Idle Hands

“Sorry, what were you saying?”

Thirty years into life online and our collective attention-spans are now potholed and weathered. We find ourselves easy prey for algorithmic time-sinks (content) and predictive analytics (commerce); succumbing to cycles of instant disgust, instant delight, and instant tedium. Research shows we read ever less deeply into the articles we open, glance at paintings in museums for ever shorter periods, and read ever fewer books.1 The solutions on offer for this attentional crisis are varied, but equal in their severity. They range from the New York Times weekly dare to just spend ten minutes scrutinizing a single painting as a form of “slow looking,” through to the increasing ubiquity of the “one-unbroken-take” gimmick in prestige film and streaming series and the “one-unbroken-sentence” gimmick in contemporary fiction,2 not to mention the heady apparel of mindfulness apps, productivity hacks, noise canceling headphones,smart-drugs, and smart-beverages that keep the poly-working precariat on their A-game.

The e-flux Index has a slightly different relationship to contemporary distraction. This publication’s orientation is not toward the monomaniacal “locked-in” tunnel vision that never dares to look up from the page in thought—or insists on spending ten minutes unblinking in front of an old master—nor to the dimly attentive, guilty comportment we have toward bite-size, instantly shareable, and just as instantly forgettable online “content.” Rather it extols the playful and associative non-linearity native to the best anthologies and magazines, the absorbing zigzag journey from C to A to B and back again. In ethos the Index therefore sits within an artistic, literary, and philosophical lineage that has long celebrated the potency of, rather than prohibiting and punishing, the creative wandering of a digressive and receptive mind, and its moments of reverie. It seeks to facilitate those epiphanic moments when a promising distraction catches wind: “Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker/ Over the strained time-ridden faces/ Distracted from distraction by distraction.”3

Each Index concentrates several months’ worth of articles, long-form essays, reviews, interviews, poems, and more, hitherto dispersed across the various sections of e-flux.com, into one publication, reorganizing them thematically into sections. These can be read in any order and considered each as its own sustained digression or associative bundle—the following pages drift, rather than walk in a straight line. The eleven digressions of Index #6, concentrating our attention onto everything e-flux published in the period October–November 2024, are titled: How We Take Things Apart, The Abracadabra of Flesh, Bulwarks Against Forgetting, Pictures on the rocks for our dreams to carry, Strangers in the Village, And Then Came the Environment, A World of Statues, Infrastructures of Dependency, Off-Script, Barbed Wire Rusts, and The Sound of Your World Collapsing.

Index#6 begins where twentieth-century poetry also began just over a century ago, in the wasteland, with a digression on How We Take Things Apart. Things fall apart, but they are also actively disassembled, digested, and thoughtlessly thrown from car windows. All that remains is waste, a fine patina of silica dust everywhere, a scrapheap of forgotten detritus. We find this in Irmgard Emmelhainz’s essay on the “destructive desire” for the cheap caloric waste of junk food, Zofia Trafas White writing on the gratuitous wastefulness of the modern construction industry, and Mae-ling Lokko on the material ecology of “muck” accumulating in the twenty-first centuries’ soils, oceans, and rivers. Yet the potential for incubating new subjectivities within such wastelands also comes to light, as in Anna Gorskaya on the ORTA collective’s “Spectacular Experiments” with the Kazakh people’s experience as nuclear test subjects, or the Barbadian filmmaker Jason Fitzroy Jeffers’s celebration of the important work of building a society from scraps in the Caribbean.

From waste to waistlines, the next digression, The Abracadabra of Flesh, asks: how do our bodies give us away? Isabel Jacobs reviews a new critical study of the hand-reader and sexologist Charlotte Wolff, which suggests our palms might reveal what we otherwise try to conceal. The olfactory likewise becomes a means of detection in Simon Hajdini’s analysis of Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 film Parasite. Meanwhile, in an essay from Elsa Mäki, the intimate role of “stitching”—making and thinking with textiles—offers salutary lessons for the imperative work of repair and “resetting the settler-colonial clock.” Kateryna Iakovlenko’s profile of the artist Katya Libkind investigates how an injured body might experience pleasure, while a republished essay from Jean Epstein stakes out an embodied territory for avant-garde filmmaking.

