Expensive and laborious to produce, a single woodcut could be recycled to illustrate scores of different ballads, each new home imbuing the same image with often wildly diverse meanings. Katie Sisneros explores this interplay of repetition, context, and meaning, and how in it can be seen a parallel to meme culture of today. In a …
What does it mean to be human when we recognise our bodies as multispecies ecologies? My research explores the intimate and fraught contact zones of biology, aesthetics, culture and care between Homo sapiens and Candida albicans, the yeast commonly known as thrush. C. albicans is one of the hundreds of viral/bacterial/fungal/insect species dwelling in the complex ecology that …
Authorities said the Brimham Rocks, which balanced delicately on the side of a cliff and were molded by weather for millions of years, were pushed over the edge and broke into dozens of pieces after hitting the ground. The tourist destination owned by the National Trust attracts thousands of visitors each year, according to Metro …
Microsoft sinks another datacenter, this time off the coast of Scotland as part of Project Natick. Phase 2 is hoped to last five years in the ocean and runs off clean energy from the European Marine Energy Centre. Project Natick reduces data center costs by using the ocean as its coolant, land-based datacenters use 4.8 litres …
Mark Fisher’s PhD dissertation Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction has been published by exmilitary, New York. Forward by exmilitary: Mark Fisher clicked send in 1999. The unpromising year – of forecasted occurrences, appearances and happenings – hosted the reception of his PhD dissertation at the University of Warwick – a site notorious today …
From The Atlantic: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global …
Essay by Roy Scranton and conversation with philosopher Timothy Morton examining Houston as a hyperobject and potential site for a future fossil fuel catastrophe. Note that this essay is speculative and was published months prior to the arrival of Hurricane Harvey, which is now tied for costliest tropical cyclone on record. From Mustarinda …
The art world is not what it used to be. In the last three decades, the socioeconomic space within which contemporary art circulates has changed dramatically. By opening a toxic conduit between counterculture and capital, promoting gentrification, and providing a liberal mask to illiberal regimes, contemporary art can (and does) effect political changes that run …
From The National Post: Australian birds have weaponized fire because what we really need now is something else to make us afraid Raptors, including the whistling kite, are intentionally spreading grass fires in northern Australia, a research paper argues. The reason: to flush out prey and feast Dick Eussen thought he had the …
From the e-flux website (December 2017): Let it be said that this is not a unified theory of blaccelerationism. It is not a black accelerationism—that is, a “black perspective on accelerationism”—nor is it an accelerationist theory of blackness. It is not a critique of accelerationism from the position of blackness or black studies. These are …
Hito Steyerl’s new book Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War is out on Verso press. From the Verso website: What is the function of art in the era of digital globalization? How can one think of art institutions in an age defined by planetary civil war, growing inequality, and proprietary digital …