What has become of the so-called West after the Cold War? Why hasn’t the West simply become “form... more What has become of the so-called West after the Cold War? Why hasn’t the West simply become “former,” as has its supposed counterpart, the “former East”? In this book, artists, thinkers, and activists explore the repercussions of the political, cultural, and economic events of 1989 on both art and the contemporary. The culmination of an eight-year curatorial research experiment, Former West imagines a world beyond our immediate condition.
The writings, visual essays, and conversations in Former West—more than seventy diverse contributions with global scope—unfold a tangled cartography far more complex than the simplistic dichotomy of East vs. West. In fact, the Cold War was a contest not between two ideological blocs but between two variants of Western modernity. It is this conceptual “Westcentrism” that a “formering” of the West seeks to undo.
The contributions revisit contemporary debates through the lens of a “former West.” They rethink conceptions of time and space dominating the legacy of the 1989–1990 revolutions in the former East, and critique historical periodization of the contemporary. The contributors map the political economy and social relations of the contemporary, consider the implications of algorithmic cultures and the posthuman condition, and discuss notions of solidarity—the difficulty in constructing a new “we” despite migration, the refugee crisis, and the global class recomposition. Can art institute the contemporary it envisions, and live as if it were possible?
Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 is edited by curator Maria Hlavajova and writer and curator Simon Sheikh. Visual introductions to book chapters are curated by Maria Hlavajova and Kathrin Rhomberg.
Contributors include: Nancy Adajania, Edit András, Athena Athanasiou, Zygmunt Bauman, Dave Beech, Brett Bloom, Rosi Braidotti, Susan Buck-Morss, Campus in Camps, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Chto Delat?/What is to be done?, Jodi Dean, Angela Dimitrakaki, Dilar Dirik, Marlene Dumas, Keller Easterling, Okwui Enwezor, Charles Esche, Silvia Federici, Mark Fisher, Federica Giardini and Anna Simone, Boris Groys, Gulf Labor Coalition, Stefano Harney, Sharon Hayes, Brian Holmes, Tung-Hui Hu, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Sami Khatib, Delaine Le Bas, Boaz Levin and Vera Tollmann, Isabell Lorey, Sven Lütticken, Ewa Majewska, Artemy Magun, Suhail Malik, Teresa Margolles, Achille Mbembe, Laura McLean, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Sandro Mezzadra, Walter D. Mignolo, Aernout Mik, Angela Mitropoulos, Rastko Močnik, Nástio Mosquito, Rabih Mroué, Pedro Neves Marques, Peter Osborne, Matteo Pasquinelli, Andrea Phillips, Nina Power, Vijay Prashad, Gerald Raunig, Irit Rogoff, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Naoki Sakai, Rasha Salti, Francesco Salvini, Christoph Schlingensief, Georg Schöllhammer, Susan Schuppli, Andreas Siekmann, Jonas Staal, Hito Steyerl, Mladen Stilinović, Paulo Tavares, Trịnh T. Minh-Hà, Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor, Marina Vishmidt, Marion von Osten, McKenzie Wark, and Eyal Weizman.
Published by BAK, basis actuele kunst and MIT Press, 2016 | Design by Mevis & Van Deursen, Amsterdam | English language | 748 pages | Paperback | ISBN: 9780262533836
An Open Access anthology edited by Matteo Pasquinelli forthcoming (Fall 2015) for Meson Press, Le... more An Open Access anthology edited by Matteo Pasquinelli forthcoming (Fall 2015) for Meson Press, Leuphana University Lüneburg. With texts by Benjamin Bratton, Orit Halpern, Adrian Lahoud, Jon Lindblom, Catherine Malabou, Reza Negarestani, Luciana Parisi, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Michael Wheeler, Charles Wolfe and Ben Woodard. Dutch edition forthcoming for Leesmagaziijn, Amsterdam.
