5: Komorebi: 129 Fragments

I came across a Discord community that I began participating in anonymously under the pseudonym Les Moore. It became tense and unpleasant and I stopped contributing after sharing as many fragments as were left behind by Heraclitus. I’ve included them below and would like to make a small publication with them called Heraclitish.

april 2021

# nm-podcast-vol-2 

Hello,
Nice to meet you, and some brief thoughts on advanced uncertainty...

Its been really wonderful to stumble upon this lively community and its manifold discourses. I feel a little like I’ve shown up late to a party and I’m unsure how to join the conversation—though this might be a perennial problem... I’ve recently undertaken a completist pod project and have been listening to the back catalogue of NM conversations. It’s fascinating to listen to the range of subjects taken on so generously and gamely with so many insights gleaned along the way. It’s also been a great near historiographical exercise circling back to through the cascading torrents of events that have superseded themselves. I think I share a generational frame and at least a peripheral engagement with most of the themes that emerge. I feel a sense of embarrassing generosity that I’m not sure how to reciprocate. 

There have been several cultural artifacts I’ve engaged recently that have become related in my mind and I wonder if this might be a venue where a discussion would be generative and appreciated. 

The three aspects of cultural production that I’m considering are Godzilla vs Kong, Rachel Aviv’s recent New Yorker article Past Imperfect and Renzo Martens White Cube. I think from the North American context where I’m writing, these represent different granularities of culture. The mass N. American cultural artifact and export, the left liberal culture sphere, and the more global and postcolonial focused contemporary art conversation. This of course is a highly reductive and problematic schematic, but maybe roughly useful for examining the scales and ideologies that are grappling with what I think of as the advanced uncertainty of the contemporary. I think all three of these artifacts are deeply unresolved, paradoxical and dealing with the anomie and epistemic crises of the present. The first one, Kong, differs from the other two in that it feels designed to compound these feelings of hopelessness, fear and nihilism, while he other two works seem to be engaged in locating an ethical bearing within these complex and fluid dynamics, with varying degrees of irony. 

I think each one of these subjects is conceivably worth much ink, rare earths, discussion—dissertations even... And as is increasingly becoming the case, the question of what is worth attention and energy feels critical and confusing. I find it difficult to find interlocutors with enough of a shared frame with the willingness or capacity to engage substantively in sustained mutual exploration. Which I see in contrast to the hot take industry favored by attention economies—not without their pleasures and uses—that seem to mainly talk performatively beyond one another in the dominant register of the self-serving cynical dismissal.

I would be interested in developing a conversation around any one of these things as well...

I’m actually working on a longer experimental essay / open letter hybrid thing to and regarding NM, but I felt compelled to share these timely morning thoughts.

I apologize for not knowing the best channel to post this and happy to relocate.

Kindly, 

Les

# nm-podcast-vol-2

thanks carly, i’m going to organize some thoughts on renzo’s film and share them on the channel you suggested

# 2021-indigenous-colonialism-non-euclidean-spaces

I recently watched Renzo Martens White Cube and found it to be a really complex, applied piece of institutional critique. In the Q&A he said something like I admire artists like Hans Haacke and wondered what it would be like to apply his thinking in praxis. I think he’s deftly performing the paradoxical impasses at the limits of what an artist can achieve in the long arm of colonialism via contemporary art. And at a time when a guilty art establishment is fixated on identifying and measuring the extent to which the art it produces has socioecological efficacy. I get the sense that beyond the irony saturated posturing and self annihilating (and perhaps also insulating) critique is an earnest desire to locate an ethical position. He’s obviously leaning in to a hyper articulated white savior drag, while also martyring himself at the alter of discourse.

I think there’s a serious commitment to ‘staying with the trouble’ in the Harawayian formulation. The trouble here being a Dutch artist reckoning with colonial histories while trying to sustain himself with an art career.  In this regard, I’m reminded of Povinelli and the Karrabing Film Collective and a sense there’s a kind of transference of a desire for art world attention. I suppose one concern I have—aside from the ongoing tutorialization of how to commodify trauma and affect for post industrial markets—is the effect of an emergent art class that excludes anyone not in the art collective. If the average worker in these rural villages is earning a dollar a day and this group starts bringing in thousands of dollars of art money, what kind of shifts and rifts is that going to bring up in the local context? I’m unclear to what degree Renzo is anticipating the knock on effects of this new museum on the depressed post-plantation context. Does securing land ownership rights for a small group of artists by trading on a broadly shared condition of exploitation seem like a worthwhile or desired model? In the shadow of the microfinance schemes that spread like a neoliberal rash over the majority world, we’ve established how corrosive the debt and competition paradigm could be to a community and its preexisting relations. And how it’s telos was to include previously unbankable people into a predatory market.

At this late stage of institutional critique, I assume Martens is clear eyed about the many issues with the contemporary white cube model. While it can be a lever for benefiting a small group in the short term, it will almost certainly bring about the well documented issues of an art model predicated on scarcity and exclusion. The film was edited in a way that made Power a leitmotif and almost interchangeable with art world exposure. I believe this is a significant part of Martens’ critique, but what’s at stake when an applied form of institutional critique aids and accelerates the proliferation of the very same ideologies and power structures that it was ostensibly criticizing? And perhaps more interestingly (the last question is the familiar ouroboros of institutional critique) how do we define, adresss, and contest the unexamined dimensions of power that are being assumed and transacted?

# 2021-indigenous-colonialism-non-euclidean-spaces

Maybe KW Berlin would share the zoom q&a if you asked them... It was with Clémentine Deliss and Tirdad Zolghar. I wish more of these institutions would better publicly archive the talks they commission.... Especially when it’s as simple as recording and uploading a zoom conversation. I wonder if the opposition is at the participant or the institutional level...

Also better publicize them or sources / calendars for aggregating them... does anyone know any pan institutional calendars for this kind of thing? is there a channel here to watch here for upcoming talks, screenings and performances?

# nm-movies-videos-film

I was visiting my brother in a part of the United States where movie theaters are open and we went to see Godzilla vs Kong. I’m algorithmically insulated in esoteric left theory and obscure musical genomes for the most part but every so often I gamely go in for anthropological forays into whatever could be called popular culture—or at least cultural milieux I would otherwise avoid... I’m impressed with the kind of critical analysis of Hollywood from theorists like Evan Calder Williams and thought this could be an interesting cultural exploration. I don’t really know much about the genesis and evolution of these two mythic characters. I understand them at their best to be a criticism of American imperialism and the unintended excesses or consequences of American hubris, terror, stupidity and greed. I imagine their meaning has been diluted and shifted with the development of their franchise and the cultural moments they responded to. I left the matinee feeling deeply depressed, into an expanse of blistering strip mall pocked desert. The sheer volume and velocity of cuts and explosions made me feel sick. The plot and dialogue felt designed to instill a deep and confounding nihilism. As far as I could discern, a paternal military figure was using a young brown differently abled girl to manipulate Kong into getting access to a precolonial reserve of power. Godzilla, who had somehow become aware of a Silicon Valley plot to gain total power had resurfaced to stop their plans. After the gratuitous destruction of countless lives, the two monsters under the guidance of the military, team up to destroy the creation of the tech elites. Most infuriatingly there is a bumbling black character named Bernie(!) who works as a low level employee at the company that’s surreptitiously building the powerful cyborg Godzilla. Bernie is a whistleblower and conspiracist blogger who trips over his paranoid apophenia at every turn and then teams up with a pair of school age hackers.

I think the unexamined implication in many viewers minds is that a white patriarchal military needs to contain the excesses of the subaltern and Asian superpowers while defending preexisting power structures from Silicon Valley elites and bumbling socialist social media personalities. This is accomplished with a bizarre openness to and co-option of dissent and opposition, against the backdrop of a Hong Kong ravaged by super titans. 

Of course this film doesn’t do anything to engage any of these themes with any degree of real analysis and explication. It stays at the level of confounding spectacle, terrifying and infantilizing its viewers towards further entrenchment in divisive cultural identities and a sense that there is some militaristic white American man behind the scenes defending a kind of traditional order. I understood it to be something like a cultural event, if we allow that pandemic time blockbusters mean anything anymore... and I’m curious to know what other people here made of it.

# nm-kunst-medien

Some thoughts on loops. 

I crashed the car yesterday driving 70 mph on the freeway with the top down and the dog on my lap. The back tire blew out and I fishtailed a couple times before smashing into a concrete traffic barrier. The airbags deployed and I blacked out momentarily holding on to the screaming dog. I came to and then nearly walked into oncoming traffic looking for a leash. I stood there scrolling though paid listings trying to call a tow truck, unsuccessfully navigating the automated menu options. I took a picture and put my phone back in my pocket with the arm that was able to perform basic tasks. A kind man stopped and took the dog into his car. The shock and adrenaline collapsed time and disoriented my body. A couple highway police stopped traffic and I moved my car to the nearest exit and then had it towed to a junk yard. No other people or cars were damaged. It was kind of an immaculate disaster. Since yesterday I keep replaying the accident in my mind. It occurred to me this morning that this looping might be a response for overcoming trauma and learning from mistakes. I get the sense that there might be a vulgar evolutionary device at work. I seem to be experiencing an incremental diminishing of the trauma with each subsequent loop. The raw experience morphologically softening into narrative. I started wondering if our collective mania for media loops might be a part of the ongoing trauma of neoliberal life in the anthropocene. That faced with the horror of cascading mass extinction and compounding social ills we simply loop small evidentiary proximate moments of this surely unevenly distributed trauma as a mediated coping mechanism. I thought of my favorite loop of my daughter in a large mossy tree in golden light and wonder if that’s not a kind of trauma. The fleetingness of life and the inability to breath in her warm shimmering hair.

