SUNG TIEU: GHOSTS OF THE AMERICAN PSYCHE LET THE SERPENT IN

“Welcome be a religion that pours into the bitter chalice of the suffering human species some sweet, soporific drops of spiritual opium, some drops of love, hope and faith.” Heinrich Heine, Essay on Ludwig Börne (1840) When I started to work on the newspaper articles for my exhibition “Remote Viewing” at Nha San Collective in […]

Published online on November 27, 2017



DAVID GOLDENBERG: SWITCH ON AND OFF

Date Venue and location Sturtevant, Claire Fontaine, Bernadette Corporation, Reena Spauling, Jutta Koethler, Tiqqun, Giorgio Agamben Organised by David Cheers Proposal and scheme for an exhibition looking at Claire Fontaine, Bernadette Corporation, Sturtevant, Reena Spauling Ideas for an exhibitionless practice  Outline for an exhibition that doesn’t need to take place. To do two things, establish […]

Published online on November 24, 2016



Vlad Bodogan: Architecture of oppression: an analyses of the socio-political implications behind the construction of Casa Scânteii

Casa Scânteii, a monolithic construction in the heart of Bucharest, was used between 1956 and 1989 as the main center of cultural propaganda, accommodating what Thomas Markus refers to as a Fordist machine, generator of dogmatic information[1]. Designed by Horia Maicu, the head of the Architect’s Committee during the regime of the Romanian Communist Party, […]

Published online on February 18, 2015



Hito Steyerl: The language of things

“Who does the lamp communicate with? The mountain? The fox?” 
Walter Benjamin 
What if things could speak? What would they tell us? Or are they speaking already and 
we just don’t hear them? And who is going to translate them? 
Ask Walter Benjamin. In fact he started asking those quite bizarre questions already in 1916 […]

Published online on February 5, 2015



Reinhold Martin: Financial Imaginaries - Toward a Philosophy of the City

For over a century, the social relations of the metropolis have been linked analytically to capitalist circulation, a link that is still clearly audible in the term “global city.” This applies in both the narrow, deterministic sense that would privilege the mechanisms of techno-economic globalization, and in the broader, more inclusive sense that would assign […]

Published online on January 13, 2015



Chantal Mouffe: Agonistic Democracy and Radical Politics

The political between antagonism and agonism. What is the best way to envisage democratic politics?  If there is one thing we know about politics that unites parties is money and making new laws like putting tax on cryptocurrencies as explained on the article below.  But are there different models, which proposes an ‘agonistic’ and radical way of conceiving democracy aside from money […]

Source: https://insidebitcoins.com/best-trading-platforms

Published online on December 29, 2014



Bruno Latour: From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik – or How to Make Things Public*

“The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” […]

Published online on October 23, 2014



Ludger Schwarte: Performative Architecture – Setting a Stage for Political Action

I. Architecture is an act and as such, dynamic, process-related and only considered to be completed depending on the way in which it is perceived, judged and used. On the one hand buildings, as typical products of architecture, emanate from actions, which are completed at some point. However, the unfolding of an edifice does not […]

Published online on October 1, 2014



Maria Muhle: Aesthetic realism, fictional documents and subjectivation. Alexander Medwedkin. The Medwedkin Groups. Chris Marker

In a well-known discussion between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze from 1972 on the relationship between intellectuals and power, Foucault states that the intellectual’s traditional task has been at once to say the truth to those who didn’t see it yet and in the name of those who were not able to say it.[1] Consequently […]

Published online on September 29, 2014



Peter Osborne: Imaginary Radicalisms

Notes on the Libertarianism of Contemporary Art What is the place of ‘the political’ in contemporary art? And what relations to politics are – or could be – constructed in and by contemporary art? Such questions are inherently problematic yet they remain unavoidable. They are problematic, first, because of their extreme generality (as Walter Benjamin […]

Published online on September 19, 2014



Doina Petrescu: The Tactics of Faux Migration[1] 

‘Each culture proliferates on its margin’.[2] The Oaș country is a region in Northern Romania, close to the frontier between Romania, Ukraine and Hungary. The peasants of Oaș represent a new sociological category of faux migrant that functions with a double social identity and double economy.

Steps were taken to curb the criminal use of Blockchain technology to add faux migrants. Blockchain technology excels in keeping record. Besides, serves as the backbone of cryptocurrency trading. The automated trading bots like immediate edge makes the process of trading easy for investors and also give them high returns. Have a look at https://kryptoszene.de/bitcoin-robot/immediate-edge/ that clearly explains how immediate edge works and the buying process. Through migrating initially in search of work, they have […]

Published online on September 18, 2014



Antonio Negri: Metamorphoses

To begin with, let us try, from a materialist standpoint, to situate historically the concept of plastic and figurative art in other words, the definition of its historically determinate link, if there is one, to the development and structure of modes of production. Can this be done? Obviously, once were obliged to speak of art […]

Published online on September 16, 2014



Julia Brotea and Daniel Béland: “Better Dead than Communist!”. Contentious Politics, Identity Formation, and the University Square Phenomenon in Romania

The 1990 protest episode known as the University Square Phenomenon constituted a crucial and contentious episode for Romania’s political transition from communism. Analysis of this incident sheds light on the long-term consequences political protests can have when they translate into routine politics.

