and a time to see less

Posted in Motto Books on February 21st, 2024
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Here live the near-blind. In their eyes the city dwells like aureoles on suckling lips. Here they apprehend the city with knowledge viscous and immediate. And here they also live uneasily, for tranquillity is found only in pictures they are disinclined to make.

In essays, letters and aphorisms, this book makes near-blindness tangible as one condition of living in. protracted war.

Author: Walid Sadek

Published and distributed by Motto Books Co-published by Agial Art Gallery
Text editing: Mika Hayashi Ebbese

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Symbionts. Caroline A. Jones, Natalie Bell and Selby Nimrod (Eds.). The MIT Press

Posted in politics, writing on November 26th, 2022
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Essays, conversations, selected texts, and a rich collection of thought-provoking artworks celebrate a revolution in bio art. Expertly designed by Omnivore and printed on special papers, including chlorophyll cover and crush citrus and crush cocoa pages.

The texts and artworks in Symbionts provoke a necessary conversation about our species and its relation to the planet. Are we merely “mammalian weeds,” as evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis put it? Or are we partners in producing and maintaining the biosphere, as she also suggested? Symbionts reflects on a recent revolution in bio art that departs from the late-1990s code-oriented experiments to embrace entanglement and symbiosis (“with-living”). Combining documentation of contemporary artworks with texts by leading thinkers, Symbionts, which accompanies an exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts Center, offers an expansive view of humanity’s place on the planet.

Color reproductions document works by international artists that respond to the revelation that planetary microbes construct and maintain our biosphere. A central essay by coeditor Caroline Jones sets their work in the context of larger discussions around symbiosis; additional essays, an edited roundtable discussion, and selected excerpts follow. Contributors explore, among other things, the resilient ecological knowledge of indigenous scholars and artists, and “biofiction,” a term coined by Jones to describe the work of such theoretical biologists as Jacob von Uexküll as well as the witty parafictions of artist Anicka Yi. A playful glossary puts scientific terms in conversation with cultural ones.

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AUDINT–Unsound:Undead. Steve Goodman, Toby Heys and Eleni Ikoniadou (Eds.). Urbanomic

Posted in music on November 4th, 2022
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Tracing the the potential of sound, infrasound, and ultrasound to access anomalous zones of transmission between the realms of the living and the dead.

For as long as recording and communications technologies have existed, operators have evoked the potential of sound, infrasound, and ultrasound to access anomalous zones of transmission between the realms of the living and the dead. In Unsound:Undead, contributors from a variety of disciplines chart these undead zones, mapping out a nonlinear timeline populated by sonic events stretching from the 8th century BC (the song of the Sirens), to 2013 (acoustic levitation), with a speculative extension into 2057 (the emergence of holographic and holosonic phenomena).

For the past seven years the AUDINT group has been researching peripheral sonic perception (unsound) and the ways in which frequencies are utilized to modulate our understanding of presence/non-presence, entertainment/torture, and ultimately life/death. Concurrently, themes of hauntology have inflected the musical zeitgeist, resonating with the notion of a general cultural malaise and a reinvestment in traces of lost futures inhabiting the present.

This undead culture has already spawned a Lazarus economy in which Tupac, ODB, and Eazy-E are digitally revivified as laser-lit holograms. The obscure otherworldly dimensions of sound have also been explored in the sonic fictions produced by the likes of Drexciya, Sun Ra, and Underground Resistance, where hauntology is virtually extended: the future appears in the cracks of the present.

The contributions to this volume reveal how the sonic nurtures new dimensions in which the real and the imagined (fictional, hyperstitional, speculative) bleed into one another, where actual sonic events collide with spatiotemporal anomalies and time-travelling entities, and where the unsound serves to summon the undead.

Contributions by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lendl Barcelos, Charlie Blake, Lisa Blanning, Brooker Buckingham, Al Cameron, Erik Davis, Kodwo Eshun, Matthew Fuller, Kristen Gallerneaux, Lee Gamble, Agnès Gayraud, Steve Goodman, Anna Greenspan, Olga Gurionova, S. Ayesha Hameed, Tim Hecker, Julian Henriques, Toby Heys, Eleni Ikoniadou, Amy Ireland, Nicola Masciandaro, Ramona Naddaff, Anthony Nine, The Occulture, Luciana Parisi, Alina Popa, Paul Purgas, Georgina Rochefort, Steven Shaviro, Jonathan Sterne, Jenna Sutela, Eugene Thacker, Dave Tompkins, Shelley Trower, and Souzana Zamfe.

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Simulacrum – Jrg. 30 #1 Intimacies. Various authors. Simulacrum.

Posted in writing on February 14th, 2022
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“Our first issue of the year is an inquiry into intimacy in its many forms. We decided on this topic the last week of summer, the first time we sat down with our new editorial team. ‘We don’t share intimacy yet,’ said one of our editors, `intimacy needs time to grow.’ Yet, looking back, that first meeting was perhaps as intimate as it gets; nervous introductions, how-was-your-summer’s, testing waters, sharing ideas, enthusiasm, and doubts as well. ‘How do we define the intimate?’ Won’t it be too much like Simulacrum’s Love issue?’ What’s the difference between love and intimacy anyway?’ 
From these questions, ideas of intimacies started to take shape: those on the threshold between public and private, in languages between lovers, those differing from the hetero-and homonormative, the intimacies shared with oneself. Through touch and writing, poetry and myth, economic systems and modes of play, the subconscious and the attentive; the divergent approaches the eleven contributors of this issue have taken give us a glimpse of the endless ways in which the spectrum of intimate experience can be explored, exercised, and rethought.”

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Spike Art Quarterly, No. 34.

Posted in Exhibitions, magazines, writing on January 9th, 2013
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Spike Art Quarterly , No. 34

Spike #34 takes on the concepts of collaboration, participation and collectivity and the way in which these concepts relate to their historical counterparts.
Contemporary life is largely shaped by capitalism, technological progress and a growing irritation with consciousness – what historically is conceived as ‘to be oneself’. We no longer invent, but we sample and catalogue; we no longer pursue utopian ideals but rather are bounded by existential necessities; today, we are keen of been reactionary much rather than critical.
How do contemporary forms of collaboration express, and respond to, the contemporary non-antagonism and political indifference? What is the shape and potential of the contemporary collectives who are ever more fluid and anti-utopian?

Including
Articles by Joanna Fiduccia and Carson Chan;,a potrait by Pablo Larios; an interview with the artist collective Am Nuden Da by Gil Leung; reviews, a 6-page image featuring classic artist collaborations, and columns by the Pfaff Brothers.

Language: German / English
Pages: 138
Size: 28 x 23 cm
Binding: Softcover
D 9,50€

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