On knowledge and the unknown: how unknowable atrocities are the gust that sways the tower of progress, why indifference and disavowal are so predominant today, how to find and share knowledge in an online environment overdetermined by corporate profits, what can be learned from reading artist’s juvenilia, and how nothing escapes the power of delirium.

On the water, water, everywhere: setting sail into the ocean as a horizon of possibility, which floats the promise of connection, but also remains a violently lived space of transnational trade, military economies and uncertain migratory flows, tacking off to other fluid subjects such as dampness, leaking, vaporous atmospheres, and the artificial waterways used to cool overheating crypto-farms.

On contemporary organizing: collective power and its sudden dissipation, complex housing movements against serial evictor landlords, struggles for data ownership by OnlyFans sex workers and the broader hacker class against an intransigent and proprietary “vectoralist” class, and the intricacies of the current women’s struggle against sexual violence in Mexico.

On verbal domination and restoring the truth to language: from the nomenclature of Ceausescu-era communism, to the mantras of contemporary populist governance, the often rarified argot of “curatorese,” the “absolutist relativism”of Putinite linguistic inversions, the patriarchal matrix of legal euphemisms, and the wordplay practiced by the very devil himself. 

On connections, online and off: the machinic unconscious, the quixotic task of trying to measure the Internet, the dark sensitivities of the “connective generation,” the trend toward hyperlinked curation, and the proto-networking underway in Bertolt Brecht’s dialectical collages and Shana Moulton’s video work with found digital imagery.  

On Doing-It-Yourself: between the iconoclasm of Pussy Riot’s “punk prayer” and the self-built vernacular log houses found in one of northernmost regions of the planet, taking in en route teenage zinesters, Fluxus-inspired punk club performances, the autopoietic countercultures of the formerly Eastern Bloc, and an analysis of the “alchemical work” of hackers.

On nature beyond “nature”: nature considered as Cybelic, as transitional and transexual, Jonas Mekas’s elegiac final Requiem, a “prophetic vision of a world poised for renewal,” clay murals of eyeless tapirs, an exhibition linking botany to colonial conquest, and the genealogy of “Net Zero” as a metrology of the Anthropocene.

On containment: how to protect and to preserve, the levels of control required for keeping the world out of museums, the data we hoard and the stories it unwittingly tells about us, the claustrophobic interiors of Chantal Akerman’s films, collections of looted art “haunted by their histories,” and the history and future of insulating our homes. 

On distance: an author returns to her book twenty-five years after its publication, a filmmaker considers the light brought to us from distant galaxies, a painter in London depoicts the hulking silhouette of Mount Tamalpais some 5000 miles away (having never seen it in person), a street photographer displace himself from the crowd that flows around him, two Italian auteurs explore the distance between the thunderclap and the lightning, the image and the event.