When we open our eyes, the world we experience appears without any effort on our part. At least that’s how it seems, most of the time. But this sense of effortlessness disguises the intricate neurobiological dance within our brains that is responsible for each and every one of our conscious experiences. This is true whether our brains are strug-gling to make sense of flowers in a desert or settling into the daily rhythm of a morning coffee. And the mystery of consciousness itself — the ‘hard problem’ of understanding how and why material, physical processes can give rise to any kind of subjective feeling — has been a challenge to scientists for hundreds of years, and to philosophers for even longer.1

Perception, Controlled Hallucination, And the Interpretation of Light – Anil Seth

When I first arrived in Lithium Valley towards the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, the area felt as delicate as my state of mind. I drove from San Diego in Southern California, through the Anza Borrego National Park, to the southern end of the land-locked Salton Sea, a place cocooned by the San Jacinto Mountains and the Santa Rosa Mountains to the west and the Chocolate Mountains and the Orocopia Mountains to the east. I travelled through beautiful mountain passes with blossoming spring flowers, down to the barren, unforgiving Imperial Valley. Situated within the Salton Trough, the Salton Sea is a place haunted by dreams of its recreational past: the California Riviera, the playground of Frank Sinatra and other crooners of the 1950s. I could hear the melodic tones of celebrity whis- perings on the wind and taste the expectations of the prospectors in the salty, sulphuric air as the area morphs from the uses of the past into the technological space of the future and the new technocratic exploitation of the arrogant argonauts of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and their cronies.1

'Fuck Earth- the Uneven Path to the Dreamworld of Consciousness– Lisa Barnard

The task of developing reliable systems for detecting objects on roads is an endeavour worth billions. An awareness of the world we move through — including its sometimes chaotic traffic — cannot simply be generated on the basis of an existing data pool, as is possible for text and images. Autonomous driving systems require a huge amount of data that needs to be recorded and evaluated in real time by cameras and sensors. 

Sensing The World – Katharina Täschner

The Canary and The Hammer is a response to the ﬁnancial crisis of 2008 and its  exposure of the Western world’s determination to accumulate wealth, detailing the inherent human reverence for gold and its signiﬁcance in the ruthless endeavour for progress...

Everyone Has a Story About Gold: Lisa Barnard

To hear the big fellows talk, they wage war from fear of God and for all things bright and beautiful, but just look into it, and you’ll see they’re not so silly: they want a good profit out of it, or else the little fellows like you and me wouldn’t back ’em up. 

The Missile and the Paperclip: Julian Stallabrass

What does it mean to speak of ‘drone aesthetics’? The term has been used to describe artwork – by artists like James Bridle, Omer Fast, Trevor Paglen, George Barber and others – that takes drone warfare as its subject. Drone aesthetics is a modern idiom, a shorthand for new modes of representing war from the extraterrestrial perspective of a machine. But like ‘aesthetics’ itself – called upon variously to designate the artistic or the beautiful – the term is an imprecise one, naming a specific practice but obscuring the more complex relations that drive it. 

Drone Aesthetics: Eugénie Shinkle

The third of May 1979 was a defining day for me, the moment when I finally threw off any attachment to my gilded public school and Oxbridge background. It was election night, when a fractured and fractious Labour Party succumbed to the inevitable Tory landslide...

Six Inches of Power: Jeremy Till

The pinched lips of eight cloned Margaret Thatchers smile unnaturally in unison, eyes fixed narrowly. Although a Thatcher far from her 1970s heyday, her rigid, manic expression is unchanged...

Maggie and the Fairytale of the Free Market:  Sarah James

At first glance it is a simple picture. A number of paths, nestling between two modest hills, disappear into the far distance. The light is flat and uninteresting, the sky blank. Yet there is something odd about it. The scale is disconcerting. The place looks ravaged, utterly bleak. Then, on closer inspection, rocks are revealed as canon balls; they are everywhere, strewn all over the landscape, tens, perhaps hundreds of them, disappearing towards the vanishing point.

Theatres of War: by Mark Power

The title chosen for this arresting body of work is as taut, condensed and suggestive as the images themselves.  In post-Kleinian psychoanalytic thought, specifically that of Wilfred Bion, PS<->D denotes the constantly operating forward thrust and regressive pull of two very distinctive states of mind, or attitudes to life and to the world – what Melanie Klein called the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions.... 