fette sans

Top, "Diagram of the Winds", in 12th-century English manuscript. The T-O map of the inhabited world occupies the center of this wheel-shaped diagram. Twelve profile busts of the winds, their Latin names provided in encircling bands, are depicted in the diagram's wide outer ring; the narrower, unpainted ring just within it contains the winds' Greek names. The four major winds are associated with the four cardinal directions, with East located at the top of the wheel. The busts of the winds blow toward the Earth at the center of the diagram, and their breath, represented as green strokes, flows into the wheel's "spokes." Each spoke bears a brief characterization of the associated wind, and these are expressed mainly in the first-person, as if spoken by the wind itself. Thus, the spokes of this diagram function like speech bubbles in a modern cartoon. Via. Bottom, screen capture from The Ascent, directed by Larisa Shepitko, 1977. Via.

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The Luddites see Big Tech as having eroded commonality: the common good, the social fabric, the institutions of collective interest. Luddism, as they conceive of it, is a communal, spiritual, and political project centered on three things: reclaiming collective agency away from Big Tech and its attention-fracking, data-capturing, social erosion project; re-enchanting public life through public events that help people experience connection; and fostering a world rooted in localism, public goods, care, fun, democracy, and what one Luddite I spoke to referred to as “collective effervescence.” Collective effervescence, I suspect, was what I was surprised to encounter in myself that winter day by the Apple Cube. The phrase, first coined by the sociologist Emile Durkheim, refers to the electric and exhilarating energy you might find at raves, protests, marathons, and houses of worship: the feeling you have when you’re connected to something larger than yourself. (...)

Our dominant technologies have, for reasons of profit-seeking, been engineered to maximize our dependence on them. Every time I went anywhere, from the subway to the streets, I saw the vast majority of people staring into the portals of their smartphones. I learned that the global average TikTok user watches over 100,000 videos annually, and the average American spends 50 hours a week on screens, 16 of those on social media platforms. An American born in 2025 is projected to spend 21 years of their lifetime looking at screens.

Top, Tim Rollins & K.O.S. (Kids of Survival), Temptation of St. Antony XXXVI - The Sun, 1990, Spit bite aquatint, etching and xerograph with animal blood and alcohol on chine collé. Via. Bottom, photograph by Maximilien Lamy (AFP), Beachgoers watch clouds of smoke rise into the sky, on the beach of Moutchic, in Lacanau, southwestern France, July 24, 2026. Via.

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Many political theorists of the post-war period produced critiques of the 'consumer society' in their efforts to adapt or supersede the marxist analysis of capitalism. Marcuse, Cardan, and Lefebvre were amongst those who considered the buoyancy of the economy and the apparent changes in class and political structure to be the real and enduring features of capitalist society: for some, such as Marcuse, this involved the postulation of the end or transformation of the working class and necessitated a radical revision of ideas about social revolution. The situationists agreed that consumption was assuming an unprecedented significance in the postwar period, but they used this position to argue for an extension of the notion of the proletariat to include all those who experienced a loss of control over their lives, whether as consumers or producers of commodities. They applied the marxist conception of alienation to every area of every¬ day life and argued that the development of capitalism entailed the extension of the means, the objects, and intensity of alienated experience. For the situationists, no area of experience is free from the permeation of capitalist relations of production and consumption; the members of capitalist societies are reduced to the level of spectators of a world which precludes their participation.

The SI argued that every experience of absence and alienation is produced by the capitalist system of relations. So that, although specific to class society, alienation appears to bear all the attributes of an inevitable and all-pervasive human condition. They characterised capitalism as the society of the spectacle: a realm in which everything is removed from real experience and becomes an inverted representation of itself. The spectacle circumscribes reality and any experience or discourse which arises within it becomes spectacularised. Ordinary gestures and the activities of daily life are packaged as glamorous and seductive; commodities come complete with preordained roles and lifestyles; and even dissent and critique are commodified and sold to those who experience and produce them. The conformist, the nihilist and the revolutionary are amongst the roles which can be chosen within the spectacle; commodified and alienated, they have an equivalence which denies their intrinsic significance. The most banal of gestures is glamorised and imposed: washing powders, confectionery, drinks and household appliances are advertised along with idealised images of those who use them and the homes, relationships, and patterns of behavior in which they do so.

Top, August Natterer, My Eyes at the Moment of the Apparitions, 1911-1913. Via. More. Bottom, Ana Santos, Untitled, 2012, Glass bottles and metal plaque, 21 x 18.5 x 18.5 cm. Via.

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I speak to maps. And sometimes they say something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps, the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, from By the Sea, 2002. Via.

