Exhibitions, Research, Criticism, Commentary

A chronology of 3,585 references across art, science, technology, and culture
● 01/12/2025
OUT NOW:
Benjaminsen & Casey
Collapsed Mythologies: A Geofinancial Atlas
Artist-researchers Eline Benjaminsen and Dayna Casey decode the ecological slang of traders—dark pools, whales, poison pills—to expose the “absurd (super)natural fictions” that govern the global economy.
Spector
● 23/11/2025
“It is a chatbot which will enable users to pose political, historical, social questions, problems of organization and tactical initiative, and receive a response which draws on the vast archive of Marxist thought.”
– American Marxist and World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) chair David North, on the forthcoming launch of Socialism AI. Trained on lefty literature and WSWS’s deep archive, it reflects and expresses the interests of the working class. “We understand the power of AI, both its reactionary but also its revolutionary potential,” North said at a public meeting in Berlin. “We are acting on the latter.”
World Socialist Web Site
● 18/11/2025
OUT NOW:
Non-Playable Characters
Eight thinkers and tinkerers, including Kyle Chayka, Günseli Yalcinkaya, 2girls1comp, Nora O’Murchú, LAN Party, and Angela Washko, examine NPC-ification creep in today’s networked society, where AI, surveillance capitalism, and the emotion economy turn people into data serfs.
Metalabel
● 17/11/2025
“You put these things out into the world—they’re artworks but also assets. And the fact that they behave as a dual ‘cultural object plus asset’ container is something I didn’t understand at first.”
– Artist Simon Denny, describing the realization about how art circulates that every artist eventually has. Responding to Exocapitalism (2025) with Hito Steyerl, the duo theorize the intersection of art, capitalism, labour, and software with co-authors (and Disintegrator co-hosts) Marek Polik and Roberto Alonso Trillo.
Spreaker
● 06/11/2025

Building on his activist work exploring “unconventional CO2 offsets” with collaborator Tega Brain, American artist Sam Lavigne introduces the world’s first (?) income-based carbon footprint calculator. The tool is based on new insights on emissions inequality that show that “40% of total U.S. emissions were associated with income flows to the highest earning 10% of households.” As Lavigne states: “Some people are, in fact, more responsible than others.”

