Matthew Fuller, Eyal Weizman: Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth (2021)

2 November 2021, dusan

“A new field of counterinvestigation in journalism, human rights, art and law

Today, artists are engaged in investigation. They probe corruption, human rights violations, environmental crimes and technological domination. At the same time, areas not usually thought of as artistic make powerful use of aesthetics. Journalists and legal professionals pore over opensource videos and satellite imagery to undertake visual investigations. This combination of diverse fields is what the authors call “investigative aesthetics”: the mobilisation of sensibilities associated with art, architecture and other such practices in order to speak truth to power.

Investigative Aesthetics draws on theories of knowledge, ecology and technology; evaluates the methods of citizen counter-forensics, micro-history and art; and examines radical practices such as those of WikiLeaks, Bellingcat, and Forensic Architecture. These new practices take place in the studio and the laboratory, the courtroom and the gallery, online and in the streets, as they strive towards the construction of a new common sense.

Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman have here provided an inspiring introduction to a new field that will change how we understand and confront power today.

To Nour Abuzaid for your brilliance, perseverance, and unshaken belief in the liberation of Palestine.

Publisher Verso Books, London, August 2021
ISBN 9781788739085, 1788739086
259 pages

Review: Chris Hayes (Tribune, 2021).

Publisher
WorldCat

EPUB (updated on 2022-11-21)

Archives of the Commons II: The Anomic Archive (2021) [English, Spanish]

18 March 2021, dusan

“In the past few years, we have seen emerging alternative and autonomous experiences of archive management and production that move away from the legitimized principles and regulations to explore the possibilities of the common. If what is common implies to leave the logic of property, if it implies to work against the privatization of knowledge and to abandon the consideration of what is public as exclusive patrimony of the State, the challenge is to find collaborative ways of production, distribution and circulation of knowledge. The experiences tackled in this book multiply the ways of conceiving and facilitating access to different types of documentary collections, so as to favor the plural becoming of history and its different writing and re-writing, elaborating and re-elaborating, in a continuous movement, that what we can call common.”

With contributions by Nancy Dantas (Center for Curating the Archive), Graciela Carnevale (Archivo Graciela Carnevale), Lani Hanna (Interference Archive(, May Puchet (RedCSur), Philippe Artières, Daniel G. Andújar, Alessandro Ludovico, Red Conceptualismos del Sur, Paulina Bravo (Archiveras sin fronteras), Kristóf Nagy (Artpool Research Center), Eva Weinmar (Piracy Proyect), Maite Muñoz Iglesias, LACA YAXS, Ernesto Oroza (Desobediencia tecnológica), Gareth Bell-Jones (The Flat Time House), Francisco Brives, Néstor Prieto, María Gil, Patricia Rodriguez, and Elsa Velasco (Museo La Neomudéjar).

Edited by Fernanda Carvajal, Mela Dávila Freire, Mabel Tapia
Publisher Red Conceptualismos del Sur (RedCSur)/Pasafronteras, Buenos Aires, 2021
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA International License 4.0
ISBN 9782956997115
145 pages

Seminar (2017)
Publisher

PDF, PDF (English, 34 MB)
PDF, PDF (Spanish, 34 MB)

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