e-flux journal #96 (2019/01)
Some historians say that the ouroboros in Egypt also symbolized the yearly flooding of the Nile, replenishing crops - life and death, rebirth. Maybe our human bodies, in addition to being part of a universe of feedback upon feedback, are also receiving and transmitting signals – sometimes through the use of the unlikeliest information tools. Amidst media, our bodies and cells can lead to endless consuming and potentially self-consuming cycles, but also with the strange possibility of immortal persistence.
We may live in a time of endless, warring feedback loops, and amidst piles of discarded digital traces and ghosts of image persistence. Many of the persistent realities are cruel, or are violent photographs – and careful photographs of violence. In various installations, certain images –
whether timid or sudden or endless, or exquisite in their healing or sorrow ‹ have remained present in multiple landscapes in an ongoing cycle of sleep-death-life; present in various forms of address, felt and hovering as in image persistence, but not fully etched as in screen-burn.
Editors: Editorial
Yuk Hui: What Begins After the End of the Enlightenment?
Oraib Toukan: Cruel Images
Tom Holert: Epistemic Violence and the Careful Photograph
Sven Lütticken: Shattered Matter, Transformed Forms: Notes on Nuclear Aesthetics, Part 2
Xiao Liu: Information Fantasies
Joan Kee: Nobody Owns Me
Irmgard Emmelhainz: Shattering and Healing
e-flux Journal #97 (2019/02)
In Khalili’s text, there is a short saga about a young would-be Muslim asking Mohammad whether God could create a boulder that is impossible for that same creator to lift. In Khalili’s telling, the story’s conclusion is this: “When a power structure has to face itself, when it is confronted with its own language, it enters into a dilemma that it cannot solve. The only way to escape the dilemma it to take away the possibility of posing the question in the first place.”
Editors: Editorial
Günther Anders: Apocalypse without Kingdom
Khaled Saghieh: 1990s Beirut: Al-Mulhaq, Memory, and the Defeat
Nikolay Smirnov: Left-Wing Eurasianism and Postcolonial Theory
Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic: Non-Aligned Extinctions: Slavery, Neo-Orientalism, and Queerness
Kathryn Yusoff: White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike
Yazan Khalili: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Noise
Kristen Alvanson: XYZT
e-flux Journal #98 (2019/03)
What happens if we measure affect like this: How many images of trees burning must we swipe through before the screen itself gets hot, before the viewer’s own temperature changes? What happens if in this scenario, the trees are swapped out for museums, and, more largely, what happens if the viewer is an intelligent being without sensibility? On another level, what if artificial programming isn’t all bad, and in fact is responsible for human artistic output? Alina Popa asks, “What if an artwork is not human performance but the artificially programmed human, or all the nonhuman serendipitous elements that have programmed her?” In any case, it seems that we as humans still have a chance to get a leg up on the automatons – but the window may be closing rapidly. Ahmet Öğüt concludes that our modes of self-design are being steadily overtaken by unrestrained intelligence: “Before algorithmic-design completely takes control, there is still another chance: the more we confuse the algorithm, the more liberated we are.”
Editors: Editorial
Franco “Bifo” Berardi: (Sensitive) Consciousness and Time: Against the Transhumanist Utopia
Alina Popa: Art after Cantemir
T. J. Demos: The Agency of Fire: Burning Aesthetics
Tony Wood: Intrusions: Or, The Golden Age Is Not in Us
Tyler Coburn: Ergonomic Futures
Ahmet Öğüt: From Self-Design to Algorithmic-Design
Klara Kemp-Welch: NET: An Open Proposition
Hito Steyerl, Coco Fusco, Raqs Media Collective, and Supercommunity: Remembering Okwui Enwezor
e-flux Journal #99 (2019/04)
In the twentieth century, Kazimir Malevich famously stated, “I transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to creation.” He explained of his work that “it is from zero, in zero, that the true movement of being begins.” One hundred years ago, in his 1919 text “On the Museum,” the painter called for staunch noninterference in the ongoing decay of old museums, whose function was to store the art of the past. The aim in this provocation was to let conservative history burn, preserve its ashes in laboratory jars, rethink the museum as a pharmacy, and let those ashes comingle–and perhaps ferment–into a more generative art of the future.
Editorial
Christian Nyampeta: “In the Black Color of the Night”: Theology and Philosophy in Exile
Alessandra Franetovich: Cosmic Thoughts: The Paradigm of Space in Moscow Conceptualism
Pedro Neves Marques: Parallel Futures: One or Many Dystopias?
