e-flux podcast

Artist Agnieszka Kurant and researcher Tobias Rees in conversation with e-flux journal Contributing Editor Elvia Wilk. Agnieszka Kurant explores how complex social, economic and ecological systems can operate in ways that confuse distinctions between fiction and reality or nature and culture. Probing collective intelligence, surveillance capitalism, AI and the evolution of culture, labor and creativity, she investigates automation, crowdsourcing and data exploitation in the context of art production. Her works often behave like living organisms, self-organized complex systems or bachelor machines. Her past projects include a commission for the façade of the Guggenheim Museum (2015) and a solo exhibition at the Sculpture Center, New York (2013). In 2010 she co-represented Poland at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. Her work was featured in exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Guggenheim Bilbao, Tate Modern, Witte de With, Moderna Museet, MUMOK, Bonner Kunstverein, The Kitchen, Frieze Projects and Performa Biennial. She is an artist in residence at MIT CAST and a fellow of the Smithsonian Institute and the Berggruen Institute. Tobias Rees is the Reid Hoffman Professor of Humanities at the New School for Social Research, Director at the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute, and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Rees finds himself intrigued by situations that are not reducible to the already thought and known—by events, small ones or large ones, that set the taken for granted in motion and thereby provoke unanticipated openings for which no one has words yet. In his writings he seeks to capture something of the at times wild, at other times tender, almost fragile openness that rules as long as the new/different has not yet gained any stable contours—when it is pure movement. Over the last decade his research has explored possibilities of practicing the human sciences after the figure of the human on which the human sciences (and art) has been contingent failed us: The human—the object of the human sciences is a figure not known before the late eighteenth century. He is the author of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary (2008), Plastic Reason (2016), and most recently of After Ethnos (2018).

Artist Agnieszka Kurant and researcher Tobias Rees in conversation with e-flux journal Contributing Editor Elvia Wilk. Agnieszka Kurant explores how complex social, economic and ecological systems can operate in ways that confuse distinctions between fiction and reality or nature and culture. Probing collective intelligence, surveillance capitalism, AI and the evolution of culture, labor and creativity, she investigates automation, crowdsourcing and data exploitation in the context of art production. Her works often behave like living organisms, self-organized complex systems or bachelor machines. Her past projects include a commission for the façade of the Guggenheim Museum (2015) and a solo exhibition at the Sculpture Center, New York (2013). In 2010 she co-represented Poland at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. Her work was featured in exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Guggenheim Bilbao, Tate Modern, Witte de With, Moderna Museet, MUMOK, Bonner Kunstverein, The Kitchen, Frieze Projects and Performa Biennial. She is an artist in residence at MIT CAST and a fellow of the Smithsonian Institute and the Berggruen Institute. Tobias Rees is the Reid Hoffman Professor of Humanities at the New School for Social Research, Director at the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute, and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Rees finds himself intrigued by situations that are not reducible to the already thought and known—by events, small ones or large ones, that set the taken for granted in motion and thereby provoke unanticipated openings for which no one has words yet. In his writings he seeks to capture something of the at times wild, at other times tender, almost fragile openness that rules as long as the new/different has not yet gained any stable contours—when it is pure movement. Over the last decade his research has explored possibilities of practicing the human sciences after the figure of the human on which the human sciences (and art) has been contingent failed us: The human—the object of the human sciences is a figure not known before the late eighteenth century. He is the author of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary (2008), Plastic Reason (2016), and most recently of After Ethnos (2018).

A conversation with Yesomi Umolu, Diedrich Diederichsen, and Anselm Franke on the occasion of Journeys with the initiated, on view at e-flux and Participant Inc through January 13, 2019. The exhibition features artists Malik Gaines, Evan Ifekoya, Grada Kilomba, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Virginia de Medeiros, and is curated by Yesomi Umolu with Katja Rivera. Journeys with the initiated is part of the project Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology, initiated by Goethe-Institut and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin with the support of S. Fischer Stiftung and the S. Fischer Verlag, and led by artistic directors Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke. The project runs from 2017 to 2019 in collaboration with numerous partners in Lisbon, Salvador de Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago de Chile, Dakar, and New York, with the final station culminating in Berlin in 2019. Excerpt from Journeys with the initiated: Between 1978 and 1980, queer German novelist, poet, and self-taught ethnographer Hubert Fichte traveled to New York to engage with a city that he perceived to be a center of Afro-diasporic culture and tradition. From the early 1970s and into the following decade, Fichte attempted to create a new ethnology that would run counter to an academic and colonial model. This effort coalesced in Fichte's development of a diaristic form of ethnographic writing that accounted for his own subjectivity and embeddedness within a given context. Fichte's novel Die Schwarze Stadt. Glossen, 1990 (The Black City: Glosses) features several sprawling long-form texts and interviews related to his encounters with artists, scholars, activists, spiritualists, everyday citizens, and queer communities in New York.

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.