# nm-kunst-medien

i’m just beginning an exploration of Ikyo Day’s work, after noticing a conversation between @gmak and @hellbanknote  I find her thinking very interesting and useful. Alien capital is an intriguing concept being applied broadly in diverse global colonial dynamics. 

‘Wolfe’s second point is to argue that settler supremacy and white supremacy, while often being “privileges that are fused and mutually compounding in social life,” are actually categorically distinct modalities of power. He turns to the examples of colonized Tibetans, West Papuans, Khoi-san, Kashmiris and others to demonstrate that the terms of their colonial dispossession have nothing to do with race. He writes, “Campaigning against White supremacism would not help these people. It would be more likely to delight their colonisers.” 

In sum, one’s status as a settler is neither an effect of the will nor a condition of one’s racial supremacy. Being a settler is solely constituted by being structurally opposed to Indigenous peoples. Here, Wolfe misses the point while overstating his case. While white supremacy may not be a feature of the colonial dispossession of Tibetans, doesn’t a Chinese supremacy exercise racial dominance over Tibetans? The example of the Khoisan is even more peculiar. It is not clear how this Indigenous population in South Africa is not shaped by the vestiges of apartheid and enduring structures of white supremacy given that their land and water were dispossessed by European settlers in what is now Cape Town’

I appreciate her scope and dialectical thinking. this seems crucial for building broad intersectional/global/ecological alliances 

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Maybe Ikyo would be a timely guest on the NM pod? re: alien capital, the current n American surge in anti asian violence, her nuanced take on afropessimism, etc. Also I would be interested in thinking with this work some more in a focused dialogic way. I’m struggling a little bit with her concept of romantic anticapitalism...

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https://www.embracerace.org/assets/beingornothingness_iykoday.pdf yes thanks I’ll keep an eye on that channel and would be happy to go deeper into Day’s work if there’s an interest

# nm-race-identity

So I watched Iyko give a lecture on Alien Labor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L1eqTYKrTM and read the Being and Nothingness piece that was mentioned. I see a very intersectional approach at work, which I generally think is good. Here are a few excepts that show her complex and dialectal thinking as it relates to Wolfe and Coulthard writing on settler colonialism and Wilderson and Sexton from an afropessimist perspective. 

‘In a nation with such fraught contexts of forced migration, immigrant exclusion, relocation, and deportation, questions inevitably arise over whether non-Indigenous but racialized peoples—such as slaves, refugees, or the undocumented—are unequivocally “settlers.” The responses to this question have been varied.’

‘...folding them into a generalized settler position through voluntaristic assumptions constrains our ability to understand how their racialized vulnerability and disposability supports a settler colonial project.’

‘I suggest that this wavering relation/nonrelation of antiblackness and Indigeneity exhibited in Wilderson’s and Sexton’s work reveal the problem in any totalizing approach to the heterogeneous constitution of racial difference in settler colonies.’

‘...perhaps my own defense of Indigenous decolonization movements for sovereignty begs a larger question about whether sovereignty in itself offers a radical politics that can encompass or mobilize a black radical tradition rooted in the project of abolition. And it is here that I agree with Sexton’s intervention to problematize the idea that antiracist agendas must emerge from the foundational priority of Indigenous sovereignty and restoration of land. But against the totalizing frame of Afro-pessimism, I want to stress instead the pitfalls of any antidialectical approach to the political economy of the settler colonial racial state from the position of either Indigenous or antiblack exceptionalism. Settler colonial racial capitalism is not a thing but a social relation.’

‘For the same reason that the economic reductionism of orthodox Marxism has been discredited, such an argument that frames racial slavery as a base for a colonial superstructure similarly fails to take into account the dialectics of settler colonial capitalism. The political economy of settler colonial capitalism is more appropriately figured as an ecology of power relations than a linear chain of events. Relinquishing any conceptual privilege that might be attributed to Indigeneity, alternatively, Coulthard offers a useful anti-exceptionalist stance: “the colonial relation should not be understood as a primary locus of ‘base’ from which these other forms of oppression flow, but rather as the inherited background field within which market, racist, patriarchal, and state relations converge.” From this view, race and colonialism form the matrix of the settler colonial racial state.’

I think it’s good to practice these complicated and antinomical lines of inquiry while complicating them further and recalibrating the changing variables that are considered. Perhaps these frictions will expand our discourse and capacity for thinking towards a broader socioecological politics in an increasingly complicated and interconnected world.

Re: Day’s notion of ‘romanic anticapitalism’, I understood it initially as a kind of false consciousness regarding the false dichotomy between material and abstract capital with racialized groups assuming the culpability of the abstract. But by the end of Being and Nothingness it appears to take on a more ecological valence and stands in for a reified idealized transcendental Nature concept. While Being and Nothingness specifically makes a case for including more indigenous criticality to our ‘matrix of the settler colonial racial state’ I see it as part of larger project to rehearse more complex and nuanced understandings of highly variegated, intersecting, overlapping and relationally fluid dynamics in ‘an ecology of power relations’

# raising-gen-alpha

my twelve year old is super into rocks and crystals right now. i think its trending on tiktok and i was looking for some resources to gently guide this nascent magic inflected geological turn towards some maybe more substantive study. feels like a fitting preoccupation for the anthropocene... i generally just encourage her enthusiasm and make some lightly critical jokes if her interests feel overly consumer oriented or manufactured or carcinogenic, etc. i find if i ask more questions instead of giving hot takes she surprises me with all sorts of fascinating insights... in this case her interests in crystals led her to looking for a spirit guide which she later shared with me was my mother who passed away before she was born. now she has an ongoing dialogue with her and makes drawings on her ipad of visions she has of her when she’s dreaming. its actually overwhelmingly beautiful and makes me reconsider my scientistic inclination. it sucks how we impose rational adulthood on children. also sucks how marketers hoodwink children into all sorts of shit. its like teaching them basic media theory / advertising awareness / deconstruction at the same time as protecting their intuitions and openness. i guess i’m looking for anything crystal rock related that is beautiful, nuanced, funny, intelligent, moving

# irl-uk

Hey I’m looking for a place accessible to goldsmiths starting august / September for a year or so but could be something shorter too. Also would love to start learning more about London. I’m doing an art and ecology masters

# raising-gen-alpha

Thank you!! We’ll check it out

# irl-uk

thank you so much! I’ll message you both soon

# nm-podcast-vol-2

So interesting to hear about plans and platforms on the last pod. As a relative newcomer it’s been fascinating to explore the archive and lively discord. The clearnet has become so abhorrent it’s exciting to see spaces with engaged people mutually determining alternatives. I really appreciate the conversations, especially the ones with guests and feel like aggregators and archives are crucial right now. I’m still getting used to the rhythms of discord. I find it useful, if not unwieldy, for macro level surveys of different cultural topographies and a great means of resource sharing. Resources here being search tools, access to archives, interesting essays, artworks, news, etc. The categorical stay-in-your-lane meta informational topicalizing approach to conversation is a bit stifling and feels somewhat incompatible with an ecological or intersectional mode of discourse. It can silo and fragment many interrelated themes that quickly become overwhelming and difficult to keep up with.  This might be a me/generational problem. I can also understand the challenges of moderating 1000 people attempting to find meaningful conversations, information and interlocutors. I find many subjects that emerge would benefit from longer, slower engagement. For contrast I have some friends in the small town where I live who have been reading Heidegger’s Heraclitus lectures for the last year, meeting once a week to go over a couple pages at a time. While I don’t necessarily advocate moving to the woods to read Heidegger or Harmon very slowly, I’m looking for a balance between that durée and the frenetic hyper truncated, disjunctive and sensational velocities of social media.

In the very long tradition of friends talking about what’s happening in the world I’ve been enjoying the New Models podcast. All the talk about becoming the new institution makes me a little nervous. What I find so refreshing about NM is it’s decentering of the individual. It’s discoursivity and it’s aggregation. What Sianne Ngai calls ‘the becoming ergon of the parergonal discourse of evaluation.’ I’m less interested in the artist to institution model. Also generally have some misgivings about communities that are built in the name of an individual. 

I feel like moderation and aggregation take an enormous amount of work and these kinds of roles should be nurtured and supported alongside more universal socioecological initiatives. My favorite episodes have been the ones with guests, Jenny Odell, Simon Denny, Benjamin and Bjarne. I’m really looking forward to Keller Easterling. I’m also looking forward to seeing how you approach developing an ecology of dark forests :deciduous_tree::spider_web::deciduous_tree:

# nm-kunst-medien

Le Cinema Club https://www.lecinemaclub.com/ is showing an Amalia Ulman short for the next couple days called Buyer Walker Rover (Yiwu) that relates back to an earlier Skype lecture of the same name https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDPnybBZRFY I found them both interesting, kind of a global flâneuse vibe, window shopping identities and pairing curious bits of words and images. It strikes me as critical work that’s almost a little seduced by its concerns and exists in a hazy nihilistic register of advanced anomie. Between the two versions of these works was the much discussed IG performance Excellences and Perfections that felt a bit like it was having its fake and tweeting it too. I wonder if the exposure from E & P created a pressure to figure herself more centrally in the work? I watched it with earbuds in that didn’t quite insulate me from my partners phone conversation about ADA violations at a correctional facility. I found myself thinking about DIS and those now well rehearsed conversations about recuperation and generational rupture. Anyway, I like watching short artist videos and talking about them. There was a well curated series on e-flux recently called True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists Films https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/376349/true-fake-troubling-the-real-in-artists-films/ I missed a few and I’m generally frustrated with how hard it is to watch these art essay film things online.  Le Cinema Club has been pretty consistently good and e-flux film and video... Does anyone have some other resources or recommendations?

