In February of last year, Amazon revealed its plans for a second headquarters—HQ2—in Arlington, VA. These plans included rendered images of what the site would look like. Of the four buildings to be, three are unnoteworthy. The fourth, on the other hand … More Endless Babel: Theme and Variations

The impossibility of creating a map on a scale of 1:1 has been a favourite subject for scientists and artists over the years. However we look at the problem, every map must reduce the infinity of reality to a finite representation of the world… … More Of Maps and Memory: How the brain’s GPS helps us to replay the past and imagine the future

In 1988, Bay Press in Seattle published “Vision and Visuality,” edited by the cultural writer and art historian, Hal Foster. The book is a collection of transcripts and essays by historians, teachers and theorists who participated in a 1987 symposium, organized by Foster and the Dia Foundation on the “modes of vision.” “Vision and Visuality” was part of a series of publications called, “Discussions in Contemporary Culture.” … More The Gimzo and the Gaze: Discerning VR, the Virtual and Virtuality through a Select Micro-History—1977 to the present.

Christiane Paul and Malcolm Levy

Whether or not you believe in the theoretical and art-historical value of the concept of a New Aesthetic – and the related buzz surrounding the labels of post-digital, post-Internet, post-medium – their rapid spread throughout art networks testifies to a need for terminologies that capture a certain condition of cultural and artistic practice in the early 21st century … More Genealogies of the New Aesthetic

Isabel De Sena Cortabitarte

In this paper I assert that in bio-art, the use of humour as a rhetorical tool holds the potential to bring ambiguous, non-normative perspectives into ethical questions that arise from developments in the life sciences (that field concerned with the study of living organisms and the advancement of life-altering interventions, such as bioengineering and genetic manipulation). … More “It’s not a joke!” Bio-art and the aesthetics of humour

Tyler Calkin

Toys are for everyone, not just the young: models, miniatures and replicas are as much for adults as they are for children. And the function of a toy extends beyond a moment’s amusement. Throughout history and across cultures, toys have been created to serve as tools for teaching. Indeed, they are almost always instructive in some capacity, eve if they have not been built with a primarily pedagogical intent. Toys are reflectors and propagators of a culture’s ideology, and variably serve as teachers of moral lessons, mathematics, imperialist narratives, class distinctions, and spirituality. … More Whimmydiddles, Whirligigs, and Capital Punishment: A History of Toys and Games, Being A Partial and Idiosyncratic Exploration of Several Centuries of Developments, Focusing Largely on Europe and North America.

K. Bradford

I stood in a temple of toilets. It was open-air, roofless. Everything pointed skyward. I sat on a toilet and looked up as dusk fell. … More The Re-tech of Noah Purifoy: an overture in detritus

Tom Leeser

The political theorist, Hannah Arendt stated that we “define labor as the opposite of play.” However the predominant value of labor has evolved from physical activities embedded in a manufacturing economy to a form of indexical finance that is decoupled from the production and exchange of things. This digitally based “fiat” economy has fractured the definitions of labor and play that was articulated by Arendt. … More Play: Active – A curatorial project in the form of a workshop