What potential does the concept of potentiality still hold What can prediction and pattern recognition promise when the “Stochastic Parrots” of Silicon Valley’s AI chatbots employ such tools only to churn out vast quantities of high-grade slop? When the latent space of possible futures are explored by such brute, rote instruments? An essay here argues that AI’s true potential can perhaps only be glimpsed by reckoning with its composite, hybrid, and distributed qualities. ...
Index #7
As we myopically gaze at the handsets inches from our face, we are often encouraged by sensible apostles of “objectivity” to try and get some perspective; to zoom out, zoom up, and achieve something like a lofty bird’s-eye view on our situation.
e-flux Index #7 floats upward to give an aerial view over the terrain of everything e-flux published between December 2024 and February 2025. This peek through the porthole across three months worth of daily publishing gathers together long-form essays on contemporary culture and architecture, exhibition, book, and film reviews, profiles of artists, critical interjections, fresh translations from the historic avant-garde, and analytical dispatches from live political and social conjunctures. These have been recomposed into eleven thematic sections, to help us get some perspective (however vertiginous) on the present moment and emergent tendencies in critical discourse. Like Rhodes’ paintings, these sections are also spatially egalitarian, and they refuse the usual hierarchy of ordering texts. They are titled Vegetarians Miss Fewer Flights; Seeking Truth From Facts; Playtime; The Form Was Simple; Hardcore Diaries; Scratching on things I could disavow; Chronotopes; Walls of Complexity; Wet Concrete; We Want Everything; and They Are Shutting Off the Lights. Enjoy the flight!
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11 ChaptersOctober 2025
Vegetarians Miss Fewer Flights
With: Sven Lütticken, Charles Tonderai Mudede, R.H. Lossin, R.H. Lossin, Agnes Arnold-Forster, Brian Dillon, Mikael Brunila and Ilan Manouach
Seeking Truth from Facts
With: Alexei Penzin, Nilo Goldfarb, Ben Eastham, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jason Read, Jacob Dreyer, Michael Kurtz and Daniel Belasco
Well that’s just the way things are. Enter the sober world of blind contingency, information, facticity and throwness, things that are given and just as readily taken away—facts that care not one jot about our feelings. How are scientific facts prioritized and constructed under the current regime of Chinese techno-science? How does the mythocratic imaginary of the new right work? How did 1960s’ refuseniks such as Fred Lonidier seek to reinvent...
Playtime
With: Travis Diehl, Max Grünberg, Alan Gilbert, Isa Jacobs, Yiren Zhao, Yin Aiwen, Adeline Chia, Daniella Brito, Thomas Allen Harris and Nikolay Smirnov
Holy Fools vs. Tricksters vs. socialist RPG enthusiasts: let the games begin. Designers employ simulation games as investigative architectures to model decentralized futures, while at the latest Steirischer Herbst the struggle for an emancipatory popular art form alights upon political comedy. The cooperative and open spirit of childhood play presented by Francis Alÿs’s video work finds its warped, funhouse reflection in that closed war game par...
The Form Was Simple
With: Kristin Ross, Andreas Petrossiants, Reinier de Graaf, Alex Retegan, Maria Dimitrova, Gaby Cepeda, Stanislaus von Moos, Le Corbusier, Kazimir Malevich, Thotti, Innas Tsuroiya and Sergei Eisenstein
Though “formalist” remains a slur for many, the looming Question of Form continues to cast a long shadow across artistic, architectural, and theoretical discourse. A conversation on the postcapitalist form of the Commune opens out onto a larger investigation into the orientating axis of the “subsistence perspective” within contemporary experiments of communal living. Two contributions from an e-flux Architecture series titled Treatment critiq...
Hardcore Diaries
With: Michał Murawski, Kateryna Rusetska, e-flux Architecture, Yuliya Yurchenko, Beauty Studio, Tania Pashynska, Yuliia Holiuk, Sofia Pinedo-Padoch, Ada Wordsworth, Kseniia Kalmus, Alina Stamenova, Kateryna Rusetska and Andrii Palash
The end of the year 2024 marked the passing of a decade of Ukraine’s uninterrupted exposure to and work with the “hardcore” of war. Ukrainian grassroots reconstruction initiatives have sifted through, cleared up, and re-used bricks, rubble, and ruined matter. They have worked in collaboration with and in response to the real needs of communities affected by war, in order to piece together both the immediate foundations and the long-term structures ...
