Thursday 8 July 2021 (guest series)

The Horizontal Reading Group is pleased to welcome author Tiziana Terranova, the last invited guest of the lecture series. Terranova has prepared for us Network Culture: 15 Years Later a workshop and lecture that will discuss the thesis proposed in Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (2004), one of the first books to propose that digital networks required a significant shift in modes and categories of analysis of culture, especially those which had been shaped by the paradigm of mass media and communications. Foregrounding ideas such as information, digital labor, soft control and communications' biopower, the book provided a new set of concepts to understand how culture was transformed by the digital internetworking of social life. The author discusses what seems to have changed in the very intense 15 years since the book's publication, and the kind of new analyses and concepts needed when thinking about today's technosocial mega-network.

Tiziana Terranova is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Digital Media in the Department of Human and Social Sciences at the Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’, Italy . She has written and lectured extensively on the political implications of digital networks and information technologies. She is the author of Network Culture: politics for the information age (Pluto Press, 2004), and the forthcoming The Technosocial Question ( Minnesota University Press), and Mega-Network: Technology, Subjectivity and Economy after the End of the Internet ( Semiotexte). She has been part of many groups involved in the task of collectively thinking about the politics of technology, including the Italian collectives Uninomade 2.0 and Euronomade; Robin Hood Minor Asset Management; the Centre for Postcolonial and Gender Studies at L'Orientale University, Naples; and the Technoculture Research Unit (www.technoculture.it).

The event will be held in English. Admission is free. No prior experience or knowledge is necessary. Joining me as moderator is Mara-Johanna Kölmel ♡, please register in advanced here 

Sunday 20 June 2021

We'll be looking into Never Again: Refusing race and salvaging the human by Paul Gilroy. In his Holberg Lecture, Paul Gilroy, winner of the Holberg Prize for 2019, advocates turning away from the defaulted racial ordering of life in pursuit of a new humanism.

Sunday 13 June 2021

We'll be looking into Hannah Arendt's short essay The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man. The essay asks us to think on how science and technology transform the human condition.

Wednesday 2 June 2021 (guest serie)

As part of the Horizontal Reading Group, poet and author Karen An-hwei Lee will give us a short introduction to her novel The Maze of Transparencies which has an important reference frame for the solo show followed by a creative writing workshop. Joining me as moderator is Mara-Johanna Kölmel.

Sunday 30 May 2021

Sunday 23 May 2021 

The crowdsourced text for this Sunday is 1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value by Denise Ferreira da Silva. Ferreira da Silva’s work addresses the ethico-political challenges of the global present.

"With a thought experiment that I call the Equation of Value, designed to help the imagination break away from the enclosures of modern thought, this speculative exercise reaches for The Thing,4 which is the referent of blackness, or that which in it is exposed as the excess that justifies otherwise untenable racial violence."

Wednesday 12 May 2021 (guest serie)

"[..] Is it still meaningful to consider hacktivism as a radical criticism of a system, when hackers have contributed to its creation and its strengthening? And, if capitalism and what was once called 'counterculture' share similar rhetoric and strategies, is it possible to imagine alternatives to the current state of capitalism?"

Sunday 2 May 2021

We will study an excerpt of Representations of the Intellectual by Edward Said in preparation for Mandy Harris Williams' HRG take over on May 6th. In her words, "I'm curious about the role of the intellectual in today's day and age, critical in that so many people are beginning to consider what is the materiality between hashtag and praxis. Or, more specifically, what is "doing the work" vs. representation of "doing the work?" How does social media work to shift and change our behavior such that intellectualism is more or less desirable or important?"

Harris Williams is a critical theorist, writer, multimedia conceptual artist, performer, Brown Up Your Feed Radio Hour Host on NTS radio, educator and internet/community academic. More information on Mandy's talk here.

Sunday 25 April 2021

We will continue The Maze of Transparencies, a novel by Karen An-hwei Lee. Speculative fiction that sheds a very interesting light into the inner life of data. It is set in a near future post-technological collapse and narrated by a cloud.
 
"Dispossessed, I was a homeless cloud. Without users to shepherd, without a server, without a flock to accommodate, I roved the data dumps of cryptoshredding..."

