Why can we imagine the ending of the world, yet not the ending of colonialism? We live the future of a past that is not our own. It is a history of utopian fantasies and apocalyptic idealization.

In Antoine de Saint Exupéry's tale the Little Prince meets a businessman who accumulates stars with the sole purpose of being able to buy more stars. The Little Prince is perplexed. He owns only a flower, which he waters every day. Three volcanoes, which he cleans every week.

Why can we imagine the ending of the world, yet not the ending of colonialism? We live the future of a past that is not our own. It is a history of utopian fantasies and apocalyptic idealization.

To address our unprecedented global and immediate need for access to reading and research materials, as of today, March 24, 2020, the Internet Archive will suspend waitlists for the 1.

Calculating the patterns and cycles of the past could lead us to a better understanding of history. Could it also help us prevent a looming crisis? By In its first issue of 2010, the scientific journal Nature looked forward to a dazzling decade of progress.

“It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill.

Libraries tend to occupy a sacred space in modern culture. People adore them. (Perhaps even more than that, people love the idea of them.

Only a tiny fraction of the world's knowledge. (Photo: David Iliff/CC-BY-SA-3.0) All around the world, shadow libraries keep growing, filled with banned materials.

The total archive is already here, Balázs Bodó finds it hidden in the shadows and run by pirates. As I write this in August 2015, we are in the middle of one of the worst refugee crises in modern Western history.

You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. To kill spam, email filters might need to act a bit more like ants.

We rely on computers to fly our planes, find our cancers, design our buildings, audit our businesses. That's all well and good.

In 1977, NASA sent 115 images – the so-called ‘Golden Record’ – into space on board the Voyager space probe. They also included greetings in 55 different languages and a number of audio clips, including (amongst others) Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night. Projected onto a double-sided, cinema-sized screen, these images – but not the audio clips – are the basis of Steve McQueen’s solo show ‘Once Upon a Time’. The images range from photographs of children being born to family portraits, the monumental (Jupiter) to the miniature (a leaf), and the poetic (a sunset with birds) to the mechanical (a calibration circle). There are ordnance photographs of the Sinai Peninsula and an intimate portrait of a nursing mother. Ethnographic portraits, perhaps inevitably, feature too and, despite the generally auspicious and upbeat tone of the Golden Record, there are also premonitions of more immediate concerns:

“Very few people are being promoted into the humble, hard-working positions which make Wikipedia work.” - Robinson Meyer via The Atlantic Earlier this month Wikipedia held its annual summit in Washington, DC. Afterwards, The Atlantic summarized the event in an article outlining how Wikipedia is slowl

In the work Once upon a Time (2004) McQueen presents a slide show of 116 of these images installed to make them seem to float in space: about two-thirds of the way to the back of a very dark room a large screen is suspended from the ceiling, but without touching the floor. The projector is behind the screen and is set to show each slide for around half a minute before dissolving it into the next. The cycle of images lasts 70 minutes and the installation includes sound.

A really new aesthetics might work differently: instead of concerning itself with the way we humans see our world differently when we begin to see it through and with computer media that themselves "see" the world in various ways, what if we asked how computers and bonobos and toaster pastries and Boeing 787 Dreamliners develop their own aesthetics. The perception and experience of other beings remains outside our grasp, yet available to speculation thanks to evidence that emanates from their withdrawn cores like radiation around the event horizon of a black hole. The aesthetics of other beings remain likewise inaccessible to knowledge, but not to speculation--even to art.

There are two types of anthropologists: One models himself on the scientist, treating the world as his laboratory, people as his raw data. He mounts surveys, crunches numbers, and, crucially, remains detached and dispassionate throughout the process. He applies for big research grants with “expected outcomes” and “anticipated impact” carefully delineated long before he has gone out into the field. The other kind of anthropologist is more like a religious initiate, participating fully in the culture in which he is placed and intimating that he is then the possessor of some secret knowledge. Like an initiate, he cannot anticipate any “outcomes” before they happen but must simply live in the moment and immerse himself in the local customs and values.

It is this latter tradition of which Michael Taussig, an eminent professor at Columbia University, is one of the greatest exponents. The New York Times has called his work “gonzo anthropology.” He has drunk hallucinatory yagé on the sandy banks of the Putumayo River. He’s cured the sick with the aid of spirits. He’s escaped from guerrillas in a dugout canoe at dawn. Above all, he is interested in individual stories and experiences, unique tales that cannot be reduced to rational explanation or bland report. To read Taussig is to have an adventure in which one can move from Walter Benjamin’s experiments with hashish to American kids’ drawings to that dawn-lit canoe without skipping a beat. His narrative is lyrical, mesmeric.

“I wanted to write books exactly like the ones he didn't live long enough to write.” Lethem on Philip K. Dick

“March 3 and March 4: Philip K. Dick is undoubtedly one of the greatest Gnostic visionaries and literary giants in all of history. Much of what Dick wrote or accurately predicted was channeled by a series of disturbing mystic events in the early seventies. He received Gnosis by various means from entities beyond reality, and his astral ideas still grip the imagination of the world. Yet what Dick revealed in his books and notes was only a fraction of his visions and theological insights. He actually wrote thousands of pages that were kept away from the general public, even decades after his death. Until now. We discuss the earth-shattering findings with a member of the editorial team. We discover more secrets of the visible and invisible cosmos; and also realize that it will take years to properly decipher what is more than an arcane religious text but living, holy information itself that might free the spirit of humanity once and for all.

Since the early 1990s Adam Curtis has made a number of serial documentaries and films for the BBC using a playful mix of journalistic reportage and a wide range of avant-garde filmmaking techniques. The films are linked through their interest in using and reassembling the fragments of the past—recorded on film and video―to try and make sense of the chaotic events of the present. I first met Adam Curtis at the Manchester International Festival thanks to Alex Poots, and while Curtis himself is not an artist, many artists over the last decade have become increasingly interested in how his films break down the divide between art and modern political reportage, opening up a dialogue between the two.

The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles. One can add to the list of the fully explained: the hue of the sky, the orbits of planets, the angle of the wake of a boat moving through a lake, the six-sided patterns of snowflakes, the weight of a flying bustard, the temperature of boiling water, the size of raindrops, the circular shape of the sun. All these phenomena and many more, once thought to have been fixed at the beginning of time or to be the result of random events thereafter, have been explained as necessary consequences of the fundamental laws of nature—laws discovered by human beings.