e-flux podcast

e-flux journal editors Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, and Kaye Cain-Nielsen discuss 10 years of e-flux journal. Excerpt from the editorial of e-flux journal issue #95—WONDERFLUX: In November 2008, the editorial for issue #00 said: Historically, more than any single institution, art publications have been primary sites for discourse surrounding the artistic field. And yet most recently, the discourse has seemingly moved elsewhere—away from the formal vocabulary used to explain art production, away from traditional art capitals, and away from the printed page. At times, new discursive practices even replace traditional forms of art production. Given the current climate of disciplinary reconfiguration and geographic dispersal, it has become apparent that the urgent task has now become to engage the new intellectual territories in a way that can revitalize the critical vocabulary of contemporary art. We see a fresh approach to the function of an art journal to be perhaps the most productive way of doing this. With this first, inaugural issue of e-flux journal, we begin something of an experiment in developing both a discursive space and a site for actual art production, in which writers, artists, and thinkers are invited to write on topics of their choosing. Reading this again ten years on makes us feel grateful for all the brilliant contributors and readers who have shaped the journal over the years. e-flux journal #95 marks a full decade into this strange experiment in contemporary art publishing. For our tenth birthday, a small group of longtime contributors have written short texts, which artists have illustrated and set to graphic format. Since 2008, the authors included here have continued to shape varied concerns and urgencies into certain consistencies and overarching emergent issues. We hope you’ll enjoy issue #95: WONDERFLUX. Stay tuned for events we’re organizing in 2019 to mark the start of the next decade of e-flux journal.

e-flux journal editors Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, and Kaye Cain-Nielsen discuss 10 years of e-flux journal. Excerpt from the editorial of e-flux journal issue #95—WONDERFLUX: In November 2008, the editorial for issue #00 said: Historically, more than any single institution, art publications have been primary sites for discourse surrounding the artistic field. And yet most recently, the discourse has seemingly moved elsewhere—away from the formal vocabulary used to explain art production, away from traditional art capitals, and away from the printed page. At times, new discursive practices even replace traditional forms of art production. Given the current climate of disciplinary reconfiguration and geographic dispersal, it has become apparent that the urgent task has now become to engage the new intellectual territories in a way that can revitalize the critical vocabulary of contemporary art. We see a fresh approach to the function of an art journal to be perhaps the most productive way of doing this. With this first, inaugural issue of e-flux journal, we begin something of an experiment in developing both a discursive space and a site for actual art production, in which writers, artists, and thinkers are invited to write on topics of their choosing. Reading this again ten years on makes us feel grateful for all the brilliant contributors and readers who have shaped the journal over the years. e-flux journal #95 marks a full decade into this strange experiment in contemporary art publishing. For our tenth birthday, a small group of longtime contributors have written short texts, which artists have illustrated and set to graphic format. Since 2008, the authors included here have continued to shape varied concerns and urgencies into certain consistencies and overarching emergent issues. We hope you’ll enjoy issue #95: WONDERFLUX. Stay tuned for events we’re organizing in 2019 to mark the start of the next decade of e-flux journal.

Recorded after the publication of e-flux journal issue 81 in April 2017, Xin Wang reads and discusses her text “Asian Futurism and the Non-Other” with Stephen Squibb. Xin Wang is a curator and art historian based in New York. She recently participated in e-flux journal’s feminism(s) double issue launch with Martha Rosler, McKenzie Wark, and Elvia Wilk. Past curatorial projects include Lu Yang: Arcade (2014, New York), THE BANK SHOW: Vive le Capital and THE BANK SHOW: Hito Steyerl (2015, Shanghai), chin(A)frica: an interface (2017, New York), and Life and Dreams: Photography and Media Art in China since the 1990s (2018, Ulm, Germany). Wang is currently building a discursive archive of Asian Futurisms at afuturism.tumblr.com, and is a PhD candidate in modern and contemporary art at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. Read “Asian Futurism and the Non-Other”: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/81/126662/asian-futurism-and-the-non-other/

In this week's episode of the e-flux podcast, Brian Kuan Wood reads his piece, "The Story of Peter Green Peter Chang," published in February, 2017 as part of e-flux Architecture's Superhumanity project at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial. Brian Kuan Wood is a writer and an editor of e-flux journal.

Following a symposium titled Technology is History, in association with the exhibition One Hand Clapping at the Guggenheim, curator Xiaoyu Weng and Brian Kuan Wood join Yuk Hui to discuss his work. The conversation was followed by a talk by Yuk Hui at e-flux titled “What Begins After the End of Enlightenment?” Text mentioned in the conversation: 30 Years after Les Immatériaux - Art, Science and Theory.  Yuk Hui is a philosopher based in Berlin. He is the author of three monographs: On the Existence of Digital Objects (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Urbanomic, 2016), and Recursivity and Contingency (Rowman and Littlefield International, Spring 2019). Read Yuk Hui in e-flux journal here. Xiaoyu Weng is The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Associate Curator of Chinese Art at the Guggenheim.   Brian Kuan Wood is a founding editor of e-flux journal.

