In its third edition, Diaphanes probes the (im)possibilities of coming to visual and conceptual grips with the present, and brings together artistic, literary, and critical positions and perspectives on imperative contemporaneity and absolute nowness (with Manuel Franquelo, Dietmar Dath, Nicole Bachmann, Maël Renouard, Esther Shalev-Gerz, Gilles Rotzetter, Alexander Kluge, Lucy McKenzie, Markus Proschek, Philip Topolovac, Ko Murobushi, Stephen Barber, Elena Vogman, Marcus Quent, Wolfgang Plöger, Jso Maeder, Luc Meresma, Dieter Mersch, Penelope Umbrico, Christine Tauber).
Where is the present when the computer pulses at the wrist every day, when we're globally interconnected in real time but don't take in our selves for a single moment, just bits and pieces, just snatching a few intensities, when neurons plus communication already makes a consciousness? Is it nothing but a hallucination, in permanent crisis? Does it stand still, get wider, poorer?
How does the past change when systems record every second, saving them for the right moment or for all eternity, when contacts, mails, and calendar and movement data evaporate like spam in the cloud? Is it forgotten, does it become a lifelong case file, or just get older?
What will become of the future when algorithms synchronize our desires, calculate our life chances and mortality rates, when data sets determine our rights? Does it freeze up like a computer screen, does it melt like a glacier, or has it long since belonged to quite different beings?
When to switch off? What to look for? How to write? Which lines to draw? Whence self-recognition? Diaphanes #3—Time Probe Zero Synthesis: authors, artists, theorists each with their uniquely discursive temporal sonars, in images, voices, texts, assemblages.
Conceived in the framework of the prestigious transversal and multidisciplinary editorial program of the eponymous publishing house, Diaphanes is a quarterly multi-language magazine with a focus on contemporary art, critical discourse, and multilingual fiction. Open for the plurality of all forms of imagination and knowledge, Diaphanes Magazine connects an interest in current tendencies with deep-rooted research, the power of fiction with nuanced judgment, aesthetic excitability with essayistic sharpness, journalistic independence with a certain enjoyment of irritation and controversy. Equally committed to art and thought, critique and production, Diaphanes wishes to correlate positions that seek new politics of text and image in the face of conformist regimes of meaning, and to contribute to a renewal of the means of critical apprehension and aesthetic sensibility given an increasingly opaque reality.
