This podcast is the first one to have two guests, Miami-based artists, writers and editors Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza, for an account of their collaborative work manifested in several texts and exhibitions. This conversation focuses on their analysis of “Generic Objects” that allows the optimal function of globalized capitalism (containers, cranes, ships, highways, palettes, buckets, etc.) through a universal metric system, as well as a more local tinkering of these objects in Miami’s Little Haiti for a more local economic form. It concludes the short series of podcasts in Miami. Gean Moreno is an artist and writer based in Miami. ...

Space is a technology. Buildings and the cities they inhabit have become infrastructural – mobile, monetized networks. For the world’s power players, infrastructure space is a secret weapon, and the rest of us are only just beginning to realize. If Victor Hugo came back to give a TED talk, he might assert that architecture, which he once claimed had been killed by the book, is reincarnate as something more powerful still – as information itself. If this space is a secret weapon, says Keller Easterling, it is a secret best kept from those trained to make space – architects. Meanwhile, ...

Atlas Survival Shelters in Montebello was started by a man who makes luxury metal doors for Beverly Hills homes. After having difficulty finding a proper bomb shelter, he decided to build his own. Visiting Atlas, you only get a whiff of the Right Wing Prepper tendencies that seem to inform the place, like a magazine they make about bunkers with a cover showing an armed man surveying the landscape behind a stack of sandbags. On their website, hundreds of photographs show their corrugated metal shelters furnished in a midwestern style, complete with decorative oar, a painting of dogs playing poker, ...

This pamphlet is one of a series produced as part of the research project Architecture after Architecture: Spatial Practice in the Face of the Climate Emergency. Each publication introduces a topic, concept or theme crucial to the project through a range of perspectives and asks ‘What does it mean in the context of climate, architecture, and spatial practice?’ Based on ongoing discussions amongst the research team and others, the pamphlets aim to be reflective as well as projective. They are preliminary in nature, written to be accessible, and usually written by one author working in collaboration with other members of ...

This SDUK broadsheet takes COMMUTING as its theme. Alongside the most familiar usage of “commuting” (moving to and from work), the contributions in this issue touch on many aspects of circulation, migration, and change that are flowing across and rumbling below the surface of the Earth. As this publication platform traces the diffusion of knowledge, this issue in particular explores the shifts, displacements, and movements we must consider in an age of rapid global change in order to commute the Earth’s death sentence. We know you open this broadsheet with many questions, interests, and curiosities already formed, so here are ...

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 ...

What if history actually did end with the fall of communism and the end of the cold war, as Fukuyama claimed, and we are now enjoying some kind paradise of liberal democracy with no better political framework to strive towards? Or, what if a recognition of exploitation and social inequities actually is leading to a massive workers’ revolution that will reclaim the means of production and lead to a more equal distribution of resources and power—whether Marxist, democratic, or otherwise? Indeed, we are unsure whether we are still inside of an idea of progressive social emancipation and human self-realization that defined the modern era, ...

To get rid of violence, you have to get rid of people, Tariq Ramadan once said in an interview. Of course, Ramadan meant this as an impossibility and a warning against overzealous idealism. But what an idea! By getting rid of people completely, we could have totally frictionless surfaces for exchange. Removing the human factor would effectively erase the difference between ethical and unethical behavior, visible and invisible infrastructure, finally relieving the increasingly tedious obligation to explain how political orders function, how economic transactions are guided. Those still living would only need to deal with the end products of systems ...

We have a soft spot for people, for our own humanity. We learn to nurture this soft spot through art, through philosophy, through democracy, through our notions of justice or the rights of humans. We learn about the good in the things that are done by the people, for the people, through the people, in the name of the people. But it’s getting cold out there. Something in this setup is shifting below our feet. Something is making the image of the people fuzzy, increasingly vague—a floating signifier missing its referent. Now militants who might have once fought for an idea ...

Edited together with Nikolaus Hirsch, this first part of a special double issue of e-flux journal focusing on architecture invites a number of the field’s most audacious and adventurous thinkers to consider how these invisible and intangible forces are rebuilding cities and reformatting space over and above the role that architecture once served. They are not only reducible to data streams and technocratic information pathways, but also convert ethical questions of whose hands do the actual work of building into material expressions of labor markets, economic flows, and colonial memory. They include the passage from the formal domain of building ...

More than ever, architects today are called upon to build gestural landmarks and grandiose signature buildings. But architecture was never only about building. It is also about the flows of people, information, and resources that shape space. Today, the practice of architecture often confronts situations where these flows cannot be reduced to modernist managerial approaches to systematizing, structuring, and mastering the potentials of space. In a two-part “Architecture as Intangible Infrastructure” issue of e-flux journal edited together with Nikolaus Hirsch, the intangible and immaterial flows that today appear to exceed the language of building proper are shown by a number of ...

Art has something to teach Marxism about the reasons for its great historical failure to understand nationalism, because art proceeds with the understanding that the materiality of representation is not the same thing as the materiality of production. If it were, if the value-process were reducible to the labor-process, or vice versa, then both art and inflation would be impossible… Editorial Editors A Tank on a Pedestal: Museums in an Age of Planetary Civil War Hito Steyerl A Farewell to Totality Gleb Napreenko From the Anxiety of Participation to the Process of De-Internationalization Carol Yinghua Lu The Eternal Hunt for the Red Man Ilya Budraitskis The Vectoralist Class, Part Two McKenzie ...