1. Vaster Than Empires
In her short story “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,” science fiction novelist Ursula K. Le Guin describes the encounter of a group of humans with an ecosystem that cannot be understood as encompassing anything less than an entire planet. When a team of scientific explorers arrives on the planet called only World 4470, after a journey that has taken just a few hours in their personal time but 250 years in Earth time, they find all its continents inhabited…
Issue #50
December 2013
With:
Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, Ursula K. Heise, Boris Groys, Shezad Dawood, Jalal Toufic, Metahaven, and Grant Kester
Dear Readers, welcome to the fiftieth issue of e-flux journal . It marks our official five-year anniversary. It’s hard to believe. To celebrate this, we invite all of you who happen to be in New York next Tuesday, December 17, to a party we are organizing at China Chalet. Join us for drinks and music, we will be there from 9pm until the night ends.
Remember our first issue? Issue #0, November 2008. Thinking back to that moment immediately following the financial crisis of 2007–2008,…
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7 Essays
December 2013
Traditionally, the main occupation of art was to resist the flow of time. Public art museums and big private art collections were created to select certain objects—the artworks—take them out of private and public use, and therefore immunize them against the destructive force of time. Thus, our art museums became huge garbage cans of history in which things were kept and exhibited that had no use anymore in real life: sacral images of past religions or status objects of past lifestyles….
ITERATION 1: QUETZALCOATL—MY ANGEL!
FRAME 1
Cross-fade of jaguar with Canary Wharf pyramid by night.
FRAME 2
Flickering multi-colored monochromatic text on black
ABOLISH THE LABYRINTH
FRAME 3
Reclining female astronaut on monochrome backdrop with images projected on glass of helmet. (Mechanical)
The old sense of alienation is no longer possible. When individuals identify with a lifestyle imposed…
Dedicated to the living memory of Gilles Deleuze, a non-revengeful philosopher
Have we not eyes ? No: “He [a Japanese man]: ‘You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.’ She [a French woman visiting the city]: ‘I saw everything . Everything .… The hospital, for instance, I saw it. I’m sure I did.…’ ‘You did not see the hospital in Hiroshima. You saw nothing in Hiroshima.’ … ‘Four times at the museum in Hiroshima.… I … looked thoughtfully at the iron … made vulnerable as flesh ……
Continued from “Captives of the Cloud, Part II”
A Massive, Expanding Surveillance State With Unlimited Power And No Accountability Will Secure Our Freedom by Hans Christian Andersen.
—twitter.com/pourmecoffee 1
Violence arms itself with the inventions of Art and Science in order to contend against violence.
—Carl von Clausewitz 2
Infrastructure is the technology that determines whether we live or die. Your infrastructure will kill you—if it fails, you fail….
Monologism … denies that there exists outside of it another consciousness, with the same rights, and capable of responding on an equal footing … the other remains entirely and only an object of consciousness and cannot constitute another consciousness.
—Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1961) 1
1. Criticism and Monological Thinking
For several years now I have written about a new area of dialogical artistic practice, in which the conventional…