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Thank you so much!! I’m looking forward to exploring this.

# nm-movies-videos-films

Thank you!! Sounds amazing... sorry for the ignorance but how do I access it? :person_facepalming:

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Sure thing, I like getting le cinema clubs weekly screenings

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beyond words and thanks reacts

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from thislight read me ‘Currently, I’m not sharing my archive of video art, experimental film, and other works that emerge out of the efforts of living, individual artists because I feel like the ethics of permission and the particularities of display operate differently. For such things, UbuWeb, Vdrome, Kadist Video Library, Cabin Fever, Le Cinema Club, Ovid, Cinema Tropical, Grasshopper, and Mubi are great resources.

# nm-kunst-medien

Yes me too, also figured there were some more nuanced takes of her work in the wake of e & p... she has a film premiering at new directors née films. I’m going to be in ny from the 1st and would like to catch it if I can

# irl-nyc

Hi nmny I’m going to be visiting for the first ten days of may. Any art and culture recommendations would be appreciated. I actually grew up in nyc so I know all the big institutions but would love to know about smaller art spaces, particular shows / performances, delicious places to eat, etc in pandemic times. I love the Elizabeth street garden after looking around McNally on prince and eating at lovely day (for example :slight_smile: ) also any aggregators of shows / events with a contemporary art focus would be really great. I used to use one that had a simple interface and let you make printable lists lol and I can’t remember what it was called

# nm-kunst-medien

@tuff_cat I feel like I’m checking my biases too with this work and perhaps a tendency to hone in on the subject position, which seems to be a central interrogation of these works. I liked gleaning quotidian yiwu street scenes from ulmans nuanced gaze. I feel like literally every person I know is dealing on some level with how they want to represent online and I go back and forth between thinking works like this are interesting and works like this are unnecessarily staged and over articulated. In reading your interview @Paige K. B. I got the sense she’s working in an almost embodied essay form. Like she’s setting up a few constraints or a general subject of inquiry and then proceeding publicly and letting the essay document the journey. I love the essay form and there’s something bold and interesting about doing it in public installments. I also get the sense she’s really deft in a particular generational micro aesthetics of performative intimacy and attention capture. Id like to see the other real v performance conversations. I thought initially that her work was about semiotic conventions but as I hear her frame it I get the sense it’s more earnest? or implicated... I think the mapping of steyerl’s withdrawal from representation is interesting. Like she can have these proxy personality constructions garnering attention and other currencies that allow her to pursue her less public explorations. She made some telling observations re class in the interview with Paige

# nm-raising-gen-alpha

Thank you so much, I’m going to pick up the McPhee and a local roadside geology for her / us. I started looking into smithsons crystal work and found this nice passage on the holt smithson foundation site ‘...the appearance of the gridded lattice is indebted to Smithson’s life-long fascination with crystals. The obsession began when his uncle gave him a quartz crystal as a child. His father later built him a makeshift natural history museum in the basement of their New Jersey home in which Smithson stored his mineral collection, and as an artist working in the 1960s he went on numerous rock hunting expeditions with his friends. In his extensive readings on crystallography, Smithson learned that the molecular growth of crystals accretes in a lattice formation. A crystal develops by repeating the same arrangements of molecules, its structure is based on replication rather than progressive, dynamic evolution. In his nonsites, this crystalline growth pattern was used cartographically to plot the relation of points distant in space, but not time.’ I love the small personal museum and idea of giving that space to children to spatially determine their interests

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I’m also a fan of the rocks that look like food genre and also the rocks that look like they made art about their surroundings genre too. There’s something wonderful about children using reconfigured minerals to make videos sacralizing other minerals

# nm-kunst-medien

Would like to pick up the ulman thread after seeing the new film... @Paige K. B. did I see you did a talk recently with Tiffany Sia about hk? Is that archived somewhere?

# nm-raising-gen-alpha

Cool! She’s engaged by visual culture so this is perfect

# nm-kunst-medien

I was really into those nighttime readings with the face blocker on home cooking. Also before my social media sabbatical I was blown away by the volume of her aggregation and hk reporting on ig. That’s a new kind of role in society and one that she was doing at such an amazing scale

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Yes she’s super interesting, a kind of depersonalized artist, or artist-as-vector / pollinator or artist as archivist amplifier. If ulman is performing a critique of a conventional flattened subjecthood and its attendant semiotics, Sia is vacating the subject and hosting urgent relational sociopolitical media flows in the overdetermined alienated narcissistic person scaled confinement we’ve been allocated online

# nm-review-of-books

Just starting xiaowei wangs blockchain chicken farm... a tech focused foray into rural China

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Oh wait is this a space for book reviews or potential reading groups?

# nm-podcast-vol-2

I’m not sure what to make of this Hello Darkness interlude. I like the radioplays because they’re satirical and funny. This level of production for an essay insisting on its authoritative, likely premature, historicization of the present feels significantly different. Almost like I’m being svengallied by the softly oscillating drones and bedroom voice. A lot of big claims here and ideas that could do with some unpacking—and perhaps some citations? I’d prefer less authoritative takes sponsored by start up institutes named after collectors and more nuanced dialogue please...

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@LILINTERNET I’m unsure how clearly defined, or useful, these genre distinctions are but I think it was the tone that wasn’t working for me. We can call it authoritative prose if you prefer. Happy to concede I may have misunderstood something here. Likely quite a few things... I really appreciate the amount of work you put into the podcasts—the writing and sound design. I think it’s a beautiful and contemporary art practice. Maybe I was feeling like your abilities are powerful and persuasive and felt concern about the things you are lending them to? I guess I was also wondering what happens when a community funded platform orients towards a model based on individual underwriters... In retrospect, I can see my comments may have come across as more antagonistic than I intended and perhaps less conducive to a dialogue. I was mainly trying to share my preference for conversations over scored monologues.

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@iamnothere yes they’re super smart and funny, maybe the penis competition one, went on a little long...

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Coo :slight_smile: I understand that and as usual, I’m excited to see what comes next…

# irl-nyc

Thank you! I’ll definitely check those out. I’m looking forward to seeing grief and grievances, the museo del bario triennial, simon Denny at petzel, Lucy raven at dia and the polidori Pompei show at kasmin

# nm-podcast-vol-2

Thanks Nora, I agree. I left clearnet social media because of how hard it became to have a meaningful exchange. I’ve been moving with trepidation in this space. I’m actually from Manhattan and in my early twenties ran a youth center in Nolita while working in music publishing. This was a time when a 20 year old, back from rehab without a degree could get a job caring about 100 kids on the lower east side. I went out almost every night. This was in the Serge Becker era when the crowds outside the box were riotous and didn’t know the better party was down the block in the basement of 205. Beatrice inn, Max Fish, Hiro Ballroom, Studio B, McCarren pool parties, No Place Like Home, Sundays at Sway, Dantes Fried Chicken, Rich Medina, soul summit in the park, sweaty nights at Nublu with flylo and forró. Just a few scenes that come to mind... It’s interesting to see how the culture and my relationship to it has changed over the years. Who became successful and what’s being rehashed, remediated, celebrated and depreciated. That downtown time was one of the most affectionately (if selectively) remembered dark forest experiences of my life. There were these major seeming cultural moments when I had the now-embarrassing-to-admit sense that certain people where poaching on my preserves. Harmony Korine and Larry Clark and later Ben Lerner. I feel like there’s a special kind of irritation experienced when one has their provenance explained to them. Or maybe I recoil when things feel too close to home.

There were voices, generation after generation and with varying degrees of charisma, cynically announcing the end of New York, an era, the world, etc, etc. The perennial declensionist romantic narrative. New crops of young artists flirting with power and reckoning with their class positions. This is kind of where I locate Dean’s writing. Youthful and clever, a little too full of and sure of itself. Beyond the very well exposed and documented excesses of the art market and internet platform brand building, I’ve been interested lately in how we think through global issues together, practicing alternative ways of relating, building coalitions, creating generous cultures of citation and sharing, decentering the individual, and not feeding attention to things we’d rather not see reproduced—except when critical address feels due.

I’ve found a lot here towards that end in the expanse of this online community. I also don’t need everything to work within a framework of socioecological efficacy. I want to learn more and laugh and experience beauty. And of course have spaces offline and on for lively discussions of it all. I think I’ve accustomed to certain rhythms and habits in virtual social space that I’m not so proud of. I’m working on checking my ego, biases, and tone. Also asking more questions... I like the idea of geographically distributed spaces like this one that create a common frame, however fragmentary or fleeting, so we can share our plurality of provisional reflections.

