This discussion with Momoyo Homma about the work of artists/poets/philosophers/architects Arakawa (1936-2010) and Madeline Gins (1941-2014) took place in the Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka where the Tokyo part of the Arakawa/Gins office is situated. We begin by introducing their work through a biographic approach, then through our interpretations of the manifesto “We Have Decided Not to Die,” which fuels the creative process of the five architectural projects built in Japan and in the United States, as well as the multitude of non-built ones. We conclude the conversation by describing the space around us, one of the Reversible Destiny Lofts: its bumpy floor, its sphere ...

Throughout a large part of the 1980s, Félix Guattari, known for his collaborations with Gilles Deleuze and his experimental and groundbreaking practices in psychotherapy, decides to shift his experimental work into a different medium of artistic and creative thought practice: the world of science fiction. Part self-analysis, part cinematic expression of his theoretical work, Guattari’s screenplay merges his theoretical concepts with his passion for comic books, free radio movements, and film. So begins Guattari’s journey to write a screenplay wherein a group of squatters makes contact with a superior intelligence coming from the infinitely small Universe of the Infra-quark (UIQ). ...

Philosophical thoughts by birds, drawn and put into words by the artist. „Birds“ was inspired by Jim Goldberg’s „Rich and Poor“, a collection of photographs of rich and poor Americans, each with a handwritten statement by the subject, thereby creating a heart gripping portrait of the USA. It was a logical step to have an ornithologist (a fictional ornithologist) portrait birds in a similar way, for they have just as much to say about the human condition. If people would only listen. “I have no idea what people think of me, I don’t think much of them, that’s for sure. Life is a bitch for ...

This entry was included in Library Stack as part of a collection by Howie Chen

Author’s Note to the Second Edition: Why do a second edition of Distracted? Because it is now starkly clear to me that there is a limited number of concepts, figures and postures that a writer is here to create and possibly elaborate (in my case: freezing, diegetic silence-over, over-turn, radical closure with irruption of unworldly ahistorical fully-formed entities, the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster, etc.). The extra material that was in my first book still awaits its writers—paradoxically getting rid of it is indirectly a way of avoiding future imitators. This version of Distracted is a second edition, in relation ...

Art cannot solve the problems of 2017, Alexander Kluge says to Hans Ulrich Obrist in this issue, but it can start solving the problems of 2036. Though it may begin in the affective work of mourning, art moves towards a rational archeology and a realistic anticipation. We could call this “futurist realism,” a vision of the coming decades as a series of problems to be solved, rather than as a source for transcendent salvations or damnations of whatever fashion. Unlike the ecstatic or dispirited futurisms we are accustomed to, futurist realism looks forward with no false regrets. Bad-faith futurism, by ...

This conversation with Michelle Murphy is divided into two parts: BIOPOLITICAL FEMINISM: The first part introduces Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and applies it to forms of economization of life particularly in relation to female bodies. Paraphrasing Foucault, Michelle affirms that governmental capitalism needs for “some must not to be born so that future others will live more consumptibly, productively in the logic of macro-economy .” She thus unfolds the political history of regulation and ‘marketing’ of reproduction and contraception that organizes such an economization of life at a scale of a population. Further, we discuss of Michelle’s concept, “The Girl” as the problematic current vessel of ...

Jalal Toufic is a thinker whose influence in the Beirut artistic community over the past two decades has been immense—notwithstanding that, as he put it, many, if not all of his books, most of which were published by Forthcoming Books, “continue to be forthcoming even after their publication.” In relation to one of these books, he wondered: “Does not a book titled Forthcoming suggest, ostensibly paradoxically, a second edition?” Here’s the revised edition of Forthcoming, a book first published nearly a decade and a half ago by Atelos press. —Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

This set of five pamphlets documents a seminar given recently by Alexander R. Galloway at the Public School New York, a self-organizing educational program where class ideas are generated by the public. “French Theory Today” explores a new generation of French voices—Catherine Malabou, Bernard Stiegler, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Quentin Meillassoux, and François Laruelle—whose work has, to varying degrees, only recently emerged in the English-speaking world. Each night of the seminar consisted of a lecture followed by questions from and discussion with class participants. As Galloway suggests in the online class proposal, the goal was “not to set in aspic a new ...

