The illustrations on the banknotes show generic examples of architectural styles such as renaissance and baroque rather than…

“The illustrations on the banknotes show generic examples of architectural styles such as renaissance and baroque rather than real bridges from a particular member state, which could have aroused envy among other countries. “The European Bank didn’t want to use real bridges so I thought it would be funny to claim the bridges and make them real,” Stam told Dezeen.”

–The Bridges of Europe by Robin Stam (viaiamdanw)

By the standards of other successful Chinese cities, Yiwu is more down-and-dirty. There are none of the showpiece infrastructure…

“By the standards of other successful Chinese cities, Yiwu is more down-and-dirty. There are none of the showpiece infrastructure projects like new expressways and elaborate modern skyscrapers that proliferate in other Chinese cities. While clearly all this trade has made many in Yiwu very rich, the city looks like the China of twenty years ago. Its market stalls are not the kind of place where most Chinese care to shop these days. Chinese, especially urban-dwellers, like well-designed brand-name chain stores with higher-quality merchandise and slick packaging.”

–Yiwu: China’s Little Known Capital of Commerce (viaiamdanw)

Each one, he said, took about three days to paint. “Before I had some Western customers,” he told me. “Now all my clients are…

“

Each one, he said, took about three days to paint.

“Before I had some Western customers,” he told me. “Now all my clients are Chinese.”

He paused, looking from the wet pink poppies to the rather depressing tones of the old school classical flowers. Was there a relationship between the shift in global purchasing power and his artist’s palette?

“There is a difference in taste,” he said at last.

“I’d say that Westerners prefer classical pictures which tend to be very dark. Chinese people like bright colours.”

”

–China’s oil painting village feels global shift (viaiamdanw)

Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy

art, politics, labour, work, post-everything, Contemporary Art, democracy, post-democratic, e-flux

The art field is a space of wild contradiction and phenomenal exploitation. It is a place of power mongering, speculation, financial engineering, and massive and crooked manipulation. But it is also a site of commonality, movement, energy, and desire. In its best iterations it is a terrific cosmopolitan arena populated by mobile shock workers, itinerant salesmen of self, tech whiz kids, budget tricksters, supersonic translators, PhD interns, and other digital vagrants and day laborers. It’s hard-wired, thin-skinned, plastic-fantastic. A potential commonplace where competition is ruthless and solidarity remains the only foreign expression. Peopled with charming scumbags, bully-kings, almost-beauty-queens. It’s HDMI, CMYK, LGBT. Pretentious, flirtatious, mesmerizing. This mess is kept afloat by the sheer dynamism of loads and loads of hardworking women. A hive of affective labor under close scrutiny and controlled by capital, woven tightly into its multiple contradictions.

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/politics-of-art-contemporary-art-and-the-transition-to-post-democracy/

He had never felt this outside of the Zone, and even in the Zone it had only happened two or three times. Suddenly, he seemed to…

“He had never felt this outside of the Zone, and even in the Zone it had only happened two or three times. Suddenly, he seemed to be in another world. A million smells assaulted him at once—smells that were sharp, sweet, metallic; dangerous, caressing, disturbing; as immense as houses, as tiny as dust particles, as rough as cobblestones, and as delicate and intricate as watch gears. The air turned hard, it appeared to have surfaces, corners, edges, as if space had been filled with huge coarse spheres, polished pyramids, and gigantic prickly crystals, and he was forced to make his way through all this, as if in a dream, pushing through a dark antique shop full of ancient misshapen furniture … This only lasted a moment. He opened his eyes, and everything disappeared. This wasn’t another world—it was his same old world turning an unfamiliar side toward him, revealing it for an instant, then immediately sealing it off, before he even had the chance to investigate.”

