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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

In this series of lectures, delivered at Nanjing University from 2016 to 2019, Bernard Stiegler rethinks the so-called Anthropocene in relation to philosophy’s failure to reckon with the manifold and indeed “cosmic” consequences of the entropic and thermodynamic revolution. Beginning with the Oxford Dictionaries’ decision to make “post-truth” the 2016 word of the year, and taking this as an opportunity to understand the implications for Heidegger’s “history of being”, “history of truth” and Gestell, the first series of lectures enter into an original consideration of the relationship between Socrates and Plato (and of tragic Greece in general) and its meaning for ...

“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.