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.

Aesthetic Programming explores the technical as well as cultural imaginaries of programming from its insides. It follows the principle that the growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural thinking — and curriculum — that can account for, and with which to better understand the politics and aesthetics of algorithmic procedures, data processing and abstraction. It takes a particular interest in power relations that are relatively under-acknowledged in technical subjects, concerning class and capitalism, gender and sexuality, as well as race and the legacies of colonialism. This is not only related to the politics of representation but also nonrepresentation: ...

On this week’s show we sit down with the one and only American Artist, whose brilliant practice places a critical lens on technology and systems, often as a means by which to discuss the forms of systemic racism, control, and manipulation that become coded into the world. In our chat we’ll hear about _____________’s origins as an artist and graphic designer, and how their work extends across research and education. Tune in as well to hear about their current research on the life and work of Octavia E. Butler.

Across the American criminal justice system, the Northpointe corporation’s COMPAS algorithm is one of many that are used to determine the likelihood that a prisoner will commit further crimes and return to prison, known as recidivism. After extensive tests and analysis on the prison statistics of a single county in Florida using a custom set of tools, the journalism foundation ProPublica found that COMPAS disproportionally mis-identitied black prisoners as having higher recidivism likelihoods and white prisoners as having lower ones, affecting sentencing outcomes and treatment by the system. Though Northpointe disputed their results, ProPublica found that the dataset produced for ...

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 ...

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”

Tech is never simply technology. It never appears in the abstract, any more than the characters “H2O” appear anywhere on water. Tech is always specific. How old should someone be when they first have sex? How old before they get their first cell phone? This sequence unsettles us because it is hard to think about either inevitability. Sex and technology are instruments of desire, the objects and system of adult unfreedom. Children at play are so analog. Young is life before text. We clutched love letters, in the past, when we couldn’t clutch each other. Now our phones get warm ...

Early in the new century, it is already clear that the vanguards of the last one were less a singular, sequential telos than a symptomatic cycle. Movements like impressionism, abstraction, conceptualism, or symbolism are more like weather patterns that recur under certain circumstances than historical exceptions never to be repeated. There are everyday sprinkles of impressionism which relate to a Monet in the same way that the average rainstorm relates to a hurricane. In “Towards the New Realism,” Boris Groys examines the revival of what is still the most suggestive and polyamorous of these commitments, the pursuit of the real. ...

Every December, dictionaries and language societies across the globe identify the “words of the year”—words that resonated widely during the previous twelve months. In the mid-2000s, these lists were populated with words like “contempt” and “quagmire,” “ambivalence” and “conundrum.” A few years later, dominant words included “trepidation” and “precipice” and “fail,” “vitriol” and “insidious” and “bigot.” The OED’s word of the year for 2012 was “omnishambles.” 2016, however, was for OED the year of “post-truth.” Merriam-Webster selected the word “surreal.” In the wake of Brexit and the US elections, Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and Turkey’s disregard for journalistic freedom, ...

The modern arrives when the boundaries dividing old and new become sites of struggle in the way that the divide between the sacred and the profane was previously. These distinctions—old/new, sacred/profane—are strategic: they refer to one embedded position in the life-world relative to another. In the October 2017 issue of e-flux journal, Noemi Smolik shows how, within Russia, the deployment of modernizing iconoclasm against the belief systems of Russia’s rural poor confounded distinctions between old and new, sacred and profane, even before the October Revolution and the Russian avant-garde. Aleksandra Shatskikh diagnoses a contemporary symptom of this misrecognition in the attribution ...

Revolutionaries are people who need to run around in circles. Revolution is a cycle of toppling and replacing, of killing God and building a Church, as Camus says. It is nothing if not intense… Editorial Editors The Intense Life: An Ethical Ideal Tristan Garcia “This Is a Story About Nerds and Cops”: PredPol and Algorithmic Policing Jackie Wang Notes on Blacceleration Aria Dean The Common Before Power: An Example Antonio Negri Productive Withdrawals: Art Strikes, Art Worlds, and Art as a Practice of Freedom Kuba Szreder Self-Destruction as Insurrection, or, How to Lift the Earth Above All That Has Died? Irmgard Emmelhainz The Glory Hole Karen Sherman On the Concept of Beauty Theodor W. Adorno Lounge Act at Thek Lounge Wayne ...

The technology of AI & Robotics is getting more and more intelligent and autonomous. How do we keep control over it? In this episode, Filippo Santoni de Sio, Associate Professor in Philosophy at TU Delft, covers the following: 3:02 — The definition of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics 5:35 — Old-school technologies vs the latest ones. What’s the difference? 8:33 — Ways in which humans lose control over AI, starting with the power shift in favour of those who have access to all the data. Cambridge Analytica scandal flashback. 11:54 — We all fear losing a job to AI. Is technology capable of replacing us? ...