Brian Holmes: Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society (2009)

“This publication contains a selection of texts and essays by the writer Brian Holmes that engage with the possibilities and problematics of geopolitics and geopoetics. Holmes is a crucial contemporary writer and thinker whose insight into current social and political developments and how they relate to artistic processes opens up a new field of “geocritique”.

The examples he cites extend across Latin America, Europe and Asia, where he looks at networks, artworks, films, institutions and protest movements for signs of how future progressive strategies might be shaped. The texts here are connected in part with the long-term collaborative research project Continental Drift.”

Publisher Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and Zagreb: WHW, 2009
Research Series, 2
ISBN: 9789070149987
414 pages

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Brian Holmes: Hieroglyphs of the Future: Art & Politics in a Networked Era (2003)

“Networks redefine urban and social borders and can be interpreted in many ways according to the chosen perspective, a limited territory or the entire globe, revealing at the same time the potential and the limits of their actions. This collection of essays, which features a solid political approach intertwined with art, pushes the limits of the critique of the mobility as defined by human beings and the reconfiguration of urban space, analyzing the powers and desired contained in it. A hyperlinking of transnational forces of opposition are invited to play a strategic game coordinating their efforts for imagining future alternative and sustainable realities, through a media struggle which uses the same propaganda tools of capitalism. The collaboration with the art collective Bureau D’Etudes and the resulting maps of power produced by them are nodal, but the core of these essays are the instruments of analysis offered, which elaborate new expressions to effectively decode our contemporary world.”

Publisher Arkzin Communications / What, How and for Whom, Paris/Zagreb, 2003
Broadcasting series, 3
ISBN 9536542838, 9789536542833
294 pages

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Alain Badiou: The Century (2005–)

“Everywhere, the twentieth century has been judged and condemned: the century of totalitarian terror, of utopian and criminal ideologies, of empty illusions, of genocides, of false avant-gardes, of democratic realism everywhere replaced by abstraction.

It is not Badiou’s wish to plead for an accused that is perfectly capable of defending itself without the authors aid. Nor does he seek to proclaim, like Frantz, the hero of Sartre’s Prisoners of Altona, ‘I have taken the century on my shoulders and I have said: I will answer for it!’ The Century simply aims to examine what this accursed century, from within its own unfolding, said that it was. Badiou’s proposal is to reopen the dossier on the century – not from the angle of those wise and sated judges we too often claim to be, but from the standpoint of the century itself.”

First published as Le Siècle, 2005.

Translated, with a Commentary and Notes by Alberto Toscano
Publisher Polity, 2007
ISBN 0745636314, 9780745636313
233 pages

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