Category Archives: Art

Bureaucracy is Beautiful? Or Death by Papelismo

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Teo Ballvé

Kyle Grayson’s Chasing Dragons pointed me to this extraordinary gallery of photographs called “Bureaucratics” by photographer Jan Banning. I recognized one of them (left): it graces the cover of Akhil Gupta’s new book Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in … Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Critique, Everyday Life, Law, Power, The State, Violence | Comments Off

Medellín: Who’s Afraid of Hip-Hop?

Posted on March 4, 2013 by Teo Ballvé

My article on hip-hop and violence in Medellín is now out: Héctor Pacheco walked down the steep hillsides of his barrio in Medellín, Colombia to wish his aunt a happy birthday. Pacheco—a local rapper nicknamed “Kolacho”—had spoken at a public … Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Boundaries, City, Drugs, Everyday Life, Frontiers, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Security, Spatiality, Territory, Terror, The State, Violence | Comments Off

Visualizing Space and Injustice in Palestine

Posted on January 27, 2013 by Teo Ballvé

In an old post about the potential political capacities of the infographic, I wrote: “If Guy Debord was right in highlighting that social relations between people are increasingly mediated by images and representations, then can the infographic be a popular … Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Boundaries, City, Critique, Everyday Life, Guy Debord, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Maps, Media, Primitive Accumulation, Scale, Security, Spatiality, Spectacle, Territory, The State, Violence | Comments Off

The Solitude of Latin America

Posted on December 10, 2012 by Teo Ballvé

Today marks 30 years since Gabriel García Márquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature. His Nobel speech, “The Solitude of Latin America,” is itself a masterpiece. The closing lines (spoiler!) below. Full text English translation is online, but if you read Spanish, … Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Dialectics, Media | Comments Off

The New Aesthetic Part III: The Network

Posted on November 15, 2012 by Teo Ballvé

This final installment on the New Aesthetic (Part I: Seeing Like a Machine; Part II: Writing Like a Drone) considers the awkward physicality of the Internet as a thing. If the New Aesthetic is that “structure of feeling” produced by … Continue reading →

Posted in Art, City, Everyday Life, Law, Media, Networks, Science & Tech., Spatiality | Comments Off

The New Aesthetic Part II: Writing Like A Drone

Posted on October 26, 2012 by Teo Ballvé

My first post on the “New Aesthetic”—that weird, sometimes unsettling irruption of digital phenomena into real life, particularly into our visual culture—described it as a “structure of feeling,” a term coined by cultural critic Raymond Williams. For him, a structure … Continue reading →

Posted in #Occupy, Art, City, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Raymond Williams, Security | 2 Comments

The New Aesthetic Part I: Seeing Like A Machine

Posted on October 9, 2012 by Teo Ballvé

You know how sometimes you learn about something you had never heard of before and then you start seeing it everywhere? The New Aesthetic has been one of those things for me since Derek Gregory turned me on to it (sue … Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Assemblages, Boundaries, City, Everyday Life, Media, Networks, Science & Tech., Spectacle | 2 Comments

Interweb Motley # 8

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Teo Ballvé

The Altlantic dissects “Gangnam Style,” the South Korean music video sensation that has reached a gajillion youtube views, revealing its critical edge: a commentary on wealth, class, and value (aka capitalism) in contemporary South Korea by skewering one of its richest … Continue reading →

Posted in #Occupy, Art, Interweb Motley, Media | Comments Off

Paglen: The Last Pictures

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Teo Ballvé

Experimental geographer and artist Trevor Paglen’s most experimental project (so far) must be this new thing called “The Last Pictures” (video below) and it’s about to debut in New York. The itinerary of events in the U.S. and Europe are … Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Frontiers, Media, Science & Tech., Spatiality | 3 Comments

Roberto Bolaño & Geopolitics

Posted on September 6, 2012 by Teo Ballvé

David Kurnick published an interesting piece about Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño on Public Books, which I just discovered and is a partner site of the journal Public Culture. Like many others, I’ve noted the “discovery” of Bolaño by the Anglo literary … Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Everyday Life, Historical-Geographies, Jester, Place | 4 Comments