L’immaginario politico e l’idea di futuro sembrano oggi cancellati dall’imperativo dell’austerity... more L’immaginario politico e l’idea di futuro sembrano oggi cancellati dall’imperativo dell’austerity. Ma quale sarebbe il vero passaggio rivoluzionario, si chiedevano un tempo Deleuze e Guattari: ritirarsi dal mercato globale o, al contrario, andare ancora più lontano, “accelerare il processo”? L’economia è in crisi, ma la tecnologia continua a evolvere sotto i nostri occhi: i social network sono sempre più pervasivi, la logistica delle merci sempre più veloce e digitalizzata, servizi segreti e finanza usano algoritmi sempre più sofisticati per analizzare e prevedere i comportamenti di massa. E se l’impasse politica fosse legata all’incapacità di comprendere le nuove astrazioni del capitale e del lavoro, gli algoritmi che controllano le relazioni sociali tanto quanto il tempo collettivo congelato dalla finanza in futures e derivati? Un nuovo nomos tecnologico sembra prendere forma a livello planetario, dove i poteri tradizionali degli Stati nazione si intrecciano con le grandi corporation della rete. Un ex direttore della Cia lo ha riassunto in modo cinico ma efficace: “Uccidiamo persone sulla base dei metadati”. Rispondendo al recente Manifesto accelerazionista e rilanciando la tesi del capitalismo cognitivo, gli autori del presente libro sostengono che lo sviluppo tecnologico possa essere ridisegnato in senso rivoluzionario, che l’astrazione più estrema dell’intelligenza debba diventare arma politica e che il futuro sia da riconquistare come terreno visionario.
Some enlightenment regarding the project to mechanise reason. The assembly line of machine learni... more Some enlightenment regarding the project to mechanise reason. The assembly line of machine learning: data, algorithm, model. The training dataset: the social origins of machine intelligence. The history of AI as the automation of perception. The learning algorithm: compressing the world into a statistical model. All models are wrong, but some are useful. World to vector: the society of classification and prediction bots. Faults of a statistical instrument: the undetection of the new. Adversarial intelligence vs. statistical intelligence: labour in the age of AI.
This cross-disciplinary exploration delves into the multiple intersections between Artificial Int... more This cross-disciplinary exploration delves into the multiple intersections between Artificial Intelligence (AI), work, and organization, mobilizing different research strands such as STS and Organization Theory, as well as the History of Science and Technology and Cultural Sociology. Matteo Pasquinelli proposes an exploration of theories of automation drawn from political economy and the history of science and technology, investigating their explanatory accounts of technological innovation. As argued by the author, these theories provide important foundations for unveiling the socio-technical genealogy of current forms of AI as well as the specific logic of automation that they follow.
JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY HISTORY OF IDEAS, 2023
The essay contributes to the debate on the role of metrics in geoanthropology. It argues that the... more The essay contributes to the debate on the role of metrics in geoanthropology. It argues that the use of the energy metric in the study of the Anthropocene among other phenomena should be seen in its relation to the metrology of labour and productivity that originated in the industrial age. In order to clarify this genealogical question, the essay extends the method of ‘historical metrology’ (Kula) to the notion of energy and, in addition, to the notion of information, that can be understood in its own as a metric of knowledge, mental labour, communication and cooperation. In illuminating the nexus between the abstractions of political economy and technoscience, the essay stresses specifically the role of machines (such as the steam engine and telegraph) as ‘epistemic mediators’ (Wise). The essay concludes by advocating for the inclusion of political metrology in the necessary toolbox and ‘geopraxis’ (Omodeo) of the Anthropocene.
It was not a cybernetician but a neoliberal economist who provided the first systematic treatise ... more It was not a cybernetician but a neoliberal economist who provided the first systematic treatise on connectionism or, as it would later be known, the paradigm of artificial neural networks. In his 1952 book The Sensory Order, Friedrich Hayek advanced a connectionist theory of the mind already far more advanced than the theory of symbolic artificial intelligence, whose birth is redundantly celebrated in 1956 with the exalted Dartmouth workshop. In this text Hayek provided a synthesis of Gestalt principles and considerations of artificial neural networks, even speculating about the possibility of a machine fulfilling a similar function of “the nervous system as an instrument of classification,” auguring what we call today a “classifier algorithm.” This article shows how Hayek’s connectionist theory of the mind was used to shore up a specific and ideological view of the market and schematically reconstructs Hayek’s line of argumentation from his economic paradigm backward to his theory of cognition. Eventually, in Hayek’s interpretation, connectionism provides a relativist cognitive paradigm that justifies the “methodological individualism” of neoliberalism.