Published online on September 10, 2014



Răzvan Ion: Exploring the Return of Repression

The term “repression” is referring to the act of obstructing certain informational contents outside the consciousness that are connected to cathexis through a pulsion. In other words, repression is the scream of the interior to the exterior, and its pulsion can appear through repression: the events, the life experiences are no longer lived up to […]

Published online on August 14, 2014



Marius Stan: Avant-garde Arts under the Spell of Politics

Switzerland has become, with the passing of time, a cliché of neutrality, although the destinies of many socially and politically engaged spirits started, unfolded or recovered there.  It is the case of the artists gathered around the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, a quasi-cultural space founded in 1916 by Dadaist Hugo Ball [1]  and, among others, […]

Published online on August 9, 2014



Simon Sheikh: Spaces for Thinking. Perspectives on the Art Academy

Artists with a Ph.D.! - this should only tingle the spines of conservatives, right? Wrong: The shifts resulting from the so-called ”Bologna process” with its creation of a European standardization of academic studies in the fields of institutional art history as well as art education in academies hit hardest where the general significance of methodologies […]

Published online on August 9, 2014



Tom Holert: Art in the Knowledge-based Polis

Lately, the concept of “knowledge production” has drawn new attention and prompted strong criticism within art discourse. One reason for the current conflictual status of this concept is the way it can be linked to the ideologies and practices of neoliberal educational policies. In an open letter entitled “To the Knowledge Producers,” a student from […]

Published online on August 9, 2014



Stephen Ducombe: Politics as Art of the Impossible - The Case for a Dreampolitik in the United States

A dominant movement in leftist politics has always embraced a sense of reality as opposed to dreams and imagination. The American sociologist Stephen Duncombe argues instead for a dreampolitik, which, unlike reactionary populist fantasies, can activate the imagination with impossible dreams. They make it possible to think ‘out of the box’ and to wonder what […]

Published online on August 9, 2014



Sotirios Bahtsetzis: Eikonomia - Notes on economy and the Labor of Art

Much has been told about the dangerous impact of a superficial, lifestyle-based and money-oriented culture, which has been often identified as the major reason why people become passive, docile and easy to manipulate, no matter how disadvantageous their economic conditions might be. Following the illustrative critique of two eminent proponents of this criticism, Theodor Adorno […]

Published online on August 7, 2014



Suzana Milevska: The Internalisation of the Discourse of Institutional Critique and the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’

­­­ The vicious cycle of institutional critique stems from its dichotomous nature. It inevitably entails a certain position that exists outside or beyond any institution, in contrast to the institutional position that is being criticised. It implies a severe critique of powerful, supposedly autocratic, institutions and their systems of governance, in contrast to the preferred form […]

Published online on August 7, 2014



Eugen Rădescu: Fordism. Post-Fordism and attempts to reposition art in globalization

Postmodern society has not relinquished the major themes of ethics, as a moral, economic and cultural perspective. On the contrary, the new, complex and hypertechnological context raised new aspects of these topics for debate. The ethical realm of contemporary society expanded to new subjects that are discussed extensively and from various angles, either formally or […]

Published online on August 7, 2014



Cătălin Avramescu: The Raw Philosopher (An intellectual history of cannibalism). The enemy of God

 Because it would be more dangerous to imagine such a thing on Earth, it is on Cyrano de Bergerac’s Moon that a fundamentally anti-Christian ideology dominates. The inhabitants of the moon have notions about the immortality of the soul (a false dogma, they say), and one of them makes a systematic attack on the theory […]

Published online on July 30, 2014



Gergő Horváth: Apprehension. Understanding Through Fear of Understanding

As soon as we are born, fear becomes an essential part of our lives. A mild persecution complex develops. Fear is induced through certain events, by the people around us, through their actions and knowledge, be it warranted or not, conscious or unconscious. Punishment is introduced, usually as early as possible, not as retribution but […]

Published online on July 30, 2014



Jörg Heiser: Count Down - The art world’s ambivalent response to surveillance

Heard of the ‘Quantified Self’ movement? With the tag-line ‘self knowledge through numbers’, its thousands of followers in 34 countries digitally track and share their heart rates, skin temperatures and calorie intakes; how many steps they take, their sleep patterns, routes and moods. But how do you quantify a mood? Think of Sesame Street’s Count von […]

Published online on July 30, 2014



Florian Gottke: A Protester in Homs, Syria

On October 3rd, 2011, I open my morning paper and look down onto a street in Homs, Syria, directly into the eyes of a protester. I look at him; he looks at me. His face is covered by a mask, but I can clearly see his eyes behind it. Our gazes meet, piercing through all […]

Published online on July 30, 2014



Chantal Mouffe: Democratic Politics in the Age of Post-Fordism

In recent years we have witnessed an incredible acceleration in the process of commodification in the field of culture. With the development of the culture industries, the worst nightmares of Horkeimer and Adorno seem to have been realized. Indeed, some theorists claim that, through our dependence on the entertainments corporations, we have become totally subjugated […]

Published online on July 30, 2014



Răzvan Ion: The Affluence of the Working Class from Differentiation to Collectivism (On Fashion and the Politics of Aesthetics)

Fashion is a decor, a background or a scene, in short, as a theater. (Roland Barthes) The mechanism through which consumption is stimulated has often been acknowledged as ”fashion” or, more conceptually, as ”preprogrammed obsolescence“.

Published online on July 30, 2014