As we continue to reflect upon the chain of political upheavals of 2011, it may be interesting to consider a particular shift in the status of information technology, now that it has been deployed as such a powerful force in facilitating the rise of a new popular voice.
Keller Easterling
An Internet of Things
A
non-modern question—the artifacts of which have always been with us,
the boundaries of which include but exceed all of the above experiments,
and the answer to which we already know—is how space, without digital
or media enhancement, is itself information.
Gean Moreno
Notes on the Inorganic, Part I: Accelerations
By
constantly invading and liquidating resource-rich contexts, capitalism
encourages images that project what will inevitably be left in its wake:
a dead world. And just as one can imagine (or see) patches of
devastated and desolate land, a kind of localized post-extraction
desertification, one can just as easily imagine this becoming a
planetary condition: the globe as a rotating, dead lithosphere, coated
in a fine dust of decomposing once-organic particles.
Gregory Sholette
After OWS: Social Practice Art, Abstraction, and the Limits of the Social
Once
again, to go beyond shallow assumptions of social media's invasion of
traditional art practices, let me put the question differently: Where
does abstraction and the non-representational intersect with the social?
Or, put the other way around: What is the limit of the social within
the social itself?
Sven Lütticken
General Performance
The
term “performance” is slippery even within relatively well-defined
contexts. In today’s economy, it not only refers to the productivity of
one’s labor but also to one’s actual, quasi-theatrical
self-presentation, one’s self-performance in an economy where work has
become more dependent on immaterial factors.
Grant Kester
The Sound of Breaking Glass, Part II: Agonism and the Taming of Dissent
This
shift from art to culture is often figured as a loss or abandonment, as
art surrenders its privileged immanence to the brutal instrumentality
of vanguard politics. “Unlike the political vanguard,” Romero Brest
writes in 1967, the artistic avant-garde “does not have an aim to
achieve.”
