The thing with tiles is that they *fit* perfectly and naturally onto our rectangular screens. Whenever I interact with an interface that is ’tiley’, it just clicks, it just makes sense. Tiles are inherent to the device they’re sitting on. The bricks in our walls are rectangular. For [more]
A few days ago, the good folks at FLUX FM announced the National’s imminent concert, or, as they put it: “music for the elderly.” I shudder to think of what equally sensitive words they would have chosen to mourn Lou Reed’s passing. Last night, with the help of [more]
Theodor W. Adorno never ceases to insist on the possibility of aesthetic autonomy in its opening toward its own impossibility. This renders him the advocate of a possible impossibility. Part and parcel of art is its “rejection of empirical reality.” Art departs the “empirical world” not by fleeing [more]
Not 100% sure if round table is the correct English word for the German Tafel, at least the “Internet” says the translation of Die Ritter der Tafelsrunde is Knights of the Round Table. Evgeny Morozov might add that the “Internet” doesn’t exist. So be it. I’ll be participating in [more]
What I call a collective is the dream-figure of a lawless community of subjects who put their trust in nothing but their singularity and ontological loneliness, a trust which, like all trust, is without ground, blind. One could formulate the difference between the subject of we-subjectivity and the [more]
Charles Byrne: the Irish giant. Born 1761. Arrives London April 1782. Exhibit at Cox’s freak show, Spring Gardens. Ratings waning within a year. Fandom of John Hunter (The Godfather of modern surgery) consistent. Byrne keeps growing. April 23 1783: Byrne at the bar pick-pocketed of his life savings [more]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5nXuvyBvjI The documentary „Meine keine Familie“ („My fathers, my mother and me,“ Austria 2012) tells the story of the Friedrichshof Commune in the Austrian Burgenland near Vienna from the perspective of one of the children born and raised there. The director, Paul-Julien Robert, lived in the commune for [more]
On the Manhattan Bridge, a steady stream of cyclists silently make their way to work at 8 a.m. on Monday morning. A middle-aged businessman with toddler daughter in bright pink cat-eared helmet. Toddler girl securely fastened in rear bike carrier, nodding off. Beard-sporting hipster on fixed-gear bike. Kryptonite [more]
Marguerite Duras: La mer est une force illimitée où le ‚moi’, le regard se noient, en se perdant pour retrouver leur propre identité.
due to the highly industrialized agriculture around the town where i grew up, almost all the flat land there is covered with plastic film for long periods the year. maybe because of that hidden landscape and because i don’t care about agriculture, i never really noticed the gurkenfliegers, [more]
I am obsessed with Russia. I love Russia, for reasons that I don’t know. For reasons that I am not aware of. For reasons that are buried in my subconciousness. I remember driving into Moscow and my heart was racing. Fast. Like on amphetamine. The glitz, the churches, [more]
Tonight they show a documentary about animals in South Africa on TV. Every time I come across an animal documentary I get stuck. Unable to switch channels ever again and immediately stop everything else I am doing. Usually I am a multi-tasker, especially while watching TV. I have [more]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoCO_1GcoV0
Shortly before the end of the II World War between March and April 1945, Straße des 17. Juni with its favorable Ost-West-Achse characteristics of extreme width and length, doubles as an airplane landing and takeoff strip at the service of the Luftwaffe. The air traffic control command-post is [more]
From the National Geographic headquarter To the DC streets and their magnificent autumn colored trees Plus sometimes it’s nice not to think pictures all the time so please excuse the slightly uncreative post.
