Dialogues on CoreCore & the Contemporary Online Avant-Garde

We are presenting here a very fun, yet rigorously peer-reviewed and intellectual work from a Ph.D scholar with a renowned sense of humor, introduced by another fantastic artist and thinker from another universe. To cap it off, the book is illustrated by Rachel Lillim, whose visual style is so compelling that it helps everyone see the work for what it is: otherworldly, playful and queer, but serious and discerning at the same time. It's a biology text about the body put together by a team of those who are, by and large, under- represented in the field. 

With a Foreword by i0 xen0 

Affects & Dreams: a manual for Becoming, the first book authored by niko mas, is a relatively quick dive into the waters of Becoming; a schizo-guide to our publishing practice (why, how, and for what cause do we publish/transmit). We tell the story of a radio show that bridged our project Crossdressing Diogenes with our latest project, Becoming. In telling the story of how we arrived here at all, we have a chance to index all of the fields and domains that Becoming has entered into so far, and begins to maniacally draw lines through many subjects.

Some of the topics covered here include:
Images of Thought, Listening modes, Negativity and The Ear, Minimalism, Honest Electronics, Logocentrism, Metaphysics of Presence, Natural
Physics, Lumbung Radio, Rave Culture, Tripping, Radio Control Rooms, Analogical Transmissions, Anamorphoses, Insomniac Dream-Machines.

This book is called Unconscious/Television; it is a book that is informed by my discontent with aspects of psychoanalysis, in both its clinical and theoretical dimensions, and the way Lacanian psychoanalysts deal with language. Also, this book aims at posing, because of psychoanalysis, philosophical problems—twisting concepts—that will entangle art and the production of thought.

Within the Lacanian framework, practices are too attached to a notion of the unconscious that is structured as language; especially in relation to the Lacanian proposition that followed Sigmund Freud. With structuralism, which highlights and strengthens the division between nature and culture, Jacques Lacan thinks that Freudian concepts, and his positioning of the unconscious as the cause, should be elaborated or reconfigured as language, with language being the structure of the unconscious, representation operating with signifiers within this structure, and the signifier representing the subject to another signifier.

Above all, what I have been concerned with is a certain relationship to the Other—that is the symbolic, alienation in language, the master signifier—and how stuck we are with this neurotic comprehension of the clinical and the theoretical, and how we need psychotic or perverse possibilities in order to invent new things, new lives, new bodies and worlds, new concepts and thoughts. (Note from the introduction)

The Western museum is a battleground - a terrain of ideological, political and economic contestation. Almost everyone today wants to rethink the museum, but how many have the audacity to question the idea of the universal museum itself?

In A Programme of Absolute Disorder, Françoise Vergès puts the museum in its place. Exploring the Louvre's history, she uncovers the context in which the universal museum emerged: as a product of colonialism, and of Europe's self-appointed claim to be the guardian of global heritage.

Vergès outlines a radical horizon: to truly decolonize the museum is to implement a 'programme of absolute disorder', inventing other ways of apprehending the human and non-human world that nourish collective creativity and bring justice and dignity to the dispossessed.

Foreword by Paul Gilroy

Translated by Melissa Thackway

First-generation Palestinian refugees recall life before and after the Nakba.

During the 1948 war more than 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were violently expelled from their homes by Zionist militias. The legacy of the Nakba - which translates to 'disaster' or 'catastrophe' - lays bare the violence of the ongoing Palestinian plight.

Voices of the Nakba collects the stories of first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, documenting a watershed moment in the history of the modern Middle East through the voices of the people who lived through it.

The interviews, with commentary from leading scholars of Palestine and the Middle East, offer a vivid journey into the history, politics and culture of Palestine, defining Palestinian popular memory on its own terms in all its plurality and complexity.

Afterword by Rosemary Sayigh. Winner of an English PEN Award 2021.

Enlevés à Bougie is a visual archive compiling documents from the kidnapping of a French state employee during the War of Independence, in 1960, Bougie, Algeria.

Over the last few decades the term ‘bootlegging’—a practice once relegated to smugglers and copyright infringers—has become understood as a creative act. Debates about homage, appropriation, and theft that are common in the art world, are now being held in the spheres of corporate branding, social media, and the creative industry as a whole. Today, bootlegging has become fetishized as an aesthetic in and of itself, influencing everything from underground record labels to DIY T-shirts, publishing ideologies, to acts of high fashion détournement.

UNLICENSED contains twenty-one interviews with a range of creative practitioners on the topic of bootlegging. The conversations in UNLICENSED investigate bootlegging’s creative and critical potential, and explore new ways bootlegging can be deployed in order to thrive as an impactful cultural force.

Interviews with: A March Issue (Line Arngaard & Sonia Oet), Babak Radboy, Clara Balaguer & Czar Kristoff, BLESS (Desiree Heiss & Ines Kaag), Boot Boyz Biz, Akinola Davies Jr, Eric Doeringer, Experimental Jetset (Marieke Stolk, Erwin Brinkers, Danny van den Dungen), Elisa van Joolen, Hassan Kurbanbaev, Urs Lehni & Olivier Lebrun, Jonathan Monk, Matt Olson, Online Ceramics (Elijah Funk & Alix Ross), Mark Owen, Printed Matter (Jordan Nassar & Christopher Schulz), Nat Pyper, Hassan Rahim, Shanzhai Lyric, SHIRT, Oana Stanescu

Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.

Palestine is a microcosm of the on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.

Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.

How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple dignity for the Palestinian.