Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

Franco Berardi Bifo

Let’s not forget that in the 1990s—when the web prompted a new environment for cognitive activity, mutating the very methodology of producing and distributing knowledge—many theorists, technologists, and economists spoke optimistically of a long, inexhaustible economic boom, spreading the idea that collective intelligence and capitalism were finally allied.

Boris Groys

One repeatedly hears that the art market, distorted by the private taste of wealthy collectors, corrupts public exhibition practice. Of course, this is true in a sense. But then what is this uncorrupted, pure, public taste that is thought to dominate an exhibition practice that surpasses private interests?

Hu Fang

I slipped out and crept up the staircase. The ceiling lamp cast an even, serene, yet totally dull light in the space. Quietly, I opened the glass doors on the second level. The corridors were not lit, though the door to the room at the end was unlatched, revealing a lucent streak akin to sunlight.

Precarious Workers Brigade

Regardless of how these questions are to be resolved, we are noticing how nice our bodies feel after these weeks, having been away from our routines and the computer, from the mute sites of our work. It becomes even clearer that this “work”—whether that of the teacher, student, or artist—is not all there is to fight for. The world we create will make that alienating rhetoric of “work” void, it will stop work from dividing us. Instead, our self-organization shows what pleasures lie in messing with the divisions of labor and life in the context of struggle.

Dieter Roelstraete

Now if we all have blood on our hands—it is pretty much impossible to argue that we don’t, and this inevitably reduces the discussion to a rhetorical variation on an ancient logical paradox—it is not just because we are simply “caught” inside a totality, the totalizing character of which even the most totalitarian master narratives of modernity could not have hoped to match; it is because we accept that the terms under which we are caught inside that this totality can no longer be negotiated.

Simon Sheikh

Strauss’s essay traces the change in bank architecture from the grandiose imperial style to its near disappearance as it came to favor modernist transparency, seeing this as ideological, and as representational. In short: banks represent. In this way, Strauss, as an artist-writer, uses art criticism (or architectural criticism, if you must) as an aesthetic inquiry into the politics of representation.

Hito Steyerl

Paradoxically, while you are falling, you will probably feel as if you are floating—or not even moving at all. Falling is relational—if there is nothing to fall toward, you may not even be aware that you’re falling. If there is no ground, gravity might be low and you’ll feel weightless. Objects will stay suspended if you let go of them. Whole societies around you may be falling just as you are. And it may actually feel like perfect stasis—as if history and time have ended and you can’t even remember that time ever moved forward.