What has become of the so-called West after the Cold War? Why hasn’t the West simply become “form... more What has become of the so-called West after the Cold War? Why hasn’t the West simply become “former,” as has its supposed counterpart, the “former East”? In this book, artists, thinkers, and activists explore the repercussions of the political, cultural, and economic events of 1989 on both art and the contemporary. The culmination of an eight-year curatorial research experiment, Former West imagines a world beyond our immediate condition.
The writings, visual essays, and conversations in Former West—more than seventy diverse contributions with global scope—unfold a tangled cartography far more complex than the simplistic dichotomy of East vs. West. In fact, the Cold War was a contest not between two ideological blocs but between two variants of Western modernity. It is this conceptual “Westcentrism” that a “formering” of the West seeks to undo.
The contributions revisit contemporary debates through the lens of a “former West.” They rethink conceptions of time and space dominating the legacy of the 1989–1990 revolutions in the former East, and critique historical periodization of the contemporary. The contributors map the political economy and social relations of the contemporary, consider the implications of algorithmic cultures and the posthuman condition, and discuss notions of solidarity—the difficulty in constructing a new “we” despite migration, the refugee crisis, and the global class recomposition. Can art institute the contemporary it envisions, and live as if it were possible?
Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 is edited by curator Maria Hlavajova and writer and curator Simon Sheikh. Visual introductions to book chapters are curated by Maria Hlavajova and Kathrin Rhomberg.
Contributors include: Nancy Adajania, Edit András, Athena Athanasiou, Zygmunt Bauman, Dave Beech, Brett Bloom, Rosi Braidotti, Susan Buck-Morss, Campus in Camps, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Chto Delat?/What is to be done?, Jodi Dean, Angela Dimitrakaki, Dilar Dirik, Marlene Dumas, Keller Easterling, Okwui Enwezor, Charles Esche, Silvia Federici, Mark Fisher, Federica Giardini and Anna Simone, Boris Groys, Gulf Labor Coalition, Stefano Harney, Sharon Hayes, Brian Holmes, Tung-Hui Hu, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Sami Khatib, Delaine Le Bas, Boaz Levin and Vera Tollmann, Isabell Lorey, Sven Lütticken, Ewa Majewska, Artemy Magun, Suhail Malik, Teresa Margolles, Achille Mbembe, Laura McLean, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Sandro Mezzadra, Walter D. Mignolo, Aernout Mik, Angela Mitropoulos, Rastko Močnik, Nástio Mosquito, Rabih Mroué, Pedro Neves Marques, Peter Osborne, Matteo Pasquinelli, Andrea Phillips, Nina Power, Vijay Prashad, Gerald Raunig, Irit Rogoff, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Naoki Sakai, Rasha Salti, Francesco Salvini, Christoph Schlingensief, Georg Schöllhammer, Susan Schuppli, Andreas Siekmann, Jonas Staal, Hito Steyerl, Mladen Stilinović, Paulo Tavares, Trịnh T. Minh-Hà, Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor, Marina Vishmidt, Marion von Osten, McKenzie Wark, and Eyal Weizman.
Published by BAK, basis actuele kunst and MIT Press, 2016 | Design by Mevis & Van Deursen, Amsterdam | English language | 748 pages | Paperback | ISBN: 9780262533836
An Open Access anthology edited by Matteo Pasquinelli forthcoming (Fall 2015) for Meson Press, Le... more An Open Access anthology edited by Matteo Pasquinelli forthcoming (Fall 2015) for Meson Press, Leuphana University Lüneburg. With texts by Benjamin Bratton, Orit Halpern, Adrian Lahoud, Jon Lindblom, Catherine Malabou, Reza Negarestani, Luciana Parisi, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Michael Wheeler, Charles Wolfe and Ben Woodard. Dutch edition forthcoming for Leesmagaziijn, Amsterdam.
