On the Death and Life of Cities
Only by enlisting the movements of a building and accounting carefully for its “tribulations” would one be able to state its existence: it would be equal to the building’s extensive list of controversies and performances over time, i.e. it would be equal to what it does, to the way it resists attempts at transformation, allows [...]
The Preservation of Banksy
There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of the historical sense, through which something living comes to harm and finally perishes, whether it is a person or a people or a culture. -Friedrich Nietzsche “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” Banksy has been on a graffiti tour of the United States [...]
Don DeLillo’s Point Omega
Not a movie but a conceptual art piece…like watching the universe die over a period of about seven billion years…I stayed awhile. Because even when something happens, you’re waiting for it to happen. -Richard Elster on 24 Hour Psycho Don DeLillo’s latest novel, Point Omega, like his (perhaps) greatest novel, Underworld, opens by restaging a [...]
The Ethics of Dust as Sheets of the Past
“You may at least earnestly believe, that the presence of the spirit which culminates in your own life, shows itself in dawning, wherever the dust of the earth begins to assume any orderly and lovely state.” -John Ruskin, The Ethics of Dust (XVIII, 346) I recently visited The Ethics of Dust, an experimental approach to [...]
The Limits of Control as Machinic Opera
If a quality has motifs and counterpoints, if there are rhythmic characters and melodic landscapes in a given order, then there is the constitution of a veritable machinic opera tying together orders, species, and heterogeneous qualities. What we term machinic is precisely this synthesis of heterogeneities as such. Inasmuch as these heterogeneities are matters of [...]
