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 ...

Group Material’s work was primarily topical and temporal, fueled by our personal and collective observations—and by the social urgencies we perceived. Our horizon was the present tense. In 1989, the curator of the MATRIX Gallery at the Berkeley University Art Museum, Larry Rinder, invited us to address the subject of AIDS after seeing our exhibition at Dia Art Foundation the year before, “AIDS & Democracy: A Case Study.” At the time, Group Material consisted of Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Karen Ramspacher. By 1989, we had witnessed several years of the epidemic with severely inadequate public response.The accumulation of ...

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.

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, ...

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.

Even in my dotage, I have never failed to mark the day that I felt compelled to distance myself from my first mentor, Francis Galton. In his day, he was a hero to his public, an intellectual giant amongst his peers, and the person I then credited with whatever learnedness I had achieved. During my youth, I was completely enamored of the conviction that Europe was unrelentingly progressing toward ever-greater prosperity and perpetual peace. This irresistible amelioration was fueled by science, engineering, and enterprise. The entirety of the earth, from the soil, to the animals, to humanity itself, could be ...

The people most harmed by the COVID-19 pandemic are often Black, Indigenous, and disabled. Many members of our communities have been lost because of ableism and racism. We remember them by trying to create a better world.

The the tenth and final episode of the Corona Under the Ocean series, with artist and filmmaker Su Yu Hsin, began with one of her many memories related to water, and how the appearance of light on water is indispensable for her when thinking with water. Su Yu Hsin’s homeland, Taiwan, is an island where water has a strong presence due to typhoons and the island’s atmospheric condition. In her artistic practice, she approaches ecology in its close relationship with technology, also investigating the ideology inherent to map-making throughout history and to this day. This podcast episode is the result ...

Mattin and Miguel Prado talk to noise scholars Cecile Malaspina and Inigo Wilkins about the collective need of counter-bunker techniques, noise in view of Carnap’s theory of probability and ‘whack’ swans. Special guest Dali De Saint Paul provides vocals and readings for our house beats and noise.

In the first pandemic of the datafied society, the disempowered were denied a voice in the heavily quantified mainstream narrative. Featuring stories of invisibility, injustice, hope and resistance, this book gives voice to communities at the margins in the Global South and beyond. The multilingual, polycentric and pluriversal narration invites the reader to enact and experience “Big Data from the South(s)” as a decolonial lens to read the pandemic.