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I think you’re so gifted and I’m excited to see how this practice develops. The last thing I want is to inhibit a sense of openness and experimentation. Wish I did a better job of expressing my gratitude and appreciation before sharing those reflections

# nm-kunst-medien 

Picking up some threads, I got to see El Planeta. I streamed it from the MoMA x Lincoln Center New Directors New Films Festival. Mine was an unmonumental and interrupted lilliputian streaming, a lonely late-pandemic sort of festival. El Planeta has a nouvelle vague atmosphere reminiscent of Jarmuschian anachronism. Neat tableaux of aesthetic alienated desire and an ignoble generation-spanning frustrated lust for luxury. Pastries and e-commerce littering a cramped flat in a depressed region of northwestern postindustrial Spain. Charmed enough to stick around I get interrupted by a text from a friend watching Mediating the Vernacular, virtually hosted by Columbia University as part of their Decoloniality and the Politics of History conference. I zoom over to join in. (The email reminder I have for the event reads Decoloniality and the Politics of Time which would be an interesting departure point for another essay). Rosalind C. Morris is describing a film she’s making and shows an excerpt called A Film is Being Made. She gave several gold miners in South Africa GoPro cameras and edited together portions of what they shot.

I got the sense she was very experienced in the critical discourse that attends this kind of ethnographic work. She skillfully folded her misgivings into her rhetorical framing, problematizing or perhaps heading off the now familiar critiques one in her position could anticipate. She uneasily arrived at the agreeable sounding formulation ‘ethnography is learning to learn with others.’ The footage is almost excessively deskilled and depicts an almost entirely unrevelatory account of exploited labor. A genre of image that I’ve become inoculated to. I wonder what this work is doing and who it’s serving. Ulman, playing a version of herself, contemplates poorly remunerated sex work and I speculate on whether decolonize shares an etymological relation to the unwanted insertion of something somewhere. As in, please remove your GoPro from my colon. My friend and I share a funny, emoji laden text commentary between ourselves while we watch separately. I listen outside stretching my car and screen afflicted body. Our tone is often snarky. A critical detachment that may belie our proximity to this kind of project. I try hosting Morris. It’s good to live in a world of ethnographers learning how to learn from each another. This fits inside me, alongside, I don’t want to live in an austerity of pastries and e-commerce. I go into the ocean to stop thinking. 

While preparing for a trip the following day, I continue watching El Planeta in distracted fragments. A tender moment of a mother and daughter massaging their aching bodies. A flight and a tense conversation online, bad air, pressure, release, tension, release, subway, release, elevator, release and we stream another film from MoMA x Lincoln Center New Directors New Films Festival. Aleph has a Koyaanisqatsi atmosphere, though softer and looser, with a sensual gaze and beautiful music. I wonder if there wasn’t a mistake, and this is actually El Planeta. It was shot in Buenos Aires, Algeria, New York, Greece, Greenland, Mexico City, South Africa. Visible cities, after Calvino. Lyrical ethnographies? I could float down this river awhile. Desert music, untouched dunes. I Shazam Sandro’s Trigal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYSkmux3aio and suddenly feel more comfortable with an expanded definition of cultural anthropology. And Lynne Tillman’s, ‘Ethnographer, study yourself. Ethnographer, heal yourself’. The artist, Iva Radivojevic, says of her film ‘In an effort to understand the world, to cope with daily life, with death, with the passage of our lives, there arises a need for life to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious. This is what Borges was signifying with his story “El Aleph”, whereby the protagonist discovers a point (an opening) suspended in space and time that when peered into, allows one to see the entire universe: the past, the future, the present, the deserts of Egypt, the sunset at the Caspian Sea... everything that ever existed is contained in this one spot. This portal is called Aleph. Since Aleph contains everything in the universe, it lacks nothing. It is a place of intense presence, a place of contentment (my interpretation). This film is a reaching toward that place’. I almost wish I hadn’t read the description. It reads to me in this moment like some bad advertising copy for the Singularity. The telos of ill-conceived AI enlightenment hubris. I loved the film washing over me, in images, music, language, voice, poetry. It’s awareness of scale, plurality, connection. 

# race-identity 

makes me think of Serres’ sweet night, ‘More beautiful than the day, peaceful by all means, the star-studded, pensive and soft night is a better model of knowledge than the sun-struck, cruel, exclusive, eye-hurting, ideologically prone and opinion-ridden light of day. ‘

/

I read this as a solid left historicization of a street level view of protest movements, with a due centering of George Floyd in the unusual conditions of a pandemic. It’s human scale and narrative shape familiar and also somehow ill fitting to the social flows and ecology of meaning produced in this stage of visual culture. I guess I’m grappling with scale and how to orient towards such massively distributed unfolding events. Or maybe I’m looking for discursive mixed media archives of polyvalent truths and insightful reflections.  Regarding the content I mostly nodded along to the agreeable synthesis of well rehearsed interpretations. I did feel as though there was a sense of ‘politics’ stalled at the righteous break shit demand change level, which in my measure seems like an intense and quickly dissipated event in relation to a larger ongoing need to develop and maintain lasting infrastructures of socioecological equity.

# nm-kunst-medien 

This looks interesting tonight https://renaissancesociety.org/events/1282/wendy-brown-and-jill-magid/

# race-identity 

I think the essay form is something I gravitate towards but would like to see it in a more dialogical relation in curated archives. Sometimes individuals, through generous citational practices kind of achieve this and if you look at someone’s social media output this kind of multi authored, mixed media archive emerges de facto. I’d like to see, perhaps instead of individual historicization, the cultivation of mixed media archives arranged thematically and developed over longer durations. This doesn’t need to be an individual endeavor either.

/

Re lasting infrastructures of socioecological equity I’m stalled at an inability to apprehend and articulate a politics commensurate with the scope of concerns I’m implicated in. At this juncture I’m simply trying to educate myself. I don’t have a solution. The prospect of a global regulatory body is terrifying and at the same time, I can’t imagine what else can meaningfully address planetary scale issues. For now identifying provisional models and testing them across different conditions feels promising. Also resisting models that reproduce familiar relations of exploitation and oppression...

/

yes, I think that is a fair description of a healthier pluralistic experience of life or tuning into one’s environment. There is an awareness of many perspectives and an embrace of the multiplicity. Theres something monolithic and regressive feeling about the technologically situated individual text as primary epistemology that’s hard to reconcile from this stage of visual culture. Like @gmak and I imagine most people, the majority of my understanding of the BLM resurgence during COVID came from highly differentiated media flows. I’m interested in how to wrest that proliferation of mediated energies out from the predatory vectoralist class and their byzantine algorithmic hellscape. 

I’m looking for a curated(?) range of personal experiences, structural critiques, mainstream coverage, on the ground footage, memes, gifs, details, archives, related historical texts, etc, etc contained in an enduring and discursive space, rhizomatically connected in the way that the internet inclines. I also danced at Lake Merritt in Oakland on Juneteenth after marching to the ports and listening to Angela Davis speak. Bittersweet and de-alienating experiences I remember in less cerebral terms. I think there’s some inertia from the Gutenberg and it’s cultural hegemony that’s colliding with a hyper capitalist enclosed social media environment that has distorted our sociality to its attentional economies and surveillance mechanisms.

# nm-raising-gen-alpha

wow. ‘Crystal renders based on real structures. Each NFT is 1/1, mirroring nature, that no two crystals grow exactly the same.’ troubling market machinations aside (the total financialization of life rendered in virtual space based on representation), this visual form seems well suited to educational applications. I’d like to be able to see more stones in this way and then learn more about them.

# race-identity 

its a confusing and familiar feeling, trying to hold space and meaningfully engage all the topics that are emerging here. i don’t mean any disrespect to the different conversations happening if i’m following one thread atm

/

Thanks @gmak, I so appreciate your openness, questioning, light touch and almost frictionless ability to hold multiple views. I’ve been struggling with local scale concerns as a beneficiary of asymmetrical power relations in the global north and even more particularly in an affluent area with a set of concerns that feel increasingly removed from world relations I feel implicated in. Just to write this I’m touching an almost immeasurable amalgamation of global flows and labor relations.

I also have some serious misgivings about the emergency crowdfunding stopgaps that flow towards landlords or medical expenses as I’m seeing them gain popularity. It feels like just another way to squeeze a little more from the already dispossessed. And while these things can ‘fill our lives and give our lives meaning’ I can’t escape the feeling that kind of meaning making is too limited in its ability to account for an interrelated planet, while in the case of crowdfunded rents and debts, further consolidating preexisting power relations. I participate in local mutual aid groups and do what I can but don’t feel satisfied with that level of politics and want to cultivate a greater responsibility towards, and alliance with, the less proximate people I’m sharing a common world with. Participating in this geographically distributed space rehearses this feeling of deterritorialized solidarity.

# nm-kunst-medien

Dark Red Forest, Jin Huaqing. 

Showing and streaming in festivals locally, or abroad with a VPN

The film follows thousands of Tibetan nuns on a 100 day pilgrimage and retreat to a severe winter plateau. Huaqing resists the impulse to follow a particular character or narrative. It felt instead immersive, shot over 5 years and taken with structure and textures. I watched it in a Johnson & Johnson vaccination fever dream, chanting and charnel grounds, sirens and cellphone haptics.

Watching the film I oscillated between thinking of it as curious, reverential and an indictment. A deep resentment welled up inside me watching gurus chastising nuns, dispensing platitudes and candies. Spiritual seekers alone in small huts in the harsh tundra, subjugated by lamas. 

One scene of a lone nun in tiny quarters considering simple loops, born in me a deep feeling of love and our common fragility. I imagine there is a world of nuance I’m missing from my occidental position and wonder what it means to make a film like this in China right now.

I watched the film while reading Xiaowei Wang’s Blockchain Chicken Farm, a chilling exploration of a rapidly changing China from within which this Tibetan culture is disappearing. I feel a deep sense of mourning at the overwhelmingly dispiriting spectrum of options. In sleep I return to sky burials and a diminishing chant of ‘I don’t want to be information’ that melts away like fragments of Heraclitus and dandelion pollen.