Sam Lavigne Notes
● 01/11/2025
“There is no path to profitability for subprime AI. These absurd data centers will stand sentinel over the ruins of our fake economy like moai on Easter Island.”
– Investigative reporter and The Fort Bragg Cartel (2025) author Seth Harp, on America’s dangerous AI gamble that he deems the “biggest capital outlay ever.” Pointing at Stephen Witt’s reporting on the race to cover the world in data centers, Harp reminds us that “OpenAI loses ten billion dollars a quarter.”
X / Twitter
H
● 21/10/2025
OUT NOW:
Paul Guillibert
Anthropocene Communism
French philosopher Paul Guillibert argues for “biocommunism” to survive late capitalism’s ecological devastation, rethinking our relation to land through Karl Marx’s late writings and ecopolitical theory.
Verso
● 09/10/2025
“The multiday treatment program at NOX, with its careful progression through diagnostic spaces, doesn’t cure a car of contemplation but manages it, containing affect within acceptable parameters.”
– Critic Nora N. Khan, on the dilemma of Lawrence Lek’s NOX (2023), a fictional AI rehabilitation facility for malfunctioning self-driving cars on view at LA’s Hammer Museum. “These vehicles arrive at NOX not because they’ve stopped working, but because they’ve started feeling,” Khan writes. “As it turns out, consciousness (or even just the high-fidelity impression of consciousness) is a massive liability in a smoothly designed world.”
LA Review of Architecture
● 29/09/2025
“Switching from an LLC or 501(c)(3) to an A-Corp model is a bit like a gambler switching from roulette or slot machines to blackjack: no matter the game, the odds are still stacked against you.”
– Critic Louis Bury, on the limitations of Yancey Strickler’s proposed pro-artist legal structure. “A-Corps are a capitalistic answer to the economic and social ills artists experience under capitalism,” Bury argues. It and Strickler’s Metalabel are innovative, but they won’t solve the root financial problem for most artists: a market that is not large enough to make a living.
Frieze
● 27/09/2025
“AI is the asbestos we are shovelling into the walls of our society, and our descendants will be digging it out for generations.”
– Canadian-British journalist and internet activist Cory Doctorow, on the long recovery from rampant automation after the AI bubble bursts. “The money-hemorrhaging ‘foundation models’ will be shut off and we’ll lose the AI that can’t do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or ‘discouraged’ and out of the labour market, and no one will do your job.”
Pluralistic
● 16/09/2025
OUT NOW:
Adam Hanieh
Crude Capitalism
Political economist Hanieh traces oil’s hidden role in shaping global capitalism, from the sector’s 19th-century origins to today’s climate crisis, revealing how fossil fuels penetrate every aspect of modern life.
Verso
● 15/09/2025
“We went from MONDO 2000 being the main magazine of the internet—a weird, psychedelic, hypertext universe, Gen X free-for-all—to WIRED, which was saying ‘you can make money,’ and ‘you can invest in the future.’ Once people are betting on the future they don’t want infinite possibility anymore.”
– Writer Douglas Rushkoff, on the shift in magazine mindshare—from counterculture to commerce—that signalled the end of the early internet. [quote edited]
Hidden Forces
● 25/08/2025
“If you’ve never spun up an AWS orchestration diagram how can you possibly critique the state of software today? I don’t understand how academia can critique technocapitalism without having actually done any of that work.”
– Exocapitalism (2025) co-author Marek Poliks, challenging academics to engage the technical realities they critique (like Amazon Web Services). Interviewed with co-author Roberto Alonso Trillo, the duo discuss the scale and mechanics of post-Silicon Valley capitalism. [quote edited]
New Models
● 19/08/2025
OUT NOW:
Alyssa Battistoni
Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature
Political theorist Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to value nature, arguing that the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn’t be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven’t been.
Princeton University Press
● 01/08/2025
OUT NOW:
Poliks & Trillo
Exocapitalism
Theorists Marek Poliks and Robert Alonso Trillo map capital’s migration into algorithmic territories—from AI to memecoins—developing conceptual tools for navigating life in an era of automated finance and distributed computation.
Becoming
● 08/07/2025
“That’s the pitch: Somehow it’s fiscally irresponsible to build a stronger floor for everyone to stand on if it in any way may lower the already astronomical ceiling height experienced by the rare few.”
– Political comedian and The Daily Show host Jon Stewart, on tech oligarchs catching feelings over having their wealth and power challenged. On July 4th, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took to X to assert his belief in “techno-capitalism” and the merit of the billionaire class.
YouTube
● 15/06/2025

Spanish artist Karlos Gil explores economic stagnation and technological obsolescence in “Need for Speed,” an environment examining the shifting urban identity of Lleida (ES). Filling La Panera’s columned warehouse space with video, graffiti, and industrial detritus, the installation transforms the former grain storage facility into an “archaeology of what was and what is to come”—balancing fading agricultural heritage with glimpses of regeneration and futurity.

La Panera
● 13/06/2025

Migros Museum of Contemporary Art Zurich continues “Accumulation—on Collecting, Growth and Excess” with its second sequence, examining the side effects of unchecked economic growth. Featured artists include Rindon Johnson, Mimi Ọnụọha, and Raqs Media Collective exploring fast fashion, digital infrastructures, and colonial narratives. Selma Selman’s Motherboards (2023), for example, documents the artist and her family extracting gold from e-waste, recasting stigmatized labour as valuable practice.

Migros Museum of Contemporary Art
● 26/05/2025
“By making high-stakes speculation feel like a game, crypto platforms increase convenience and encourage sustained activity. This is not accidental; it is an engineered dynamic that drives volume, visibility and, ultimately, revenue.”
– Sociologists Amy Swiffen and Martin A. French, on how crypto exchanges contribute to the “gamblification” of everyday life. The normalization of risk in crypto circles is so pervasive that failure is not seen “as a structural outcome but as part of the ‘game,’” they write.
The Conversation
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