Anton Vidokle

Julieta Aranda

Brian Kuan Wood

The internet does not exist. Maybe it did exist only a short time ago, but now it only remains as a blur, a cloud, a friend, a deadline, a redirect, or a 404. If it ever existed, we couldn't see it. Because it has no shape. It has no face, just this name that describes everything and nothing at the same time. Yet we are still trying to climb onboard, to get inside, to be part of the network, to get in on the language game, to show up on searches, to appear to exist. But we will never get inside of something that isn't there. All this time we've been bemoaning the death of any critical outside position, we should have taken a good look at information networks. Just try to get in. You can't. Networks are all edges, as Bruno Latour points out. We thought there were windows but actually they're mirrors. And in the meantime we are being faced with more and more--not just information, but the world itself. Contributors Julian Assange, Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Benjamin Bratton, Diedrich Diederichsen, Keller Easterling, Rasmus Fleischer, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Ursula K. Heise, Brian Kuan Wood, Bruno Latour, Geert Lovink, Patricia MacCormack, Metahaven, Gean Moreno, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jon Rich, Hito Steyerl e-flux journal Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

The Internet Does Not Exist

Let's be clear about something: it is infuriating that most interesting artists are perfectly capable of functioning in at least two or three professions that are, unlike art, respected by society in terms of compensation and general usefulness. Furthermore, when the flexibility, certainty, and freedom promised by being part of a critical outside are considered as extensions of recent advances in economic exploitation, does the field of art then become the uncritical, complicit inside of something far more compelling? e-flux journal Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle Contributors Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Keti Chukhrov, Diedrich Diederichsen, Antke Engel, Liam Gillick, Tom Holert, Lars Bang Larsen, Marion von Osten, Precarious Workers Brigade, Irit Rogoff, and Hito Steyerl

Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art

Are You Working Too Much?

Boris Groys

Emilia Kabakov

Arseny Zhilyaev

Ilya Kabakov

Pavel Pepperstein

Dmitri Prigov

Andrey Monastyrsky

A TLS Book of the Year 2017 In this, the first anthology of Russian contemporary art writing to be published outside Russia, many of the country's most prominent contemporary artists, writers, philosophers, curators and historians come together to examine the region's contemporary art, culture and and theory. With contributions from Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Boris Groys, Dmitri Prigov, Anton Vidokle, Keti Chukhrov, Oxana Timofeeva, Pavel Pepperstein, Arseny Zhilyaev and Masha Sumnina amongst many others, this definitive collection reveals a compelling portrait of a vibrant and complex culture: one built on a contradicting dialectic between the material and the ideal, and battling its own histories and ideologies.

Russian Contemporary Art Writing

Cosmic Shift

Kaye Cain-Nielsen

Maybe it’s time to see how the sausage is made. Chances are that in the last couple years, your life has been turned upside down by a pandemic, a war, an economic meltdown, or some combination of these. And you may feel that whatever you were lucky enough to avoid may already be on its way to you. As the coming years are sure to bring more uncertainty, maybe it’s time to prepare? Let’s try to consider how our basic needs are met, as the individual and collective bodies that we are. Many of us have grown accustomed to an era in which a global logistical orchestra serves our needs and whims, bringing food to our mouths with surgical precision. Especially for cosmopolitan urbanites used to traveling, sampling exotic cuisine, or spending money freely, these delivery mechanisms may appear to have created the ultimate hostage situation. Is it time to bite the invisible hand that feeds us? This fragile political ecosystem has something in common with the fragility of the natural ecosystem when forced to supply illusions of abundance. Maybe it’s time to see how the sausage is made. In e-flux Food and Agriculture Reader, authors from around the world reflect on food and agriculture as foundational expressions of life—as sociality, history, and entanglement. By attending closely to something that is the bedrock of security and survival, a world emerges where power over production and consumption can be organized less like a hegemonic system and more like a daily routine. Attending more closely to systems of survival opens the door to another kind of abundance, one that always evades scarcity. Food is absolutely political, but food is also fundamentally pleasurable and social. Hannah Arendt allegedly asked her students about the difference between love and desire. She then answered her own question: If you desire strawberries, you eat them. If you love strawberries, you grow them yourself. Contributors Autonomous farming collectives, Genaro Amaro Altamirano, Mary Walling Blackburn, Carolina Caycedo, Sophie Chao, Lia Dostlieva, Alix Guibert, Mythri Jegathesan, Ou Ning, Christian Nyampeta, Elizabeth Povinelli, Enrique Del Risco, Martha Rosler, Vivien Sansour, Pelin Tan, Rachel Vaughn, and others. Copublished by e-flux journal

e-flux Food and Agriculture Reader

Video Rental Catalogue

E-flux

A TLS Book of the Year 2017 In this, the first anthology of Russian contemporary art writing to be published outside Russia, many of the country’s most prominent contemporary artists, writers, philosophers, curators and historians come together to examine the region’s contemporary art, culture and and theory. With contributions from Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Boris Groys, Dmitri Prigov, Anton Vidokle, Keti Chukhrov, Oxana Timofeeva, Pavel Pepperstein, Arseny Zhilyaev and Masha Sumnina amongst many others, this definitive collection reveals a compelling portrait of a vibrant and complex culture: one built on a contradicting dialectic between the material and the ideal, and battling its own histories and ideologies.