Kasia Wolinska and Frida Sandstr.m: The Future Body at Work
Sophie Lewis: Full Surrogacy Now
Noel W Anderson: Echoes from the Hole: Doubling Darkness Is Most Dark
Irmgard Emmelhainz: Decolonial Love
e-flux Journal #100 (2019/05)
In this issue of e-flux journal - number 100 - Liam Gillick takes up Duchamp’s provocation that artworks should be considered in terms of twenty-year time spans. For Gillick, the twenty-year scale reveals points of change more effectively than decades: “Twenty years is enough time to understand the development of a new technology through to its application. Twenty years is enough time for new educational models to take effect - both negatively and positively. Twenty years is still enough time to wonder whether a set of ideas within the art context retains any relevance or needs reconsideration.”
…
Concluding issue #100, Franco “Bifo” Berardi writes that “The contemporary subconscious is
marked by two powerful gravitational pulls: extinction and immortality, which feed into each
other.” Berardi admits that the answer to the question of exactly what extinction he is talking
about is not clear to him. At the end of the essay, he asks: “Is crime the inducer of Chaos, or the generator of Order?”
Editorial
Liam Gillick: We Lived and Thought Like Pigs: Gilles Châtelet’s: Devastating Prescience
Luis Camnitzer: Where is the Genie?
Koichiro Osaka: The Imperial Ghost in the Neoliberal Machine (Figuring the CIA)
Françoise Vergès: Capitalocene, Waste, Race, and Gender
Daniel R. Quiles: Railways Are the Future: ABTE Against Neoliberalism
Oxana Timofeeva: What Lenin Teaches Us About Witchcraft
Franco “Bifo” Berardi: Game Over
e-flux journal #101 (2019/06)
Rather than finding orientation by way of images in the real world, today images may mutate into a sort of interface - an operational tool reaching beyond visual-cognitive persuasions, beyond representation, beyond “the image” itself, enabling seemingly boundless and borderless mobility between spaces, scales, temporalities. Navigation now begins where the map becomes invisible or indecipherable, operating on a plane of immanence in perpetual motion. Navigation, instead of framing or representing the world, continuously updates and adjusts multiple frames from viewpoints within the world. Navigation in the digital realm is the modeling and mapping of an elusive environment - in the service of orientation, play, immersion, control, and survival.
Editorial: “Navigation Beyond Vision”
Jennifer Gabrys: Ocean Sensing and Navigating the End of this World
Patricia Reed: Orientation in a Big World: On the Necessity of Horizonless Perspectives
Matteo Pasquinelli: Three Thousand Years of Algorithmic Rituals: The Emergence of AI from the Computation of Space
Nikolay Smirnov: Meta-geography and the Navigation of Space
Oraib Toukan: Toward a More Navigable Field
Tom Holert: Ships in Doubt and the Totality of Possible Events
James Bridle: Failing to Distinguish between a Tractor Trailer and the Bright White Sky
e-flux journal #102 (2019/09)
Against the backdrop of the fires engulfing the Amazon rainforest, Teresa Castro outlines the importance of queer kinship with vegetal and other forms of life, which have much to teach us. Warning against anthropomorphizing the rainforest as “the lungs of the earth,” Castro reminds us that this is ultimately part of a colonizing view that frames “nature” as something we own - as something that works for us. Castro also traces the history of plants on film; this history reveals our limited imagination when it comes to vegetal life, but also includes magical moments of other-than-human autonomy and subjectivity.
Editorial
Franco “Bifo” Berardi and Massimiliano Geraci: Killing Swarm
Jonas Staal: Comrades in Deep Future
Teresa Castro: The Mediated Plant
McKenzie Wark: Femme as in Fuck You
Samer Frangie: The Little White Dog and the Postwar Promise
Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber: Another Art World, Part I: Art Communism and Artificial Scarcity
Claire Fontaine: The Visitor as a Commercial Partner: Notes on the 58th Venice Biennale
Geert Lovink: Cybernetics for the Twenty-First Century: An Interview with Philosopher Yuk Hui
e-flux journal #103 (2019/10)
There is a certain plasticity of meaning inherent in any use of language. If that weren’t the case, poetry and literature would not exist. There would only be contracts, scientific formulas, shopping lists, and so forth. Journalism would be properly factual – there would be no fake news or disinformation. All utterances would document isolated events, never evoking larger patterns or tapping into hidden desires. But then the question arises: Even if language could be cleansed of all ambiguity and spin, what role would images play?