Sunday 18 April 2021

☁️ The Maze of Transparencies by Karen An-hwei Lee. A novel set in a near future, post-technological collapse, narrated by a data cloud named Penny. She describes herself as “a panoply of people’s data . . . a whisperer of dreams . . . a nebulous puff in a starry noosphere of human consciousness.”; an insight into the inner life of data.
 
"Once upon a cloud, I accommodated Yang as a user. We've parted ways, in a manner of speaking. Or rather, I never left Yang, who can't log in."

Sunday 11 April 2021

Blessed is the Flame: An introduction to concentration camp resistance and anarcho-nihilism by Serafinski. What does it take to resist in absolutely futile and overwhelming situations?

"The underly­ing point is that the progress of society has nothing to offer us and everything to take away. Often it feels like we are giving it away without a fight: when we sell our time for money, allow our passions to be commodified, invest ourselves in the betterment of society, or sustain ourselves on the spoils of ecological destruction, we openly (though not consensually) participate in our own destruction. [...] This has been theorized in a thousand ways, described in environmental, social, and political terms, it has been prophesied, abstracted, and narrated in real time, and still we are unsure of what to do with it."

Sunday 4 April 2021

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. This book has a very interesting mix of fact-fiction poetic sensibility and naturalist observation for social movements and our whole species based on the subversive and transformative guidance of marine mammals. Refusing capitalism and rethinking relation, it offers some points of practice for looking at the world through a post-colonial lens.

"[...]Once upon a time there was a giant sea mammal, who weighted up to twenty-three tons, swimming in the Bering Sea. In 1741, a German naturalist 'discovered' Hydrodamalis gigas swimming large and luxe, at least three times bigger than the contemporary manatee. Within twenty-seven years, the entire species was extinct, killed on thousands of European voyages for fur and sealskin. So she knows what we know. It is dangerous to be discovered.
 
Twenty-seven years. Who else could only tolerate twenty-seven years among western humans? Jimi Hendrix, Jean-MIchel Basquiat, even Amy Winehouse, and Kurt Cobain. Twenty-seven years is such a short time..."

Sunday 28 March 2021

We'll be looking at Capital Is Dead. Is This Something Worse? by McKenzie Wark. Exploring some of our contemporary conditions, contemporary labour, capital; existence in our new information economy.

"Which punk rock goddess are you? I'm Kim Gordon. Or I was. Not happy with that answer, I took the online quiz a few more times, until I got Patti Smith. I don't know what company made that quiz, but I agreed to give them access to a whole bunch of information in exchange for the privilege of playing it, in order to learn what I already know, that I'm more of a Patti Smith type than a Kim Gordon type.

The quiz held my attention for long enough to escape boredom, and it gave me something to post on social media, presumably to snag other people's attention. Some people get rather freaked out about algorithms that seem to know so much about us, although I always thought of privacy as a bourgeois concept. What is dystopian here may be less the sharing of information than the asymmetry of the sharing.

If you are getting your media for free, this usually means that you are the product. If the information is not being sold to you, then it is you who are being sold."

Sunday 14 March 2021

We'll be looking at Entreprecariat: Everyone Is an Entrepreneur. No Body is Safe. by Silvio Lorusso. Irony and sarcasm are weaponized in order to shift our collective understanding of work ethic, labor, leisure, production, competition; self-entrepreneurship, the miseries of precarity and the aesthetics of productive anxiety.

Sunday 7 March 2021

We'll be looking at the intro of Networked Disruption: Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and Business by Tatiana Bazzichelli. This book reflects on the meaning of disruption; what it means to challenge the notion of power and hegemony, with a focus on art practices, hacktivism and the business of social networking.

Sunday 28 February 2021

Sunday 14 February 2021

We'll be looking at an excerpt of Black Quantum Futurism by Rasheedah Phillips. Then again, exploring what does it mean to interconnect our everyday world with the seemingly counter-intuitive field of quantum science. And how have these entanglements been interrogated through art.

“Why BQF over the present state of reality? Because a linear mode of time, which dominates time consciousness in Western society does not allow access to information about the future and only limited information about the past. The ways in which we are situated in time comes to be reflected in how we think about, talk about, and conceptualize the community, world, and universe around us. In a linear conception of time, which is built into our language, behavior, and thought, the past is fixed and the future is inaccessible until it passes through the present. The present moment is fleeting, but ever-present. Time's asymmetrical, uni-directional quality, however, is not an inherent or apriori feature of nature. It only appears this way because we have learned to order and make sense of the world this way.”