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A collection of essays, fictions, and interviews exploring the weird temporalities of finance and catastrophe. Once, financial practitioners plied a hybrid trade as hydrologists, star-gazers, and weather-watchers who sought to discover the natural laws of value and exchange as they did the divine order of an unchanging nature. Today, corporate firms hire trend forecasters and scenario planners to play out strategic fictions in virtual worlds. Hurricane insurance markets simulate a turbulent climate to offer investment instruments to hedge against the risks of the stock market. And for financial astrologers operating in the city of London, celestial motions provide a cosmic map that orients t...
The publication Deliquescing accompanies Steve Bishop's 2018-19 solo exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Both the exhibition and publication reflect a body of research that focuses on the fragility of memory and the potential for its preservation, defying the gradual breakdown of matter through the effects of time. The lion's mane mushroom is sought after for its medicinal properties, known for protecting and repairing the mind and memory. Within KW, the artist reconstructed the exact conditions needed to cultivate the mushroom. Its medicinal properties were abstracted and repeated in the space of the gallery--the mushroom held in perfect stasis so that it wouldn't lap...
The first accessible reader on magic’s generative relationship with contemporary art practice. From the hexing of presidents to a renewed interest in herbalism and atavistic forms of self-care, magic has furnished the contemporary imagination with mysterious and often disorienting bodies of arcane thought and practice. This volume brings together writings by artists, magicians, historians, and theorists that illuminate the vibrant correspondences animating contemporary art’s varied encounters with magical culture, inspiring a reconsideration of the relationship between the symbolic and the pragmatic. Dispensing with simple narratives of reenchantment, Magic illustrates the intricate ways...
Provocative, hopeful essays imagine a future that is not reduced to algorithms. What is human flourishing in an age of machine intelligence, when many claim that the world’s most complex problems can be reduced to narrow technical questions? Does more computing make us more intelligent, or simply more computationally powerful? We need not always resist reduction; our ability to simplify helps us interpret complicated situations. The trick is to know when and how to do so. Against Reduction offers a collection of provocative and illuminating essays that consider different ways of recognizing and addressing the reduction in our approach to artificial intelligence, and ultimately to ourselves...
A collection of essays, fictions, and interviews exploring the weird temporalities of finance and catastrophe. Once, financial practitioners plied a hybrid trade as hydrologists, star-gazers, and weather-watchers who sought to discover the natural laws of value and exchange as they did the divine order of an unchanging nature. Today, corporate firms hire trend forecasters and scenario planners to play out strategic fictions in virtual worlds. Hurricane insurance markets simulate a turbulent climate to offer investment instruments to hedge against the risks of the stock market. And for financial astrologers operating in the city of London, celestial motions provide a cosmic map that orients t...
Accompanying a landmark exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, this catalogue explores the impact of computer and networked technologies on artists from the mid-1960s to the present day.
How has the process of globalization shaped artistic practices on the one hand, and art history and theory on the other? The contributions in this volume approach this question from a range of perspectives, taking into account the role of travel, for example, or practitioners’ increasing knowledge of other cultures, art’s increasing awareness of itself as existing on a global level, literary translation, the advance of technology, and the ever-changing grand narratives of art history. As well as reflections on European avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes, the collection features discussions of Japan, Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. As a whole, the volume engages with broader current discourses about cultural globalization, and features input from leading scholars around the world as well as some important novel interventions by early-career researchers. The authors not only make a major contribution to the evolution of avant-garde studies, but also offer valuable, original points of view to art history and to the cultural theory of globalization more broadly.
Provocative, hopeful essays imagine a future that is not reduced to algorithms. What is human flourishing in an age of machine intelligence, when many claim that the world’s most complex problems can be reduced to narrow technical questions? Does more computing make us more intelligent, or simply more computationally powerful? We need not always resist reduction; our ability to simplify helps us interpret complicated situations. The trick is to know when and how to do so. Against Reduction offers a collection of provocative and illuminating essays that consider different ways of recognizing and addressing the reduction in our approach to artificial intelligence, and ultimately to ourselves...
Following half a century of neoliberalism, there appears to be a new ideology in the making, called 'commonism.' This book attempts to map these new ideological notions through examples and artistic practices, as well as critical reflection. How are the commons constituted in society? How do they shape the reality of our living together? What strategies and aesthetics do artistic commoners adopt? Is there an alternative and more just future imaginable through the political ideology of the commons? Commonism claims to be better aligned with the ecological and social reality of today than capitalism. Perhaps it is also closer to how social relationships actually function.
Over the course of the last ten years the issue of debt has become a serious problem that threatens to destroy the global socio-economic system and ruin the everyday lives of millions of people. This collection brings together a range of perspectives of key thinkers on debt to provide a sociological analysis focused upon the social, political, economic, and cultural meanings of indebtedness. The contributors to the book consider both the lived experience of debt and the more abstract processes of financialisation taking place globally. Showing how debt functions on the level of both macro- and microeconomics, the book also provides a more holistic perspective, with accounts that span sociological, cultural, and economic forms of analysis.