Ancestors and Algorithms appears online in Fictional Journal issue #2, and 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”1. The show creates an unimaginable scene, the embodiment of its viewer’s worst nightmare and hilarious fantasy that has since become reality…

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 Northampton Branch, and through 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 ...

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.

Morality is an invitation to reflect and debate situations in contemporary life that refuse clear distinctions between right and wrong, what is and what ought to be. As a whole, this project has been defined by a desire – inherent to contemporary art – to open spaces for active, engaged forms of spectatorship that are not predetermined by either moral or ideological imperatives. Morality is a provocative theme, especially in a world that is now determined by the experiences of war, displacement, political and economic crises, the rise of religious stereotypes, and the radicalization of seemingly old doctrines and ideologies. ...

“When all the talk is of who is a real American, it takes courage to ask: who is unreal?” A novelist details how to write the truth under fascism or in so-called democracies—and how to identify those who crave “the status of being a truth teller,” those who decry barbarism and risk nothing. A doctored video and an essay.

Do we have the power to refuse mass surveillance? In our final episode, we speak with Forensic Architecture founder Eyal Weizman, who explains how artists, activists, and researchers can use the tools of photography, surveillance, and AI to hold corporations, governments, and other institutions accountable.

With anchors in feminist theory, queer discourse, and digital politics, Really Fake rescues “fakeness” from the morass of “fake news” and rejuvenates “fake” as a material and tactical reality. This book treats fakeness as a media object itself: “Fakes” are things that travel and circulate through our bodies, sociality, and the technologies that envelop them. Punctuated with anecdotes, experiences, poetry, stories, and a strong feminist ethic and ethos of care, intimacy, and collectivity, Really Fake offers a series of entry points into reframing the debates of fakeness beyond polarized positions of performative outrage.

Following the attacks on the creators of the controversial satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015, the shootings at a debate on free speech in Copenhagen, the punishment of the rights activist and blogger Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia, and the subsequent massive civil mobilisation, the cultural field is forced to process the significance of these events and their wider implications for our work. In Paris and many other instances across continents, representation itself came under attack. Arguably, the field of representation has been in crisis for some time, yet the current context demands that we consider this crisis from ...

Fall Semester presents WINTER BREAK, its third iteration of online publications and visual contributions. WINTER BREAK talks about the broken nation using Venezuela as example, the territory, the idea, and what seems to come with it. What is Venezuela today apart from a contradiction between its gross political reality and an enlarged fictitious self-image? Within this contradiction, WINTER BREAK imagines ways of relating to the current socio-political machinery without just opting for the one-dimensional immersion in the politics that has plagued its recent times. The regime in power has introduced a new form whose tactics are close to artistic practice, ...