L’immaginario politico e l’idea di futuro sembrano oggi cancellati dall’imperativo dell’austerity... more L’immaginario politico e l’idea di futuro sembrano oggi cancellati dall’imperativo dell’austerity. Ma quale sarebbe il vero passaggio rivoluzionario, si chiedevano un tempo Deleuze e Guattari: ritirarsi dal mercato globale o, al contrario, andare ancora più lontano, “accelerare il processo”? L’economia è in crisi, ma la tecnologia continua a evolvere sotto i nostri occhi: i social network sono sempre più pervasivi, la logistica delle merci sempre più veloce e digitalizzata, servizi segreti e finanza usano algoritmi sempre più sofisticati per analizzare e prevedere i comportamenti di massa. E se l’impasse politica fosse legata all’incapacità di comprendere le nuove astrazioni del capitale e del lavoro, gli algoritmi che controllano le relazioni sociali tanto quanto il tempo collettivo congelato dalla finanza in futures e derivati? Un nuovo nomos tecnologico sembra prendere forma a livello planetario, dove i poteri tradizionali degli Stati nazione si intrecciano con le grandi corporation della rete. Un ex direttore della Cia lo ha riassunto in modo cinico ma efficace: “Uccidiamo persone sulla base dei metadati”. Rispondendo al recente Manifesto accelerazionista e rilanciando la tesi del capitalismo cognitivo, gli autori del presente libro sostengono che lo sviluppo tecnologico possa essere ridisegnato in senso rivoluzionario, che l’astrazione più estrema dell’intelligenza debba diventare arma politica e che il futuro sia da riconquistare come terreno visionario.
Some enlightenment regarding the project to mechanise reason. The assembly line of machine learni... more Some enlightenment regarding the project to mechanise reason. The assembly line of machine learning: data, algorithm, model. The training dataset: the social origins of machine intelligence. The history of AI as the automation of perception. The learning algorithm: compressing the world into a statistical model. All models are wrong, but some are useful. World to vector: the society of classification and prediction bots. Faults of a statistical instrument: the undetection of the new. Adversarial intelligence vs. statistical intelligence: labour in the age of AI.
This cross-disciplinary exploration delves into the multiple intersections between Artificial Int... more This cross-disciplinary exploration delves into the multiple intersections between Artificial Intelligence (AI), work, and organization, mobilizing different research strands such as STS and Organization Theory, as well as the History of Science and Technology and Cultural Sociology. Matteo Pasquinelli proposes an exploration of theories of automation drawn from political economy and the history of science and technology, investigating their explanatory accounts of technological innovation. As argued by the author, these theories provide important foundations for unveiling the socio-technical genealogy of current forms of AI as well as the specific logic of automation that they follow.
JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY HISTORY OF IDEAS, 2023
The essay contributes to the debate on the role of metrics in geoanthropology. It argues that the... more The essay contributes to the debate on the role of metrics in geoanthropology. It argues that the use of the energy metric in the study of the Anthropocene among other phenomena should be seen in its relation to the metrology of labour and productivity that originated in the industrial age. In order to clarify this genealogical question, the essay extends the method of ‘historical metrology’ (Kula) to the notion of energy and, in addition, to the notion of information, that can be understood in its own as a metric of knowledge, mental labour, communication and cooperation. In illuminating the nexus between the abstractions of political economy and technoscience, the essay stresses specifically the role of machines (such as the steam engine and telegraph) as ‘epistemic mediators’ (Wise). The essay concludes by advocating for the inclusion of political metrology in the necessary toolbox and ‘geopraxis’ (Omodeo) of the Anthropocene.