/

I streamed it though MoMA as part of the new directors series along with a film called Aleph that really reminded me of koyaanisatsi. You need a membership tho. If you search the film u can find where it’s playing in festivals and watch it / stream it locally or use a vpn to stream it elsewhere. Thank you for the Himalaya recommendation

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Really enjoying the Desus and Mero high culture turn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMhK9WcAdvk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzVNHA1mQwY

# nm-review-of-books

Some thoughts on Xiaowei Wang’s Blockchain Chicken Farm

Blockchain Chicken Farm 

This is a sort of travelogue primer, ostensibly for someone like myself—left, coastal, China curious—on the ‘Rural Revitalization’ and some of the recent historical context for its implementation. Xiaowei Wang, a Harvard and Berkeley educated editor of the critical tech journal Logic, and former Silicon Valley denizen, is our astute guide. They have a wonderful sensitivity to the emerging cultural phenomena and the neologisms racing to keep up. We’re treated to preliminary explications of metronormativity, KOLs, Taobao villages, blockchain, shejinglian (snake-shaped face), Face++, rural live-streaming and cyborg body modifications. They lead us through the connotative drift of concepts like ‘Shanzhai’ and ‘innovation’ and gesture towards the latent liberatory and repressive potentials residing therein.

Blockchain Chicken Farm offers a critical survey of emerging infrastructure that determines social and economic flows. From the hokou system, TVE’s, and the eWPT to programs like Skynet and The Real Population Platform—with its mission of ‘total social control’. They contour a narrative of tech optimized industrial agriculture that further dispossesses, displaces and drives a ‘floating population’ towards e-commerce schemes, precarious gig labor, urban village dwelling and what we might call the global trend towards vocational consumerism.

The book shifts between different nodes or granularities in global product chains. In one chapter, we follow plastic seeded, chemically treated, vacuum sealed ‘wish pearls’ engineered by a ‘disruptive’ oyster startup to their new homes in the Midwestern United States via live-streaming multilevel marketing sales schemes popular in China and catching on abroad. A globalized, rapidly shifting and culturally hybridizing condition hardly prepares us to evaluate QR tagged artesanal $40 chickens, dissident Peppa the Pig memes, and massive AI managed porcine farming operations. To what ends are we applying these new technologies? is a question that haunts the book, which concludes at precisely the dawn of our most recent zoonotic pandemic. 

Wang proceeds with sporting journalistic aplomb, offering thoughtful cautionaries and impassioned indictments—at times tipping into a platitudinous prescriptive register. My gripes with the writing are surely less interesting than the many sprawling topics on offer here to consider. Wang mobilizes a diverse coalition of theorists including Sylvia Wynter, Lauren Berlant, Audre Lorde, Frantz Fanon, James Boggs, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Lee Edelman and Thich Nhat Hanh, mapping concepts like quantifauxcation, the specter of ‘our children’, cruel optimism, and interbeing onto her subjects—applied and illuminating hybrid epistemes. 

I accompanied my partner to a small reunion in a tiny top floor apartment of a walkup on a beautiful tree lined street in Brooklyn. Our host from Shaanxi made hot pot for the occasion. The Chinese government had provided her a stipend to study abroad, and she would have been eligible for more if she hadn’t majored in set design at NYU. The stipend was also conditional on her returning to China to take a job—an initiative to mitigate brain drain and bolster knowledge economies. We took turns plunging our vegetables into the rolling spicy pots set on camping stoves on the handsome mid-century modern table. I passed around Blockchain Chicken Farm and introduced some of the subjects within. Our host tempered and elucidated, regaling us with stories of technological efficacy and curiosities—until the conversation turned towards the migrant laborers living in urban villages. Yes, your food comes in 15 minutes with app enabled deliveries—but that’s because a person in a cruelly optimized and gameified algorithmic system lives in a terrified state of unrelenting precarity. I got the sense our diverse group felt a common transnational trajectory of increasing technocracy. It isn’t hard, from this moment’s vantage, to imagine the near total expansion of algorithmic governance, with outrageously affluent administrators lording over an ever-shrinking middle class and a swelling precariat whose lives are determined by closed black box systems, in increasingly indiscrete virtual-physical space. 

/

and related talk at the Berkeley Center for New Media with An Xiao Mina https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74bHnouLp0U

# race-identity 

Thanks for sharing this, as usual Fred is so insightful. This position reminds me of a text from Judith Butler that takes up a Jewish critique of Zionism http://cup.columbia.edu/book/parting-ways/9780231146104

# irl-ny

I just saw this! It’s hard to keep up with all these different channels. I feel like I’m being trained out of interdisciplinary or intersectional thinking. I would have liked to see the Hanne Darboven show. It feels like Euclidean Stockholm syndrome, aesthetically upsetting and acutely Teutonic. Meaning turned numerical and asemic under orthogonal pressure. The anticipation of so many unpleasant aspects of the long modern data epoch we’re suffering through makes the adulation of this small milieu of conceptual artists confounding to me. I skipped the Denny show. I’m wearying of these 3D infographic pedagogical collectable installations. I love the criticism and visual experimentation in the realm of journalism(?) but the gallery shows seems tediously beholden to the logics and legacies of commodified institutional critique. Don’t hate the player... I suppose I’m looking for something more affective too with this COVID New York spring thaw. 

Grief and Grievance felt like a timely museum scale reflection on black suffering in the compromised language of the institution. A profound elegy to the great Okwui Enwezor. I sat again with Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, watching it loop, complicating with meaning. Loong Mah was my favorite rough and ready group show in a semi-secret non-traditional venue that I needed Andrea K. Scott to tell me about. It felt good to wander around buildings I’ve never been to in a lively Chinatown. It felt good to wait a half an hour for a table watching the scene at Kiki’s. I picked up a delicious loaf of fermented Japanese Shokupan bread from Anti Conquest Bread Co at Dimes that’s definitely worth mentioning. I learned the baker went to RISD and his bakery is named after Kropotkin.

I thought the inaugural triennial at the Asia Society was really solid, well presented and wish I saw the first installment. I wandered through MoMA taking in photos from a bourgeois prosumer mid century Brazilian photo club before walking through the dizzying matrix of random amateur videos in the Private Lives Public Spaces show. Archive fever. A thoughtful, intimate piece by David Hartt in the Reconstructions show called (after Borges) On Exactitude in Science (Watts). A video of a young artist dousing themself in shark pheromones and then diving underwater with a camera—have to pay back those student loans somehow! I bumped into Alex da Corte giving a tour to Big Birds wife of As Long as the Sun Lasts on the roof of the Met. The Alice Neel show left me a little cold. A singed photo from a hateful arson and a late painting called Ginny chilled me to my core. Liza Lou’s Kitchen at the Whitney was wonderful. I got a lot of shelf time at McNally and Printed Matter. A monograph of some beautiful paintings of animals by Dylan Solomon Kraus. A newer Sternberg title called Institution as Praxis—New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research that I’m looking forward to reading. May be relevant to the NM community... I had a beautiful afternoon in the Elizabeth Street Garden. A small part of me believes the fate of the whole planet is inextricably linked to the ability of this little ecology to flourish. When I get overwhelmed I go across the street to Lovely Day and have a cup of miso soup and a side of broccoli greens. Without the oyster sauce because the sugar is cloying. Oda House, the Georgian restaurant, has an upper east side location that’s like time traveling, where you can exchange breathless Iosseliani praise and eat transcendent adjaruli—imagine a flakey pastry boat filled with molten cheese that you stir a soft egg into and eat with the hull.

# race-identity 

Thank you for sharing. [The Iyko day art forum piece https://www.artforum.com/slant/iyko-day-on-asian-hate-through-the-prism-of-anti-blackness-85725] Really great perspective. These formulations resonate for me:

By contextualizing anti-Asian racism within a longer arc of capitalist development, I argue that understanding the racial discontinuities are as important as the continuities for determining our collective response. My purpose therefore is to clarify the specificity of Asian racialization as it exists on a settler-colonial terrain of anti-Blackness. Rather than create an equivalence between anti-Asian and anti-Black racisms, I underscore the asymmetries of racial difference that coalesce to reproduce the inequality, scarcity, and isolation that capitalism requires.

And...

Collectively, ending these forms of gendered racist violence would require an end to US empire: an end to militarism and policing, criminal punishment, state regulation of women’s bodies, and an economy based on violent relations of scarcity over plenty, individualism over interdependence. Alternatively, antidiscrimination and hate-crimes legislation represent what Ren-yo Hwang calls “carceral care,” punitive solutions that expand the power of prisons, borders, and bases that disproportionately target the very gendered, racialized bodies they purport to protect. Covid-19 still has much to teach us, perhaps most urgently that it is time to stop looking to the carceral state for the care and protection it cannot give.