Nikolaus Hirsch

Nick Axel

Daniel Barber

Examines how images of accumulation help open up the climate to political mobilization The current epoch is one of accumulation: not only of capital but also of raw, often unruly material, from plastic in the ocean and carbon in the atmosphere to people, buildings, and cities. Alongside this material growth, image-making practices embedded within the fields of art and architecture have proven to be fertile, mobile, and capacious. Images of accumulation help open up the climate to cultural inquiry and political mobilization and have formed a cultural infrastructure focused on the relationships between humans, other species, and their environments. The essays in Accumulation address this cultural infrastructure and the methodological challenges of its analysis. They offer a response to the relative invisibility of the climate now seen as material manifestations of social behavior. Contributors outline opportunities and ambitions of visual scholarship as a means to encounter the challenges emergent in the current moment: how can climate become visible, culturally and politically? Knowledge of climatic instability can change collective behavior and offer other trajectories, counteraccumulations that draw the present into a different, more livable, future. Contributors: Emily Apter, New York U; Hans Baumann; Amanda Boeztkes, U of Guelph; Dominic Boyer, Rice U; Lindsay Bremner, U of Westminster; Nerea Calvillo, U of Warwick; Beth Cullen, U of Westminster; T. J. Demos, U of California, Santa Cruz; Jeff Diamanti, U of Amsterdam; Jennifer Ferng, U of Sydney; Jennifer Gabrys, U of Cambridge; Ian Gray, U of California, Los Angeles; Gökçe Günel, Rice U; Orit Halpern, Concordia U; Gabrielle Hecht, Stanford U; Cymene Howe, Rice U; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Simon Fraser U; Robin Kelsey, Harvard U; Bruno Latour, Sciences Po, Paris; Hannah le Roux, U of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg; Stephanie LeMenager, U of Oregon; Nashin Mahtani; Kiel Moe, McGill U; Karen Pinkus, Cornell U; Stephanie Wakefield, Life U; McKenzie Wark, The New School; Kathryn Yusoff, Queen Mary U of London.

The Art, Architecture, and Media of Climate Change

Accumulation

Mark Wigley

Beatriz Colomina

A wide-ranging and challenging exploration of design and how it engages with the self The field of design has radically expanded. As a practice, design is no longer limited to the world of material objects but rather extends from carefully crafted individual styles and online identities to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes. Superhumanity seeks to explore and challenge our understanding of “design” by engaging with and departing from the concept of the “self.” This volume brings together more than fifty essays by leading scientists, artists, architects, designers, philosophers, historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, originally disseminated online via e-flux Architecture between September 2016 and February 2017 on the invitation of the Third Istanbul Design Biennial. Probing the idea that we are and always have been continuously reshaped by the artifacts we shape, this book asks: Who designed the lives we live today? What are the forms of life we inhabit, and what new forms are currently being designed? Where are the sites, and what are the techniques, to design others? This vital and far-reaching collection of essays and images seeks to explore and reflect on the ways in which both the concept and practice of design are operative well beyond tangible objects, expanding into the depths of self and forms of life. Contributors: Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Lucia Allais, Shumon Basar, Ruha Benjamin, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Daniel Birnbaum, Ina Blom, Benjamin H. Bratton, Giuliana Bruno, Tony Chakar, Mark Cousins, Simon Denny, Keller Easterling, Hu Fang, Rubén Gallo, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Rupali Gupte, Andrew Herscher, Tom Holert, Brooke Holmes, Francesca Hughes, Andrés Jaque, Lydia Kallipoliti, Thomas Keenan, Sylvia Lavin, Yongwoo Lee, Lesley Lokko, MAP Office, Chus Martínez, Ingo Niermann, Ahmet Ögüt, Trevor Paglen, Spyros Papapetros, Raqs Media Collective, Juliane Rebentisch, Sophia Roosth, Felicity D. Scott, Jack Self, Prasad Shetty, Hito Steyerl, Kali Stull, Pelin Tan, Alexander Tarakhovsky, Paulo Tavares, Stephan Trüby, Etienne Turpin, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Eyal Weizman, Mabel O. Wilson, Brian Kuan Wood, Liam Young, and Arseny Zhilyaev.

Design of the Self

Superhumanity

Anton Vidokle

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