v6

Echoes of Light: Reflections on Lux Aeterna
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by Emily Zimmerman
volume 6

We are the captive guests of everything we have created, yet we endowed none of it with the mercy to let us go free. —Max Bense, Technical Existence Errors, ever unpredictable, surface the unnameable, point toward a wild unknown. To become an error is to surrender to becoming unknown, unrecognizable, unnamed. New names are created

Of Blood and Circuitry, from Satellites to Dust: Confronting Media in Crisis
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by Lauren S. Berliner and Berette S Macaulay, in conversation
volume 6

Lauren Berliner: I want to open by asking you why, after seeing Lux Aeterna, I want to open by asking you why, after seeing Lux Aeterna, you said, “We have to talk.” What was on your mind? I am very eager to hear your insights as an artist, curator, and scholar who has tangled with

FemSat: Propositions for Feminism in Radiophonic Space
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by Radio Amatrices
volume 6
Originally published in Espace art actuel, “Féminisme spatial / Space Feminism.” Montreal, Quebec. Issue 130 (Winter 2022). Print.

144 MHz – 2-METER BAND Radiophonic space is open to anyone with the skills and legal rights to listen and transmit. Yet, radio—specifically Amateur Radio—has often been the domain of privileged white, male-identified people. There is a complex relationship between governmental, legal control and tacit, ad-hoc governance by radio amateurs themselves. Do It Yourself (DIY),

In Defense of the Poor Image
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by Hito Steyerl
volume 6
Originally published in e-flux journal #10, November 2009.

The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted

Chasm
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by James Bridle
volume 6
© 2018 James Bridle Excerpt from James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (London; Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2018). Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.

‘If only technology could invent some way of getting in touch with you in an emergency,’ said my computer, repeatedly. Following the 2016 US election result, along with several other people I know and perhaps prompted by the hive mind of social media, I started re-watching The West Wing: an exercise in hopeless nostalgia. It

Ancient Knowledge Survivalist Manifesto
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by Studio for Propositional Cinema
volume 6

WE ARE ON THE BRINK OF THE ABYSS: an impending self-extinction deleting human life, and, with it, our words, our cultural speech-forms, our cultural output, our meaning. Our deletion will not be the end. The animal, mineral, and vegetable worlds will thrive in our absence. New biological hierarchies will be formed, other extinctions will occur,

50 Years of Art & Technology in Seattle
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by Robin Oppenheimer
volume 6
This essay was written in 2016 on the occasion of 9e2Seattle, a festival that commemorated the 50th anniversary of the 9 Evenings festival.

“As inventors, artists are a breed apart. They are unencumbered by the practical constraints experienced by their more product-minded counterparts. Hardware and software in the artist’s hands are merely a technical means to an aesthetic goal. The commercial feasibility of a given solution is often not relevant. But, as has been the case with the

On Horizons
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by Norie Sato and Emily Zimmerman, in conversation
volume 6

Norie Sato has been a pivotal force in the Pacific Northwest as an artist and a curator, responsible for supporting the production and exhibition of video art throughout the 1970s and 1980s and placing spaces such as and/or at the forefront of a national dialogue around the then-emerging, experimental forms of media art.  As an

Tropicollage
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by Astria Suparak
volume 6

The tropics exist as a dreamy respite from “real” life…for some people.  But it’s not a holiday for the 3.2 billion people who live in the tropical zone. White-made media reinforces a racialized, exotic vacation trope, training their cameras on and constructing sets with gangly palm trees, pristine beaches, glistening oceans, and deferential Pacific Islander,

Spikes and Stills
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by Vic Brooks
volume 6
Adapted from Brooks, Vic. “Spike and Protocol,” Programming EMPAC Vol. 2, ed. Johannes Goebel (Troy: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2021), 19–27.

“To unwind a tangled clump of wires we must lay out in parallel many independent stories [in order] to then recognize where they exist, the mutual interdependencies, or, more often, the conflicts.” —Manfredo Tafuri  In Italian architectural historian and theorist Manfredo Tafuri’s influential account of the trajectories of modernist architecture, the inevitable “shocks, accidents, points