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@gmak also it’s hard for me now  to not think about the slow mo scene in the matrix when I read a passage that’s illuminating

# nm-podcast-vol-2

Fascinating to listen to this exploration of what medium design could mean, especially in the context of New Models. I’ve been really interested in NM as a deterritorialized social assembly, at a juncture when the ‘clearnet’ hegemony has corrupted sociality to the degree where people are withdrawing en masse to experiment with other forms of digital-being-together. This group of 1000 or so self selecting art adjacent people have come together to messily rehearse, with all the limitations of the available tools and mediums, an extraphysical sociality. And this is no small thing. It seems to be in a tenuous moment of ascendency and asking its constituency to assess the organizational dynamics and operational structure. What started as a retreat to less predatory platforms—demonstratively appealing for those here—is coming up to the constraints of platform sovereignty in a monopoly space. Internally, delimited by structural forces, one could anticipate some oppositional positions concerning the interests of the hosts and the interests of a community whose active participation produces value. Implicitly, everyone participating at the nominal monthly fee and with varying degrees of social contribution find this presently agreeable, though scale and platform developments will continue to shift dynamics. It appears the popularity of the discord was somewhat unexpected and effectively forced the question of organizational structure. I’m inclined to suggest that the burden of reimagining social relations outside of vectoral capitalism doesn’t fall on the shoulders of this podcast. Though in light of the severity of the problems, the paucity of alternate models and the scope of interests that have emerged so far, the stakes feel high and the horizon of possibility exciting.

It’s interesting that Hakim Bey came up in the talk. The thrill of these nascent zones of experimentation is seductive. They tantalize with the feeling of a party you missed. They seem to always be relayed after the fact in a sepia tinged romantic revisionism. There seems to be a futural, aspirational, provisional quality that’s inherently anti-dogma and perhaps anti-telos, which seems useful and also difficult to reconcile with developing lasting infrastructures of socioecological equity. I wonder how these utopian experiments effect more enduring power structures. Keller’s slippery, sneaky, teflon, post-ethical snooker game of levers, multipliers, superbugs and theatrical language strikes me as an internalization of—or adaptation to—contemporary power relations. And perhaps this can also be a form of a resistance. I think Keller’s poetic obfuscation is a fitting response to the hegemonic doctrine of transparency. Her interdisciplinary blurring or queering or cross contamination of category is an artful protest. Her trembling, tragicomic, aspirational, relational provisionality I find a winning disposition. As well as the invitation to design socio-spatial levers that can reproduce in memetic space. I also wonder how much class contributes to creating the conditions for small rhetorical cyphers getting high on effusive poetics. There’s a question lingering of what art might mean or do in this moment. Is medium design, meme design, blockchain socialism, installation pedagogy, etc examples of contemporary art forms? It’s interesting to follow Daniel’s turn to crypto financial speculation from ‘post internet’ art. Also watching Julian’s music videos of people twerking with CGI effects. I’m totally prepared to understand this as contemporary art. Located beyond capitalist realism, in some realm of attentional libidinal virtualization. I also think a lot about how artful the podcast is, and how much goes into moderating a community.

I keep returning to Sianne Ngai’s ‘the becoming ergon of the parergonal discourse of evaluation’. Which seems in some ways to be what’s happening here. A collaborative, research based, dialogic archive as praxis. Perhaps a version of art making that extends beyond the neoliberal individual, needs a culture of ecological interdependent awareness to create the conditions for its flourishing...

A few things from this episode that might be interesting to develop further; Carly’s notion of the unquantifiable and resonant excesses of rumors. Julian’s media theory take on Catholicism’s use of visual culture towards syncretic and mutating propagation. Daniel’s thoughts on medium design as algorithmic and the potential of designed spatial experiments to be something like an inverted version of special economic zones. I initially shared Keller’s exasperated sigh of incredulity at the thought of a less game-able, less dumb black box currency that reintroduces social and ecological externalities, and also laud the efforts to think through alternatives from within the material present. That persistent paradox of Lorde’s, the dismantling the masters house with the masters tools. The sense that a version of elite technocratic or ideological complexity is at work in power cloaking and consolidating itself.

# irl-nyc

Me too, I was waiting for a really disaffected teenager to walk by but such is life. Also initially read this as you referring to me as a relative nobody. Which I actually like in this setting

# nm-podcast-vol-2

Does anyone know who’s funding strelka?

# irl-nyc

all good! just wanted to share a funny thought... and i’ve always loved that lepage scene

[image of Falconetti praying in The Passion of Joan of Arc]

# nm-podcast-vol-2

yikes this makes me nervous. i remember his quarantine urbanism piece a while back, which likely is foundational for the new book. his confidence about the life-or-death stakes of implementing massive new technology enabled infrastructures of surveillance, or rather legitimizing them, makes me uncomfortable. there was a casual dismissal of the concerns of these emerging big data biopolitics. I detected a contempt for human affect, paired with an almost euphoric embrace of tech solutionism. Delivered in a rhetorical barrage of self assuredness. Also did I understand correctly that he’s pro nuclear??

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not looking to be pleased. looking for nuanced conversations and a place to share misgivings about consequential subjects. i’m interested too.

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@LILINTERNET Yes he’s certainly brilliant, provocative and charismatic. And working for Russian oligarchs to soft pedal geoengineering projects, artisanal nuclear reactors and top down surveillance? His thinking feels in step with emergent scales of computational processing in a wave of what we might call big data intellectualism. If not rewarding, I feel a responsibility, a critical stance, towards understanding his positions. Certainly onboard with planetary scale systems of care, just very cautious as to how those behave and who is implementing them. 

/
Curious to know more about the humanist turn your mentioning @bryanw 
also if you feel like sharing the advanced copy...

/
https://strelkamag.com/en/article/18-lessons-from-quarantine-urbanism

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to which i replied yes he’s quite the contrarian. i suppose you could make the case that total surveillance is already here and now its a question of redistributing the access and coordinates of ‘sensing’ in more equitable ways

# nm-music

It’s not so much that I like this, but rather that it sounds like the fleeting Anthropocene death rattle of a romanticized interbeing from within the anesthetizing drones of virtual primacy 

https://shiningskullstudio.bandcamp.com/album/you-can-see-your-own-way-out

# nm-podcast-vol-2

Thank you. Lots of great insights in the Lovink piece [https://networkcultures.org/geert/2020/11/10/principles-of-stacktivism/] including this one: 

‘We only need to understand a bit about Moscow cultural politics why Bratton was hired to keep politics out while hiding this strategy with dazzling jargon and aesthetics. What we do not need is yet another Realpolitik or more violent globalist neo-liberal consensus. Our crumbling world is in urgent need of new vocabularies and visions. There will be no return to the old normal. But what happens when grandiose vistas block our view of the real existing interest groups and ideologies that feed — and feed off — contemporary theory production? What kind of politics of abstraction is going on here? There’s a fine line between empowerment through knowledge and techno-obfuscation of a planetary engineering class in the making...’ 

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I’m almost thru the book and organizing some thoughts to share here

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100% like @Trees said public data for cooperative solutions

/

Re: Revenge of the Real

This will likely be a much debated text in the coming year. Here are some preliminary thoughts that may also inform the forthcoming conversation with Bratton on the New Models podcast. 

A TLDR upfront; We are interdependent and facing planetary scale issues that need coordinated efforts to address. Bratton understands this, but with an evangelical fervor for techno science that dismisses all other epistemologies. 

We have to sift through 19 chapters of contempt and hubris to find minor insights about theoretical applications of data. These are delivered from on high in the abstract and appear disconnected to any political means of realization. 

Revenge of the Real places Bratton squarely in a seat—long cooled since god’s departure—of arbiter of the Real. From this comfortable if not comical perch, Bratton punches down on the history of collective action, philosophy, and human affect with the sense that anything that resists the primacy of ‘secular biopolitics’ administered by ad hoc alliances of private and state actors is reactionary religious, nationalist or liberal traditionalism— or kooky conspiracy. 

Sure, we can daydream about benevolent algorithms guiding us to a fully modeled and automated ecological planetarity with dignity for all. But why would we assume that the current power structures would be able to implement this equitably? Or that it’s even possible, let alone desirable? Lets not forget the engineer of spaceship earth, California tech libertarianism from which Bratton results has led us precisely to this moment of predatory internet monopolies and mass surveillance projects.

The book overdetermines the epidemiological view, making it a totalizing cosmology that legitimizes a centralized group of technocratic engineers implementing algorithmic authoritarianism based on a life-or-death state of exception. This downplays the cascading anthropogenic mass extinction event and all the other forms (and durations) of violence that coexist and create the conditions for this particular pandemic.

To begin redistributing wealth, opening borders, providing social safety nets, developing renewable energies, making cities livable, building efficient public transportation, dealing with the crisis of automobilism, and making education and the internet accessible actually doesn’t require more elaborate and energy consuming computer data modeling. Or rather, the computer modeling is parergonal to the socioecological resolutions that mobilize it. 

I actually read this text like a CV for the public relations departments of the data divisions of hegemonic power structures. Bratton seems to be offering his rhetorical services towards legitimization. A mercenary opportunist, cozying up to power and offering misdirecting critiques. I don’t know much about who’s funding Strelka and what their motivations are but I get the sense that its in the geoengineering business.

This pandemic has not simply demonstrated the need for more data collection and processing at the top levels. It has demonstrated the need to address the ongoing abuses of power and diminishing access to a life with dignity. What is not said explicitly anywhere in this text is that we need to open data, mutually determine the coordinates of what we are interested in, and share the results to be used collaboratively towards greater socioecological good.

There might be some insights to glean from this text, but the energy to unpack and examine all the reckless declarations makes it more a critical responsibility than a useful contribution.

/

I quickly move from anxiety to deconstruction when I’m confronted with this degree of self assuredness. Especially around such consequential issues. How much longer will we reward these kind of fallacious, falsely totalizing, undialectical flights of hubristic world building and destroying? I wonder if this kind of monolithic approach and the deconstructive response might be replaced or supplemented? Maybe with something softer? More generative? More inquisitive? More collaborative?