Scratching on things I could disavow
With: Danilo Scholz, Mohamed Amer Meziane, Sabu Kohso, Sean O’Toole, Yuk Hui, Innas Tsuroiya, Svetlana Romanova, Serubiri Moses, Bilal Khbeiz, Marci Kwon, Ekalan Hou, Mathilde Walker-Billaud, Claire Staebler and Émilie Renard
Spin the globe. Recalibrate the imperial order of the world. Purported centers and peripheries get adjusted, as the new “intense proximities” produced by global supply chains and labor flows redraw the maps of what was once quaintly termed the global village. The neoliberal order’s favorite lexicon of societal transition, development, and progression under the auspices of free trade at the same time rings hollow against a neo-reactionary recurrence...
Chronotopes
With: Hallie Ayres, Ren Ebel, Leopoldina Fortunati, Musoke Nalwoga, Adeline Chia, Maria José de Abreu, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Océane Ragoucy and Jenny Wu
Tick-tock. As time goes by, multiple—and often incommensurable—timescales and calendars intermesh with and overwrite one another. We can consider for instance the human and non-human records of time passing (as appears in recent work by ikkibawiKrrr), the archival, real footage of an event and its subsequent reenactment (as in Cihad Caner’s work on a 1972 Dutch anti-immigrant riot), or the marked discrepancy between the male proletarian’s hourly waged labor and the housew...
Walls of Complexity
With: Jörg Heiser, Mi You, Melissa Gronlund, Stephanie Bailey, Evan Moffitt, Juan José Santos and Aslak Aamot Helm
It’s complicated. From the shifting sands of the globalized, post-liberal geopolitical order to the post-genomic framework of modern cancer research, increasing orders of complexity bedevil contemporary epistemologies. The more we see, the more confounded we become. Correspondingly, artists, curators, and radical thinkers continue trying to reckon with this valley of undetermination. Hans Haacke forensically maps the sprawling portfolio of a New York slumlord; a transdisciplinary conferenc...
Wet Concrete
With: Tamta Khalvashi, Luka Nakhutsrishvili, Stephanie Bailey, Carmen Amengual, Soyoung Yoon, Max Crosbie-Jones, Dingxin Zhao, Henry Giroux, Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Tom Allen and Kateryna Iakovlenko
There is a moment in revolutionary time after the old order is deposed and before the new concrete sets. This is an interregnum when the volatile energies of resistance, refusal, protest, and defiance have yet to canalize into political organizations or institutions. A thoroughgoing genealogy of nationalist movements situates the wet concrete of the French Revolution as the foundations for European liberal nationalism, while Carmen Amengual’s films look o...
We Want Everything
With: Charles Tonderai Mudede, Pietro Bianchi, Alice Guy-Blaché, Orit Gat, Pramodha Weerasekera, Adeline Chia, McKenzie Wark, Crystal Bennes and Isa Jacobs
“Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade,” as Proust had it. This holds for speculative economic bubbles like Tulipomania, explored in this section in an essay on the nascent capitalism of early-modern Netherlands. It also holds for the insatiable new needs inculcated by the advertising industry (as can be seen in a piece on Radu Jude’s montage film of post-communist commercials in Romania: Eight Postcards from Utopia, 20...
They Are Shutting off the Lights
With: Tom Denman, Lydia Xynogala, Britta Hentschel, Kenny Fries, Leslie Chapman, Yvan Prkachin and Amica Dall
On health, death, therapy, sickness, aging, sclerosis, contagion, and healing. On noxious chemicals sealed in glass containers and misguided curatorial displays of work by disabled artists in glass vitrines. On taking the hydrotherapeutic waters, AI psychoanalysts, and the invention of iron lungs. On burned-out activists, Brunelleschi’s Florentine “hospital of the innocents,” attention-deficit youth, and the systemic, chaotic dementia of a sundowning political order.