Ancestors and Algorithms appears online in issue 2 of Fictional Journal and is reproduced in the Propaganda pdf document. In 2000, Dan Greaney, the writer of The Simpson’s cartoon, imagined Donald Trump as the president of the United States in the episode Bart to the Future, and he admits that the idea “was pitched because it was consistent with a vision of America going insane.” The show creates an unimaginable scene, the embodiment of its viewer’s worst nightmare and hilarious fantasy that has since become reality. A global dissatisfaction with liberal democracy has cleared the political stage for right-wing populists such as Trump and ...

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 ...

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. This item is publicly available as part of the Library Stack Public Branch at NN Contemporary Art.

These are serious times, or so our governments keep telling us. Strangling economies with their austerity policies, they assure us that they have no choice. In a world where “there is no alternative”, how do you dissent? Once upon a time, graphic designers would have made political posters and typeset manifestos. Today, protest has new strategies. Enter the internet meme. With its Darwinian survival skills and its viral potential, the meme is a way of scaling up protest. Hackers and activists have learned to unleash the destructive force of a Rick Astley video. They have let slip the Lolcats of ...

Extreme exposes art and curating cultivated through unique modes of production and creation in the margins of the globe, reflecting a dynamic developed through ongoing colonial realities. The issue is a compendium of partial, situated knowledges, originating from the four corners of the globe that, when combined, create a pluriverse of visions and a hopefully a momentary community that sustains contradictions inherent in the joining of a variety of vantage points. The issue deals with such pertinent issues such as: the colonization of knowledge as a driving force that abandons experimental and open-ended forms of knowledge; cross-cultural collaboration between non-binary identities ...

This book explores how cultural practitioners and institutions perceive their role in the post-truth era, by repositioning their work in relation to the notion of the “public”. The book addresses the multiple challenges posed for artists, curators and cultural activists by the conditions of post-factuality: Do cultural institutions have the practical means and the ethical authority to fight against the proliferation of “alternative facts” in politics, as well as within all aspects of our lives? What narratives of dissent are cultural practitioners developing, and how do they choose to communicate them? Could new media technologies still be considered as instruments ...

Prologue When I first proposed curating this exhibition on the subject of paranoia, it was September 2016, a little over a month before the United States presidential election. Donald Trump couldn’t possibly win, and we were about to see the momentous election of our first woman President. I had long been interested in paranoia—as an affliction, a strategy, and an ontological system. I took it seriously, very seriously, but it also felt like something outside of me, a symptom of something kept at a distance. Both during the campaign and in its aftermath, things began to swing out of control. Incidents like ...

METAHAVEN’S VAST BODY OF WORK ACROSS ART, DESIGN AND FILM speculates on what the shifting status of truth might mean emotionally, technologically and geo-politically, and asks who and what enables this condition. Since 2007, the Amsterdam-based collective has unbraided, examined, and worked on the borders between information, fantasy, fiction, and noise. Design Hub Gallery presents their exhibition Field Report at a time of unprecedented public concern about the construction of truth in politics and the media.

The 2nd issue of the Sorry Report is a panoramic view on epidemic ignorance that shapes our lives in the information age. Cases studies include EU Skepticism, Smoking, Speed Limit Controversy in Germany, Gun Control in the US, Populism. Brexit, Climate Change, Racism, Vaccination, Alternative Facts, and Love. Remember Karl Popper — “True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.” Sorry.

Journalist and author Masha Gessen discusses ways of surviving an autocracy. Rule #1? Believe the autocrat. For this week’s episode of the e-flux podcast, we are featuring Masha Gessen’s lecture, “How We Survive an Autocracy,” originally given on May 24, 2017 as part of an ongoing e-flux lectures series dedicated to discovering the protocols of twenty-first century truth, assuming that these still exist.

Brian Kuan Wood talks to Daniel van der Velden of Metahaven (Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden) on the occasion of their exhibition at e-flux titled Turnarounds. Turnarounds consists of the film installation Hometown (2018), a new series of textile pieces, and an essay in e-flux journal. Hometown focuses its ultra-wide, hypnotic gaze on two cities—Beirut and Kyiv—that merge into a fictional home for the film’s protagonists, Ghina Abboud and Lera Luchenko. Fluorescent, lava-like animations alternate between images of industrial estates and overgrown gardens as Ghina and Lera lyrically describe the town. A caterpillar gets killed, but while mourning the loss, both evade responsibility for the ...

Artist Keren Cytter discusses past and future projects on the occasion of the premiere of her film Middle of Beyond at e-flux. In conversation with Josh Altman. Middle of Beyond blends fiction, news clips, and animation recounting ten days in the life of Malte Krumm, a month after the latest US elections. The film depicts the numbness of a world flooded by information and social media activity, where the borders between reality and illusion are crumbling and narcissism and self-promotion overshadow moral values. Based on a true story.