What happens when social scientists write about artworks? How does it affect the academic environment of a business school and how does it change the perception of art? Can it be used as a novel scientific method in the business studies?

Can objects be traumatized? How does the commercial value of an art object relate to its aesthetic qualities? How do objects interact? These are some of the questions addressed by Graham Harman, the originator of object-oriented philosophy and a central figure of the Speculative Realism school of thought in contemporary philosophy.

WONDERFLUX brings together a group of longtime contributors with graphic artists to collaborate on illustrated essays and develop a new pictorial language around some of the emergent consistencies and overarching issues that defined the first decade of e-flux journal.

Elizabeth Povinelli’s anthropology of the otherwise locates itself within forms of life that run counter to dominant modes of being under late settler liberalism. In these essays, she considers the emergence of new worlds and the extinguishment of old ones, seeking to develop a social imaginary that can sustain radical potentiality without turning a blind eye to our deep interdependence.

For the last two decades, Josephine Meckseper has created large-scale installations, sculptures, paintings, and films that simultaneously expose and encase signifiers such as advertisements, political imagery, and everyday objects to form an exploration into the collective unconscious of our time. The artist’s exhibition at the Frac des Pays de la Loire is her first major institutional survey show in France.

Oceans are a crucial in regulating the planet’s climate—a necessary condition to ensure human survival on earth. Findings of oceanography can help people living in the Anthropocene to better understand life (and survival).

Understanding microbiota alters and challenges our concepts of immunology, metabolism, and the relation between nutrition and mental health, and also helps us learn more about the pathogenesis of diseases, the development of which are associated with a lack of microbial diversity.

Geoengineering refers to the large-scale intervention into the earth’s natural systems—oceans, soils, and atmosphere—in an attempt to counter the adverse effects of climate change, be it through solar radiation management, carbon dioxide removal, and so forth.

Writing about such major artists as Diane Arbus, Claude Cahun, and William Eggleston, Brian Dillon is interested in the slippages between life, work, and reputation. He attends to the formal strangeness of the art of Julia Margaret Cameron, Hannah Höch, Eileen Gray, and Loie Fuller. And he finds contemporary echoes of their dissident modernism in the sculpture of Helen Marten, Eva Rothschild, and Enrico David. In writing about contemporary writers such as Eimear McBride and Claire Louise Bennett, he is looking for the kind of formal adventure he is convinced can and must accompany the personal or political.

The notion of the handmade has shifted from the margins to center stage. Craft’s value is increasingly recognized across creative, economic, social, cultural, and political contexts. Owing to dissolving disciplinary boundaries and the widespread appropriation of craft, its meaning is changing.

Unpayable Debt examines the relationship between coloniality, raciality, and global capital through a black feminist poethical framework. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s 1979 sci-fi novel Kindred, in which an African American writer is transported back in time to the antebellum South to save her owner-ancestor, Unpayable Debt relates the notion of value to coloniality—both economic and ethical.

Faint on stage? Umm Kulthum never did. It was the people who swooned when she sang. What if, overcome by the power of her song, the singer herself had passed out? What would have ensued during the sudden silence? Umm Kulthum faints on stage is the title Polys Peslikas coined for one of the paintings in his exhibition “The future of colour” at the Cyprus Pavilion during the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.

This first comprehensive survey of Joseph Kosuth’s work with public media centers on his pioneering project The Second Investigation (1968–74). This indexical work takes the form of anonymous advertisements in media—newspapers, magazines, billboards, television—based on a taxonomy of the world developed in the early nineteenth century by Roget for use in his thesaurus. Marking the start of Kosuth’s sustained engagement with public media, this work anticipated the media orientation of New York postmodernism beginning in the late 1970s.