Invited to Stockholm in spring of 2015 to work with the graduating MA and BA students of the Royal Institute of Art on “making a publication,” the two foreign editors of A:Art (Stuart Bailey and Angie Keefer) instead found themselves swept into the death throes of a decades-old struggle between rival institutions over the current identity and possible future of a national art scene. The book is a chronological account of events that unfolded among the Academy, the art school, its students, assorted government ministries, and the Swedish press, with accompaniment from various outside texts, including Raymond Williams’ Keywords, an ...

Graphic communication designers, (in a ‘Western’ context) have historically foregrounded ideas of agency through the realms of aesthetics, expression and semiotics in clear response to the proliferation of services and industries that have required their expertise. Indeed, graphic communication designers have been busy, very busy, bringing organisation to complex information, alongside the shaping and interpretation of messages. More recently, the arrival of cultural and social contexts for communications, in response to ideas of personal cultural capital, (amongst others), has marked an interruption to the former process of design within which ideas translated into output so deftly. Meanwhile, audiences following a cue ...

Astroturfs of Offense is a diagram and glossary of terms related to the topic of astroturfing. The project is a collaboration between the New Models community and Shifting Uncertain Situations (S.U.S.). S.U.S. is an agency that seeks out public discussions and intervenes to produce documents that sow productive suspicion and ambiguity into wider conversations and unsettle ingrained patterns of thought. The agency encourages protesters to download and distribute their flyer at grassroots and astroturfed events.

We live in an age of sticky problems, whether it’s climate change or the decline of the welfare state. With conventional solutions failing, a new culture of decision-making is called for. Strategic design is about applying the principles of traditional design to “big picture” systemic challenges such as healthcare, education and the environment. It redefines how problems are approached and aims to deliver more resilient solutions. In this short book, Dan Hill outlines a new vocabulary of design, one that needs to be smuggled into the upper echelons of power. He asserts that, increasingly, effective design means engaging with the ...

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 ...

From its earliest use in the mandatory Jewish quarter of sixteenth century Venice to its association with Black segregated areas in postwar America, the term “ghetto” has held a variety of meanings and invoked myriad feelings. Daniel Schwartz traces the history of this controversial word.

Over the course of a year, Shifter hosted a series of public discussions, each concentrated on unraveling a keyword – a term that carries with it both a sense of urgency and agency in our present climate. By inviting artists, writers, activists, philosophers and others to propose terms and lead discussions, we opened up our editorial process to the motivations of others. The yearlong series culminates in Shifter’s 22nd issue Dictionary of the Possible. This dictionary catalogs the keywords taken up for discussion over the course of a year, accompanied by a list of questions provoked during each discussion. Rather ...

This book explores the future of critique in view of our planetary condition. How are we to intervene in contemporary constellations of finance capitalism, climate change and neoliberalism? Think we must! To get to the symptoms, the book’s 38 terms ranging from affect and affirmation to world and work provide the reader with a critical toolbox to be continued. Negativity, judgment and opposition as modes of critique have run out of steam. Critique as an attitude and a manner of enquiry has not.

British Left lexicon of political keywords. The diminution of the capital stock of the society, or of the funds destined for the maintenance of industry, however, as it lowers the wages of labour, so it raises the profits of stock, and consequently the interest of money. By the wages of labour being lowered, the owners of what stock remains in society can bring their goods at less expense to market before, and less stock being employed in supplying the market than before, they can sell them dearer. Their goods cost them less, and they get more for them. Their profits, therefore, being augmented ...

British Left lexicon of political keywords. The diminution of the capital stock of the society, or of the funds destined for the maintenance of industry, however, as it lowers the wages of labour, so it raises the profits of stock, and consequently the interest of money. By the wages of labour being lowered, the owners of what stock remains in society can bring their goods at less expense to market before, and less stock being employed in supplying the market than before, they can sell them dearer. Their goods cost them less, and they get more for them. Their profits, therefore, being augmented ...

The future never felt closer than it does today. A series of environmental, technological and social shifts are affecting today’s world and the human’s role within it. Continuous urbanization, the impact of the anthropogenic activity on the natural environment, the increasing use of algorithmic systems in all sectors of life, and the growing asymmetries of power among territories and populations, are all central issues at stake. How possible is it to address the future and the changes already taking place?

How does language change our understanding of the natural world, and our own role within it? How can the introduction of new terms into public discourse – depense, degrowth – alter our realities? Visual Ecolophonic is an informal research project by INDA & Animali Domestici through encounters with with Sami reindeer herders, cultural associations, and artists, in northern Finland, which considers how the Northern Sami language embraces the ecosophic, or ecophilosophical, complexity of nature in a way that other languages do not. The project considers how architects may embrace a more complex vocabulary and understanding of the ecologies in which ...