“I hereby make the simple promise that whenever I purchase new clothes, I will ask the responsible retailer or store representative where, and under which circumstances, the clothes were produced.” This is a promise everyone visiting the Fair Fashion Lab [The Hague, NL] [1] could make and sign. Formulated by artist Arne Hendriks, winner of… Read more

This week we will talk about the consumer and his role in the production process. Perhaps as consumers we are becoming excessively aware of what we want and, frequently, products are made exactly like we expect them to be. What happened to surprise, discovery and hunting for something? Before our role as consumers, we are… Read more

Welcome to the 21st century. We recently exited a century where objects were ideological— we believed that images of life under capitalism and liberal democracy would be enticing enough to bring down opposing economies. Now we talk about the “supreme object of ideology”, an object that is not really an object, or may be proclaimed… Read more

Today concepts like “epoch” and “zeitgeist” seem to have become totally obsolete. The reason for this could be that we are not interested in those concepts anymore, but we remain unable to think about reality in a new way.

“I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’” Because “thinking” is difficult to define […] “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?”—Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence. “Our bodies are hardware, our behaviour software.”—Ted Nelson   In 2010 the robot Suzette, by Bruce Wilcox, succeeded for the first… Read more

While writing an introductory post for this week’s theme, I quickly realised I would have done nothing more but borrow words from my references. For this reason, I decided to publish here few short excerpts from the most inspiring sources I could find on the subject. I believe reading this altogether constitutes a quick but… Read more

When I met Kottwitz for the first time, I did not have the faintest clue of who it was I had in front of me. In those days I was helplessly strapped onto the seat of a roller-coaster, zooming past the world at full speed, dashing through loops of matter and money. I was a… Read more