“The task of the physiological resonators is to amplify the carrying power of the sound emitted. […] Subjectively one has the impression that one is speaking with the part of the body in question – the head, for example, if using the upper resonator. […] In reality, there is [more]
1. Art is that which generates a concept of art. 2. The artwork implies a surpassing and transgressing of its factual conditions. 3. An artwork is something other than (merely) a document of its times. 4. Art articulates a difference from the texture of facts. 5. The artwork [more]
Arriving in Schönefeld you take the S-Bahn directly to Lichtenberg, Storkowerstraße. Usually you do. If the S-Bahn doesn’t work they come up with Schienenersatz-Verkehr, an Ersatz-bus. Ersatz as you all know from Freud signifies compensatory. This is how the compensatory station looks like: 27,4% Reichsbahn pre-1945, 27,4% [more]
I love contemplating narration, the way soccer fans love dissecting a breathtaking goal and the crisp passes that led to it. In what voice does the story unravel? Or does the story unravel the voice? Does the narrator emerge more whole at the end of the telling? Or [more]
Vier Pappeln sind zu sehen von weitem, stehen auf dem Grundstück, am Ufer zum Kanal. Der Westwind biegt die Pappelspitzen parallel. Strassennamen gehen verloren; zwischen den Jahren, in alle Himmelsrichtungen, nach einem Krieg. Luisenstrasse 16. Der Name des Kanales ist geblieben; Kalkgraben. 1927 fuhr ein Dampfschiff auf [more]
It looks like phone makers are arming their models with enhanced ergonomic form factors. Two recently launched specimen include the LG G Flex and Samsung’s Galaxy Round. Both models feature flexible OLED displays – the former with a curved vertical axis, the latter with a curved horizontal axis. [more]
Letzte Nacht war Sonnenfinsternis in Turkana, Nordkenia. In ganz Afrika hat es seit 40 Jahren keine mehr gegeben. Die letzte Sonnenfinsternis, die ich bewusst wahrgenommen habe, war am 11.8.1999 in Berlin. Es war nur eine partielle, aber sie war trotzdem beeindruckend. Ich betrachtete sie durch einen schwarz eingefärbten [more]
Theodor W. Adorno quotes the passage from Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics where the latter says of the artist that, “as a free subject,” he seeks to “strip the external world of its inflexible foreignness,” impressing on it “the seal of his interiority” in order to “enjoy in the [more]
As Told by the Holy Woman in Her Own Words A Hundred or So Years after the End of the World How the Duke tried to take my virginity but could not The guards marched me out of the room, up a staircase, then down another long hallway [more]
I was calling myself because I had misplaced my phone when suddenly this relic of mobile communication that is voice mail sprang into action and I found myself speaking to myself. The thing is, I recorded my voice mail message 13 years ago, when I was 20 and [more]
To be a subject means to surpass and transgress the horizon of facts in order—in the assertion of a new form, the form of the subject—to give space to the experience of a primordial inner turmoil, which is the truth of the subject. I call this inner turmoil [more]
Diskussionen auf Wikipedia sind faszinierend. Wenn man sich geduldig durch jeden „Versionsunterschied“ klickt, stößt man nicht nur auf allerlei Albernheiten, auch Uneinigkeiten innerhalb eines ganzen Berufsstandes können zum Vorschein kommen. Der Eintrag „Cutter (Film)“ kann mit beidem glänzen. Am 4. März 2009 gab ein Nutzer, dessen Profil daraufhin [more]
Joe Fleisch (flaysh): like a dog on his knees, at a leash, with a dog-collar, half-naked. Beat me, whip me! You are my African queen, my mistress, my dominatrix. Hahahahaha!! (Bursting out into a shrieking, screaming hysterical laughter) (then turns to Nimrod who kind of ignores him) Please, [more]
Es herrscht Sprachlosigkeit im Transitbereich und in meinem Kopf. Der Istanbuler Flughafen fühlt sich an wie das Tor, durch das man schreiten muss, um auf die andere Seite des Mittelmeers zu gelangen. Egal ob auf Tel Aviv oder Beirut, hier wird gewartet. Weißes Licht, Klimaanlage, Burgerking, Victoria’s Secret [more]
The subject is not a self which can be certain of itself as it could be certain of a fact. It is the scene of self-experience which proves to be the experience of inconsistency insofar as it experiences the lack of a stable self as the condition of [more]
I stayed up all night to watch the YouTube Music Awards, because I’m supposed to talk about them on the radio in, oh, three hours and also because I wanted to know. I found them to be a quite depressing affair, but exhilarating at times. They took place [more]
Der Größte. Die Art und Weise seines Musizierens suchen bis heute ihresgleichen. Er, der so selektiv vorging, nicht alles dirigierte, was auf seinem Pult landete. Aber was er berührte, das wurde zu mehr als nur zu Gold. Bis heute existiert kaum ein Dokument seines Schaffens, welches nicht den [more]
That’s the thing in LA. You go to some of the events or dinner parties and you never know if it is real. Or what is real. In LA, I often feel like Alice in Wonderland. Things are too big. Or too small. Too loud, too wonderful, too [more]
The aporia leads towards a threshold which the human subject cannot cross. Contrary to the idea that with it, loves comes to an end, aporia is a part of love. The aporias of love prove to be the conditions of its possibility, if love means to resist narcissistic [more]
Courage is easy on a summer night. Your skin needs no protection: the sun is down, the wind is warm. There’s a loud party across the street, the song that’s been playing nonstop on the radio since June drifts in through the open windows. Long into the night, [more]
There was a guy in the train from Paris to Basel who had the annoying habit of repeating every sentence, every word at least three times. He said “the rich in France pay 75% taxes, that’s too much, that’s too much, that’s too much.” Then he asked his [more]
It is 1987 and part of the 750 Years Berlin anniversary celebration is hosted on a stage design built around the golden Victory Column; a rumor goes that also a reproduction of Brandenburger Tor is part of the structure. The anniversary celebration lasts six months and has West [more]
How is the place of the work within the social field to be determined? How do the production of art, art criticism, art studies, and philosophy relate to one another? Is there a political commission for an artwork? Is art necessarily critical—critical of institutions, the market, ideology? Or [more]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbpfdC7Fdnw