Three characters populate Agnieszka Kurant’s Cutaways, 2013, a short film premiering as part of exformation, the artist’s first exhibition in a United States museum. Played by Dick Miller, Charlotte Rampling, and Abe Vigoda, these characters were found, or more precisely reclaimed, from the cutting room, having been edited out of the final cuts of the feature films for which they were created: Pulp Fiction, Vanishing Point, and The Conversation, respectively. Kurant revives these figures not only by writing a brilliant new script for them but also by casting the original actors: twenty to forty years later, the roles are the ...

Drawing on his book Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature, Ben Carver examines the figures and functions of evolution, isolation, and entanglement in the imaginary Utopias and Uchronias of speculative fiction, and plots some unsuspected paths between early counterfactual histories and the dark underworlds of contemporary conspiracy theory.

A riddle: One night, an arresting officer enters a holding cell full of people. He asks the group what they were doing congregating on the public thoroughfare that morning. Why bring their bodies out from home to stand together on the sidewalk, walk together on the street? The officer seeks connection. Somewhere in the cell’s radius a commercial window had been smashed. Somewhere in the cell’s radius was a changing of the guards. Thinking for a moment that they can see each other, one of the arrested persons asks in return, “Well, don’t you think another world is possible?” What ...

Miguel Prado, Mattin and Reza Negarestani continue the conversation in this unprecedented moments demarcated by COVID–19: Wire-guided torpedoes, conspiracy theories, the great plague London, the human sloth with an endnote from Gottfried Ben. New paradigmatic times sonified and musicalised by Mattin and Miguel Prado.

Headless, an exhilarating murder-mystery by the elusive K. D., probes the sordid secrets and sinister deeds of powerful financiers who use Caribbean firms to conceal their fortunes. The novel begins with workaday author John Barlow agreeing to ghostwrite a novel about secretive tax havens. Barlow assumes the job will be a no-brainer. But then his eccentric employers, Swedish conceptualist artist duo Goldin+Senneby, ask him to investigate Headless Ltd., a shadowy company with possible links to the French philosopher Georges Bataille, known for his obsession with human sacrifice. Barlow travels to Nassau, Bahamas, the glitzy mecca of offshore finance, and begins ...

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.

After development of Masdar was halted in 2011, the world’s first zero-carbon city was prounounced a failure by the media—as the first green ghost town. Anthropologist Gökçe Günel wanted to understand what else was happening there.

Science Fiction is often falsely regarded as a genre that is only concerned with matters of science and technology. While that is true, it also shines a spotlight on the space between between today’s world and other, possible worlds. Westin’s Science Fiction might as well be called Social Fiction: it covers human flaws, the lunacy of our society, and the concept of life itself. Westin’s microstories capture scenes of interstellar life—transgalactic communication attempts between robots, aliens, and humans, philosophical rumination, comic relief, Siri’s emotions, and the usual pitfalls of navigating the space-time continuum.

Prompted by the 2011 Egyptian uprising, this book-length essay on the cultural politics of sleep by writer and editor Anna Della Subin takes as its starting point Tawfiq al-Hakim’s 1933 play The People of the Cave. Based on the legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, which also appears in the Qur’an, the play tells the story of three Christian men and a dog who awaken in a cave after fleeing from persecution by their pagan king. Upon venturing out, the men discover that three hundred years have passed, and must come to terms with a transformed world. Though hailed ...

Cities are full of spatial constructs that fuel, frame and glorify the growth agenda. Factories, shopping malls, motorways, tower blocks, petrol stations, speculative housings – all are products of, but also perpetuators of, the narrative of constant growth. These forms and the practices they host are unsustainable, yet we patiently wait for their industries to fade (or crash) into obsoletion before we begin to ponder their possible spatial transformation. Globalisation has been highly effective in de-visualising the effects of unsustainable practices – production is screened from consumption, labour is concealed from play – and this has hindered our ability to ...

We are back with original Xenofeminist Patricia Reed and speculative computer scientist Anil Bawa-Cavia to discuss their text ‘Site as Procedure as Interaction’. We confront (with optimism? openness?) this second wave of abject worldings from the poor grasp of reality of GPT-3 to the U.K. outcry with A-levels algorithm debacle. Sonification of Anil courtesy of Roc Jiménez de Cisneros a.k.a EVOL Sonification of Patricia courtesy of Katrina Burch. Yoneda Lemma (a.k.a. You Need a Lemon, sometimes Yoni Dilemma)

In Episode Four, we talk about the algorithmic potential of storytelling. Artists Stephanie Dinkins and Stan Douglas discuss how they use the language of photography, surveillance, and AI to narrate different pasts and imagine different futures. Dinkins draws upon her own life experience, while Douglas incorporates moments from British history.