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I’m a big fan of James Bridle’s New Dark Age. I’m due to revisit it... also there’s a chapter in Bernhard Siegert’s Cultural Techniques (Fordham, 2015) called (Not) in Place: The Grid, or, Cultural Techniques of Ruling Spaces that I think pertains here. I came across it first in Walead Beshty’s canonical Picture Industry: A Provisional History of the Technical Image

# nm-music

lol same song or indiscrete art? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNLdBYvpiJk

I love this Keszler video v much. auteur level snap zooms

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https://open.spotify.com/album/6R94wqL4kDI5yXXRKTi0o3?si=vYsCoyGZSSyyPKX40cqAMw like a Fitbit got bored on a morning jog and started making concrète compositions out of biometrics and park sounds

[Kornél Kovács, Szenzus]

# nm-podcast-vol-2

Thanks Bryan, I think the idea of a coordinated planetary network that can help in mitigating health crises is a great ends to work towards. It’s Bratton’s approach—or disposition to borrow Easterling’s parlance—that I’m doubtful of. I also acknowledge that I read the book over the course of a day and wrote a response the following morning that wasn’t deeply considered. In reflecting back, the balance of the piece tilts more towards the ad hominem than I would have liked. It was hasty and provisional. I also think the joke that I made at the end wasn’t appropriate. The velocities of Internet discourse are overwhelming for me and I’m learning and practicing how to comport myself. The quotes you pulled are inoffensive and aspirational but fuzzy and take slogging through so much misplaced antagonism it doesn’t seem worth it. There wasn’t much that felt substantive in terms of how to implement these aspirational systems. Re: his funding I was careful to say I don’t know much about it, but it seems to be oriented towards planetary scale geoengineering projects, which I imagine is an enormous market that a lot of unsavory actors are angling towards. I think you can read Bratton a number of ways, and I don’t disagree with the idea that the wrong data is currently being collected. I also think he’s explicit about wanting to do more planetary scale sensing and modeling (more technology?) as well as unambiguously claiming the only way out of anthropogenic climate change is anthropogenic geoengineering (in the context of the preexisting power structures). I imagine a lot of people will have a similar response to mine and Bratton can likely anticipate more criticism along these lines.

# breaking-news

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/throttling-gaza?pc=1343

# nm-kunst-medien 

There was a really great conference the List center at MIT organized a couple weeks ago called Another World 

https://www.wassermanforum2021.com/videos

in the q&a i asked Hito Steyerl what she was giving attention to and she circulated this list later on to the people who attended. so much to dig into and think about. 

Website: Institute of Network Cultures

Project: DECODE

Publication: The Concept of Non-Photography, Francois Laruelle 2011, London.

Publication: The Great Offshore: Art, argent, souveraineté, gouvernance, colonialisme, RYBN

Collective: Clusterduck

Organization: Further Field

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@gmak the Lawrence Lek talk on his sinofuturist work dovetails with the some of the Iyko Day writing we were discussing.

# race-identity 

I caught Silvia on a panel this morning at Columbia called Decoloniality and the Politics of Time. She is such a treasure. I’ll share the recording link when it’s up. and here are the past talks and full program 

All the panels are available to stream until June 10th, 2021. The password is: decoloniality2021!

Keynote by Walter D. Mignolo, moderated by Alex Alberro:

https://tinyurl.com/5dzh7tuu

Mediating the Vernacular with Julia Bryan-Wilson and Rosalind C. Morris, moderated by Anooradha Siddiqi:

https://tinyurl.com/k3u46wty

Indigenous Cultural Production with Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, Pablo Lafuente and Elvira Espejo, moderated by Alessandra Russo:

https://tinyurl.com/4c5kwtdj

Politics of Hybridity with Allison Bigelow and Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, moderated by Pujan Karambeigi

https://tinyurl.com/4dzdd4te

Full Program:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/calendar/decoloniality-and-the-politics-of-history.html

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also is there a place here where people share time sensitive online events??

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thank you! it looks pretty active, i’ll keep an eye on it and share things there

# nm-kunst-medium 

i’d love to find a copy of the kate bush remix in the host and cloud, ideally in its entirety un cut but at least from the section that starts ~ 1:38…

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There is something fascinating to me in someone with quotidian means giving themselves artfully in their irreducible and opaque way to the rendering of their preoccupations and contingencies. And then there is also the thrill of collaborative or institutional projects that succeed in realizing cultural events, alternate imaginaries and articulated subjectivities at larger, discursive scales. I locate this earlier work of Huyghe’s in the institutionally bloated omphaloskepsis valley between. I went with my daughter to his LACMA retrospective in 2015, an immersive, sprawling, lightly participatory, heavily mediated, extra human ecology with performers and animals enlivening the space. It was a not uncomplicated pleasure haunted by the feeling Anuradha Vikram astutely formulated in her Hyperallergic review. ‘Huyghe’s resistance to interpretation is also a resistance to accountability, and his juxtaposition of white, affluent humans at play with animals in a state of subjugation demonstrates the shortcomings of radical thought as understood by Eurocentric men of leisure with limited recognition of the autonomy of any subject — human or otherwise — except themselves.’ And as far as ways to spend an afternoon in Los Angeles, I found the experience filled with wonder and plenty of interesting themes to discuss—if not able to meaningfully address the material conditions that occasioned it.

I was talking with a friend recently about Niki de Saint Phalle, in light of the PS1 show. I was joking that the garden in Tuscany felt like an anticipation of burning man art or the kind of place that Epstein would host a weekend soirée. The work of Huyghe and Saint Phalle both share an aura of privileged self indulgence. There seems to be a continuity here in an axis of power, sex, celebrity and money. For all the ecological or tarot-spiritual washing, there seems to some base libidinal drives and usual power dynamics. I could also easily enjoy both of their worlds for an afternoon. Does it follow that we should aspire to a more distributed condition of creative self and co determination? Or is it better to resist this scale of spectacular self indulgence? Writing this I’m also aware of the jouissance that attends this style of cultural commentary, it’s belonging to an overlapping class position. I’m grappling with my own ambivalence about writing and art. Compounding this is the sense that I have lost the coordinates that delimit art from intention. Such that I see criticism as critical art, politics as political art, geoengineering as geoengineering art, and all beholden to a gamified economy.

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@_caring Happy to hear your in a place of study and ordering books about relational aesthetics from the library. I’ve been there too! I’ll share some of my gleanings

I like this Grant Kester lecture as a primer https://vimeo.com/171072010

The Bourriaud is foundational 

Claire Bishops provocative Artificial Hells and an accompanying lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvXhgAmkvLs&t=1143s

Maria Lind is a great source for institutional models developed in social democratic contexts 

The Arte Util site has an amazing archive of social practice projects but the site seems to be down rn

And of course the canonical Hennessy Youngman YouTube lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yea4qSJMx4

# nm-live-party-room

https://breakingglass.staedelschule.de/ happening now

PROGRAM:

Friday, May 28, 2021

5:00–5:30 pm

Welcome and Introduction

Yasmil Raymond

Johan Bettum and Daniel Birnbaum

5:30–8:00 pm

Art in the New Era. The Virtual Turn

Michelle Kuo

Rachel Rossin

Tomás Saraceno with Peter Jäger and Yasmil Raymond

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

8:00–9:30 pm

Experiencing the Self: Space and the Virtual

Wolf Singer

Lundahl & Seitl

Yuk Hui

Saturday, May 29, 2021
12:00–12:15 pm

Introduction

Johan Bettum and Daniel Birnbaum

12:15–2:30 pm

Art and Architecture in Virtual Space

Space Popular

Vittorio Gallese

Ben Vickers

2:30–6:00 pm

Making Worlds Today

Elizabeth Diller

Thomas Metzinger

Sanford Kwinter

6:30–8:00 pm

Staging the Future

Simon Denny

iheartblob

Refik Anadol

Sunday, May 30, 2021

6:00–6:15 pm

Introduction

Johan Bettum

6:15-7:00 pm

Virtual Reality in Architecture

Greg Lynn

7:00–9:00 pm

Projects and contexts by students and alumni of Städelschule

David Bachmann and Ben Livne-Weitzman (WAVA)

Yara Feghali

Ainsley Johnston

Yeon Joo Oh and Haewook Jeong

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Happening now:

Hello friends,

Thank you for registering for tomorrow’s event: Big Ideas in Improvisation: Fred Moten and Vijay Iyer In Conversation. We’re excited that you will be joining us!

Below you will find the Zoom link for the event, which is taking place tomorrow (Friday, May 28th) at 7pm (EDT). Opening remarks will start promptly at 7pm, followed by Vijay Iyer and Fred Moten’s conversation and a moderated Q&A.

Please be advised that the talk will be recorded and may be used in part or full for IICSI research outputs and/or published in the IICSI Research Library. Zoom records only the active speaker, so keeping yourself muted will prevent you from being recorded, if this is a concern. We hope you will consider keeping your camera on, so that our speakers can see who they are talking to, but of course this is up to you.

