Regarding Spectatorship: Revolt and Distant Observer is an ongoing research project curated by Marianna Liosi and Boaz Levin exploring the notion of mediated political spectatorship.

The project focuses upon the prevalent mode of vision and the engagement of the distant onlooker in relation to mediated political events, critically exploring the role played by mass and informal media as well as by technological devices in the politics of representation. Recent social uprisings, protests waves, revolutions and coups were all highly mediated events. New “social” media, as well as more traditional broadcast communication channels, contributed to the events, and became as much a part of the spectacle as it’s medium. The research aims to explore the notions of distance in relation to involvement, spectatorship in relation to agency and vision in relation to action. It gathers together a wide range of questions concerning the ambivalent way in which the role of technological devices and social media within the political sphere is perceived.

The website is the first public outcome of the one year-long multi layered project that will also include itinerant events and will culminate in an exhibition at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, opening on November 20th 2015. Conceived as an ongoing platform of discussion, the website aims to facilitate and stimulate a broad and interdisciplinary discourse around the questions of political spectatorship, offering a rich historical and theoretical context to the project. The website gathers together solicited essays and archival material by a wide range of intellectuals, alongside a growing collection of cultural references, videos and archival material. The first round of contributors include Brian Holmes (media theorist, culture critic, activist), Vera Tollman (critic and writer), Quinn Slobodian (historian), Sohrab Mohebbi (curator and writer), Oleksiy Radinsky (writer and filmmaker) and Paolo Caffoni (editor and essayist).

Amongst the artist to participate in the exhibition are Sharon Hayes, Martha Rosler, Ian Wallace, Ken Lum, Peter Snowdon, Abbas Akhavan and Daniel Herleth.

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Watching “Powers of Ten” in 2014: A Blueprint for Same Old Power Structures?

Vera Tollmann

This lonely scene, the galaxies like dust is what most of space looks like. This emptiness is normal.” Shifting between poetic and technological commentary, the male voice-over in Powers of Ten sounds familiar, a friendly voice from a 20th century educational. Calm, trustworthy and concentrated. One could never feel lonely “picture-travelling” in the cinematic company of such a voice. At continue

“The greatness ­­— and also the abyss — of human potentiality is that it is first of all potential not to act, potential for darkness” (Giorgio Agamben)

Sohrab Mohebbi

The greatness ­­— and also the abyss — of human potentiality is that it is first of all potential not to act, potential for darkness1. The mission nights were the busiest for the painters. While the fighters fought across the front lines, the paramedics wiggled amongst the tanks and artillery, back in the tents the artists were making portraits of continue

Breaking from the Government of Publics

Paolo Caffoni, with diagrams by Falke Pisano

At the end of nineteenth century, Gabriel Tarde helped bring about a radical shift in the terms of the academic debate on the nature of social psychology, when he said: “I therefore cannot agree with that vigorous writer, Dr. Le Bon, that our age is the ‘era of the crowds’. It is the age of the public or of publics – continue

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