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“Obsessed with buffering”
“Obsessed with buffering”

Tom McCarthy

Recessional—Or, the Time of the Hammer

Towards the end of Thomas Pynchon’s mammoth 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, the stumbling ingénue of a hero Tyrone Slothrop sets off on a commando raid. The territory he and his cohorts move through is a giant ­metropolis, a “factory-state” in which capital, technology and power, perfectly co-calibrated, send airships drifting through urban canyons, past chrome caryatids and roof-gardens on skyscrapers that themselves shoot up and down on ­elevator-cables: a conurbation ­Pynchon calls the “City of the Future” or “Raketen-Stadt.” The...
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“Poetry must be made  by all. Not by one.”

Mário Gomes

“Poetry must be made by all. Not by one.”

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Language can never be private

Johannes Binotto

Language can never be private

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Yes, magic exists!
Yes, magic exists!

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.)

A Sinister Assassin

Antonin Artaud’s very last work, prior to his death in March 1948, is the most extraordinary element of his entire body of work – and is the element now most enduringly inspirational, for contemporary artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers, choreographers, and others inspired by Artaud – through its fiercely exploratory, extreme and combative forms, along with its dissolutions and negations of forms, focused above all on the human anatomy, as well as on sonic experimentation and on provocations for innovation in...
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Humanity is a metahuman concept.

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

Humanity is a metahuman concept.

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Zoran Terzić

Everything new is a pose in the alcoves of capital

In the late nineteenth century Alfred Jarry created a prototype of the modern wannabe in his pot-bellied Père Ubu, a figure that raises entitlement to a high art. Ubu doesn’t want to be king; others urge him to it. But he is also the others. And when he does become king, CEO, or US president, he doesn’t know what it means, or if it means anything at all. He just states his claim. And so he shimmies from statement to power. And having obtained power, Ubu decerebrates the world, exposing the grounds for groundlessness, to paraphrase Ortega y Gasset. Ubu is a tautomaniac, that is, he can be explained in his own terms and is thus always in the right (being in the right is all he is). He needs no proof, but on the contrary wants “to turn the absurd into the highest power of thought” (Deleuze & Guattari)....

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