Distraction

The physical recontextualization of an artifact, whether a painting or a building, is conceptually con-tinuous with the practice of citation, or the transfer of parcels of coded meaning from one text to another. In the one case, the reused element is material; in the other case, the transferred element is only a representation, a virtual relic. Virtual reuse repeats a form or combination of forms; or brings to life again a fictional character. An original shaping labor is valued and preserved.

Naive art is a prototype of Romantic anti-capitalism, contemporary postcapitalism and the politics of the aesthetic withdrawal from politics. It is also at the root of the convergence of art and the nation state, nationalism and national identity.

There exists a long history of thinkers’ abodes built on the literal and /or metaphorical outskirts of civilization and /or society — for that is of course precisely where much philosophy has either long been, or, more pointedly, imagined itself to be most productive.

Eyes closed. “You don’t talk; you write” I painfully decipher on the purple notebook she is holding near my leg. On stage Dua Saleh is playing Warm Pants. Eyes closed. I loved her handwriting. In this moment I can’t stop smiling. Answer: “DEAL” the letters appear on my screen.

“There are days that I’m so bored, I can’t even concentrate.” Swiping fingers assist to move the mind elsewhere. Checking the smart phone is the present way of day dreaming. Unaware of our brief absence, we enjoy the feeling of being remotely present. Briefly you remember what it’s like to feel. While checking status updates we’re wandering off in our mind, the movement is reversed and, without notice, the Other enters our world.

All the mirages he saw in the desert were of ruins. I along with my two siblings and my mother de-serted the family apartment during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Did this make the apart-ment a ruin? Yes, but not because it was severely damaged and burned during the last days of the offensive: even after it was restored, it remained a ruin.

Artificial Intelligence is a metaphor and a machine. As a metaphor, its origins can be found in Hobbes's notion of the Artificial Soul - a construct he devises to describe the sovereign of the state as an amalgamation of natural persons.

In 2013 I was invited by an international NGO to assess the ‘modern’ settlement and housing designed for forest communities near the Volcano National Park in Rwanda. This article describes these encounters, exploring how the government's uniform housing project, that followed the 1994 Genocide, defines what is modern or who is a citizen in Rwanda today by eradicating differences of ethnic identities and place.

Although Air Force surgeon Jack Steele had coined the “bionics” in 1958 to describe the engineer-ing of machines based on biologies principles, the term soon connoted super human, cybernetic pros-thesis. With remarkable circularity between fact and fiction, early cochlear implants were marketed as “bionic ears” (Blume 1997).

Anarcho-Animism is a meme-like digital object that aims at opening the question concerning the relation between animism and anarchism. In fact, the expression is inspired by another one, coined by Ben Morea, one of the fathers of contemporary American Anarchism...

There where plenty of realities I wanted to escape from as a teenager, there was the question of be-longing and identity as an Anatolian German Alevi. There was the question of which bodies I felt sexually attracted to. There was the question of coming from a working class family and growing up in a White upper class neighbourhood.

The Italian Stock Exchange Commission (Consob) recently launched a “public consultation” con-cerning “initial offers and exchanges of crypto-assets”, which outlines an early domestic regulatory approach to ICOs. The intent is to “facilitate” this new phenomenon with the aim of avoiding the usual restrictions and hindrances that characterize Italian legislation today and design a “safe har-bour” based on an “opt-in” regime.

The outer space has for centuries been a place in which heavenly utopias and religious figures were thought to exist. The ideals evoked by appealing to things existing in outer space have had a pro-found impact on ethical standards for people living on Earth. The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), for example, saw a parallel between ‘the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’.

After the initial success of Bitcoin, many alternative cryptocurrencies have emerged (e.g. Peercoin, Primecoin, Dogecoin, etc.), for the most part replicating the same model as Bitcoin, albeit with some minor differences in the protocol. But it soon became obvious to people that the technology under-pinning Bitcoin —the blockchain— had much greater potential.

Mi sono soffermato su questo film (Joker) perché mi pare che esso esprima a suo modo il passaggio dal padre edipico freudiano a quello che chiamerei il nuovo Edipo, dove alla figura del padre si so-stituisce una nuova figura pervasiva: quella del “potere”. O, come si dice in America, “the system”. Paolo Sorrentino, in un film recente, lo ha chiamato Loro. Chi sono Loro? Loro sono tutti coloro che hanno potere: i politici soprattutto, i ricchi, i grandi imprenditori, le star...

For half of my life have I been defending peace and justice in cyberspace. This piece for DISTRACTION reflects on what I have learned, and what I know I still don’t understand. I continue to wonder what it is in the cables, flowing with electricity and consciousness, at the frontier of both the mind and technology. I still reflect on how deeply it changes who we are, and how we build society. This DISTRACTION piece echoes an old poem of mine, written for the play “le Prochain Train”.
“I would like to tell you about what’s between us. You cannot see it, feel it, touch it, or hear it. It doesn't taste or smell. But it is therebetween us, it enlightens us and binds us all. And until today, it still belonged to us.”
Translated from “Je te parle de ce lien qu’il y a entre nous. Tu ne le vois pas, tu ne peux le sentir, le toucher, ou l’entendre. Il n’apporte aucun goût dans ta bouche. Mais il est là, entre l’autre et toi, il vous éclaire et il vous lie. Et jusqu’à aujourd’hui, il nous appartenait encore.”

The challenge for international politics in the 21st century is to keep things together. That is, to ensure that all states, including the great powers, respect the same set of core rules and cooperate on global challenges such as the climate crisis, instead of seeing the world fall apart in rival blocs as happened during the Cold War. That certainly is the objective that Europeans, through the EU, should pursue. That is a moderate objective – unlike, say, achieving great power status, grabbing land from a neighbour, or overturning the world order. But even a moderate objective requires power, so that the EU can resolutely pursue it.