Bulwarks Against Forgetting examines the use and abuse of historical memory. In a time when official “memory cultures” mandate one reading of atrocities past and present, this digression inquires into how collective counter-memories can fight against the forces of forgetting. We find such an approach in Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s “unshowable photographs” of the 1947 Nakba, Basyma Saad’s eulogies for the human cost of the American Century, the archival interrogations of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s analytical camera, and Sam Ashby’s reverential queer historiographies. Minh Nguyen’s essay on the aporias of post-socialist Vietnamese art detects an ambivalence between sentimental nostalgia and disenchantment amongst contemporary artists towards this recent past, while a close reading of the poet Don Mee Choi’s ambitious trilogy explores her lyrical concept of “orphan memories.”

Leaving the all-too-terrestrial domain of historical memory and drifting up into the clouds of the imagination, Pictures on the rocks for our dreams to carry gathers together this issue’s tricksters, jokers, storytellers, magicians, and daydreamers.4 Following the first part of his investigation into psyops in Index#5, in the concluding parts of his essay Trevor Paglen delivers the punchline to the one about the magician recruited by CIA. Elsewhere the extraterrestrial (in Oleksiy Radynski’s discussion of Florian Yuriev’s cosmic Flying Saucer building in Kyiv) comes into contact with the utterly quotidian (in Valery Podoroga’s essay on the theory of “incidence” in Daniil Kharms’s fiction) inside the limbic world of storytelling, magic, and the conjuring act of fiction. We also read of two contemporary American filmmakers pushing the limits of anti-cathartic storytelling (Sean Baker and Harmony Korine, respectively), and learn from Boris Groys how the eschatological cosmology of Evald Ilyenkov channeled the “magic séance” of Hegel’s dialectic.

Strangers in the Village begins its digression with Yuk Hui asking: what happens when we shift our perspective of dwelling, of being-in-the-world, from the sturdy terrain of home to the conditions of Heimatlosigkeit, in-betweenness, diaspora, and glocality? A discussion between Molly Crabapple, Andreas Petrossiants, and Shellyne Rodriguez emphasizes the power of doikayt (“hereness” in the Yiddish of the interwar Jewish Bund) as a political imperative, an idea which is then modulated through the delicate connectivity of Gego’s Reticuláreas sculptures, the “imaginary diasporas” of Edival Ramosa, and Gregg Bordowitz’s celebration of “Yinglish” (somewhere between Yiddish and English). The intermeshing of local and global is also explored through Alex Taek-Gwang Lee’s trenchant piece on the paradoxical cultural politics of the Nobel Prize, as an arbiter of global literary distinction often cynically co-opted to shore up so-called “national literatures,” and in Jamie Allen and Armina Pilav’s close study of Malta as a “beneficiary and battleground of global influence.”

After everything else, And Then Came the Environment. Setting off with the critic Rob Goyanes through the smoke of Gustav Metzger’s pioneering autodestructive installations, we here approach the anti-pastoral landscapes of what Metzger called “damaged nature.” The eco-philosopher Michael Marder’s pointed essay theorizes the mismatch between the sea as we imagine it and the realities of marine pollution, suggesting the urgency of a “phenomenology of climate devastation.” The photographer Nadia Huggins meanwhile details her efforts to produce an ecological archive of black sand deposits secreted across the tourist paradise of the Grenadines. Sarah Bell, Lucy Benjamin, and Enzo Lara-Hamilton stage interventions against the social normalization of increasingly extreme weather in Australia’s largest city, while the experimental filmmaker Jen Liu explores the ambivalences of liquidation as an idea: from catastrophic tsunamis and waves of redundancies to the swarm logic of “becoming water.”

