Radical Friends. Ruth Catlow, Penny Rafferty (Eds.). Torque Editions

Posted in politics, writing on July 29th, 2022
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Contributors: Ramon Amaro, Calum Bowden, Jaya Klara Brekke, Mitchell F. Chan, Cade Diehm, eeefff, Carina Erdmann, Primavera De Filippi, Charlotte Frost, Max Hampshire, Lucile Olympe Haute, Sara Heitlinger, Lara Houston, Cadence Kinsey, Nick Koppenhagen, Kei Kreutler, Laura Lotti, Jonas Lund, Massimiliano Mollona, MetaObjects, Rhea Myers, Omsk Social Club, Bhavisha Panchia, Legacy Russell, Tina Rivers Ryan, Nathan Schneider, Sam Skinner, Sam Spike, Hito Steyerl, Alex S. Taylor, Cassie Thornton, Suzanne Treister, Stacco Troncoso, Ann Marie Utratel, Samson Young

First publication to document the use and potential of Decentralised Autonomous Organisations in the arts that use blockchain technology and build on NFT innovations.

Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) offer unique tools for translocal peers to encode rules, relations and values into their joint ventures using blockchain technology. This new book, edited by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty, who have been at the forefront of investigations into the relationship between DAOs and the arts, constitutes over 5 years of research with essays, interviews, exercises and prototypes from leading thinkers, artists and technologists across this emerging field.

Radical Friends is an urgent book for the 21st Century and beyond. It shows us, in the spirit of the legendary poet and artist Etel Adnan, that the technology of the future needs to be about “togetherness, not separation. Love, not suspicion. A common future, not isolation.”
–Hans Ulrich Obrist

How things are run is often more important than what is done. It may not be easy to establish alternative formats and infrastructures, but it’s certainly necessary… This collection shows that it is possible too.
–Sadie Plant

This book is about friendship, despair and hope — a beautiful, must-read for all people who are asking unanswerable questions about life, love and the end of the world.
–Franco “Bifo” Beradi

Order here

Edition Schwimmer in Motto

Posted in photography, politics, Zines on July 19th, 2022
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Edition Schwimmer’s booklets, Hofter Monthly and TheSchwimmer by Sibylle Hofter are available in Motto.

Hofter Monthly and TheSchwimmer are monthly photography publications drawing from Sibylle Hofter’s work and archive.

With contributions by Wolfgang Hofter, Sophie Holz, Mania Lohrengel, Patricia Nya Njaounga, Sheney Okan, Christian Seidel, Daniel Sellek and Anna Tietz.

Sibylle Hofter is a Berlin based visual artist exploring film, text, site-specific sculpture, installation in public space, and photography, participatory and individual. She is also a curator of various projects, and co-founder with Sven Eggers, of the on-going political, media-critical semi-participatory photo project Agentur Schwimmer (Swimmer Agency), that she currently runs with Daniel Sellek. Hofter process usually includes extensive research on extra-cultural fields. Since 2011 she edits Hofter Monthly booklets and TheSchwimmer booklets on paper. She focuses on emancipatory, post-colonial, collaborative work.

The booklets are sold individually or in a special edition box set.

Order here

The Funambulist #41 – Decentering the U.S. Léopold Lambert (Ed.). The Funambulist

Posted in Editions, magazines, politic, politics, writing on May 30th, 2022
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The question that motivates this issue is simple: how come so many of us outside the settler colony called the United States of America, are so deeply influenced by and interpret our own contexts through the political ‘software’ created by U.S.-based academics and activists? The goal here is less to disqualify this U.S. political framework, than to demonstrate that the successful ways through which it analyzes its own context may not be as useful when analyzing other situations. Throughout the issue, we aim to reflect on U.S. exceptionalism, including in its own anti-imperialist critique (Zoé Samudzi), on what Blackness misses when it is mostly centered on African American espitemologies (Cases Rebelles), on transfused U.S.-forged concepts of “brownness” or “BIPOC” (Sinthujan Varatharajah), on illusory attempts to translate struggles into (U.S.) English (Bekriah Mawasi), on the complete blind spot casteism constitutes in this U.S. ‘software’ (Shaista Aziz Patel & Vijeta Kumar), on the need for a pluriversal approach of queerness (Rahul Rao)… Even within the U.S., the political framework that categorizes all people (from Indigenous people to white settlers) coming from the south of its border as “Latinx” needs to be problematized as settler colonial creations (Floridalma Boj Lopez). With this issue, we aim at doing just that: not letting go of the precious epistemologies U.S.-based thinkers have brought us, but simply decentering them to favor the pluriversality of our influences.

The cover was created for us by Michael DeForge and the News from the Fronts section brings us reflections on Taiwan (Szu-Han Ho & Meng-Yao Chuang), Cameroon (Ethel-Ruth Tawe), the Ainu (Kanako Uzawa) and Fusako Shigenobu’s political legacy, a few weeks before her release from prison in Japan (May Shigenobu).

Open here