This conversation is the first one I recorded for Archipelago (hence the not-so-great quality of the sound, sorry!). In the first part of the discussion, Sarah and I attempt to introduce the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon through his concepts of individuation, allagmatic, milieu, the body as “always more than one.” His work is important to us as Sarah explains because it went from a metaphysics of “being” to one of “becoming,” allowing things not to have an essence, but rather to be involved in the process of their individuation. In the second part of the conversation, I ask questions to Sarah ...

Author’s Note to the Corrected Edition: Gustave Flaubert: “Why are you wasting your time rereading Graziella when one has so many things to reread? That’s an inexcusable distraction” (Lettres de Flaubert (1830-1880), édition Conard, 1926-1930; édition électronique par Danielle Girard et Yvan Leclerc, http://flaubert.univ-rouen.fr/correspondance/; my translation). From November 2009 onwards, one should answer Flaubert’s question thus: I am rereading Graziella—without having read it in the first place! (Flaubert noted the following in a letter to Louise Colet, April 24, 1852: “Let’s chat a little about Graziella. It is a mediocre work, even though it is the best thing Lamartine has done ...

This podcast is special as it is more of an homage than a conversation like the ones orchestrated for Archipelago. It is an excerpt of a recording — I apologize for the bad quality of the sound — I made in October 2011 with poet-artist-philosopher-architect Madeline Gins. She died on January 8, 2014 and it is not without emotion that I listened to this recording again. This conversation came after an exchange of letter that can be read on The Funambulist as preamble; we then had a conversation at the end of a day spent at the unique Bioscleave House designed by Gins and her late husband Shuzaku ...

A book of theory, essays, stories, and poems released in association with the exhibition Hyperobjects at Ballroom Marfa, which explores the overwhelming scale of today’s ecological crisis.

“Technologists only change the world in various ways in generalized indifference; the point is to think the world and interpret the changes in its unfathomability, to perceive and experience the difference binding being to the nothing.” Anticipating the age of planetary technology Kostas Axelos, a Greek-French philosopher, approaches the technological question in this book, first published in 1966, by connecting the thought of Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger. Marx famously declared that philosophers had only interpreted the world, but the point was to change it. Heidegger on his part stressed that our modern malaise was due to the forgetting of being, ...

It’s Me! is science fiction in the literal sense. As modern science seems to be incapable of explaining consciousness – specifically, the binding of distributively processed, neuronal microexperiences into unitary, experiential objects apprehended by a unitary phenomenal self – David Pearce argues that we will need to revise our notions of both the intrinsic nature of the physical and the quasiclassicality of neurons. As a consequence, his essay “Nonmaterialist Physicalism“ gives a novel, experimentally testable prediction of quantum superpositions (“Schrödinger’s cat” states) of neuronal feature-processors in the central nervous system at sub-femtosecond timescales. In Ingo Niermann’s companion piece “How the ...

This second November conversation in London about disobedience takes a conceptual approach to this legal notion with Elena Loizidou. Through her personal research, as well as the work she curated around this notion in a 2010 symposium and a 2013 book, we attempt to consider disobedience for the political subjectivity it involves vis-a-vis the law. We do so not solely through the canonical figure of the civil objection (Rosa Parks), but also through more complex examples involving notions of selfishness, privacy and apolitics in the work of Hannah Arendt, William Burroughs, Emma Goldman and Walter Benjamin. We also look at how ...

