e-flux Journal #60

<p>The museum may now be assuming a new function in the network. It is being reformatted as a recording device, a flexible memory machine that can store culture like a bank, artworks like a storefront, politics in the form of data. And each of these can be exchanged with one another as currency: the political movement can be turned into an activist archive, sold as an artwork, then exhibited as data, then sealed off in a vault with cultural artifacts for safe keeping. Museums in China are built without staff or contents to fill them long after they are constructed. Others exist online, leaving their buildings to rot. But it would be completely wrong to say that these are the dying gasps of another old-fashioned, overweight institution suffering an identity crisis after its contents got uploaded to the internet. Because more museums are being built today than at any other time in human history. ..</p> <p><b>Editorial </b><br /> Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle</p> <p><b>Is a Museum a Database?: Institutional Conditions in Net Utopia</b><br /> Mike Pepi</p> <p><b>The Neuroplastic Dilemma: Consciousness and Evolution</b><br /> Franco Berardi Bifo</p> <p><b>American Tutti-Frutti </b><br /> Porter McCray</p> <p><b>Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise</b><br /> Hito Steyerl</p> <p><b>An Introduction to the New Syrian National Archive</b><br /> Ali Shamseddine and John Rich</p> <p><b>Conceptual Realism: The Vulgar Freedom of Avant-Garde Museum Work</b><br /> Arseny Zhilyaev</p> <p><b>To Make a World, Part II: The Art of Creating a State</b><br /> Jonas Staal</p> <p><b>The Opacity of Queer Languages</b><br /> Anna T.</p> <p><b>The State of Detention: Performance, Politics, and the Cuban Public</b><br /> Coco Fusco</p>