Miguel Prado and fellow Guild navigator (and co-host for today’s episode) Sonia de Jager meet Diana Walsh Pasulka: professor of philosophy and religion at UNCW and author of American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, and Technology. We discuss what do we mean by agnostic when we want to be challenged by new knowledge, the UFO phenomena as a new form of religion, recent Congress’ public hearing into “unidentified aerial phenomena”, how ancient aliens could have handed technology to humanity and much more!

Things were mopey in the K-HOLE offices. Dystopia texts no longer made Sean *zing*. Greg was depressed because he didn’t feel like there was any imagination anymore. When Emily thought about what that meant, the only thing that came to mind was Disneyland. Chris refused to do any client work whatsoever. Dena had long since moved to Los Angeles…

Dune was to be his most ambitious film production: a personal adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel of the same title, published in 1965. The science-fiction saga was ideally suited to the choreography of transgressive visual and narrative genres of the sort in which the method of Alejandro Jodorowsky (b. 1929 in Chile) partakes, and as it had been manifested in his films El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973). Such an important project merited its own blank book. Hence, the word “DUNE” written in Art Deco-style typography is on the cover of a thick yellow notebook from 1974. Inside, however, ...

Ancestors and Algorithms appears online in issue 2 of Fictional Journal and is reproduced in the Propaganda pdf document. In 2000, Dan Greaney, the writer of The Simpson’s cartoon, imagined Donald Trump as the president of the United States in the episode Bart to the Future, and he admits that the idea “was pitched because it was consistent with a vision of America going insane.” The show creates an unimaginable scene, the embodiment of its viewer’s worst nightmare and hilarious fantasy that has since become reality. A global dissatisfaction with liberal democracy has cleared the political stage for right-wing populists such as Trump and ...

These past few years, the fairly ancient concept we call “truth” has been bandied about the place quite a bit. Our social trust barometers, for a long time calibrated with “politician” on one side and “scientist” at the other, have been thrust into stormy weather. People like Donald Trump and Richard Dawkins have buried the needle into extremes of rhetorical squall, political uproar and techno-scientific demand, operationalising belief and fact in excessive ways — destructive of both self and others. The rest of us, muddling through this other ancient concept we call “modern life”, try and poise ourselves somewhere in ...

As part of our publishing program engaged with social activism, Printed Matter published the Artists & Activists Pamphlet Series between 2008 and 2012. Inspired by the legacy of the political pamphlet, these modest format publications offered artists and collectives a space to address some of the social and political concerns of our time and critically examine the concept of art and activism. Twenty pamphlets were created in total, and they were distributed for free at the Printed Matter storefront and included in mail-order packages. Printed Matter is now making the entire series available for free download through our website.

“Between Sky and Belief: Cosmological Uprisings”, a conversation between Alice Sparkly Kat and Ying Liu. The program consists of individual presentations on practices and research that take a critical approach to astrology, divination and other frameworks that decode futurity. The conversation dissects the historical and contemporary applications of astrology to narrate our current sociopolitical reality and to fathom our universe. Alice Sparkly Kat Alice Sparkly Kat is a queer, PoC astrologer. They use astrology to re-chart a history of the subconscious, redefine the body in world, and reimagine history as collective memory. Their astrological work has inhabited MoMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, ...

Interrogator 1cx Entelechy: Itinerary 1. get my fucking contract 1.1 questions it seemed to begin as from something alien 1.2 1.3 storage facility…

In a recent BBC documentary on “objectum sexuals”—people who have loving relationships with inanimate objects—Erika Naisho Eiffel spoke about her love affair with an archer’s bow: “We were just such a great team because we had that connection on every single level. I’d almost swear that my blood flowed from my arm and went right into him. And it felt like the molecules in him were flowing right back into my arm.” It’s no surprise that, before their love waned, Naisho Eiffel was a record-breaking world champion archer—a love story indeed. But more importantly, Naisho Eiffel’s example seems to suggest ...

For the Summer 2012 issue of e-flux journal we are very pleased to present a special “Animism” issue guest-edited by Anselm Franke, curator of the exhibition by the same name. Even if you missed Animism on tour in Europe since it began at Extra City and MUHKA in Antwerp in 2010, you have probably learned of its encompassing mobilization of the systems of inclusion and exclusion defining “science” and “culture.” The various stages of the exhibition have shown the discourse of animism to be a crucial skeleton key for releasing the deadlocks formed by the repressed religious, teleological, and colonial ...

The critique of bureaucracy slithers like a sewer—hidden, warm, and necessary—beneath the aging towers of the twentieth-century intellectual metropolis. Arising first as one answer to The Question—namely, what happened in the USSR?—bureaucracy eventually came to replace the bourgeoisie as the preferred explanation for why everything was the way it was. To this day, pseudonyms for bureaucracy remain highly fashionable pieces of conceptual hyperbole. Any characterization of instituted sociality as uniform unfreedom—the spectacle, the body without organs, libidinal economics, Empire, Bloom—has its origins in the bureaucratic obsession with control, as distinct from the bourgeois obsession with ownership… Editorial Editors Art, Technology, and Humanism Boris Groys The ...

Edie Fake, Jamillah James, Alexis Blair Penney Hosted by MoMA PS1 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City, NY Sunday November 18, 2012 2pm The Center for Experimental Lectures is thrilled to present lectures by Edie Fake, Jamillah James, and Alexis Blair Penney, hosted by MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, New York as part of the museum’s Sunday Sessions program. Artist Edie Fake’s lecture The Sexual Life of Patterns explores the concept of “the weave” in relation to textiles, gender, and the trans body. Extending the logic of intuitive herbalism, magic, and tarot into textile decoration, ornamentation, and repetitive pattern, Fake’s lecture will explore the physical ...