Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder, Shusha Niederberger (eds.): Aesthetics of the Commons (2021)

6 February 2021, dusan

“What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a ‘pirate’ library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art can play an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic; that art has the possibility to not only envision or proclaim ideas in theory, but also to realize them materially.

Aesthetics of the Commons examines a series of artistic and cultural projects—drawn from what can loosely be called the (post)digital—that take up this challenge in different ways. What unites them, however, is that they all have a ‘double character.’ They are art in the sense that they place themselves in relation to (Western) cultural and art systems, developing discursive and aesthetic positions, but, at the same time, they are ‘operational’ in that they create recursive environments and freely available resources whose uses exceed these systems. The first aspect raises questions about the kind of aesthetics that are being embodied, the second creates a relation to the larger concept of the ‘commons.’ In Aesthetics of the Commons, the commons are understood not as a fixed set of principles that need to be adhered to in order to fit a definition, but instead as a ‘thinking tool’—in other words, the book’s interest lies in what can be made visible by applying the framework of the commons as a heuristic device.”

Contributors: Olga Goriunova, Jeremy Gilbert, Judith Siegmund, Daphne Dragona, Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver, Gary Hall, Ines Kleesattel, Sophie Toupin, Rahel Puffert and Christoph Brunner.

Publisher diaphanes, Zürich, January 2021
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 License
ISBN 9783035803914
275 pages

Reviews: Gerald Raunig (transversal, 2021, DE), Jaime Groetsema (ARLIS/NA, 2021), Agnieszka Wodzińska (Network Cultures blog, 2021), Alessandro Ludovico (Neural, 2021).

Project website
Book launch
Publisher
WorldCat

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See also Open Scores: How to Program the Commons (2020).

Diana Taylor: ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence (2020)

7 December 2020, dusan

“In ¡Presente! Diana Taylor asks what it means to be physically and politically present in situations where it seems that nothing can be done. As much an act, a word, an attitude, a theoretical intervention, and a performance pedagogy, Taylor maps ¡presente! at work in scenarios ranging from conquest, through colonial enactments and resistance movements, to present moments of capitalist extractivism and forced migration in the Americas. ¡Presente!—present among, with, and to; a walking and talking with others; an ontological and epistemic reflection on presence and subjectivity as participatory and relational, founded on mutual recognition—requires rethinking and unlearning in ways that challenge colonial epistemologies. Showing how knowledge is not something to be harvested but a process of being, knowing, and acting with others, Taylor models a way for scholarship to be present in political struggles.”

Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2020
Dissident Acts series
ISBN 9781478009443, 1478009446
xii+329 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (31 MB, updated on 2021-4-13)

A Peer-Reviewed Journal About, 8(1): Machine Feeling (2019)

27 September 2019, dusan

“Digital culture has become instrumental for capturing and managing what Raymond Williams would once have called “structures of feeling”. The journal issue A Peer-Reviewed Journal About Machine Feeling alludes to this, and points to a material analysis of aesthetics and culture, including its technical and social forms, and in the way that this concept was originally employed as an acknowledgment of the importance of the hard to capture dimensions of everyday life. What potential new sensibilities and structures of feeling may arise in such normalized registers of our habits? What new cultural and social forms and practices emerge in the coming together of machine learning and structures of feeling? In each their own way, the authors in this journal explore these questions.”

Edited by Christian Ulrik Andersen and Geoff Cox
Publisher Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, Aarhus University, Aarhus, 15 August 2019
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License
ISSN 2245-7755
219 pages

With contributions by Mitra Azar, Daniel Chávez Heras, Michela De Carlo, Iain Emsley, Malthe Stavning Erslev, Tomas Hollanek, Rosemary Lee, Carleigh Morgan, Carman Ng, Irina Raskin, Tiara Roxanne, Rebecca Uliasz, Maria Dada, Tanja Wiehn, and Brett Zehner.

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