–Roadside Picnic - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (viam1k3y)

Perhaps the most urgent fear is this: a sense among even those Chinese whose living standards have soared that frantic…

“Perhaps the most urgent fear is this: a sense among even those Chinese whose living standards have soared that frantic development has come at too high a price. Never in history have the promise and peril of head-spinning modernization been so apparent within the space of a single lifetime. A country where the authorities call the air in the capital “fine” on days when nearby skyscrapers are completely shrouded from view, where waterways are suddenly and inexplicably clogged by enormous numbers of pig carcasses, where once-revered elders live in rural poverty and isolation — this is the stuff of nightmares. The party’s anxiety over these bad dreams can be seen in many things — in its calls for official think tanks to study carefully the “color revolutions” that toppled East European and Central Asian autocrats, and in the suggestion that party cadres read de Tocqueville’s account of the French Revolution, to ensure that China avoids the mistakes of the ancien régime.”

–Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, ‘The Elusive Chinese Dream’ (2014)

We don’t distinguish among “hacking” behaviors now — everything that’s done in any way to harm, compromise, gain unauthorized…

“We don’t distinguish among “hacking” behaviors now — everything that’s done in any way to harm, compromise, gain unauthorized access to, probe, or monitor without knowledge is considered a hack or hacking. And media outlets obligingly stretch the definition as wide as possible for short headlines and shallow stories. We don’t ask about function, motive, provenance, authority, or any other detail. Hacking is coding is doxing is theft is an intelligence operation is a malware insertion is a leak is a practical workaround. File it all over there, in the menacing box with the skull and crossbones on it.”

–Scott Smith, ‘In 2015, we’ll need different words to talk about the future’ (2014)

As it happens, timespace as heterogeneous singularity is not unprecedented in human history: the dreamtime of the indigenous…

“As it happens, timespace as heterogeneous singularity is not unprecedented in human history: the dreamtime of the indigenous Australians in which past, present and future were held in symbiotic tension, is known as the “all-at-once-time” as opposed to the one-thing-after-the-other-time that we all became accustomed to in occidental modernity. The first synchronous electric clocks—the ones we now see on the tower-most parts of monolithic modern architectures—were introduced only in the 1920s. A synchronous electric clock has no inherent timekeeping properties, but runs at the frequency of the electrical power source, which—when coupled to an electric motor with the correct gearing—drives the clock hands at the correct time. Even time—as we know it—is virtual: a technological construct.”

–Rhizome | Post Whatever: on Ethics, Historicity,& the #usermilitia (viaphotographsonthebrain)

(T)he expanded use of unmanned drone missiles has been made possible by an intelligence-gathering system which the US Air Force…

“(T)he expanded use of unmanned drone missiles has been made possible by an intelligence-gathering system which the US Air Force has named Operation Gorgon Stare. It refers to a collection of surveillance and data-analysis resources that “sees” unblinkingly 24/7, indifferent to day, night, or weather, and that is lethally oblivious to the specificity of the living beings it targets.”

–24 / 7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary (viajuhavantzelfde)

Wal-Mart and Amazon have become America’s main conduits for cheap, mass-produced goods from China’s factory floors. But who…

“

Wal-Mart and Amazon have become America’s main conduits for cheap, mass-produced goods from China’s factory floors. But who needs them anymore?

I am holding in my hands a men’s down jacket with fur trim, sent four days ago direct from a warehouse 67 miles west of Shanghai.

The $52.19 jacket won’t be confused for Prada. The fur appears to be “fur.” It came out of the box smelling like plastic and solvent.

What the jacket represents is far more interesting: It’s the final and direct link between China’s manufacturers and the global consumer. In the same way Chinese companies took over the production of goods, they are now increasingly capable of merchandizing those goods, using the Web and modern freight transport. Bentonville, you are being outsourced to China, too.

”

–Who Needs Amazon or Wal-Mart? China Cuts Out the Middleman (viaiamdanw)

The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated needs, subsists as one of the great human…

“The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated needs, subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism. Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism. Most of the seemingly irreducible necessities of human life—hunger, thirst, sexual desire, and recently the need for friendship—have been remade into commodified or financialized forms. Sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability, and thus remains an incongruous anomaly and site of crisis in the global present. In spite of all the scientific research in this area, it frustrates and confounds any strategies to exploit or reshape it. The stunning, inconceivable reality is that nothing of value can be extracted from it.”

–24 / 7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary (viajuhavantzelfde)