It was not a cybernetician but a neoliberal economist who provided the first systematic treatise ... more It was not a cybernetician but a neoliberal economist who provided the first systematic treatise on connectionism or, as it would later be known, the paradigm of artificial neural networks. In his 1952 book The Sensory Order, Friedrich Hayek advanced a connectionist theory of the mind already far more advanced than the theory of symbolic artificial intelligence, whose birth is redundantly celebrated in 1956 with the exalted Dartmouth workshop. In this text Hayek provided a synthesis of Gestalt principles and considerations of artificial neural networks, even speculating about the possibility of a machine fulfilling a similar function of “the nervous system as an instrument of classification,” auguring what we call today a “classifier algorithm.” This article shows how Hayek’s connectionist theory of the mind was used to shore up a specific and ideological view of the market and schematically reconstructs Hayek’s line of argumentation from his economic paradigm backward to his theory of cognition. Eventually, in Hayek’s interpretation, connectionism provides a relativist cognitive paradigm that justifies the “methodological individualism” of neoliberalism.
The aim of this text is not to prove a linear academic thesis, yet to record a spectrum of homolo... more The aim of this text is not to prove a linear academic thesis, yet to record a spectrum of homologies and resonances across the history of the tree as a symbolic and logic form. The inspiration for this sort of Warburgian excursus comes from the simple recognition that a plant is found at the centre of ancient cosmologies as much as at the centre of modern epistemologies. The tree form has been adopted to support religious architectures as much as the abstract world of logic. " We're tired of trees " remarked, though, the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari in 1980, especially after reading Julien Pacotte's book Le réseau arborescent, schème primordial de la pensée (The arborescent network, primordial diagram of thought). Already in 1936 Pacotte explored the abstract tree form in disciplines such as mathematics, biology and chemistry. He believed that the ramifying network is a " universal aspect of intimate reality " and " the very foundation of formal thought ". 1 In any case the enslavement of a natural form says more about political and social structures and hierarchies of human knowledge than about the mind itself. As much as other biomorphic symbols, the tree figure is but a mirror of the human and through the inversion of its branches we discern the society of its time.
A Produção do Mundo: Problemas Logísticos e Sítios Críticos, 2022
Matteo Pasqueinlli, "‘Três mil anos de rituais algorítmicos: a emergência da inteligência artific... more Matteo Pasqueinlli, "‘Três mil anos de rituais algorítmicos: a emergência da inteligência artificial a partir da computação do espaço’", in A Produção do Mundo: Problemas Logísticos e Sítios Críticos, edited by Andrea Pavoni and Franco Tomassoni, Lisboa: Outro Modo Cooperativa Cultural, 2022, 63-79.
The seminar introduces key concepts of the history of modern political philosophy, political econ... more The seminar introduces key concepts of the history of modern political philosophy, political economy and aesthetics. In particular, it takes the notion of "abstract labour" as a prism through which to address unresolved issues in contemporary theory in and beyond academia. While abstract labour is a central concept of Marx's writings on the critique of political economy, it was originally introduced by Hegel in the Jena lectures (1805/06) to describe an exteriorized stage of subject formation and recognition. As a transitory stage of spirit's concretion, already for Hegel abstract labour is constitutive of the social bond. In Marx, abstract labour becomes generic: it forges the social bond in all modern societies in which the commodity form prevails. Ever since Marx, particularly in a globalised world post 1989, the conceptual limits and Western genealogies of abstract labour have been problematized (Chakrabarty, 2000). The seminar discusses what activities, ruptures, knowledges and aesthetics have been shaped by abstract labour and how this notion has travelled to critical theory, epistemology, contemporary art theory, and history of science and technology.
