In her 2012 White Shadows: What is Missing from Images lecture at the Gdansk Academy of Fine Arts in Poland, Hito Steyerl speaks about how new technologies force us to reformulate important questions about the making visible, capturing, and documenting of information. In the first part of her talk, Steyerl focuses on the use of 3D scanning in forensic crime scene investigations. Steyerl explains how the 3D scanner, or LiDAR technology (Light Detection And Ranging), sends laser beams that reflect off of the surfaces of the objects that are being scanned. In this process, each point in space is measured ...

A key figure of Swedish counterculture and the creator of the first digital arts laboratory in Nordic countries, Charlotte Johannesson has worked primarily with two tools: the artisan technology of the loom and digital IT programming technology, exploring and throwing into relief the connections, both conceptual and methodological, that exist between the two. Charlotte Johannesson. Take Me to Another World renders an account of the meticulous research process around colour and line that the artist executes in her textile and digital practice. It also spotlights the contribution of Danish writer and artist Amalie Smith, who set up a dialogue between Johannesson’s career ...

In this episode, we begin a two-part episode with disability activist Alice Wong, who has done incredible work with social media to strengthen connections between global disability communities.

In this episode, I am going to do a brief discussion and wrap-up of our first season. I am also going to get a bit into the motivations for making a podcast like Contra* in the first place.

This week’s show features artist, musician, herbalist, and community builder Cy X, whose work encompasses installations, digital instrument building, live audiovisual performances, and their broader interdisciplinary practice blurs boundaries between art, community building (including co-founding Synth Library NYC), healing work, and music. Tune in to hear Cy’s journey from working in marketing to experiencing a creative awakening and finding place (and making space) in NYC.

Deep Lab is a collaborative group of researchers, artists, writers, engineers, and cultural producers interested in privacy, surveillance, code, art, social hacking, and anonymity. Members of Deep Lab are engaged in ongoing critical assessments of contemporary digital culture and exploit the hidden potential for creative inquiry lying dormant within the deep web. Deep Lab supports its members’ ability to output anonymously via proxy tools; in this way, our research can remain fluid via multi-pseodonymous identity. Deep Lab promotes creative research and development that challenges traditional forms of representation and distribution, evaluating these practices alongside typical traffic analysis identification. This process ...

Businesspeople talk about art like artists talk about money: gratuitously, without compensation. Hired to talk about money, an entrepreneur will speak in terms of art. Put an artist on a panel and you will often get disquisitions on exchange, capital, and commerce. Both constituencies are compelled by what lies outside their professional responsibility, and the response to this compulsion vibrates between veneration and contempt. For every Übermensch crypto-expressionist billionaire patron, there is one who sneers at the foolish valuelessness of art history and its scribes. For every dedicated anticapitalist artist, there is one who happily understands themselves to be making ...

Early in the new century, it is already clear that the vanguards of the last one were less a singular, sequential telos than a symptomatic cycle. Movements like impressionism, abstraction, conceptualism, or symbolism are more like weather patterns that recur under certain circumstances than historical exceptions never to be repeated. There are everyday sprinkles of impressionism which relate to a Monet in the same way that the average rainstorm relates to a hurricane. In “Towards the New Realism,” Boris Groys examines the revival of what is still the most suggestive and polyamorous of these commitments, the pursuit of the real. ...

Division is the characteristic habit of humanity: ēthos anthropōi daimōn, as Heraclitus had it. Demons for division, we divide and are divided. Taken over by divisions within ourselves, the demonic appears as the divided self. Wherever the self realizes an apparent struggle, whenever one is possessed by another, the demon is present. Possession dramatizes self-production as a fight for local control. Demonology is the science of these heteronomous selves, these others inside us. “From the beginning,” Boris Groys writes in this issue, “the contemporary artist is demonic: he is possessed by himself and cannot be relieved of his demons”… Editorial Editors Black Circuit: ...

From predicting criminality to sexual orientation, fake and deeply flawed Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rampant. Amidst this feverishly hyped atmosphere, this book interrogates the rise and fall of AI hype, pseudoscience and snake oil. Bringing together different perspectives and voices from across disciplines and countries, it draws connections between injustices inflicted by inappropriate AI. Each chapter unpacks lazy and harmful assumptions made by developers when designing AI tools and systems, and examines the existential underpinnings of the technology itself to ask: why are there so many useless, and even dangerously flawed, AI systems?

This issue, produced in the framework of Okayama Art Summit 2019 (IF THE SNAKE, curated by Pierre Huyghe, September 27 – November 24 2019, Japan), focuses on the concrete conditions of embodied thought. From the assessment of historical attempts at grounding critique in the body to the exploration of contemporary issues surrounding situated knowledge, from the analysis of the aesthetic and political economy at play in the encounter with advanced human-like sex robotics to the ways in which algorithms are transforming our sense of intimate relationships, and from the ways in which cruising practices subvert dominant discourses on architecture and ...

Host Ben Fino-Radin chats with curator and author Legacy Russell. Legacy’s recent book Glitch Feminism offers “a new manifesto for cyberfeminism: finding liberation in the glitch between body, gender, and technology.” We discuss Legacy’s origins as a curator, the book, and her vision for The Kitchen where she is the incoming director and chief curator.