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!

In digitized, interconnected, post- and trans-human times, judgment becomes ‘justment.’ Once online, criticism diffuses into the channels of the social networks, it is commented on, ironized, parodied, corrected. Individual criticism has turned into dividual criticism. A response to Engaged Art Criticism — 7 Propositions by Ines Kleesattel and Pablo Müller.

The Center for Experimental Lectures presents Andrianna Campbell, Taraneh Fazeli, Sb Fuller, Sara Magenheimer, and Em Rooney Hosted by The Shandaken Project at Storm King New Windsor, NY Sunday September 4th, 2016, 3pm-evening Andrianna Campbell begins the day at 3pm at Storm King Art Center. Campbell, who was a resident of The Shandaken Project at Storm King earlier this summer, will offer a guided tour of speculative artworks by over 20 contemporary artists. In her many years of making inquiries about contemporary cultural production, Campbell has formed significant relationships with the artists invited to participate in this experimental narrative. Campbell will present the speculative ...

Amidst a climate of uncertainty and social distancing due to COVID-19, writer and e-flux journal contributing editor Elvia Wilk and artist Anicka Yi discuss various changing global ecologies, viral and otherwise. Their original in-person conversation was planned on the occasion of Tate Modern’s selection of Yi for the annual Hyundai / Turbine Hall commission. A symbiotic organism in its own right, Anicka Yi’s work fuses multi-sensory experience with synthetic and evolutionary biology to form lush bio-fictional landscapes. Utilizing a “biopolitics of the senses,” Yi challenges traditional approaches to the human sensorium, emphasizing olfaction as well as microbial and embodied intelligence. Through her research ...

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 ...

Research regarding the significance and consequence of anthropogenic transformations of the earth’s land, oceans, biosphere and climate have demonstrated that, from a wide variety of perspectives, it is very likely that humans have initiated a new geological epoch, their own. First labeled the Anthropocene by the chemist Paul Crutzen, the consideration of the merits of the Anthropocene thesis by the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences has also garnered the attention of philosophers, historians, and legal scholars, as well as an increasing number of researchers from a range of scientific backgrounds. Architecture in the Anthropocene: ...

Taking as its premise that the proposed epoch of the Anthropocene is necessarily an aesthetic event, this collection explores the relationship between contemporary art and knowledge production in an era of ecological crisis. Art in the Anthropocene brings together a multitude of disciplinary conversations, drawing together artists, curators, scientists, theorists and activists to address the geological reformation of the human species. Contributors include Amy Balkin, Ursula Biemann, Amanda Boetzkes, Lindsay Bremner, Joshua Clover & Juliana Spahr, Heather Davis, Sara Dean, Elizabeth Ellsworth & Jamie Kruse (smudge studio), Irmgard Emmelhainz, Anselm Franke, Peter Galison, Fabien Giraud & Ida Soulard, Laurent Gutierrez ...

To ‘articulate’ media means to understand them by locating their connections in space and time. Articulating Media offers new approaches to the writing of technology and the technologies of writing by twinning an investigation of language with an attention to location. Where does media theory take place? How should media theory understand its own occupation of the spaces of media? What materialities might survive media’s many articulations and associations? Diverse in topic and method, the collection’s nine chapters analyse those questions of value, representation, and categorisation that are held within the languages of media. Contributors consider media technologies – following previous ...

The etymology of the word author refers to an act of creation, an act of augmentation, from the Latin verb augere. Author instantiates creation, the expansion of the pre-existing. In 1967 Roland Barthes declared the death of the author in his famous essay to state once more that the crisis is that of the author as a single subjectivity and as a term that condenses prestige, undermined by the de-subjectivation strategies of automatism, fortuity and fragmentation of the historical avant-gardes, as well as by the machinic act and by the reproducibility of the second avant-gardes. Fifty years after Barthes’ paradigmatic formula, this lack of ...

For the eighth issue of How to Sleep Faster, Arcadia Missa has brought together work—in a variety of forms—responding to the theme of Autonomy and Automation. The increased use of automated processes has often been considered a threat to personal and political autonomy, yet traditional notions of automation are changing, with movements such as Accelerationism (and its right-wing variant espoused by neo-reactionary thinkers like Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin) and Fully Automated Luxury Communism becoming an increasing part of mainstream debate. But does the popularization of this discourse around autonomy—and the increased use (in art and in everyday life) of ...

We affirm ourselves as the center of evolution by saving it from our own destruction. Our new heroism is to keep things, at best, as bad as they are. What does good even mean? We are the joke of evolution—and nobody’s laughing. Listen to Chus Martínez in conversation with marine scientist Skye Morét and writer Ingo Niermann.

In the face of ecological emergencies, this book explores and experiments with the meanings and implications of being and organizing in a relational world. From a position of vulnerable optimism, it attempts to engage in accessible ways with the typically inscrutable ideas of sociomateriality and posthumanism. The perspective of entanglement that is developed, and associated dilemmas considered, involve searching for possibilities of giving voice to voiceless more-than-human others. This book is about prompting imaginings of possibilities for responsible being and collective flourishing that can be hopeful for us all.