A diagram sketched during the Anthropocene Campus at HKW Berlin to illustrate and simplify the tr... more A diagram sketched during the Anthropocene Campus at HKW Berlin to illustrate and simplify the transformation of the entropic regimes across the agricultural, industrial and information revolutions (and the feedback effects on previous technological stages). A diagram to start framing industrial revolution and information revolution within the Anthropocene debate, both understood as the combination of flows of energy, matter, labour, information, capital within the structure of the thermal engine first and the Turing machine later. Industrial revolution re-organized and accelerated agriculture. Information revolution reorganized and accelerated industrialization and agriculture too. 'Almost no entropy' is of course an ironic note. Missing here is the vector of capital accumulation to show the Great Devalorisation crisis after the rise of the knowledge/network society that led to the financial crisis.
This books reframes the relation between economy and religion along an original genealogy spannin... more This books reframes the relation between economy and religion along an original genealogy spanning from the early Christian theology to the contemporary studies on debt. Contra Weber and Freud, the current governance of debt is not explained with the traditional schema of repression but as the exploitation of the positive capacity of ascesis. This book in fact criticises the typical conservatorism of political theology (including Agamben) and aims to liberate ascesis against capitalism. Such a philosophical program of agnostic asceticism follows closely the pagan ‘care of the self’ addressed also by the late works of Foucault.
Der Begriff Künstliche Intelligenz wird oft in den populären Medien, sowie in Kunst- und Philosop... more Der Begriff Künstliche Intelligenz wird oft in den populären Medien, sowie in Kunst- und Philosophiekreisen als eine Art alchemistischer Talisman zitiert, dessen Funktion selten erklärt wird. Das zurzeit vorherrschende Paradigma (u.a. wichtig für die Automatisierung von Arbeit) basiert nicht auf GAKI (gute altmodische künstliche Intelligenz, die nie erfolgreich in automatisierter symbolischer Deduktion war), sondern auf neuronalen Netzwerken 1958 entwickelt von Frank Rosenblatt, um statistische Induktion zu automatisieren. Nichtsdestotrotz führen neuronale Netzwerke selbst eine spezifische Dimension des „Unberechenbaren“ ein. Statistische Induktion ist unfähig dem Universum der Kategorien seiner Trainingsdaten zu entkommen, und wird deutlich am Beispiel der Erkennung von sprachlichen Metaphern oder von Humor. Ein neuronales Netzwerk hat immer Probleme „Erfindungen von etwas Neuem“ zu identifizieren.
Text von Matteo Pasquinelli. Übersetzung aus dem Englischen von Manuela Koelke.
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The writings, visual essays, and conversations in Former West—more than seventy diverse contributions with global scope—unfold a tangled cartography far more complex than the simplistic dichotomy of East vs. West. In fact, the Cold War was a contest not between two ideological blocs but between two variants of Western modernity. It is this conceptual “Westcentrism” that a “formering” of the West seeks to undo.
The contributions revisit contemporary debates through the lens of a “former West.” They rethink conceptions of time and space dominating the legacy of the 1989–1990 revolutions in the former East, and critique historical periodization of the contemporary. The contributors map the political economy and social relations of the contemporary, consider the implications of algorithmic cultures and the posthuman condition, and discuss notions of solidarity—the difficulty in constructing a new “we” despite migration, the refugee crisis, and the global class recomposition. Can art institute the contemporary it envisions, and live as if it were possible?
Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 is edited by curator Maria Hlavajova and writer and curator Simon Sheikh. Visual introductions to book chapters are curated by Maria Hlavajova and Kathrin Rhomberg.