Join Zoom Meeting: https://zoom.us/j/91262974542

Meeting ID: 912 6297 4542

Passcode: 773269

# nm-kunst-medien

I would like to amplify the work of Another Screen, an ‘irregular’ durational streaming project from Another Gaze, the feminist film journal started in 2016. They’re currently showing a collection of Palestinian films made by women, in addition to television work from and about Marguerite Duras. The curatorial scope and media presentation, overseen by Daniella Shreir, is timely and impressive. Kaelen Wilson-Goldie’s review in Artforum is a helpful guide to the substantial Palestinian film program. This agile response to the latest tragedies in the ongoing crisis in Palestine animates that which tends to disappear behind reportage and statistics—the textures, spirits, the unnamed and unbounded remainders. A theme of music runs through the program, perhaps most poignantly felt in Jumana Manna’s A Magical Substance Flows Into Me, a transgenerational kinship of diasporic lyrical ethnography. The Duras program is streaming until June 6th with some experimental television pieces and evocative late reflections. For a Free Palestine: Films by Palestinian Women is streaming until June 18th, with a virtual artist talk on June 7th. 

https://www.another-screen.com/

https://www.artforum.com/film/kaelen-wilson-goldie-on-for-a-free-palestine-films-by-palestinian-women-85981

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/another-gaze-presents-an-evening-with-palestinian-women-filmmakers-tickets-157132871649

# nm-review-of-books

I really appreciated Jesse McCarthy’s thoughts https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/on-afropessimism/

# nm-live-party-room

Unexpected Lessons

Decolonizing Knowledge and Memory on 11 & 12 June 2021

»The Western Archive is exhausted!« — Felwine Sarr What can knowledge be today, beyond European knowledge systems? New perspectives and different questions are needed in order to break up colonial thought patterns and challenge Eurocentric, white views. The Project TALKING OBJECTS aims to negotiate these questions on the African continent and in Germany. Five thematic fields are in the foreground: decolonizing memory, decolonizing knowledge, the re-evaluation of objects from colonial contexts, empowerment by and opportunities of artistic perspectives, and questions about classical museum forms of preservation and presentation.

Friday, 11 June 2021

1.30 pm — Welcome Remarks Mahret Ifeoma Kupka, Isabel Raabe (Curators of UNEXPECTED LESSONS), Jim Chuchu, Njoki Ngumi (The Nest Collective), Chao Tayiana (Curators of the programme in Nairobi)

2.00 pm — Keynote Recreating Ecologies of Knowledge: Nana Oforiatta Ayim (writer, art historian, filmmaker)

2.30 pm — Keynote Music, Knowledge and Transmission: Felwine Sarr (Economist, Musician)

3.00 pm — Talk Epistemic shift in Memory and Knowledge Conversation with Nana Oforiatta Ayim and Felwine Sarr. Moderation: Aïcha Diallo (Cultural scientist)

4.00 pm — Sound Performance Elsa M’bala

4.30 — Film A New England Document. By Che Applewhaite

5.00 pm — In Nairobi: Decolonization Labour is emotional Labour Vox Pops — Sentiments on the Street What I Felt / What I Said — Artistic Presentation Interactive Discussion

6.30 pm — Sound Performance Elsa M‘bala

7.30 pm — Artist Talk Who heals here? with Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro and Elsa M’Bala. Moderation Magnus Elias Rosengarten (Artist, writer)

8.30 pm — Performance Where is your Fire? Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro

Saturday, 12 June 2021

11.00 pm — Talk Black (European) Studies - Mapping Academia Natasha A. Kelly (Sociologist), Peggy Piesche (Cultural Scientist), Vanessa Eileen Thompson (Sociologist), Moderation: Mahret Ifeoma Kupka (Curator, art historian)

12.30 pm — In Nairobi: The Other Objects Renaming

1.00 pm — Film Un-Documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder by Ariella Aisha Azouley

2.00 pm — De-Westernization - On African Philosophy Digital Input with Nadia Yala Kisukidi (Philosopher)

2.30 pm — Poetry Performance Opowu Stefanie-Lahya Aukongo (Poet, curator, singer)

3.30 pm — Colonialities and Education in Museums Input Carmen Mörsch and Nora Landkammer (Cultural mediators and art educators)

4.15 pm — In Nairobi: The Other Objects A New Behaviour

5.00 pm — Break and Film a so-called archive by Onyeka Igwe

5.30 pm — Repenser l’histoire d’art / Re-considering Art History Bénédicte Savoy (Art historian), El Hadji Malick Ndiaye (Art historian, curator) Moderation: Ibou Coulibaly Diop (Literary scholar) 

7.00 pm — In Nairobi: Becoming Kaspale Performance Syowia Kyambi

# nm-podcast-vol-2

This episode skims over such a wide field of concerns. The discord blooming with rhizomes below. I woke up and my phone said it was 4:33. There’s so much noise in my mind I can barely hear anything. Outside its unseasonably warm with a precarious swaying of eucalyptus and the thinning calls of diminishing birds. A Michel Serres night. I open a laptop and I’m reminded of the compromises I make. The auto-generated alphanumeric domain with hollow evocations of aromatics and stone fruit. I close that window and open a document that overlaps several hard-to-reconcile others. Some flowery copy for high end real estate, a parataxis from a tech startup website and a list of books not available to me through the local library. Transnational cosmopolitanism : Kant, Du Bois, and justice as a political craft, Secularism and cosmopolitanism : critical hypotheses on religion and politics, Crossing Empires : Taking U.S. history into transimperial terrain, Art and postcapitalism : aesthetic labour, automation and value production, Writing anthropology : essays on craft & commitment, Originalcopy : post-digital strategies of appropriation, and The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction. These days I’m mostly reading things with colons in the titles. 

My desktop background is a Bosch scene, an almost self portrait, with an owl like Minerva, or Benjamin’s angel, turned towards the skyward piling debris as it’s blown into the future by a storm he called progress. Significant icons placed on the surface, like overlays on a Kerry James Marshall painting. I think it was the comments from @r___g that woke me up this morning. The reverberations from the crisis in Palestine. A nuanced and generative agonism in left, anti-zionist circles. The pod and discord weave tapestries of breaking news, memetic neologisms, celebrity gossip, crypto speculation, hot takes and subcultures that actually seem commensurate with the algorithmic scope of attentional economies we almost involuntarily mediate. It’s a thin tapestry, not enough to keep warm, and of course ‘we’ is always a challenging category. Early on in the pandemic I went to a san pedro ceremony at a tech incubator in Palm Springs with a cartoon shaman and a pop star from South Asia in a borrowed Tesla. I convinced myself I was working on a Didion-esque slouching towards the anthropocene piece and spent most of the time discouraging a tech entrepreneur from space colonization plans. His orbiting space colonies would be peopled with 15,000 demographically like.

It occurs to me that my floating space colony—my narrowly defined ‘we’—might look a little bit like New Models. A frustrated and curious creative class ready to tease out meaning—or at least register the immanence of contemporary phenomena like the range of Lana Del Ray’s domain-squatting dad’s domain names, the semiotics of Corporate Memphis, the pastel psychogeographies of fertility startups, Trump’s alleged former Kabbalah teacher and the developing ‘Yuk Hui as daddy’ episteme. I sometimes feel like I’m addicted to the thrills of what we might call a technology-multiplied horizon of ecological reckoning. It’s interesting that this episode is called Earth Flatteners and takes up a multiplicity of relating concepts. Rage bait, compression, UFO sightings, Alegria design, hyperloops, lab leaks, psyops, digital yuan, affects, ethics, attention, financialization—wait... did I just join a cult? How am I going to explain this to my friends? Is anyone else getting recommended videos with Jordan Peterson? I suppose ecologically speaking it’s all related. My mind is circling back to OOO and flat ontologies. Maybe this offers some practices for decentering humans and existentially redefining our relationship to the material earth. At least maybe we can return to the terrestrial critical zone that Latour likes to theorize within. This zone and likely any ontology—object or otherwise—is lumpy, no? In the Easterlingian sense, and allows for the coexistence of many partial and paradoxical truths...

Les, what are you doing? Come back... I’m cold... 

# nm-kunst-medien

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/arts/design/hito-steyerl-pompidou.html

JF: I almost feel bad asking you about N.F.T.s, but as someone who has ruthlessly probed art’s relationship to financial speculation and to crime, you must find them familiar.

HS: At the moment, art is an excuse, or a pretext maybe, to roll out the infrastructure: the cryptoinfrastructure, the Web 3.0 infrastructure. And the slogan is this magic spell of the N.F.T. It’s really a magic spell, because it doesn’t mean anything! It just means: I own you, and somehow, by magic cryptoincantations, I will enter it on the blockchain. But because it sounds complicated or high-tech, it draws so much attention, right? It’s just basically a mechanism of disinformation. The more confusing it gets, the more attention is drawn or used up by it.

JF: It really does seem that the rhetoric around N.F.T.s — and around crypto more generally, I’d say — draws so much on the modernist figure of the artist. Individual creativity, free of institutions, finally unleashed.

HS: I mean, I’m witnessing it at least for the third time: this implementation of new infrastructure with the same kind of sloganeering and propaganda. “It will be more democratic. It will be more accessible. There will be equal opportunity. Everyone will get information. The middlemen will be taken out.” I mean, how often am I going to hear it? How often are people going to fall for it?

The first time I heard it was during the first so-called “internet revolution,” in Serbia. You can look at Serbia now, 20 years later, and see whether all of this has come true. Then it was the beginning of social media, the Arab Spring, Iran. But the same rhetoric of technology automatically leading to progress and more equality is being deployed yet again. With N.F.T.s, it is basically the same. The only difference is that now we’re hearing it from Paris Hilton.

# nm-music

this lecture from Marcus Boon might relate, he does some interesting things with a politics of vibration and bringing Kristeva’s abjection to Tyler,  the Creator

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEQR4WuTx9k