In these interviews dating from 1998, Châtelet amplifies the major themes of To Live and Think Like Pigs, discusses his method of dramatisation and the crucial importance of style; and touches on subjects from dialectics to dope smoking, from Yoplait to slavery, along the way introducing some of the book’s key concepts: cybercattle, the average man, the tapeworm-citizen, and of course the pitiful couple Cyber-Gideon and Turbo-Bécassine.

The Bare Prison of Santo Stefano is the seventh issue of a series of publications published by Wilfried Lentz. The Bare Prison of Santo Stefano (2011) is published as an accompaniment to the presentation of a series of works with the same title at Frieze Art Fair 2011. This publication is signed and numbered in an edition of 250. The Prison of Santo Stefano, 2011 is informed by research into the state of detention. Focusing on a prisoner’s general conditions, Biscotti analyses the psychological effects caused by isolation, the aim of which is to destroy physical and intellectual abilities. The project ...

This SDUK broadsheet is the first to follow The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea, a ten-day contemporary art festival engaging with climate change, environmental crisis, and resilience which took place in Mississauga’s Southdown Industrial Area in September 2018. Taking BEARING as its theme, this issue turns our attention to alienation, affect, anxiety, and questions of responsibility and resilience. For curious readers of all persuasions—those new to the project and those who have been following its year-long unfurling—here are some places to begin: If you are wondering how can we enact responsibility to humans and nonhumans in bleak political and ecological ...

Daniel and I had this conversation the day after the 2013 Goldsmiths Graduate Conference, where we were both participating in a panel suitably entitled “The Sea, Shores, Islands – Territory, Sovereignty and the State.” His paper “The Construction of the End,” given that day is the starting point of our discussion, in which we discuss the legal debates about the location of the shore line in Spain, the national claims of sovereignty of a given territory based on scientific and technological criteria, as well as the various circumventions of the law that provide a form of cabinet of architectural curiosities of which ...

These are serious times, or so our governments keep telling us. Strangling economies with their austerity policies, they assure us that they have no choice. In a world where “there is no alternative”, how do you dissent? Once upon a time, graphic designers would have made political posters and typeset manifestos. Today, protest has new strategies. Enter the internet meme. With its Darwinian survival skills and its viral potential, the meme is a way of scaling up protest. Hackers and activists have learned to unleash the destructive force of a Rick Astley video. They have let slip the Lolcats of ...

Zach Blas in conversation with Laurel Ptak, Art in General’s Executive Director & Curator, on the occasion of Blas’s exhibition Contra-Internet at Art in General and his lecture-performance Metric Mysticism at e-flux. Zach Blas is an artist and writer whose practice confronts technologies of capture, security, and control. Currently, he is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His recent works respond to biometric governmentality and network hegemony. Read more about the exhibition, on view through April 21, 2018, at artingeneral.org. Read Zach Blas’ essay in e-flux journal #74 (June 2016): “Contra-Internet”

‘Today we are facing extreme and most dangerous developments in the thought of security. In the course of a gradual neutralisation of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security imposes itself as the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among several decisive measures of public administration until the first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterion of political legitimation. The thought of security entails an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be ...

“At the heart of this book is a simple and profound proposition: to ‘do’ architecture is to immerse oneself in a conflictual process of material production—participation is not a productive encounter of multiple practitioners and stakeholders, but a set of conflicts, negotiations, maneuvers, and swindles between and within a multiplicity of agents, human and nonhuman alike—equally including architects, clients, financiers, and builders, say, but also silicon, plastic, concrete, each with its conflicting aims and different material means to achieve them. Every building is thus the materialization of such encounter. So, despite the hubris of the field, none of the parties ...

Rahel Süß discusses citizens’ assembly, democracy and provocation, and spaces deliberate democracy necessitates.

Globalization, technology, and politics have altered the definition and expectations of citizenship and the right to place. Dimensions of Citizenship documents contributions from the seven firms selected to represent the United States in the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. This paperback volume profiles and illustrates each of the US Pavilion contributions and contextualizes them in terms of scale. Drawing inspiration from the Eames’ Power of Ten, Dimensions of Citizenship will provide a view of belonging across seven stages starting with the individual (Citizen), then the collective (Civic, Region, Nation), and expanding to include all phases of contemporary society, real and projected (Globe, ...

There is today a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural recognition of the need to reconceptualize the complexities of the global reality. In this study the authors present the view that a rethinking of Hegel’s concept of Civil Society has the potential to meet this need. They argue that the standard interpretations of Hegel are largely misplaced and that a properly systemic reading of the concepts of Civil Society, the State and their relationship, has the potential to shed new light on our understandings of the normative implications of global processes ranging from the effects of economic globalization to the global activism of ...

In the summer of 2016, a suite of hacking tools appeared for auction from a previously unknown group called “The Shadow Brokers,” who claimed to have hacked these tools from another secretive organization: the “Equation Group.” This folder of firewall tools (downloadable below) were released for free as proof of the hack’s overall legitimacy; The Shadow Brokers asked for one million Bitcoin (about 570 million dollars) for the rest of the tools. The free folder featured exploits (components of a larger attack that leverages security vulnerabilities), implants (covert software developed for targeted attacks on a particular device, usually for surveillance), ...