This podcast, recorded with the three founders of Demilit (Bryan Finoki, Nick Sowers, and Javier Arbona) is a precedent for Archipelago since it constitutes both a walk to examine the hyper controlled policed space of downtown Oakland and a receptacle for the echoes of Occupy Oakland that comes as interludes to our discussion. We observe objects and spaces that are produced by securitarian logic that often attempt to dissimulate their function by an aesthetic of the ordinary. Starting from Oakland City Hall where Occupy used to have its encampment, we spend the first part of the conversation around the administrative/corporate center of ...

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.

Best of Rhizome 2012 is a selection of texts published on the editorial platform of Rhizome along 2012. Edited by Joanne McNeil, the book is, in the words of Rhizome’s Executive Director Heather Corcoran, “not just a best of Rhizome’s work, but a portrait of the year that we hope will gain significance over time for its contextualization and articulation of artists’ practices. Artists are predictors and barometers of change, and sensitive to their cultural surroundings. From texts on production in the digital age, to the influence of the Occupy Movement, from drones and surveillance, to online vernacular – these ...

Civilizations at their peak present curious spectacles. They ooze wealth and pride, produce fantastic art and technologies, all while shredding the foundations of their prosperity. Their citizens seem to believe they eclipse mundane restrictions of time and space. The monuments their predecessors have left in Rome, on Easter Island, in Egypt, in Venice, littered like warning beacons elsewhere throughout the world, demonstrate such faith may not match reality. A rock thrown skyward must believe, at the top of its arc, fleetingly, that it is flying. When we admire our great cities, we find it hard to believe that they will ever ...

What makes a city successful today? Over the past few decades, artists—and more broadly, clusters of creative people—have become central to narratives of urban revitalization and civic growth in cities around the world. In many locales, artists in search of cheap rent constitute the vanguard wedge of gentrification. Yet the so-called creative class includes whole categories of knowledge workers enjoying far less precarious conditions than artists, and it is their affluence that continually leads to the displacement of both working-class residents and artists alike. In the creative city, the branding of subcultural movements, the translation of the gritty into the quaint, ...

For this podcast, I asked questions to Pamela Brown about the role of debt in American society and the way its very function has been historically affecting, and continues to affect the African-American community in particular. Debt should normally be understood as a mutually beneficial contract but has been transformed into yet another capitalist apparatus of profit-making. It functions through an ideology of promise that ensures the conformity of life paths and the perpetuation in the future of the roles in the present society. Once the mechanisms that intertwines debt and race have been exposed, Pamela describes the work she ...

Released on October 8, the second issue of the Occupied Wall Street Journal included an editorial note entitled “No list of demands,” responding to the perceived absence of strong messaging offered by the movement. The note specified that: The exhausted political machines and their PR slicks are already seeking leaders to elevate, messages to claim, talking points to move on. They, more than anyone, will attempt to seize and shape this moment. They are racing to reach the front of the line. But how can they run out in front of something that is in front of them? They cannot. For Wall Street ...

Americans against capitalism? Arab nations toppling autocrats through peaceful protests? 2011 has been a year of massive popular uprisings—on a completely unexpected scale and from populations that were thought to have been thoroughly subdued. Commentators have predicted that discontent in the Arab world would soon come to a head for so many years that it was beginning to seem unlikely, just as others had begun to dismiss the political potency of popular demonstrations in fiscalized Western democracies. For those who started to think that large-scale, radical optimism was naïve or nostalgic, the events of the past year should be sufficient ...

As we continue to reflect upon the chain of political upheavals of 2011, it may be interesting to consider a particular shift in the status of information technology, now that it has been deployed as such a powerful force in facilitating the rise of a new popular voice. But first, how did this happen? How did a form of communication—developed in the late 1950s with a well-funded US Defense Department initiative in response to the Sputnik threat, then blossoming in the hands of engineer-entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley of the 1970s into the center of accelerated hyper-capitalism in the 1990s—evolve to become ...

On some days it is more apparent than others that the ground is shifting below our feet. On a clear day, we can see the horizon that tells us we are in the midst of a global regime change, yet we do not yet know the face of the new power just beyond it. But what we can see is the limit of an economic regime that has dangled vast advances in symbolic spheres of information and communication, in capital flows and even human movement across the globe. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before we realized the ...

The word “data” comes from the Latin dare, which means “give.” This evolves into datum, which signifies something given. Data is what is given; Big Data, many given somethings. Gifts are given, too, but it’s hard to think of data as a gift—and nearly impossible to think of Big Data as a Big Gift, though it certainly appears that way to some… Editorial Editors A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-)Recognition Hito Steyerl Drone Form: Word and Image at the End of Empire Nathan K. Hensley Method without Methodology: Data and the Digital Humanities Lindsay Caplan Connoisseurship and Critique Ben Davis Enantiomorphs in Hyperspace: Living and Dying on the ...

Notebook 089 is a result of the immense changes that have taken place in the world since 1989. With the end of the Cold War, the utopian neoliberal fantasy of a global capitalist expansion, unfettered by the limits of any borders (psychic, physical, ethical, national, or ecological) and governed through an extension of credit/debt coupled with correlated “structural adjustments,” assumed a new function for nation-states around the world, as a privatizer of gains, and a socializer of costs. In a span of twenty years the insolvency of this paradigm has become evident; not only has an entire world been gripped ...