Supercommunity: Diabolical Togetherness Beyond Contemporary Art

Leading artists, theorists, and writers exhume the dystopian and utopian futures contained within the present

“I am the supercommunity, and you are only starting to recognize me. I grew out of something that used to be humanity. Some have compared me to angry crowds in public squares; others compare me to wind and atmosphere, or to software.”

Invited to exhibit at the 56th Venice Biennale, e-flux journal produced a single issue over a four-month span, publishing an article a day both online and on site from Venice.

In essays, poems, short stories, and plays, artists and theorists trace the negative collective that is the subject of contemporary life, in which art, the internet, and globalization have shed their utopian guises but persist as naked power, in the face of apocalyptic ecological disaster and against the claims of the social commons.

“I convert care to cruelty, and cruelty back to care. I convert political desires to economic flows and data, and then I convert them back again. I convert revolutions to revelations. I don’t want security, I want to leave, and then disperse myself everywhere and all the time.”

• Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War
• In the Flow
• Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials
• Superhumanity: Design of the Self
• Art Power (The MIT Press)
• After Art (POINT: Essays on Architecture Book 4)
• Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures)
• Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power
• Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being)
• The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present