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“We want to hijack mass media in order to radicalize people politically. Videogames have an enormous potential to question ideology and they don’t fulfil this potential at all.”
– Austrian machinima collective Total Refusal, on what drives their videogame appropriations. In the film Hardly Working (2022), for example, they cast NPC workers in critique of contemporary labour. “Videogame narratives are very obedient to authority,” the collective says, “but there’s no reason that they have to be.” [quotes edited]
“I like to think of the creators of the barcode as the Oppenheimers of capitalism.”
Atlantic editor Saahil Desai, waxing poetic about the ubiquitous zebra-striped data format that powers retail. “The era of big-box stores and megastores and Costcos the size of medieval European towns is only possible because of the barcode,” he concludes. [quote edited]
“Your own sense of reality becomes increasingly specific to you and your synthetic friends, but this isn’t happening on a neutral plane. Your friends work for giant corporations and are designed to extract as much value from you as possible.”
– American artist Trevor Paglen, at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37C3), illustrating a dystopian near-future of corporate AI companionship, where “emotional manipulation will be the name of the game”
“Like Bartleby, we would all ’prefer not to.’ Maybe it’s fatigue-induced, seeking relief from the incessant demands of 24/7 capitalism, careening towards meltdown. Terminally online, we ‘can’t even.’”
– American writer and Spike editor Adina Glickstein, contemplating exhaustion and melancholia in a terminally online, crisis-ridden world. Existential inertia can engender a productive refusal, Glickstein writes in her final (deeply personal) “User Error” column: “a wildcat strike of the soul, against a world where all manner of activity is increasingly apt to be flattened into work.”
“Silicon Valley runs on VC hype. VCs require hype to get a return on investment because they need an IPO or an acquisition. You don’t get rich by the technology working, you get rich by people believing it works long enough that one those two things gets you some money.”
– Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker, demystifying the AI revolution at the Washington Post Futurist Summit. “We need to be clear about what we are responding to: ChatGPT is an advertisement—a very expensive advertisement,” Whittaker insists.
OUT NOW:
Sanela Jahić
Under the Calculative Gaze
The paperback adaptation of Jahić’s artistic research shown at Aksioma in early 2023 expands on the entanglement of socially-applied technologies, systemic injustices, and creeping authoritarianism. Included: an essay by prominent AI critic Dan McQuillan.
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Swiss artist collective Fragmentin premieres G80 (2023), a Mudac-commissioned interactive installation, within the London Design Biennale “Global Game” exhibition at Somerset House. A console interpretation of Buckminster Fuller’s “World Game” of equitable resource distribution, G80 challenges notions of total control and technocracy. 80 correlated sliders invite negotiation of societal values—freedom, GDP, ecology etc.—and taunt viewers with a motorized choreography when left alone.

“I’ve come to see these technologies as intrinsically antihuman. How far back do we have to go to find technology that’s not about controlling nature? You have to go back to fucking Indigenous people and permaculture. That’s the future.”
– American media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, on his Silicon Valley disillusionment. “It’s not just Look what they did to my song,” the former techno-optimist tells journalist Malcom Harris. “It’s that the song itself is corrupt.”
“The fact that we all need land to live, and that there’s no more land available, is the crux of the immorality in profiting from it. You’re renting someone’s rights back to them.”
– Writer and engineer Jehan Azad, on the travesty that is land ownership. Drawing on the agrarian justice teachings of Thomas Paine and Henry George, Azad makes the case against a system of perpetual “existential debt.” He writes: “From the moment you emerge, you’re in a space that belongs to someone else, and from then on, money is spent each day to give you access to the space you require to exist.”
OUT NOW:
Jenny Odell
Saving Time
An analysis of how our sense of time is structured by the relentless demands of capitalism, and a counterproposition arguing for “different rhythms of life.”

Utrecht’s IMPAKT Centre for Media Culture opens “Out of Office,” a group exhibition that takes on exploitative productivity. “In the modern workplace, doing nothing, not showing up, or gestures of mutual support become acts of resistance,” writes curator Marijn Bril about how the contributing artists Alina Lupu, Sam Meech, Adrian Melis, Mario Santamaría, Total Refusal, and others counter efficiency and optimization. Case in point: Santamaría’s sleepy auto-reply to Bril’s exhibition invitation (image).

A survey of DISNOVATION.ORG’s ongoing Post Growth (2020–) research project opens at Kunsthaus Langenthal (CH) with the title “The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow.” The international collective challenges economic growth narratives with evocative thought experiments and prototypes that include videos, installations, objects, and texts. On view are, for example, the indoor farming experiment Life Support System, the diagrammatic CO2 cost analysis Shadow Growth, and samples from the 2021 book Bestiary of the Anthropocene.

“In his final book he argues that a new ‘ecological class’ must be assembled to replace the productivist working class of past socialist imaginaries; a class determined not by one’s position relative to the means of production but one’s position in a set of earthly interdependencies.”
– Political theorist Alyssa Battistoni, on late French philosopher Bruno Latour’s turn to climate politics and his often vexed relationship with the left
OUT NOW:
Mojca Kumerdej
New Extractivism
A compilation of interviews with artists Joana Moll, Vladan Joler, DISNOVATION.ORG, and Ben Grosser conducted as part of Aksioma’s eponymous exhibition and conference program in 2022
“As each patron stepped up and withdrew from the ATM, their picture was taken, ranking them based on the amount of money left in their wallet. For the opulent at Basel Miami, is was the perfect piece to feed your hubris.”
– Critic Seth Hawkins, reflecting on Brooklyn collective MSCHF’s Art Basel Miami Beach intervention, and its lingering crypto winter significance
“When I say profit is the main driver behind this, it’s really important, because this is not necessarily how it needs to be, but it is how these systems are set up.”
– Environmental Media Lab Director Mél Hogan, describing the extractive and eugenicist tendencies underpinning the data economy. “It’s why all those Big Tech guys are telling everyone to vote Republican … [that and lobbying are] intentional political manoeuvres to maintain those hierarchies.”

The first-ever solo exhibition of Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF opens at Perrotin, New York, presenting elaborate interventions that leverage the absurdity of late-stage capitalism. Transforming the gallery into an interactive strip mall, “No More Tears, I’m Lovin’ It” showcases the group’s art as merchandize. Spot’s Revenge (2022, image), for example, trolls Boston Dynamics with a heavily armed robot dog, after the manufacturer disabled the legally purchased unit remotely.

“When you hit corporate America, it hits back—MSCHF have been subject to innumerable cease and desist decrees and being de-platformed from social media and online payment services.”
– American curator Michael Darling, on the Brooklyn-based art collective’s many provocations that are now on view at Perrotin, New York.

“Terms & Expectations,” a group exhibition curated by Barbara Cueto & Bas Hendrikx, open’s at Toronto’s InterAccess. Focused on “distribution centres as agents within our natural environment,” the show hones in on critical infrastructure that underpins platform capitalism (e.g. the ubiquitous Amazon fulfilment centre). Featured are artists including Hiba Ali Simon Denny, Sophia Oppel, and Coralie Vogelaar, contributing works in mediums ranging from installation to performance.

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