Contributors include: Nancy Adajania, Edit András, Athena Athanasiou, Zygmunt Bauman, Dave Beech, Brett Bloom, Rosi Braidotti, Susan Buck-Morss, Campus in Camps, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Chto Delat?/What is to be done?, Jodi Dean, Angela Dimitrakaki, Dilar Dirik, Marlene Dumas, Keller Easterling, Okwui Enwezor, Charles Esche, Silvia Federici, Mark Fisher, Federica Giardini and Anna Simone, Boris Groys, Gulf Labor Coalition, Stefano Harney, Sharon Hayes, Brian Holmes, Tung-Hui Hu, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Sami Khatib, Delaine Le Bas, Boaz Levin and Vera Tollmann, Isabell Lorey, Sven Lütticken, Ewa Majewska, Artemy Magun, Suhail Malik, Teresa Margolles, Achille Mbembe, Laura McLean, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Sandro Mezzadra, Walter D. Mignolo, Aernout Mik, Angela Mitropoulos, Rastko Močnik, Nástio Mosquito, Rabih Mroué, Pedro Neves Marques, Peter Osborne, Matteo Pasquinelli, Andrea Phillips, Nina Power, Vijay Prashad, Gerald Raunig, Irit Rogoff, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Naoki Sakai, Rasha Salti, Francesco Salvini, Christoph Schlingensief, Georg Schöllhammer, Susan Schuppli, Andreas Siekmann, Jonas Staal, Hito Steyerl, Mladen Stilinović, Paulo Tavares, Trịnh T. Minh-Hà, Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor, Marina Vishmidt, Marion von Osten, McKenzie Wark, and Eyal Weizman.
Published by BAK, basis actuele kunst and MIT Press, 2016 | Design by Mevis & Van Deursen, Amsterdam | English language | 748 pages | Paperback | ISBN: 9780262533836
Essays
The writings, visual essays, and conversations in Former West—more than seventy diverse contributions with global scope—unfold a tangled cartography far more complex than the simplistic dichotomy of East vs. West. In fact, the Cold War was a contest not between two ideological blocs but between two variants of Western modernity. It is this conceptual “Westcentrism” that a “formering” of the West seeks to undo.
The contributions revisit contemporary debates through the lens of a “former West.” They rethink conceptions of time and space dominating the legacy of the 1989–1990 revolutions in the former East, and critique historical periodization of the contemporary. The contributors map the political economy and social relations of the contemporary, consider the implications of algorithmic cultures and the posthuman condition, and discuss notions of solidarity—the difficulty in constructing a new “we” despite migration, the refugee crisis, and the global class recomposition. Can art institute the contemporary it envisions, and live as if it were possible?
Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 is edited by curator Maria Hlavajova and writer and curator Simon Sheikh. Visual introductions to book chapters are curated by Maria Hlavajova and Kathrin Rhomberg.
Contributors include: Nancy Adajania, Edit András, Athena Athanasiou, Zygmunt Bauman, Dave Beech, Brett Bloom, Rosi Braidotti, Susan Buck-Morss, Campus in Camps, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Chto Delat?/What is to be done?, Jodi Dean, Angela Dimitrakaki, Dilar Dirik, Marlene Dumas, Keller Easterling, Okwui Enwezor, Charles Esche, Silvia Federici, Mark Fisher, Federica Giardini and Anna Simone, Boris Groys, Gulf Labor Coalition, Stefano Harney, Sharon Hayes, Brian Holmes, Tung-Hui Hu, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Sami Khatib, Delaine Le Bas, Boaz Levin and Vera Tollmann, Isabell Lorey, Sven Lütticken, Ewa Majewska, Artemy Magun, Suhail Malik, Teresa Margolles, Achille Mbembe, Laura McLean, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Sandro Mezzadra, Walter D. Mignolo, Aernout Mik, Angela Mitropoulos, Rastko Močnik, Nástio Mosquito, Rabih Mroué, Pedro Neves Marques, Peter Osborne, Matteo Pasquinelli, Andrea Phillips, Nina Power, Vijay Prashad, Gerald Raunig, Irit Rogoff, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Naoki Sakai, Rasha Salti, Francesco Salvini, Christoph Schlingensief, Georg Schöllhammer, Susan Schuppli, Andreas Siekmann, Jonas Staal, Hito Steyerl, Mladen Stilinović, Paulo Tavares, Trịnh T. Minh-Hà, Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor, Marina Vishmidt, Marion von Osten, McKenzie Wark, and Eyal Weizman.
Published by BAK, basis actuele kunst and MIT Press, 2016 | Design by Mevis & Van Deursen, Amsterdam | English language | 748 pages | Paperback | ISBN: 9780262533836
Text von Matteo Pasquinelli. Übersetzung aus dem Englischen von Manuela Koelke.