Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah spent months in South Carolina searching for an answer to those questions—speaking with Roof’s mother, father, friends, former teachers, and victims’ family members, all in an effort to unlock what went into creating one of the coldest killers of our time.

On Material Entanglements: an Interview with Morehshin Allahyari Although we both live in the bay area, I got to Morehshin Allahyari’s work through an internet rabbit hole. Some months ago I picked up ‘Cyclonopedia’ by Reza Negarestani and got pretty engrossed by the book’s mix of fact and fiction. The story suggests that petrol functions as a lubricant necessary to spread an ancient evil throughout the world eventually leading into what he calls a desertification of the earth. a place where all will be flattened and ready for some sort of re-boot.

»Wir haben die Möglichkeit, Dinge auferstehen zu lassen« Warum tut es vielen Menschen fast körperlich weh zu sehen, wie Terroristen auf Statuen mit dem Vorschlaghammer einhauen? Weil diese Kunstwerke die Geschichte und Kultur von 3000 Jahren Zivilisation repräsentieren.

A few weeks ago on this site I reviewed John Robb’s book Brave New War, discussing the potential of reconfiguring heritage preservation from a top-down, hierarchical model into a participatory, two-way, resilient and distributed platform.

The appetite for antiquities from the Middle East is being met by Isis, who are looting ancient sites with the market in mind. It’s imperative that this demand – from the US and elsewhere – ceases The western appetite for antiquities has always been a motivation for others to loot them.

The Distributed MonumentThe Download is a series of Rhizome commissions that considers posted files, the act of downloading, and the user’s desktop as the space of exhibition.Material Speculation: ISIS/Download Series (King Uthal) by Morehshin Allahyari is the second Download. The 570MB downloadable ZIP file is below. Work from the series also appears on the Rhizome front page through Feb 21.Can the internet resurrect the dead? The lost art object—be it speculative, missing, or destroyed like a statue smashed by ISIS—now circulates as JPGs, PDFs, and YouTube videos. Untethered from physical matter, these files work to extend life.↪ Read the full essay, and explore the archive of Morehshin’s research, here

This stunning essay, written by Alexis Anais and Anna Khachiyan, accompanies Morehshin Allahyari’s Material Speculation exhibition, at Trinity Square Video, Toronto: As ISIS has shown, the potential futures that digital technology promises to provoke almost always teeter on the ethically ambiguous—trapped in a crossfire of discourses that vary depending on who’s doing the talking…Allahyari’s work refuses to accept this hypocrisy, which seem to ignore the many number of intimidations put forth by the West. She recognizes that what has traditionally been considered public history is often made vulnerable, subject to possession by organized violence and radical politicking, in which both sides are equally implicated…The concept of 3D printing as symbolic of corporeality and mortality is defined in the Manifesto as “infatuation,” following the idea that the human body desires a cyborgian evolution. ↪ Read the full essay here

Transhumanist Presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan suggests microchipping Syrian refugees to aid the humanitarian effort. "Maybe Big Brother isn't the bad guy -- if he protects us from ISIS."

I believe that the present century is the most precarious in which humanity has ever lived. On the one hand, certain emerging technologies are placing an ever-greater amount of power in the hands of smaller groups, and even single individuals, at the extreme.

Trevor Paglen is a photographer, writer and investigator. His work takes aim at the U.S. government’s network of secret facilities and programs that have burgeoned since September 11; as he puts it, this means that “there is very little evidentiary material in the images that I create.

Have you watched the last few moments of Saddam’s life? Or the necrophilic videos with Gaddafi’s behind? Al Zarqawi’s internet kill rooms? Magnotta’s cat suffocation videos? Ronal Poppo’s eaten face? I will admit that I have and it is ticklish, but not in a good way. Gore videos on the internet are abundant and they certainly work up the stomach. It’s no trek to watch them, but apparently that is the point. Recently, I stumbled (as one does on the internet) on a range of gore forums and videos. All sorts of weird kinks flourish in these platforms, and they will give you a good dose of weekly shock ‘n’ awe material. In these marginalized discussion groups, a certain thought intrigued me. Gore aficionados claim that watching ‘real’ murder protests the distorted and censored imagery of world horror events, and these videos correct our vision by portraying a more realistic representation of atrocities and the macabre. Also, gore audiences are stigmatized as those who engage in snuff activi

