollow interiority and introspective anxieties produced by an end-stage capitalist society thrust into a global pandemic. Contributors probe the possibilities of sustainable artist industries that are independent from traditional frameworks and economies, relying on personal networks for inspiration and the production of meaningful work. Featured are innovative artists laying the foundation for a cyber-modern future, engaging in DIY biology sculpture, live coding for music, vaporwave and darkwave synth-tech, audiovisual liquid light projection, textile recycling, generative 3D processing, webcam performance, digital Suprematist collaging, and televisual metalepsis, to name a few.

In contrast to current ‘roadmaps’ to recovery, this report rejects the notion that “the economy” should be the object of Coronavirus response, and that the project is one of recovery, resilience, or return. Instead, we argue that the task at hand is nothing short of reconstructing society through two great transformations. First, we must make it possible to both respond swiftly to all emerging pandemics with all of the resources at our disposal. Second, we must enable society to shift seamlessly in and out of periods of social distancing with policies that promote social solidarity and economic security for all.

For the penultimate episode of Season 5, Sky Goodden interviews Cecilia Alemani, the Artistic Director of the 59th Venice Biennale. After three years of research and commissioning (an extended period of preparation, due to the pandemic) and 7 months of The Milk of Dreams being open to an immense public, Alemani takes a rearview look onto a show that responded to—and endured—several seismic shocks over the course of its run, and was, in so many respects, unprecedented. She touches on “history knocking on the door of the biennial” with regards to both the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, and ...

A series of nine remote screenings, events, and discussions in lieu of IRL gallery programming at Chen’s, a Brooklyn-based gallery directed by Howie Chen and Alex Ito. Chen’s Gallery With this Summer 2020 series, we focus on issues of hegemony, representation, solidarity, and new futures. With the ongoing uprising and the relentless news cycle, we hope to create a space that is communal and restorative by spending time with people whose individual efforts find ways to connect art to the pressing matters of life. We are interested in how Art — as a field of images, abstractions, gestures, ...

Northampton, MA One afternoon in May 2021, amidst rising temperatures and vaccination rates, I went to Child’s Park with my wav recorder. That week, I was feeling stuck and unsure of what to do with my free time and creative projects. I chose the park because it was a place where activity concentrated, which I had noticed during my frequent visits there that spring. Individual people and groups posted up on the grass at sufficient distances from each other to afford some sense of safety, comfort, and privacy, values which everyone’s body language and choice of grassy spot seemed to assert. ...

The project The Devil of Affinities consists of a theoretical text, a poetic text and an imagined exhibition. The exhibition was scheduled to open May 15th, 2020 at the project space Gern en Regalia in New York and includes the artists Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho and Cole Lu. Due to COVID-19, it has been postponed for an uncertain amount of time. Unable to facilitate the exhibition as planned, I have reimagined the project for Brand-New-Life to forefront what has emerged from my study of these artists and their works in ensemble.

Arrancamos un nuevo año con Mario Aguiriano (del podcast Café Marx) y Kolitza. Hablamos sobre la crisis, el comunismo, la pandemia, Marx, las limitaciones de la sociodemocracia y una presentación breve del movimiento GKS (gazte koordinadora sozialista). Música de J.Martina, Harrga y Mattin.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Turn the proverb around a time or two and you might be able to locate yourself and your allies in the confusing terrain of the present. The question of how to define an enemy as distinct from a friend has been a longstanding preoccupation of politics. Today, some conventions for deciphering alliances have become complicated. For instance, you can’t look into someone’s eye or shake their hand while safely practicing physical distancing, and still others are intensified as the ability to track a person’s positions through the convoluted archive that is the internet. ...

How is contagion designed? How do labour, migration, habits and data configure contagion? Analyzing the current conjuncture through these vectors, this book critically addresses issues of rising unemployment, restricted movement, increasing governance of populations through data systems and the compulsory redesign of habits. Design logics underscore both biological contagion and political technologies. Contagion is redesigning how labour and migration are differentially governed, experienced and indeed produced. Habits generate modes of exposure and protection from contagion and become a resource for managing biological and social life. Data turns contagion into models that make a virus actionable and calculable. New modes of ...