The entire cultural output of humanity is being fed into AI. Large Language Models are ingesting not only books, articles, and blogs in their entirety, but also the content of our private written and spoken conversations. LLMs are boiling lakes and burning down forests to generate texts based on statistical mediocrity, which we are supposed to worship as the beginning of a great new gilded age.
Read16 June 2025
In Defense of Artistic Freedom: Support Legal Action Against Political Abuse
We, the undersigned, stand in solidarity with Slovenian artist Maja Smrekar, who is pursuing legal action against the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) for unauthorized use of her artwork, defamation, and incitement of public hostility.
In their curatorial statement for the exhibition, Really? Art and Knowledge in Time of Crisis (2024), Mi You and David Garcia explore how artists address the erosion of trust in knowledge and the rise of disinformation through investigative and critical practices.
This short essay for Cahiers Costech explores the complicated relationship of activist and experimental / artistic practices around digital and online media to the problem of time.
ReadDisruption Network Institute:
Investigating the Kill Cloud
A new hub for investigations and empirical research on how artificial intelligence impacts new technologies of war, automated weapons, and networked warfare.
In the United States, fascism presently unfolds as a simulation. The fascist simulation constitutes itself as a pixelated sea of livestreams, images, posts, and comments, circulating widely as its own networked, autonomous model of reality. It is enacted as an ensemble of people, social media platforms, presidential tweets, superspreader events, confederate flags, television chyrons, informatic infrastructures, automatic rifles, toxic masculinities, MAGA hats, racist hashtags, and video game servers. It is fascist ideology reified through consumer technology.
ReadOpen letter by Paolo Cirio.
Press Release Oct 6, 2020.
Addressed to Roselyne Bachelot, French Minister of Culture.
In response to the censored art installation at the exhibition Panorama 22, programmed at Le Fresnoy - Studio national, under the threat and pressure of the French Minister of Interior Gerald Darmanin.
Slought mourns and demands justice for the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Arbery, and the many others whose lives were taken by the police and white supremacy.
"Without community, there is no liberation."
― Audre Lorde
Simple steps to take before hitting the streets
Mass protests have broken out across the United States after a Minneapolis police officer killed black Minnesotan George Floyd while he was in police custody.
One thing demonstrators should be aware of before they head out is that their cellphones may subject them to surveillance tactics by law enforcement. If your cellphone is on and unsecured, not only can your location be tracked, but your messages and the content of your phone may also be retrieved by police either if they take custody of your phone or later by warrant or subpoena.
An attempt to provisionally theorize the emergence of new subjectivities in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic.
ReadHow much has changed in just a few days. Here is another text I've composed in an attempt to continue to think about the pandemic, and our lives within it. I hope it's of use, however minorly, as we all try to come to some kind of terms with the novel transformations, precarities, and struggles emerging in every direction.
~i
Translating the abstraction—and banalities—of the Anthropocene into readable cartography has resulted in many past attempts that often ended up reproducing those same qualities. But, as Brian Holmes asserts in this essay, we seem to have found ourselves in a moment where collaboration, engagement, and new forms of knowledge exchange are breaking that deadlock. Tracing his own involvement with artistic practices that both engage with and attempt to represent a “political ecology,” Holmes explains how the evolving, collaborative cartographic practice that brought the "Mississippi. An Anthropocene River map" into being simultaneously reveals and interrogates the power structures of Anthropocence society.
ReadWe do not regret to inform you that Ashkal Alwan is indefinitely postponing all programmes and events scheduled to take place from October 17-27, 2019 as part of the 8th edition of Home Works: A Forum on Cultural Practices.
Dr. Shahidul Alam, internationally renowned photographer, activist, founder and Managing Director of the Bangladesh multimedia company, Drik, founder of Chobi Mela International Photography Festival and Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, was forcibly abducted from his home on the night of 5 August.
Shahidul Alam was granted bail on November 15, 2018 and released from jail, but still faces a maximum of 14 years in prison if convicted.
News and updates #freeshahidulalam
A Billion Dollar Issue
by Alina Mogollon-Volk (AliMVo Productions)
EPISODE 6 of We Interrupt This Program
Instigating final declaration of the FC⚡MC
In the middle of the protest, something new emerged:
Final declaration of the FC⚡MC - International Media Center during G20 in Hamburg
“Antisocial Media” is a remix/cut-up/utopian-plagiarism of Guy Debord’s 1967 “The Society of the Spectacle” that reflects on the role of the network and (anti)social media in political, economic, and everyday life.
ReadXnet publishes a Basic How-to guide for preserveing fundamental rights on the Internet
#Democracy – Rights and freedoms protected by the people: recent events in Catalonia as a case study
How-to guide: https://xnet-x.net/en/how-to-for-preserving-fundamental-rights-internet/
Even more basic PDF version.
An interview with a Syrian activist in exile, code-named Sami, published by Occupy.com draws attenton once more to the radical experiment in real-life bottom-up matriarchal democratic design unfolding against all odds in the autonomous Kurdish region of Rojava in Northern Syria. We are republishing two short texts here on this subject matter to speculate about the question if 'Rojava' could offer a repeatable model for post-governmental political design?
"In August 1996, we called for the creation of a network of independent media, a network of information. We mean a network to resist the power of the lie that sells us this war that we call the Fourth World War. We need this network not only as a tool for our social movements, but for our lives: this is a project of life, of humanity, humanity which has a right to critical and truthful information."
These were the words of Subcomandante Marcos, speaking in 1997 from Chiapas in the midst of the Zapatistas' guerrilla information war against the Mexican state and the neocolonialism reflected in NAFTA. Marcos's powerful statement and Zapatista stories of struggle were circulated from the jungle of Chiapas on mailing lists, listservs, and websites, capturing the imagination of activists around the world and galvanizing a wave of new grassroots media projects. Perhaps no project more purely embodied this response than the Indymedia network, which was launched in November 1999 at the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings and quickly grew into a global network of news websites.