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 ...

This title will be available soon. 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 ...

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, ...

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.

In early 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world and states of emergency were declared by one country after another, the global technology sector—already equipped with unprecedented wealth, power, and influence—mobilised to seize the opportunity. This collection is an account of what happened next and captures the emergent conflicts and responses around the world. The essays provide a global perspective on the implications of these developments for justice: they make it possible to compare how the intersection of state and corporate power—and the way that power is targeted and exercised—confronts, and invites resistance from, civil society in countries worldwide. This ...

“Today one may complain that life has been reduced to points in a matrix of relations—cities, territories, and historical narratives prematurely refined into categories of known and unknown, real and virtual, concrete and abstract space.” At the time, we could not have imagined the mass migration into abstract space that would soon follow. Today, living through the planetary pandemic, the imperative to navigate the world and our own lives through computational tools has been radicalized to the extreme. The last months of Skyping, Zoom conferencing, and collaborative Google Docs writing make us feel we have no choice but to exhaust ...

In this issue, Alessandra Franetovich and Trevor Paglen discuss Orbital Reflector, Paglen’s reflective sculpture launched into low-earth orbit as a satellite. Housed in a small box-like structure, the lightweight reflective material of the sculpture was meant to deploy and self-inflate like a balloon and reflect sunlight towards earth, making it visible to our eyes as a nearby artificial star. Unfortunately, at the critical moment of the sculpture’s release in 2018, the US government was on shutdown, with all agencies held hostage in order to force Congress to fund Trump’s gigantic border wall between the US and Mexico. There was no ...

“But these, dear Indians, dear Hindus, are your leaders and your holy men. They are your mirrors and your death wish. Take a good look at them. Because they are not looking out for you.” These scathing words by Shuddhabrata Sengupta, from a piece published recently in India and reprinted in this issue of e-flux journal, condemn the country’s leaders for their role in fostering the conditions that led to the catastrophic number of coronavirus deaths the country is now suffering. It is not just India’s political leaders that are at fault, but also the holy men who advise them—spiritual ...

The Covid-19 pandemic has attacked not only our individual bodies, but our collective body as well. Through thirteen contributions by writers who are mostly from former socialist countries where the space of freedom is contracting once again, this special issue of e-flux journal asks what this collective body actually means, and what it has become. These changes are not only happening in Europe’s former socialist countries. Something similar is also occurring in Greece and Turkey, where two essays in the issue originate. This is not to say that all is well elsewhere, that democracy is thriving in Western Europe and North ...