Seeking shelter from the unpredictabilities of the great outdoors inside the sterilized “closed world” of the museum, we then arrive at a digression on A World of Statues. For Frantz Fanon, the White West was “a world divided into compartments, a motionless Manicheistic world, a world of statues.”5 Adventurous and radical curatorial research and practice seeks instead to cross-compartmentalize, to depose reductive binaries, and to topple or at least détourn this settled order of things. The second part of Mal Ahern’s far-reaching essay rethinks the contained environment of the white cube to ask what must change for the gallery to accommodate a more accessible, egalitarian approach to art. Andrea Fraser’s ambitious attempt to diagrammatize the field of contemporary art typologizes the variety of current exhibition formats. Meanwhile Serubiri Moses’s thoroughgoing survey of the last twenty years of African art exhibitions in New York and Ives Maes’s research project examining the surprising linkages between the historic avant-garde and the pavilion architecture of international trade fairs each open up important new horizons for exhibition-making.

What comes after autonomy? After independence is attained? Infrastructures of Dependency suggests these questions may prove knottier than expected. A searching conversation between Sven Lütticken and the late Marina Vishmidt departs from the hobbyhorse of art’s autonomy to consider how “to effect a more thoroughgoing transformation of social life and productive relations, one that would render autonomy specifically for art or culture redundant.” Olivia Erlanger’s sculptures and video work sketch domestic infrastructures of control. Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s essay on hyper-colonialism critiques the reassertion of domination by former colonial powers through forms of cognitive and resource extraction, while Stephanie Bailey’s review of work by Ho Chi Minh City’s Art Labor collective and Dorraine Duncan and Jhordan Channer’s genealogical account of post-independence Jamaica both address the postcolonial melancholia of industrialization.

In the period covered by e-flux Index#6, October–November 2024, several masters of the dark arts of political spin and spectacle returned to front stage. The digression titled Off-Script gathers together pieces that move within this funfair house of horrors. Slavoj Žižek writes on Trump the reality TV president, and his retinue of authoritarian court jesters, but also of the liberal outrage that sustains this troupe in playing to the gallery. Jennifer Johung teases out the relationship between performance theory, performativity, and feedback loops. Diego Marcon’s works summon up dolls and marionettes, cheap thrills and jump scares, while Jenna Bliss’s films venture into the terrain of “scripted reality.” Katherine C.M. Adams analyzes the dramatic force of the text and the relationship between theater and film, while Marguerite Duras (reflecting on her own filmmaking) starts to wonder if her scripts can be altogether done away with.

From the theater to the commons, Barbed Wire Rusts asks: how can we live together? Kristin Ross’s essay on commoning and coalition-building within land-based and Indigenous struggles threads the needle from nineteenth-century communards to contemporary movements against Cop Cities. Jason Waite casts a backward glance to Okwui Enwezor’s 2006 Seville biennial and finds him there making use of the concept of “neighborliness,” while Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s recent work brings together humans and AI through “one of nature’s oldest coordination technologies”—the choir. David Gissen’s genealogy of the Bay Area’s Independent Living Movement unearths its disability critique of property. Meanwhile we survey various autopoietic artistic communities eking out modes of collaboration, cohabitation, and neighborliness—ranging from contemporary Warsaw’s newly vigorous gallery scene, to Brian Dillon writing on Agnés Varda’s 1960s Hollywood salons, to Topy .pson’s profile of a group of artistic researchers producing an arts center in a tiny Serbian village.

What’s that noise? It is the Sound of Your World Collapsing, the final digression of e-flux Index #6.6 Three pieces from an e-flux Architecture project on “Loudreading”—by Luis Othoniel Rosa, the Post-Novis collective, and Roque Raquel Salas Rivera respectively—ask how far a collective voice can travel, and what obstacles radical recitation must overcome to make certain experiences and histories audible.7 The cacophony only increases in Sophie Rose’s essay on the “snag” of the spoken voice, and the points where perfect articulacy breaks down: how can a stutter interfere with the possibility to “raise one’s voice”? Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s soundwork heightens the decibel count through approaching the intense aural violence of modern warfare. Ben Eastham strains to hear the individual artworks submerged within the operatic curatorial clamor of the 15th Gwangju Biennale. This polyphony, this Algarabía, then subsides as we descend into resonant silence, into a world of echoes, with Natasha Marie Llorens sitting in Konsthall C’s reconstruction of the UN headquarters meditation room.

—Berlin, May 2025