In contrast with media constructed as vast, ontologically homogeneous, non-localized systems, formats show material networks of interoperability and exclusions, inscribed in local specificities, and involving precise conditions for the circulation of images and sounds. Formats, institutionalized as standards, frame the “technical networks” defined by Gilbert Simondon, that unfold technical objects into economically and politically structured webs that cover the world. Media are always formatted and, as such, do not flow: they are displaced.

One Per Year is a collection of fifteen essays written between 2000 and 2014. The topics range from media theory to philosophy related to media theory to music reviews to art reviews to thoughts on design. Like a time capsule, the book archives 15 years of media history from the point of view of the same person, an artist and theorist who went himself through an evolution, from his early interest in hacking and web design to his encounter with internet art and continental philosophy, to his participation in recent debates around glitch art and the New Aesthetic.

Digital media technologies re-pose the question of organization—and thus of power and domination, control and surveillance, disruption and emancipation. This book interrogates organization as effect and condition of media. How can we understand the recursive relationship between media and organization? How can we think, explore, critique—and perhaps alter—the organizational bodies and scripts that shape contemporary life?

“Socrates loves philosophy but is mad about Phaedrus. So he seduces the young and handsome man under a tree with the words that matter most.” — Back cover of Phaedrus Pron Artist and writer Paul Chan transforms Phaedrus, the famous dialogue by Plato about love, madness, and the powers of the divine, into a relentless and absurdly funny exchange between two men searching for the right words to say the very wrong things. Phaedrus Pron was written using a unique set of fonts created by Chan that turns letters, numbers, and grammatical marks into phrases and sentence fragments. Chan’s fonts instantly translate ...

Prince of Networks is the first treatment of Bruno Latour specifically as a philosopher. It has been eagerly awaited by readers of both Latour and Harman since their public discussion at the London School of Economics in February 2008. Part One covers four key works that display Latour’s underrated contributions to metaphysics: Irreductions, Science in Action, We Have Never Been Modern, and Pandora’s Hope. Harman contends that Latour is one of the central figures of contemporary philosophy, with a highly original ontology centered in four key concepts: actants, irreduction, translation, and alliance. In Part Two, Harman summarizes Latour’s most important ...

Rab-Rab Talks # 1 Ivana Momčilović on Learning, Non-Useful Art, and Anti-Fascism In conversation with Rab-Rab, Momčilović will talk about her collective projects with Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière and Natacha Michel, today’s leading theoreticians and writers, with whom she has collaborated since the nineties. Momčilović will comment on the emancipatory potential of Badiou’s and Rancière’s theses on understanding current political and artistic practices. Her focus will be on the educational research project, Ph.D. in One Night, in which she has worked since several years together with contemporary dancers, experimental musicians, and visual artists. Ph.D. in One Night claims re-evaluation of non-useful, ...

An optimistic response to a terminal diagnosis finds its apotheosis as a lecture. The all-star news anchor, veteran of all three major television networks, Katie Couric is quoted as waxing, “most of us would slip into a deep depression, but Randy used the experience as teaching material.” Given on September 18th, 2007 at Carnegie-Mellon as a part of a cross-disciplinary lecture series, terminally-ill computer science professor Randy Pausch’s lecture “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” inaugurates an era of viral possibility for the lecture: weaving together self-help maxims, dad jokes and the ethos of computer science interdisciplinarity, this popular incarnation of ...

The arrow arrives at its destination with a clamor, its blackness marking the arrival of thought from the outside: thought as problem, thought as sabotage.

Of what do these essays speak? Of photography in the flesh – but not the flesh of the photographer. Myriads of negatives tell of the world, speaking in clichés among themselves, constituting a vast conversation, filling a photosphere that is located nowhere. But one single photo is enough to express a real that all photographers aspire one day to capture, without ever quite succeeding in doing so. Even so, this real lingers on the negatives’ surface, at once lived and imperceptible. Photographs are the thousand flat facets of an ungraspable identity that only shines – and at times faintly – ...