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Zoran Terzić . Die Verallgemeinerung des Menschen . . . . . Kai van Eikels . Macht kaputt, was Demokratie kaputt macht . . . . . Michael F. Zimmermann . Courbet als Assyrer . . . . . A. L. Kennedy . What is an Author? . . . . . Mengia Tschalaer . Queere Räume . . . . . Artificial and Other Intelligences . . . . . Marlene Streeruwitz . Der Autor ist nicht die Autorin . . . . . Tom McCarthy . Toke My Asymptote – oder: die ekstatische Agonie des Erscheinens . . . . . Claire Fontaine . Vers une théorie du matérialisme magique . . . . . Mengia Tschalaer . Queer Spaces . . . . . Tom McCarthy . Toke My Asymptote – or, The Ecstatic Agony of Appearance . . . . . Kai van Eikels . Do in What's Doing, Democracy in! . . . . . Claire Fontaine . Towards a Theory of Magic Materialism . . . . . . Present.Perfect. . . . . . . Present.Perfect. . . . . . Zoran Terzić . The Grand Generalization . . . . . Felix Stalder . Feedback als Authentitzität . . . . . Marlene Streeruwitz . L'auteur n'est pas l'auteure . . . . . A. L. Kennedy . Was ist ein Autor? . . . . . A. L. Kennedy . Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur ? . . . . . Felix Stalder . Feedback as Authenticity
Web Magazine
Each showroom has a couple of “managers”.
Do I really know the person I’ve watched every day on screen for months? I know many things, like where he is, where he comes from, what his home looks like, when he gets up and sleeps, etc. But do I really know him? ABO DE
Practice in collective destruction

Kai van Eikels

There is no responsibility-bearing demos without participation in political action. OPEN
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Ecstasy of inauthenticity

Tom McCarthy

The ironic self-awareness of the poet can only be that of his own inauthenticity, repeated or fed back into itself at increasingly conscious levels, and ‘to know inauthenticity is not the same as to be authentic’. ABO DE
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DIAPHANES No. 11
DIAPHANES Magazine No. 11

On Gestational Communism

“If you love your family, you want family abolition for them!” ABO DE

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

Surrogate Abolition

Bang Bang Baroque

On the first gaze the works of Emma Waltraud Howes seem incongruously out of time. Visiting her studio, one enters... ABO

Emma Waltraud Howes

Questionnaire Emma Waltraud Howes

Pregnancy is the weirdest condition

The seahorse is the chosen metaphor for pregnant trans men ABO DE

I.V. Nuss

The Love in the Convex, in Absolute Roundness and the Sluttification of All Men West of the Bosporus

DIAPHANES No. 10
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 10

Capitalism sucks. Tag everything.

it seemed like we’d just been in some horrible dream OPEN
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Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Junk Philology. An Anti-Commentary

The Disobedience of the Word

“He always read Priam instead of ‘prime’.” OPEN
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Sina Dell’Anno

Punk / Philology

“Fuck that thing.” That’s all punk needs.

“The thing about punk is that you’re allowed to talk about anything. Kids can talk about whatever they want. There’s... OPEN
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Donatien Grau, James Spooner

Afropunk Philology

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear? OPEN
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Kim Gordon

The Pitch

All that pent up terror and rage

A stupid tweet by a nobody, meant as a parody, somehow goes viral and the internet offers up death threats. OPEN
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Dodie Bellamy

Plague Widow

DIAPHANES No. 8/9
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 8/9

Subjectivation and Authenticity

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

Felix Stalder

Feedback as Authenticity

Practice in collective destruction

We recklessly count on ethics coming from somewhere other than a practice only offered by party politics or activism, from which the majority population excludes itself. The panic invocation of Christian values shows the extent of the dilemma here: please come up with something, anything, that will make people behave... OPEN
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Kai van Eikels

Do in What's Doing, Democracy in!

Each showroom has a couple of “managers”.

Do I really know the person I’ve watched every day on screen for months? I know many things, like where... ABO DE

Present.Perfect.

Critique of generic rationality

The programs “sense” how the clients function, but not because AI is becoming more human—rather because clients now function as... OPEN
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Zoran Terzić

The Grand Generalization

Ecstasy of inauthenticity

The question of authenticity and I go back some way; we’re old sparring partners – frenemies. It’s been a fraught relationship, shot through with paradox and misconstruing. My first novel, Remainder, does turn around its protagonist’s obsession with becoming ‘real’, inhabiting his era or his city, building, skin, movements and... ABO DE

Tom McCarthy

Toke My Asymptote – or, The Ecstatic Agony of Appearance

DIAPHANES No. 6/7
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 6/7

Charlemagne Rides through Paris

Facebook’s algorithm has served up memories of my Turkish travels often enough, but now it’s taking countermeasures and suddenly presenting quite different entries from my so-called timeline. For example, this blurred photograph of an equestrian statue of Charlemagne, unfortunately barely visible, with vassals. I had noticed him a few years ago...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 6

Why should this be art?

