Tiqqun journal, 1-2 (1999-2001) [French/transl.]

Tiqqun was a French journal that published two issues in 1999 and 2001. The authors wrote as an editorial collective of seven people in the first edition and went uncredited in the second edition.

“Tiqqun’s poetic style and radical political engagement are akin to the Situationists and the Lettrists. Tiqqun is relatively accepted in the radical, philosophical milieu, the Situationist and post-Situationist groups, in the ultra-left, the squat and autonomist movements, as well as among some anarchists. Tiqqun is strongly influenced by the work of the italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.” (Wikipedia)

Reading The Cybernetic Hypothesis (article by Joss Winn, July 2010)
Tiqqun at Bloom0101.org (from IA)
Tiqqun.info

Issue 1 (French, more formats at IA)
Issue 2 (French, more formats at IA)
Trans. of selected texts from issues 1 and 2 (English)
Trans. of selected texts from issues 1 and 2 (English, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Portuguese)

Shifter Magazine 16: Pluripotential (2010)

“We present scores, scripts, instructions, critical essays and more for Shifter’s 16th issue entitled ‘Pluripotential’.

Here we invoke a term, which describes the innate ability of stem-cells to differentiate into almost any cell in the body, to think through the possibility of criticality and cultural change through aesthetic strategies.

The skin that we are born with is transformed as a result of its life of touches, caresses and trauma and becomes flesh. While on the one hand each of us experiences a unique set of circumstances, our common knowledge also shapes this flesh. Analogously, the brain becomes the mind through its history of experiences: A British child growing up in Tokyo speaks fluent Japanese, something her parents having arrived later in life to Japan may never be able to do. The brain is prepared for a multiplicity of cultural and linguistic conditions, within certain biological limits of malleability. Furthermore, as Agamben has noted, ‘the child […], is potential in the sense that [s]he must suffer an alteration (a becoming other) through learning.’

These limits of malleability may fall within the paradigm of what Ranciere calls the distribution of the sensible: “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception, that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common, and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.” Does art have the pluripotential ability to produce events in the cultural landscape, which in turn produce a redistribution of the sensible: a shift in public consciousness concerning how and what we see and feel, and furthermore a reconsideration of who constitutes the public ‘we’. Here the contradicting ideas of a homogeneous people, versus the singularities that produce differences within the multitude become relevant.

This play between structural constraints and a potential for continuous change is seen in forms such as scores, scripts and instructions; and strategies including ‘detournement’ and remix, which hold within them the potential to be performed and reconstituted in multiple ways. It is therefore through these forms that we set out to explore ‘Pluripotential’.” (editors)

Contributors:
 Éric Alliez
, Bernard Andrieu, 
Eric Anglès
, Kader Attia, 
Elena Bajo, 
Lindsay Benedict
, Nicholas Chase, 
Seth Cluett
, Zoe Crosher
, Krysten Cunningham, 
Yevgeniy Fiks
, Dan Levenson, 
Antje Majewski
, T. Kelly Mason, 
Michele Masucci
, Daniel Miller, 
Seth Nehil
, Warren Neidich, 
Susanne Neubauer, 
Hans Ulrich Obrist
, Chloe Piene, 
Sreshta Rit Premnath, 
Linda Quinlan, 
Patricia Reed
, Silva Reichwein, 
Barry Schwabsky, 
Gemma Sharpe, 
Amy Sillman
, Francesco Spampinato, 
Tyler Stallings, 
Laura Stein, 
Clarissa Tossin
, Brindalyn Webster
, Lee Welch
, Olav Westphalen
, James Yeary

Edited by Sreshta Rit Premnath and Warren Neidich
Published in April 2010
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License

Magazine website

PDF (updated on 2013-8-1)
Back issues 1-15

Joseph Weizenbaum: Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation (1976) [English, German]

“Joseph Weizenbaum’s influential book displays his ambivalence towards computer technology and lays out his case: while artificial intelligence may be possible, we should never allow computers to make important decisions because computers will always lack human qualities such as compassion and wisdom. Weizenbaum makes the crucial distinction between deciding and choosing. Deciding is a computational activity, something that can ultimately be programmed. It is the capacity to choose that ultimately makes us human. Choice, however, is the product of judgment, not calculation. Comprehensive human judgment is able to include non-mathematical factors such as emotions. Judgment can compare apples and oranges, and can do so without quantifying each fruit type and then reductively quantifying each to factors necessary for mathematical comparison.”

Publisher W. H. Freeman, 1976
ISBN 0716704633, 9780716704638
300 pages

Review: Amy Stout.

Wikipedia

Computer Power and Human Reason (English, 1976, DJVU, updated on 2013-11-22)
Computermacht und Gesellschaft (German, trans. Gunna Wendt, 2001, unpaginated, added on 2013-11-22)