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Humanities

Claus Pias (ed.)

Cybernetics

“To refuse to think without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking.”

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...

epistemology
historic documents
computational sciences
computer science
media theory

Current Texts

Ornamentation is the body of our thought

Elena Vogman

With Bely, a continuum is continuously produced between visceral organic states, political states of society and meteorological states of the world. OPEN
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Malte Fabian Rauch

Philosophy is found wanting. It is considered anachronistic, some say dead. The tradition is in ruins. ABO

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

We rehearsed the crowd scenes in the Winter Palace, in the Throne Room and the Armorial Hall. ABO

Maria Filomena Molder

So many egoists call themselves artists…

Words are human things; a great obscurity saturates them… OPEN
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Current Texts

Dieter Mersch

Digital disrupture

The machine remains alien to any mechanical limitation.

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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Current Texts

From xenolinguistics to cephalopods

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable?

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utopia
science fiction
communication
communication media
semiotics and semiology
linguistics

Current Texts

Michele Pedrazzi

Il testo ignoto è una promessa

Cosa porterà il prossimo bit? Sconvolgenti novità? Semplice ridondanza?

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music
electronic music
time
reading
media theory

New releases

Anna Kipke (ed.), Iryna Kovalenko (ed.), ...: Drafts in Action

Eyal Weizman, Ines Weizman: Before & After

Mathilde Arnoux (ed.), Maria Bremer (ed.): Westkunst, 1981

Muriel Fischer (ed.), Sandra Frimmel (ed.), ...: Global Narratives of Russian Disinformation

Sigrid Adorf (ed.), Sønke Gau (ed.), ...: going public.

Observing the Spectator

Anthology

Das Gedächtnis des Auges in Kunst und Wissenschaft

Nachbilder sind optische Phänomene, mit denen das Sehen sich selbst in den Blick nimmt. Seit der Empirismus im 18. Jahrhundert die Subjektivität der Wahrnehmung erschloss, traktierten Wissenschaftler, Künstler und Philosophen ihre Augen, um sie nicht als Empfänger, sondern als Erzeuger von Licht- und Farbphänomenen zu erfahren. Als im buchstäblichen Sinne verkörperte...

Werner Busch (ed.), Carolin Meister (ed.)

Nachbilder

Anthology

Involving the Beholder

The invention of depicting figures participating in an event — nameless bystanders, beholders, and onlookers — marks an important change in the ways artists addressed the beholder of the artworks themselves. This shift speaks to a significant transformation of the relationship between images and their audience. The public in the...

Beate Fricke (ed.), Urte Krass (ed.)

The Public in the Picture / Das Publikum im Bild

Anthology

Kunst und Gesellschaft

Die Ausstellung ist in den letzten Jahrzehnten zu einem der erfolgreichsten kulturellen Ereignisse avanciert. So zumindest scheint es angesichts der Vielzahl neuer Museumsbauten, der globalen Verbreitung sogenannter Biennalen und dem zunehmenden Maß an medialer und diskursiver Aufmerksamkeit, das der bildenden Kunst zuteil wird. Worin aber gründet dieser Erfolg? Welche gesellschaftliche...

Carolin Meister (ed.), Dorothea von Hantelmann (ed.)

Die Ausstellung

Anthology

Zu Jacques Lacans Bildtheorie

»Weil das Bild jener Schein ist, der behauptet, er sei das, was den Schein gibt, steht Platon auf gegen die Malerei als eine Aktivität, die mit der seinen rivalisiert. Dieses andere ist das ›klein a‹, um das ein Kampf geführt wird, dessen Seele die Augentäuschung ist.« (Jacques Lacan) Der materialreiche Band...

Claudia Blümle (ed.), Anne von der Heiden (ed.)

Blickzähmung und Augentäuschung

Topics

Choreographing multitudes
- crowd psychology
- social networks
- crowd
- social movements
- swarm model
- protest movements
minima oeconomica
Analysen und Kritik moderner Ökonomie, deren Wissenschaft und Legitmation im Zeitalter der Finanzialisierung
- economization
- economics
- discourse history
- economy
- financial markets
- financial crisis
THINK ART? THINK ART!
Wissen-Nicht-Wissen
- ignorance and non-knowledge
- literary studies
- epistemology
- idleness
- astonishment
- poetology of knowledge
- potentiality
- poetics
- history of knowledge
- experiment

Current Texts

Felix Stalder

Subjectivation and Authenticity

It is human selection that turns a machine selection that is meaningless because of its compilation criteria into a (potentially) meaningful narrative.

ABO DE

Current Texts

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem

Guy Debord was the avant-garde’s Christ.

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem looks back and ahead in the light of the spectacle of aesthetic capitalism, which has become even more unfettered since Debord’s death.

ABO FR DE

Current Texts

Black Panther is an American, not an African story

A.K. Kaiza

In another era, the mish-mash presentation of Africa would have been the focal point of criticism. But this is not the age for facts. OPEN
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Sina Dell’Anno

“He always read Priam instead of ‘prime’.” OPEN
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Dan-el Padilla Peralta

it seemed like we’d just been in some horrible dream OPEN
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Sandra Frimmel

What does it mean? ABO DE

Should we abandon the cosmopolitan idea?

Zairong Xiang (ed.)

minor cosmopolitan

minor cosmopolitan takes the “ism” out of “cosmopolitanism.”

Around the turn of the millennium, academics and politicians predicted that the world would grow together as one and that people would become less bound by national affiliations. Almost twenty years later, there is little left of this vision. This is not such a surprise when we consider that the cosmopolitan ideal (as articulated during the European Enlightenment) wholeheartedly embraced the promises of a globalising economy, yet has remained oblivious to, and even complicit with, capitalist exploitation, slavery, and colonialism....