by Daniel Rourke  A bomb won't go off here... (Click to enlarge) Y: I like the use of the past tense. Saying “weeks before” sets up the seen* as a narrative. X: Oh yeah. Y: It’s almost like the story’s not ended, like we now are still part of the story. X: And that there’s people there all the time. Y: That they are always on this street. X: Yeah, in that little square. And they’ve always all got long, blondish hair. Shopping. Y: Does it mean that a bomb might go off somewhere else? X: That’s exactly what it means. It means that a bomb’s not going to go off here, but it is going to go off somewhere else. Y: Somewhere where people aren’t more suspicious? X: Not people: shoppers. Y: Somewhere where shoppers aren’t more suspicious. X: There’s no such thing as people – there’s just shoppers. Y: By reporting someone studying the CCTV cameras to the police the shopper didn’t become anything of greater value than a shopper. They managed to stay as a shopper and yet still act in a way which protected the rights of all shoppers everywhere. X: That is the best thing you can be for society. A citizen is secondary to a shopper. For the good of the country there is nothing better than a shopper who reports suspicious looking un-shoppers. If you’re an un-shopper, and you are in a shopping precinct, then you’re not there for the good of the country. * A play on the words ‘seen’ and ‘scene’ is alluded to here and for the remainder of the conversation. ------------------ Y: There’s a couple of things I’m a bit worried about in this seen. One is the location of the photographer who took this picture - and I’m not talking location in space, but actually location as a member of society. Nobody there is watching them. Nobody is aware of their identity as a photographer, giving them the perfect identity of the perfect terrorist. They are un-seen. They are in fact making the seen. There wouldn’t be a ‘seen’ without them. The other thing that I am worried about is the woman in pink on the left there. She looks a bit suspicious to me. She isn’t shopping. X: She is shopping! She’s a shopper. You don’t have to worry about her. Y: She doesn’t look like a shopper, she looks like a looker. She looks like a studier. She is studying the seen. X: Yeah, but she is looking at the seen with a sense of: “Yes, this is ours and we have to protect it.” Y: But do you not think that the location of the pink lady on the left is very similar to some of the shadowy figures that Salvador Dali placed within his works? Where the viewer – the shadow of the viewer – is located within the frame. X: [gasp] The pink lady is us! Y: The pink lady on the left is meant to be us, looking on the happy seen. X: The undisrupted – the un-bombed seen. Y: She’s thinking: “A bomb won’t go off here, because weeks before I reported a viewer – similar to myself – studying this seen.” X: Yeah. And it’s not just that that one ‘shopping in’ of one suspicious non-shopper protected the seen from that one occasion of being bombed – it has prevented that seen from ever being bombed. Y: A bomb will never go off here, because sometime before this photo was taken a shopper – perhaps the woman in pink on the left – reported someone studying the CCTV cameras, who wasn’t this photographer. X: No. Not this one. Y: This photographer is more interested in studying the shoppers than they are in studying the CCTV cameras. Although the CCTV cameras are in the seen. X: I am guessing that this suspicious person who was studying the CCTV cameras – and not shopping – was suspicious because they were just in the middle of town, in the middle of the day, on a week day. Why weren’t they at work? Y: Well they were. They were doing their job. Terror. X: This place, it’s a very pedestrianised, a very... Y: ...bland. X: A very bland town. A town where shoppers live. If this was a really beautiful city centre, like Bath Spa, if this was a beautiful Spa town, there would be people taking pictures all over the place of a nice Georgian building here, a nice Georgian building there. I am worried because how am I supposed to tell, when I next go shopping, who is taking pictures in a bad way and whose taking pictures in a good way? Y: It’s obvious that this seen suggests to us - the lady in pink on the left - that from now on one should shop in as bland locations as possible, in places which visually, aesthetically, have nothing going for them whatsoever. Because it’s only in a place like that that one can be absolutely sure that anybody taking photographs of or near CCTV cameras are doing so for terroristic purposes. X: Yeah. ------------------ Y: I’m a bit concerned about the notion of not relying on others. X: You can’t rely on other shoppers. They are only concerned about the next bargain, in the next shop. You - as the good shopper, who is so expert at shopping that you can get your shopping done and have time to notice what suspicious things are going on around you - you can only rely on yourself to do that. It’s up to you to protect everybody, but mainly yourself and your own shopping. Y: There is something about the notion of shopping that completely revolves around the individual. It’s that freedom that we get in a capitalistic society to choose what we want from a selection of identical goods in a series of identical shops, it’s being able to wander through the streets making the choices that define you. But there is something very much related to that in the action of the terrorist. Yeah, ok, every shopping centre, every CCTV camera is the same, but the terrorist has the right to choose which shopping centre or CCTV camera to bomb. They reduce the individual even further to a state of nothingness. There is the freedom to shop, but there is no freedom in being bombed. X: But there’s no freedom in not being bombed. We are not being bombed, and they are not being bombed, but the last thing they are is free. Y: They are not free from not being bombed. X: No. Y: They are trapped by the fact that... X: ...by the fact that they are not being bombed. But if they were bombed... Y: That would be true freedom. The London Metropolitan Police's new campaign is available online for all concerned citizens to study at their leisure: Counter Terrorism Posters. by Daniel Rourke