Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 1929
Ernest Hemingway on F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Moveable Feast, 1964
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 1954
Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862
Walter Benjamin, One Way Street, 1928
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1880
It was the worse for him because he was condemned to love without forewarning of loveβs nature. His sickness was unremitting and incurableβa state of desire, chaste, innocent of aim or name.
A childβs reaction to this type of calamity is twofold and extreme. Not knowing how deeply, powerfully, life drops anchor into its vast sources of recuperation, he is bound to envisage, at once, the very worst; yet at the same time, because of his inability to imagine death, the worst remains totally unreal to him.
The Holy Terrors, Jean Cocteau, 1929
Secrets of Voodoo, Milo Rigaud, 1985
Humanity is faced with a double perspective: in one direction, violent pleasure, horror and deathβprecisely the perspective of poetryβand in the opposite direction, that of science or the real world of utility. Only the useful, the real, have a serious character. We are never within our rights in preferring seduction to it: truth has rights over us. Indeed it has every right. And yet we can, and indeed we must respond to something which, not being God, is stronger than every right, that impossible to which we accede only by forgetting the truth of all these rights.
Georges Bataille, The Impossible, 1985
I Am Waiting, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1919-2021
Love, Antonin Artaud, 1896-1948
It may puzzle the more pompous as to why this body of men and women, these ardent revolutionaries of the spirit, spent so much time engaged in occupations usually considered more suitable for bored children on wet afternoons. The answer is that Surrealist play is more like a kind of provocative magic, that it breaks the thread of discursive thought, and, above all, helps them to confirm the primary Surrealist belief in what they called objective chance or the certainty of hazard, to break through conventional thought and behaviour to a deeper truth.
A Book of Surrealist Games, invented and played by AndrΓ© Breton, RenΓ© Magritte, and Max Ernst, compiled by Alastair Brotchie, 1995
The World Bank and the IMF have created a system
Of modern-day colonialism that make the people
Of the developing world poorer
And the multinational corporations richer
And take the power away from all of us
It's time to take back control of our lives
And tear apart these monuments to greed
And build our new world from the broken pieces
LeftΓΆver Crack, Super Tuesday, 2004
Data can be stateless. I think we (the people) should build digital world museums that live up to the name. Citizens of the world cannot yet overcome national citizenship; I wonder whether data can be our avant-garde in that struggle. After all, it exists in territories that range from the somewhat uncontrollable to the outright unregulated and anarchic. You are right to be afraid.
Nora Al-Badri, The Post Truth Museum, 2021
KW Institute for Contemporary Art, The Last Museum, 2021
Inventive, ambitious, and frequently surreal, the stories of My First Book are a mirrorball onto the world as it is. Levy illuminates what it is to be at once adorable, special, heavily medicated, consistently panicked, and completely sincere. To find and keep faith is the order of the dayβbut how? Never far from a digital interface, Levy's characters grapple with formative political, existential, and romantic experiences in a web-drenched society on the brink of collapse.
Honor Levy, My First Book, 2024
"And truly, who leaves Goldman Sachs? Inflated black balloons and inflated self-worth are radiations that touch us all, signs of failed higher thinking in hermeneutic nihilism. Itβs definitely fulfilling."
Overpriced cheesecakes are the starting point for an essay on art writing; shoplifting in Berlin opens to a reflection on the economies of activist practices; fiction allows for discussion of the legacy of institutional critique, queer mΓ©langes or quiet melancholy.
Estelle Hoy, SakΓ© Blue, 2024
Drone Vision addresses questions of how visibility and verticality are intrinsic to drone technology and its meanings for artistic and political praxis. This book is based on the two-year research project Drone Vision: Warfare, Surveillance, Protest β a collaborative initiative between HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, the Hasselblad Foundation, NiMAC, Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre and the National College of Arts in Lahore. Led by Dr. Sarah Tuck, the research project explores the affective meanings and implications of drone technologies on warfare, surveillance and protest.
Sarah Tuck, Louise Wolthers, Drone Vision: Warfare, Surveillance, Protest, 2022
Militant Media engages with the ethical and political implications of media and technology in relation to contemporary struggles and conflicts. Diverse contributions reveal how media and technology can simultaneously enable and constrain agency and control. Together these contributions seek to challenge prevailing power structures and enable new forms of political solidarity.
Centre for Research Architecture, Militant Media, 2024