I Hate the Avant-Garde. When an artist as self-ironic and self-reflective as Yuri Albert makes such a statement about art, then skepticism is called for. Like his overall series Elitist-Democratic Art, the title deliberately plays with simple affirmations and negations, and at the same time exhibits the inherent receptive dilemma... ABO DE

Sandra Frimmel

I Hate the Avant-garde

How could Dante be avant-garde?

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers

What is the Meaning of the Avant-garde’s Death?

When life’s hard, time’s a motherfucker going slow

In his photographs and texts, ­Calcutta-based Soham Gupta forces the tension that arises between fiction and real-life conditions in as... ABO DE FR

Soham Gupta

Angst

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... ABO FR DE

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem

Tomb for Guy Debord

DIAPHANES NO. 5
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 5

350 000 000 photographs onto Facebook everyday

The idea of making the world more open and connected has degenerated to a business concept. OPEN
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Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck

What we don’t see

I remember

So wie geplant kommt es ja selten, meistens ergibt sich etwas halt so. Das ist weniger der Zustand der Welt als eine mutlose Haltung und Rechtfertigung, dafür, dass man sein Leben nicht selbst forsch in die Hand genommen hat. Es sind die höheren oder die hinterhältigen Mächte, Schicksal. Die Suche nach...

Fritz Senn

Das Leben besteht aus gestrandeten Konjunktiven

“Can you imagine something like that?”

The curators were probably worried that someone would stumble carelessly up the stairs while looking at the exhibits—could I simply have gone past the first object at the bottom? Number 1, “Formless Veil, curtain …” Must have been attached to the wall just between the entrance and exitus … “My... OPEN
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Axel Dielmann

The Dressmaker

Behind the Great Firewall

I sit in the lobby of a hotel in China where I am accommodated along with other guests of an academic colloquium. Set in the middle of a vaguely Tuscan landscape, it includes a golf course, a thermal spa, and an extensive colony of holiday homes. Skyscrapers and the Yellow...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 5

Blood!

Thérèse ayant douleurs menstruelles could be a beginning. OPEN
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Ines Kleesattel

Art, Girls, and Aesthetic Freedom Down Below

DIAPHANES No. 4
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 4

Artificial and Other Intelligences

Facebook’s picture tumbler is currently reminding me of my first visit to China a year ago. I was impressed: so many skyscrapers, so many people, so much technology! And such wonderful noodle soups! I put a few impressions on my Facebook timeline, even though Facebook is blocked by China’s Great...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 7

So many egoists call themselves artists…

“So many egoists call themselves artists,” Rimbaud wrote to Paul Demeny on May 15, 1871. Even though that is not always obvious, ‘I’, the first person, is the most unknown person, a mystery that is constantly moving towards the other two, the second and third persons, a series of unfoldings... OPEN
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Maria Filomena Molder

The Alms of Time

I really should not have hired him…

I really should not have hired him, but he seemed like he could fill in for my regular cook. Schneider had called in sick it seemed like it could drag on, so I took him on without too much fuss. He was a stocky, small man who could speak only... ABO DE FR

Jochen Thermann

The Assistant Chef

Black Panther is an American, not an African story

In another era, the mish-mash presentation of Africa would have been the focal point of criticism. But this is not... OPEN
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A.K. Kaiza

An Annotated History of Wakanda

غریبه‌ها غریبه‌ها

Etrange (غریب) در زبان فرانسوی از ریشه لاتین extraneus به معنای «خارجی» در برابر داخلی intraneus است. آنچه از خانه نیست unheimlich (امر غریب) از heim (خانه) نیست از منزل نیست در طرف دیگر دروازه fores است foreigner (خارجی)، خارج از ضرب و زیادی است odd (زاید) ناهنجار نامعمول نادر... OPEN
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Jean-Luc Nancy

Zah Zuh

DIAPHANES NO. 3
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 3

Corporate Love

Gilles Rotzetter

Corporate Love

Facebook’s Just a Nail Studio

I noticed this pattern for fingernail decoration four years ago in the window of a “nail studio” in Salisbury, south-west England. Nail studios had begun to interest me because I supposed them to be something like sociological indicator plants. How dumb or despairing must a women be to want to...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 3

Ornamentation is the body of our thought

With Bely, a continuum is continuously produced between visceral organic states, political states of society and meteorological states of the... OPEN
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Elena Vogman

Dynamography, or Andrei Bely’s Rhythmic Gesture

After This Comes That Before That Comes This

Wolfgang Plöger

After This Comes That Before That Comes This

­Pioneering!

