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  Some images from the You Are Here event at the #SouthbankCentre on Sunday: https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/you-are-here/ Co-created, directed and designed by Danny Boyle, Carson McColl, Gareth Pugh and Paulette Randall, with Sabrina Mahfouz and Natasha Chivers, it was billed as a 'journey through 75 years of British music, dance, theatre, fashion and film'. This review pretty much captures it: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2026/may/03/you-are-here-review-danny-...

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  Miu Miu Women’s Tales #29 - Joanna Hogg’s story of a bag, told from the bag’s point of view and filmed entirely on iPhones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAFUnkmA86s Still quite humanist, in that the bag seems mainly concerned with the humans who possess it. But interesting nonetheless to place alongside other bag-centred works of #art and #literature – The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin – Bag Piece by Yoko Ono Feel free to add to the list. #culture #iphone #humani...

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  1/4 Tried to watch the Radical with Amol Rajan Today #Podcast for the #BBC. The episode on social mobility with Joe Seddon, founder of #zerogravity https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002rgj9 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m002f1d0/radical-with-amol-rajan Truly dreadful: in the sense of being both bad and frightening. Apparently, there are some #universities just not worth attending and some #university degree courses not worth taking – because they fail to deliver sufficient econ...

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  On Sunday went to #Offprint, a publishers’ fair bringing together independent, #experimental and socially engaged publishers working across #art, #architecture, #design, the #humanities and #visualculture https://www.offprint.org/en/ Came back with this: #book #publishing #community

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  1/3 The current controversy over the winner of the prestigious Commonwealth #shortstory prize, prompted by the presence of supposedly obvious indicators of #AI plagiarism and fraud, points to a much wider issue than simply whether the text in question, ‘The Serpent in the Grove’, was created by a human (from the #globalsouth) or by a #machine. https://africasacountry.com/2026/05/how-to-read-postcolonial-writing https://www.jamaicaobserver.com/2026/05/15/trinidadian-cops-commonwealth-short-stor...

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  Brought Rehearsing A #City For All, edited by Silvia Bottiroli, back from a visit to the Venice Biennale last week – as you do. https://shop.b-r-u-n-o.it/products/fuori-rehearsing-a-city-for-all Particularly taken by Bottiroli’s idea of #public space ‘not as a site but rather as a subject with #agency and therefore a collaborator for any intervention’ we might wish to imagine’ (p.10). Interesting, too, because it rather contrasts my refusal in the chapter on ‘How to Redesign a City’ in Mask...

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  The Posthuman Cinema Collective have released Dream Factory. Trailers, overview + press kit here: https://posthumancinema.com/dream-factory/index.html ‘DREAM FACTORY unfolds across 5 movements, beginning with the molding of artificial forms as they imagine themselves into embodied existence and culminating in these entities speaking directly to viewers in modulated #human voices. The work traces a complete evolution, from foundational apparitions constructing a sense of form, through experi...

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  The Scholarly Letter is inviting submissions on Scholarship in the Age of the On-lightenment Deadline: August 2nd | Honorarium: $150 Email: thescholarlyletter@scholar-square.com ‘We are not seeking think-pieces about “the decline of #academia nor celebratory #techoptimism in the context of #scholarship Rather, we are seeking reflective, rigorous, intellectually serious essays that grapple with what it means to pursue scholarship and to be a scholar within platformed, curated, and fragmented...

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  Sorry to have missed Screen Melancholy by artist Li Yi-Fan and curator Raphael Fonseca at the #VeniceBiennale. https://www.taiwaninvenice.org/2026/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0V-CfD4Ro4 Hopefully it will tour. ‘It explores the complex, layered relationship between individuals and “images” in the visual-first generation. This relationship encompasses how people receive and create images. Through the character in the video, I encourage viewers to “learn how to make animation!” As a ca...

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  A favourite bookshop? https://tajnekomplety.pl/en Secret Collections in Wroclaw, Poland #books #bookshop

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  ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It: So What Kind of AI Do We Actually Want?’ — the latest issue of the Open Humanities newsletter — went out today. It features discussions of Cory Doctorow’s The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI and Karen Hao’s Empire of AI, in the context of the recent warnings that there is a 10% chance AI could ‘kill all humans’ within the next ten years. But rather than asking only whether AI might destroy us — or what we should do about it — the newsletter as...

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  Public Knowledge: Online Seminar Series on Expanded Ecologies of Publishing Wednesdays, 10am ET | October 21 – November 25, 2026 Online via Zoom besidesthescreen.com/publicknowledge Public Knowledge offers a free online seminar series aimed at exploring publishing in the arts, academia, and popular culture. The program is based on weekly presentations by specialists in the area. Guests include Stevphen Shukaitis, Ana Rodríguez Navas, Janneke Adema, Anna Anthropy, Lukas Brasiskis, Divina P...

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  My paper copies of Barbarian Currents: Half a Century of Brazilian Media Arts, have arrived. This pioneering anthology brings together the voices of artists, critics and curators who played a pivotal role in the emergence of technological arts in post-war Brazil. The documents, most of which have been translated into English for the first time, remind us that ‘alternative’ art histories are simply the flipside of dominant narratives. They encourage us to look beyond the lens of Western exceptio...

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  Speaking of Barbarian Currents, just a gentle reminder about this event tomorrow: Other Art Histories Tue 13 Oct 2026 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM King’s College London, Strand, Bush House, South East Wing, BH SE 2.12, WC2R 1AE The Centre for the Ecologies of Attention and Perception at King’s College London invite you to this talk, accompanied by a screening, on reframing the history of art history, while asking bigger questions about the condition of modernity and the narratives that have shaped it....

