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Humanities

The biggest bite out of the fruit of Knowledge
The biggest bite out of the fruit of Knowledge

Claus Pias (ed.)

Cybernetics

Although aspects of cybernetics can be traced back to various points in history, the proceedings of the so-called Macy Conferences, which have been edited for this volume, represent its modern foundational document. Held between 1946 and 1948 under the cumbersome title “Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems,” the papers delivered at these conferences were soon thereafter, at least as of 1949, referred to as contributions to cybernetics. Sponsored by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation (which was...
  • media theory
  • epistemology
  • historic documents
  • computer science
  • computational sciences
Current Texts

Dieter Mersch

Digital disrupture

We really need an analysis of algorithmic conditions and their paradoxes and ambiguities that gives them an adequate framework and horizon. But instead we currently seem to be finding an algorithmic solution of the algorithmic, much as digital solutions are being offered for the problems of the digital public sphere, in the way that IT corporations, for example, use exclusively mathematical procedures to evaluate and delete “fake news,” inappropriate portrayals, or the violation of personal rights. This tends to result in a circularity that leaves the drawing of boundaries and raising of barriers solely to programming, instead of restoring them to our ethical conscience and understanding of what the social could mean today. The machine, by contrast, remains alien to any mechanical limitation—just as its inability to decide lies in the impossibility of self-calculation. The nucleus of digital culture should instead be sought where the cultural of culture is located:...

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Topics
  • Choreographing multitudes

    Choreographing multitudes

    • swarm model
    • protest movements
    • social networks
    • social movements
    • crowd psychology
    • crowd
  • Color and meaning

    Color and meaning

    Who is afraid of Red, Yellow, Blue…?

    • image and imagery
    • color
    • monochrome
    • chromatics / colour science
    • semiotics and semiology
  • Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    • poetics
    • poetology of knowledge
    • literary studies
    • idleness
    • ignorance and non-knowledge
    • epistemology
    • astonishment
    • experiment
    • history of knowledge
    • potentiality
  • THINK ART? THINK ART!
Current Texts

Andreas L. Hofbauer

The yoke of being, noteworthy dis-position

It wasn’t nature and its dangers that forced domestication and enabled the economic shrine. Temple and funerary cult, sacrifice and distribution of the meat—for Homer all sacrificial animals were still hieria, holy creatures—and the containment of wildness led to symbolic and socio-cultural change, which became the vector and motor of sedentary, food-producing communities. It wasn’t sheep, goats, or cattle that were domesticated first; it was the zoon logon echon itself that bowed to the self-created yoke of the cult. Why, we don’t know. Beyond this it’s important that unlike plants only very few species of animal can be domesticated, and that this shouldn’t be confused with taming. Economic significance develops as an epiphenomenon. It transforms from possible human sacrifice to animal sacrifice to the distribution of meat in early “Greek” antiquity, then to the obeloi (skewers with varying amounts of meat, as tokens for the priests’ or judges’ portion; even...

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  • economization
  • ethnology
  • anthropology
  • money

 

The Cultural Logic of Environmentalization
The Cultural Logic of Environmentalization

Mathias Denecke (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...

Liquidity, Flows, Circulation

Today, it has become a truism that capital circulates, that data, populations and materials flow, that money offers liquidity. These terms appear crucial for any description of our contemporary situation, whether in economics, media studies, or contemporary art. This book asks whether the preponderance of talk of flow, liquidity, and circulation is an expression of the cultural logic of today’s environmental capitalism.
  • art
  • cultural critic
  • capitalism
  • digital media
  • digital culture
Current Texts
Blood!

Ines Kleesattel

Blood!

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  • painting
  • art history
  • body
  • gaze
  • subjectification
  • gender
  • feminism