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View of Hito Steyerl, “This is the Future,” Portland Art Museum, 2023. Courtesy: the artist; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; and Esther Schipper, Berlin. Photo: Mario Gallucci
Is artificial intelligence natural, perhaps even inevitable? Drew Zeiba tabulates how K Allado-McDowell, Hito Steyerl, and ricky sallay zoker use predictive tech to pry open or close off our ecological futures.
When is a modeling agency more than a modeling agency? When “it’s a feeling.” Cara Schacter meta-texts a first-anniversary newsletter anthology from No Agency, NYC’s cloutiest new logo.
Photography documents people, who mimic in turn what they see in photos. In the medial vernacular of our digital era, are we more likely to find life in humans, or their mechanical images?
In the mistake culture produced by an era of surveillance, our idea of the good isn’t defined by action, but its appearance, and the power to make truth boils down to who keeps the receipts. By Matilda Lin Berke
In times of it-girl inflation, everyone wants to live in a celebrity’s skin. Who better than Joan Didion to burst that bubble? Her spirit explains why style survives death and serious (prose-) stylists only buy Kim Kardashian’s shapewear.
A short history of luxury designer retrospectives – of Armani, YSL, Alexander McQueen, et al – and their more experimental counterparts illuminates 20th-century ideas of nation-building and fashion’s many possible futures.
In an age of burgeoning techno-feudalism, do artistic uses of kink aesthetics work as immunizations against societal violence, or do they amount to just another cope?
Is it possible to have style undressed? And what do we lack if we lack clothes? In her July column, Joanna Walsh ponders the hard work of taking (almost) everything off.
We feel either too big or too small for our clothes. In her June column, Joanna Walsh considers the monstrous feminine, oversize fashion, and the hard work required to make us “fit.”
While US Supreme Court’s May 2023 ruling against Andy Warhol’s “Prince” silkscreens might hamstring appropriative art, Sam Venis sees the legal system protecting human artists from generative AI.
The cultish bravura of New York’s most in-crowd shit-poster led to predictions of an in-cinema shooting at the premiere. But reflecting a scene back at itself is not an insight into our incoherent condition – it’s a hype tactic.
Özgür Kar, Death with clarinet, 2021, 4K video with sound, 75" Samsung TV, custom flightcase, media player, speaker, 15 min, looped; open: 122 x 176 x 125 cm; closed: 122 x 176 x 38 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Emalin, London. Photo: Stephen James
Tramming backward through time to the score from Twin Peaks, Daniel Moldoveanu indulges the melancholy phantoms of failed revolutions and the relief of finally giving in.
“Fashion is the future, clothes are what we already wear.” In her May column, Joanna Walsh ponders how fast fashion’s accelerationism plays with seasons, desire, and the virtual, projecting us into an elsewhere we’ll never venture into.
Two exhibitions in Paris – Nile Koetting at Parliament Gallery and the group show “Au delà” at Lafayette Anticipations – conjure data’s limitations in the face of the divine.
What is style? It’s not fashion, or clothing; it’s only ever personal, but never entirely personal. In the first installment of Spike’s NEW COLUMN, Joanna Walsh ponders why we yearn for ten-piece wardrobe plans or call for Derrida to get style.
Translated into English decades after her death, the sci-fi stories of the avantgarde-writer Izumi Suzuki gently twist modern Japan into tales of unspeakable loneliness.
All images: Jo Broughton, “Empty Porn Sets,” 1995–2007, C-type prints mounted on aluminum and set in sub box frames, 20.5 x 25.5 cm. All images courtesy: the artist and Michael Mckenzie at Hammer Lab, London
As the blender of post-modernity makes an ever-smoother paste of our selves and our projections, Daniel Moldoveanu asks if we are becoming front-row voyeurs of a death we could prevent.
Forget Y2K; the 2010s are already back again. But retromania leads us down into a labyrinth of data horror, writes Adina Glickstein in her February column.
Minutes to midnight, Nolan Kelly wonders if hyperpop is a nostalgic rehash of too-recent hits, or a consolation for a culture exhausted by novelty-seeking?
Where Don’t Worry Darling styles itself as a critique of retro-patriarchy, Steven Phillips-Horst sees a vision of womanhood stuck in a cul-de-sac of moral escapism.
Will we still set New Year’s resolutions when our consciousness lives on computers? Adina Glickstein rings in 2023 with transhumanists, goblins, and worms.
Invited to expertise at a speed-date swap meet for discourse in twenty-seven languages, Daniel Moldoveanu looks askance at the doomed pageantry of trying to get one’s point across.
In her new column "User Error," Spike Editor-at-Large Adina Glickstein charts the volatility of love and the crypto market, and finds solace in nightcore and Avril Lavigne conspiracy theories.