Simone White and Judah Rubin discuss White’s recent text, “or, on being the other woman,” published in e-flux journal issue #92 on feminisms. The conversation followed a recent duo lecture at e-flux with Mirene Arsanios and Simone White. Simone White's most recent book is Dear Angel of Death, published in spring 2018. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. Judah Rubin is a poet living in Queens. He is the former Monday night coordinator at the Poetry Project and is currently working on texts concerning necropolitics, corruption, and all-you-can-eat buffets.

Julieta Aranda and Liam Gillick join Lawrence Weiner in his New York studio for a conversation spanning art education and cosmetic dentistry. Julieta Aranda is an artist and Editor of e-flux journal.  Liam Gillick is an artist living in New York. Read Liam Gillick in e-flux journal. Lawrence Weiner is an artist born in 1942 in New York, NY, where he lives and works today.

Mary Walling Blackburn discusses her text, "Sticky Notes, 1-3," published in e-flux journal #92—"on feminisms" (Summer 2018), with editor-in-chief Kaye Cain-Nielsen. "The video editing suite sat directly across from 1607 Broadway. My mother’s boyfriend was editing a sequence of two figures fighting with long sticks. They were aiming for one another’s heads. Each man, in turn, carefully swung his fragile skull away from a baton, and then a baton toward another fragile skull swinging away. To the right of the screen was a window. From a certain low angle, at a standing vantage point several feet from the sill, the video sequence and a spectacular outside the glass read as an operative split screen." Excerpt from "Sticky Notes, 1-3" *Note from Mary: I should be very clear that when referring to dignity I am speaking about "white dignity"; I am trying to communicate that white dignity is bunk and wealthy dignity is bunk. Moreover, when I state that I don't know why 'anyone gets to keep their things with our status'...anyone, again means myself (who qualifies as the privileged poor) and those who operate in wealth within this amplified structure of riches.   Mary Walling Blackburn was born in Orange, California. Walling Blackburn's artistic work engages a wide spectrum of materials that probe and intensify the historic, ecological, and class-born brutalities of North American life. Recent publications include Quaestiones Perversas (Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, 2017), co-written with Beatriz E. Balanta; "Gina and the Stars," published by Tamawuj, an off-site publishing platform for the Sharjah Biennial 13; and "Slowness," a performance text in the sound-based web publication Ear│ Wave│Event. 

Mirene Arsanios discusses her text, "E Autobiography di un Idioma," published in e-flux journal #92—"on feminisms" (Summer 2018). In conversation with editor-in-chief Kaye Cain-Nielsen. "I would have liked to come to you (abo) with something more reliable, like documents (akto), but I’m an oral language (idioma)—an Afro-Portuguese proto-creole developed on the western coast (kosta) of Africa and brought over to the Caribbean in the seventeen century. That’s one of the theories of my genesis. There are others (otronan). Dutch and Spanish tagged along at later stages, with a few Arawak words (palabranan). Initially, slave traders and slaves used me to 'communicate'; then I was just used (merka). The only document in my possession says I was born on the island of Curaçao, north of the Venezuelan shore. Linguists struggle to match my identity to a location. Words travel and land in places (luganan) that do not match their jurisdiction (a nation (nashon)-state)."—Mirene Arsanios, "E Autobiography di un Idioma"    Other works mentioned:—Iman Mersal, الصوت في غير مكانه (The Displaced Voice); trans. Lisa White (New York: Belladonna* Collaborative, chaplet #232, 2018). Excerpt read by Belladonna editor Ana Paula.—Iman Mersal, "عن الأمومة والعنف، إيمان مرسال (On Motherhood and Violence)," trans. Anna Ziajka Stanton, Makhzin issue #2—FEMINISMS (Daisy Atterbury, Tarek El-Ariss and Mirene Arsanios, editors)—Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother (New York: Macmillan, 1996).   Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection The City Outside the Sentence (2015). She has contributed essays and short stories to Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Animated Reader, and The Outpost, among others. Arsanios cofounded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. On Friday nights, you can find her at the Poetry Project in New York, where she coordinates the Friday Night reading series with Rachel Valinsky.

Eva Díaz discusses her essay "We Are All Aliens" published in e-flux journal issue 91 (May 2018) with contributing editor Elvia Wilk. "For some, contemporary art has become a kind of alt-science platform for research and development projects that offer alternatives to the corporate control and surveillance of outer space. Artists working on issues about access to space are at the front line of a critical investigation about the contours of the future, both in its material form and social organization. Many of these artists are challenging the current expansion of capitalist and colonial practices into outer space, particularly that of so-called 'primitive' accumulation: the taking of land and resources for private use. They recognize that much of the tremendous capital amassed in the early 2000s e-commerce and tech boom is now being funneled into astronomically costly 'New Space' projects such as SpaceX, a company funded by PayPal cofounder Elon Musk, and Blue Origin, the space enterprise of Amazon's Jeff Bezos." –Excerpt from "We Are All Aliens" Eva Díaz has taught at the Pratt Institute in New York since 2009. Her book The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College was released in 2015 by the University of Chicago Press. She is currently at work on a new book titled After Spaceship Earth, analyzing the influence of R. Buckminster Fuller in contemporary art.