Seventeen year-old Bianca Passarge of Hamburg dresses up as a cat, complete with furry tail and dances on wine bottles. Her performance is based on a dream and she practices for eight hours every day in order to perfect her dance. Photo: Carlo Polito/Getty Images; Collection: Hulton Archive

• Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

  Editorial

• The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind

  The End of Neonationalism: On The Comparative Certainty of Extraterrestrial Life and its Significance for Humankind (Earth and the Solar System Section)

  Nearly 4.6 billion years ago, within a vast cloud of interstellar space, a small pocket of gas and dust collapsed under its own gravity and our solar system was born. As part of this system, our Earth is always in flux and is constantly remolded by powerful forces. These forces can often appear as sudden and unexpected phenomena.

• Keti Chukhrov

  Epistemological Gaps between the Former Soviet East and the “Democratic” West

  But all those restrictions that we condemn in historical socialism have deeper roots; they do not stem simply from authoritarian limitations against freedom, but from different historical paradigms of emancipation that the socialist East, on the one hand, and the liberal capitalist West, on the other, adhered to.

• Hito Steyerl

  Freedom from Everything: Freelancers and Mercenaries

  While today’s lance-for-hire takes on many different forms—from stone crushers, shovels, baby bottles, and machine guns to any form of digital hardware—the conditions of employment do not appear to have changed as dramatically as the lance itself. Today, that lance—at least in the case of writers—has most likely been designed by Steve Jobs.

• Alan Gilbert

  Allegories of Art, Politics, and Poetry

  While some might argue that political indoctrination occurs via the state and its affiliate apparatuses, and others might claim that it happens through the corporate media, it’s clear that what’s been hijacked aren’t our thoughts per se but our desires. The service industry is predicated on capturing desire in a way that a manufacturing economy, with its checklist of items to buy, never was.

• Zdenka Badovinac, Eda Čufer, Cristina Freire, Boris Groys, Charles Harrison, Vít Havránek, Piotr Piotrowski, and Branka Stipančić

  Conceptual Art and Eastern Europe: Part II

  One of the things that happened in 1967—I feel its almost that specific—is that once the central status of that modernist account of the history of aesthetics is put into question, a whole lot of practices, previously part of history albeit slightly invisible, become very visible again. Duchamp, Manzoni, Yves Klein become visible, as does early Morris. Then, people in the West start looking outside the mainstream, they start looking at Latin America, to the East, and everything opens up very fast. As if what history signifies becomes much messier and wider again, and the mainstream, basically controlled from New York, disappears. When you lose the mainstream you lose all your regulations, the sense of standards, paradigms—and you lose the concept of art.

• Ana Teixeira Pinto

  In Memory of Aaron Swartz