"Trying to compete in the economy of attention from the field of contemporary art is a naive goal in the... OPEN
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Manuel Franquelo

An interview with Manuel Franquelo

DIAPHANES NO. 2
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 2

Humanity is a metahuman concept.

We are bodies. It makes no sense to debate this. OPEN
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Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

On Realism

Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

The key to survival will lay in female hands. OPEN
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Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

Venice, Lagos, and the Spaces in between

How about some string?

I said “Would you like a rope? You know that haul you have is not secured properly.” “No,” he said, “but I see you have string!” “If this comes into motion—” I said, “you should use a rope.” “Any poison ivy on that? ” he asked me, and I told him my rope... ABO DE

Diane Williams

Bang Bang on the Stair

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

“Nuestro Norte es el Sur” = “Our North is the South.” OPEN
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Mário Gomes

The Poetics of Architecture

About ‘how we treat the others’

“There is something deeply humiliating in such a situation.” OPEN
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Artur Zmijewski

Conversation on “Glimpse”

DIAPHANES No. 1
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 1

Paradox I: That all things kill themselves

To affect yea to effect their owne deaths, all living are importun’d. Not by Nature only which perfects them, but by Art and education which perfects her. Plants quickned and inhabited by the most unworthy Soule, which therfore neyther will, nor worke, affect an end, a perfection, a Death. This...

John Donne

Paradox I

Part Dieu. The Painting of Francisco Sierra

You have to imagine Francisco Sierra as a cheerful painter. ABO DE

Michael Heitz

Another New God in Parts

The matrix for »Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats«

“This text was written at the end of 1962, after my return from Algeria. For me the text is the... OPEN
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Pierre Guyotat

The Prison

I remember

I remember during the frozen Tokyo winter of 1997: I took long walks in the dead of night through the Shinjuku Kabuki-cho district of endless bars, subterranean clubs and abandoned cinemas with Donald Richie, the American writer and film-maker, already in Tokyo for over forty ­years at that moment and...

Johanna Went

I remember (Johanna Went)

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CLOUD NAMES

Cumulus tuba ; Cirrus cumulonimbogenitus ; Wallcloud ; Bannerwolke ; Föhnfische ; mother-of-pearl cloud ; Altocumulus translucidus ; Stratocumulus castellanus ; Cumulus mediocris ; Punch-hole nuage ; Cumulonimbus calvus ; Iridescent cloud ;   Nuage nacré ; Altostratus pannus ; Cirrus floccus ; Schäfchenwolke ; Instabilité (cirrus) de Kelvin-Helmholtz ; Plume nuage ;;;

Dorothee Scheiffarth

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CLOUD NAMES

 

Barbara Basting — The Algorithm and I

Artificial and Other Intelligences

Barbara Basting, 04.12.2019

Facebook’s picture tumbler is currently reminding me of my first visit to China a year ago. I was impressed: so...

Behind the Great Firewall

Barbara Basting, 26.10.2018

I sit in the lobby of a hotel in China where I am accommodated along with other guests of an...

Facebook’s Just a Nail Studio

Barbara Basting, 10.04.2018

I noticed this pattern for fingernail decoration four years ago in the window of a “nail studio” in Salisbury, south-west...

12 May 2011 – 12 May 2017: On Non-Digital Storage Media

Barbara Basting, 24.03.2017

The Facebook algorithm has noticed that I have something to do with art and museums, and presents me with a...

Other columns
Magazine Special
Upending meanings and rewriting sanity

A. L. Kennedy

Upending meanings and rewriting sanity

When it all burns you’ll know – a writer was there at the first…

ABO DE FR
Magazine Special

Claire Fontaine

Towards a Theory of Magic Materialism

Becoming the translator rather than the careless exploiter of nature might be the ad­venture of humankind in the years
to come.

OPEN
ACCESS FR
  • contemporary art
  • political aesthetics
  • materiality
  • nature

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»Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, MAESTRO DI COLOR CHE SANNO. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.


Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: DELINE THE MARE.


Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. BASTA! I will see if I can see.


See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.«


James Joyce

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