Editorial
Metahaven: Sleep Walks the Street, Part 1
Sven Lütticken: Toward a Terrestrial
Elvia Wilk: Ask Before You Bite
iLiana Fokianaki: Narcissistic Authoritarian Statism, Part 1: The Eso and Exo Axis of Contemporary Forms of Power
Aaron Schuster: Communist Ninotchka
Claire Tancons: Portrait of the Artist as a Dramatist: A Conversation with Peter Friedl
Jörg Heiser: The Great Escape: Adrian Piper’s Memoir on Why She Went into Exile
Cuauhtémoc Medina: A Southerly Gale: Francisco Toledo, 1940-2019
e-flux journal #104 (2019/11)
Art institutions, like any small or megalithic enterprise shot through with capital, are inherently political beasts. But the larger of these often try to gloss and shade away certain political lineages or leanings. So, though institutions may develop public strategies offering a new history of modern art that represents the diversity of its protagonists, the vague results are instead an obfuscation of political movements and hidden narratives that would otherwise offer power back to those overlooked and displaced. They continue to be buried deep in the still vast, unseen collection, or, more likely, never collected or touched by the institution in the first place. For example, there
is no room in MoMA’s now 708,000 square feet for the major contributions to art made by practitioners of socialist realism. Nor for that matter do we see works even tenuously
connected to that tradition – there is no section titled “In and Around Socialism.”
Editorial
Boris Groys: The Cold War between the Medium and the Message: Western Modernism vs. Socialist Realism
Soo Hwan Kim: Sergei Tretyakov Revisited: The Cases of Walter Benjamin and Hito Steyerl
Dena Yago: The Wall Stays in the Picture: Destination Murals in Los Angeles
T. J. Demos: Climate Control: From Emergency to Emergence
Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber: Another Art World, Part 2: Utopia of Freedom as a Market Value
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay: Imagine Going on Strike: Museum Workers and Historians
Metahaven: Sleep Walks the Street, Part 2
Franco “Bifo” Berardi and Massimiliano Geraci: Killing Swarm, Part 2
e-flux journal #105 (2019/12)
The Loophole of Retreat—An Invitation
On April 27, 2019, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was the site of a very special convening. It was the brainchild of Simone Leigh, and shared its title with her 2019 exhibition at the museum. Organized by Leigh, Saidiya Hartman, and myself, “The Loophole of Retreat” was an exhilarating, rejuvenating, and inspirational daylong gathering dedicated to the intellectual life of black women that brought together an international constellation of writers, artists, poets, filmmakers, and activists. This special issue of e-flux journal seeks to lift up the extraordinary voices, thoughts, and conversations that emerged at the convening and share them with a wider audience. In doing so, I and my coeditors, Leigh and Hartman, seek to extend the dialogues of the “Loophole” in the hope of including others and inspiring future gatherings which, like the Guggenheim convening, will honor and celebrate the intellectual and creative labor of black women.
Tina M. Campt: The Loophole of Retreat—An Invitation
Saidiya Hartman: Extended Notes on the Riot
Simone Leigh: Images from “Loophole of Retreat”
Simone White: bound together by this matter
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts: The Music of the Spheres
Rizvana Bradley: A Gathering of Aporetic Form
Dionne Brand: Maps
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson: Suspended Munition: Mereology, Morphology, and the Mammary Biopolitics of Transmission in Simone Leigh’s Trophallaxis
Christina Sharpe: Beauty Is a Method
Vanessa Agard-Jones: Selvage/Obsidian: A Response
Grada Kilomba: Still images from ILLUSIONS Vol. II, OEDIPUS
Françoise Vergès: Politics of Marooning and Radical Disobedience
Denise Ferreira da Silva: How
Okwui Okpokwasili: of wishing and superheroes
Lorraine O’Grady: Interstice
Annette Lane Harrison Richter: Reflections on Black Sisterhood and the United Order of Tents
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich: Still images from Spit on the Broom
Asiya Wadud: the order was in the hour of worship
The Forking Paths
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Editor in Chief: Kaye Cain-Nielsen
Designer: Jeff Ramsey
Language: English
Size: 20×27cm
Year: 2019