Laboria Cuboniks: The Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation (2018)

“The real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealised.

The Xenofeminist Manifesto calls for the scaling up of feminism. Contemporary feminism, it contends, is limited by its predominant investment in local and micropolitical action. What is needed is a feminism capable of systemic intervention. The Xenofeminist Manifesto propose that such a feminism must start from a new universal–one no longer coded as cis, straight, white, and male–with Xenofeminism as its theoretical and technological platform. Drawing on queer and transfeminist theory, as well as philosophical rationalism, against nature and biological essentialism, the feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks instead invest in alienation and the anti-natural, in seizing technology and in embracing the desire for an alien future.

If nature is unjust, change nature!”

Publisher Verso, London, September 2018
Creative Commons BY 4.0 International License
ISBN 9781788731577, 1788731573
95 pages

Commentary: Annie Goh (2018).

Publisher
WorldCat

HTML
EPUB

Giorgio Griziotti: Neurocapitalism: Technological Mediation and Vanishing Lines (2016–)

“Analyzes the changing politics of technology, charting out possibilities for autonomous cooperation

Technological change is ridden with conflicts, bifurcations and unexpected developments. Neurocapitalism takes us on an extraordinarily original journey through the effects that cutting-edge technology has on cultural, anthropological, socio-economic and political dynamics. Today, neurocapitalism shapes the technological production of the commons, transforming them into tools for commercialization, automatic control, and crisis management.

But all is not lost: in highlighting the growing role of General Intellect’s autonomous and cooperative production through the development of the commons and alternative and antagonistic uses of new technologies, Giorgio Griziotti proposes new ideas for the organization of the multitudes of the new millennium.”

First published as Neurocapitalismo: Mediazioni tecnologiche e linee di fuga, Mimesis, 2016.

Foreword by Tiziana Terranova
Translated by Jason Francis McGimsey
Publisher Minor Compositions, Colchester, February 2019
Open access
ISBN 1570273421, 9781570273421
244 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF
Reviews and extracts in Italian, Spanish and French

Jonas Staal: Propaganda Art from the 20th to the 21st Century (2018)

“This study by artist Jonas Staal explores the development of propaganda art from the 20th to the 21st century. Staal defines propaganda as the performance of power by means of the equation propaganda = power + performance. Through his work as a propaganda researcher and practice as a propaganda artist, he argues that different structures of power generate different forms of propaganda and therefore different forms of propaganda art. Whereas in the context of the 20th century Staal discusses the differences between avant-garde, totalitarian, and modernist propaganda art, in the 21st century he proposes the categories of War on Terror Propaganda Art, Popular Propaganda Art, and Stateless Propaganda Art. By means of concrete examples of artists and artworks within each of these categories, he attempts to show how the performance of power in the 21st century translates into different visual forms, and how they shape and direct our reality. Staal’s study shows that power and art exist in continuous interaction. Propaganda and propaganda art are not terms that only refer to the past, but concepts and practices through which we can understand the construction of reality in the present.”

PhD Dissertation, Faculty of Humanities, University of Leiden
Open access
425 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF (2 MB)
Video (12 min)