The Media Res

06/11/2014

Check out Nathaniel Rivers' fabulous new essay on the work of contemporary artist Jenny Odell "who, in one quick moment, con-fused the project of an object-oriented democracy with the artistic gesture of re-attuning us to the infrastructures in our midst." http://www.themediares.com/pages/artifacts/stranger-attractions.html

Better yet, infrastructure has been the missing mass I think through the assemblages of nonhuman and human actors that compose the world.

06/10/2014

06/10/2014

Nathaniel Rivers for TMR on infrastructure made alien in the work of Bruno Latour and Jenny Odell:

"To think within infrastructure is to do more than render its components visible: it is to rupture the seams between the human and the nonhuman in collective, political life."

http://www.themediares.com/pages/artifacts/stranger-attractions.html

05/13/2014

Lynch may not have divulged the kind of meaning Holdengräber was after, but he left us with a form to contemplate, one that now, like his first film, Eraserhead, is “done,” has “gone out into the world” and “is what it is”–a form full of images–sugar as granulated happiness, luke-warm milk shakes, black cars and canopy-clad brownstones, dark subway entrances, a dumpster-diving David Lynch–that can “impress upon us steadily and constantly without intermission, without benefit of words or thoughts.”


http://www.themediares.com/pages/parlance/you-dont-say.html

Though claiming the authority of empirical truth, the privatized popular news media spouts ideology. The editors seek proposed submissions that involve satirical dialogue and speculative discussion. How to reinvest parody with critical potency? How to pollinate conversation toward human flourishing?

05/07/2014

The New York Public Library has announced a plan to remake its landmark building on 42nd Street. As Joshua Steiner, vice chairman of the board of trustees, put it in 2008, the renovation in many way represents the “further democratization” of the library. By contrast, a staff member with whom I spok…

05/07/2014

A lot of people with whom I email have had enough of me. Their gripes are always the same: “You write back too quickly,” “You don’t give me enough...

05/06/2014

Odd Flower

10/26/2013

"Refusing to make money off your own data might be as political an act as refusing to drive a car or eat meat."


http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520426/the-real-privacy-problem/

As Web companies and government agencies analyze ever more information about our lives, it’s tempting to respond by passing new privacy laws or creating mechanisms that pay us for our data. Instead, we need a civic solution, because democracy is at risk.

09/27/2013

"The obvious point is that the entire venture of the colonists was fundamentally capitalist in its inception, and that it was the Massachusetts Bay Company, a sort of seventeenth-century equivalent of a modern corporation, that had imposed the original charter on the colonists, essentially making them “wage slaves” of the company."

TMR contributor, Fr. Aaron Taylor for Red Egg Review

http://www.redeggreview.org/common-vs-private-good-in-plymouth-colony-a/

08/07/2013

FDA for TMR, on the "foolishness" of Holy Russia:

"He prostrates himself before her, identifying Russia at last as one of that most Eastern brood of saints, the Fools-for-Christ, whose baffling and often, to all appearances, insane and immoral behavior is but a ruse to conceal their holiness and virtue and to preserve their humility."

http://www.themediares.com/pages/theologoumena/holy-russia.html

The Queen of the Sciences has been in exile. The editors seek proposed submissions that replant the seeds of humanism in the soil of Gospel. How to trivialize the logic of Wall Street with economies of eternity? How to re-enchant mind and matter with mystery? How to name the Other with mystical prec...

08/07/2013

"you homeless, wanton, drunken Russia—fool in Christ." by m.e.g