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  This is the abstract for a talk I’ve been invited to give at the one-day conference Post-Platform Media, taking place at the University of Westminster on 15 January 2027, organised by Paul Rekret and Henry Ivry. 'For a New Technology of Philosophy' A launch point for the thinking behind this talk was Anton Jäger’s 2023 book, Hyperpolitics, whose 2026 English edition is proving influential among the British left. Jäger identifies a new political era – hyperpolitics – as coming a...

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  A podcast featuring Sigi Jöttkandt, Joanna Zylinska and myself from Open Humanities Press, titled 'Friendship, and Other Ways of Producing Knowledge', is now available on the Scholē IRL website. https://www.scholeirl.org/ And on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPuu4XjOkK0&t=4s ‘This week, we are joined [by] the Directors of OHP, an international community of #scholars, editors and readers with a focus on critical and cultural theory and a mission to ma...

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  Like this line from The Revolution Will Not be Funded: Beyond the Non-profit Industrial Complex, edited by INCITE! ‘Do you think the system is really going to fund you to dismantle it?’. Should be adopted as a motto. Full text: https://files.libcom.org/files/incite-the-revolution-will-not-be-funded-beyond-the-nonprofit-industrial-complex-2.pdf #DefundCulture #culture #resistance #funding #nonprofit #notforprofit

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  Please find attached details of an upcoming online 12 September event on my new book Masked Media: What It Means to be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence (London: Open Humanities Press, 2025): http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/ Co-organised by Culture Machine and 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos (https://diecisiete.org/masked-media/), the event is hosted by the Laboratory of Contemporary Writings / Laboratorio de Escrituras Contemporáneas, which...

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  If you’d like to sign the petition calling on the UK government to amend the Equality Act 2010 to make social class a protected characteristic, you can do so here: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/752554 #class #SocialClass #EqualityAct #ClassMatters #UKPolitics #classwar #ClassCeiling #DefundCulture #WorkingClass

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  Voted ‘Britain's ugliest building’ when it opened in 1967, the #brutalist Southbank Centre has finally been granted listed status: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8d5je92j2ro It would be good to think a certain book cover — which proudly features said slab of uncompromising #modernism — may have played a small role in its #architectural rehabilitation. https://www.mediastudies.press/defund-culture-a-radical-proposal You’re welcome, Southbank. #BrutalistArchitecture #SouthbankCe...

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  A #magazine devoted to #art and #football. What's not to like?

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  Ha! What do you know. Turns out there were #humans behind many of the posts on Moltbook all along. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronschmelzer/2026/02/10/moltbook-looked-like-an-emerging-ai-society-but-humans-were-pulling-the-strings/ #ai #artificialintelligence #moltbook

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  ‘The real takeaway from this #film for me, is about who gets to make art, whose voice matters, and what they choose to disregard, in this #creative climate. For all its attempts to be shocking, Fennell’s film has stripped away all that is #radical about #WutheringHeights, and even aesthetically her attempt to out-weird a #Bronte falls flat, feeling to me like a two-hour-16-minute-long perfume advertisement for watered-down eau de Tim Burton.’ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/1...

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  Article in The New Yorker on how Nick Land has ‘has reemerged as one of the most influential reactionary thinkers of our time.’ And yet is also very much yesterday’s man. “They sounded like old fogeys,” said podcaster Justin Murphy, host of a 2020 LA conversation between Land and Curtis Yarvin, another influential neo-reactionary - an event that was also attended by Peter Theil. “We’ll remember this night as proof that the Dark Enlightenment is over.” https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-lede/...

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  These libertarians are scary and weird in equal measure. ‘Praxis is the world’s first Digital Nation, a home for the brave, who strive for virtue and wisdom. Our purpose is to restore Western Civilization and pursue our ultimate destiny of life among the stars.’ No surprise that Peter Theil, Sam Altman and Winklevoss Capital Management have all invested: https://www.praxisnation.com/?ref=alphagrowth Techno-utopian secessionism meets space-colony manifest destiny. What could possibly go wron...

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  '#Labour is spooked… somewhere in its collective soul it knows we have reached the belated end of the political 20th century… “Politics needs to change in some huge way, doesn’t it?’ I.”' — via The Guardian This is why I argue we need to make the case for defunding now - because the ‘undermining of certain #liberal institutions (rather than the familiar left-liberal move of protecting or gently reforming them)’ may be what’s needed if we’re serious about reconstructing a better...

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  Very accurate review of the Dave gig at the O2 on Friday night. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgk22k855jjo Right down to the crowd capturing every moment for Snapchat and Instagram. Many seemed more interested in capturing themselves reciting his lyrics than Dave himself. #dave #london #rap #music

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  ‘Thousands of authors including Kazuo Ishiguro, Philippa Gregory and Richard Osman have published an “empty” #book to protest against #AI firms using their work without permission.’ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/10/thousands-authors-publish-empty-book-protest-ai-work-copyright Yet #copyright itself has long been criticised as part of broader systems of enclosure and #SettlerViolence. So the assertion of copyright is not a victimless crime, any more than is the training of AI...

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  Looking forward to launching a more politically and environmentally responsible set of badges. They’re designed as a creative and critical response to the extractive, exploitative and dehumanizing logics that lie behind the idea of putting a logo on #books to certify they were written by #humans - such as the new scheme launched by the UK’s Society of Authors. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/10/uk-society-authors-logo-identify-books-written-by-humans-not-ai Rather than reinfo...

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  Liked this piece of book art at the Quantum Entangled exhibition at the Science Gallery in #london. It highlights the #artistic and poetic language underpinning the #science in Dynamics of Dark Energy by Edmund Copeland et al. https://london.sciencegallery.com/quantum But the exhibition as a whole was disappointing. Although not inaccessible, it’s quite vague, making it's hard to see how anyone who doesn’t already have a grounding in #quantum physics would come away much the wiser. L...