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Many places have a "forest that shouldn't be entered." Even people who are used to working in the mountains feel there is something there. They are suddenly overcome with fear and it becomes the custom to avoid certain places. These places exist. I don't know what is there, but I think they are real . . . The world is more than we can fathom with our five senses. The world doesn't exist just for humans. So I think it is all right to have such things. This is why I think it's a mistake to think about nature from the idea of efficiency, that forests should be preserved because they are essential for human beings . . . I am concerned, because for me the deep forest is connected in some way to the darkness deep in my heart. I feel that if it is erased, then the darkness inside my heart would also disappear, and my existence would grow shallow.

Left, Paul Bergon, Dans l'escalier, ca. 1894-1912, Gelatin silver print, image: 24,6 × 12,1 cm, mount: 40,5 × 25,7 cm. Via. Right, Albrecht Dürer, A Woman in Netherlandish Dress Seen from Behind, 1521, Brush and black ink, heightened with white, background with brush and black ink, on gray-violet prepared paper. Via.

See also, Georges Didi Huberman, Le regard dans les plis, 2026

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I get scared easily. I’m afraid to be alive because whoever has life shall one day die. And the world violates me. The demanding instincts, the cruel soul, the crudeness of those who have no decency, the laws to obey, murder — it all makes me dizzy just as there are people who faint at the sight of blood: the medical student with a pale face and white lips about to dissect his first cadaver. It scares me when in a glance I see the bowels of other people’s spirit.

Top, screen capture from Trouble Every Day, directed by Claire Denis, 2001. Bottom, screen capture from Magdalena Viraga, directed by Nina Menkes, 1986.

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I like things that shock and affect my nervous system deeply. But things are not shocking unless they have been put into a memorable form. Once you’ve seen blood spattered against a wall a few times it’s no longer shocking. You think, well, that’s just blood splashed against a wall. It has to have something which just reverberates within your psyche and disturbs your whole life cycle. Something which affects the whole atmosphere you live in. Most of what is called art, your eye just flows over. It may be charming or nice, but it doesn’t change you. The same is often true about photos, even war photos. They are often violent, and yet it’s not enough.

Michael Peppiatt, from Francis Bacon in Your Blood, 2015. Via.

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Some lives are hit with catastrophic trauma over and over again; then trauma, with its concomitant strategies of survival, becomes a chronic condition. Defenses and denial become second nature; traumatic repetition becomes second nature. Trauma as a mode of being violently halts the flow of time, fractures the self, and punctures memory and language. And then there are those afflicted by what Freud called “Schicksalsneurose,” that is, a “fate neurosis,” who seem to be living under a bad spell, haunted by a curse that often precedes their lives, an ancestral curse perhaps, hidden and intangible, relegated to secrecy and silence.

Top, screen capture from Herakles, directed by Werner Herzog, 1962. Bottom, Ugo Rondinone, Frail foggy fairytale, 2009, Wood, hardware, enamel, 256 × 284 × 13 cm. Via.

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Here is the history of the body; water perhaps darkness perhaps stars bone then scales then wings then legs then arms then belly then bone then nerves then feathers then scales, then wings then liquid then pores then bone then blood pouring, then eyes, then distance, only this all that has happened since is too painful, too unimaginable.

Top, photograph by Andrew Norman Wilson & Shane Lavalette, from the series Nobodaddies, 2026. Via. Bottom, Vladislav Markov, LOCATION.LOCATION.LOCATION., 2026, Installation: kitchen, screen, video, carpet, 2 lamps, brown floor cover, Video duration 43'23'', on view at Bernheim Gallery, Zürich. Via.

David Pryor Adickes was an American sculptor and painter born in Huntsville, Texas. He is best known for A Tribute to Courage, the sixty-seven-foot statue of Sam Houston, the first and third president of the Republic of Texas, erected in Adickes’s hometown on the northbound side of I-45 in 1994. That same year, a drive to Mount Rushmore inspired Adickes to embark on his most ambitious undertaking: a series of two-ton, eighteen-to-twenty-foot concrete-and-steel busts of every U.S. president. He ended the series in the early twenty-first century with President Barack Obama. Adickes passed away at the age of ninety-eight in the summer of 2025.

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Orchestra, a 10-month-old company, has set up more than 100 street-facing cameras across the city, giving it live coverage of areas including SoMa, the Tenderloin, North Beach and the Marina. It plans to place 900 more cameras across the city's main commercial corridors over the next six months.

The pitch is something like Google Search, but for city streets. "It's a search engine for the physical world," said cofounder and chief operating officer Stephania Stavropoulos.

Orchestra installs free street-facing cameras on private businesses' properties. The cameras stream high-definition video around the clock, and AI converts the footage into structured data, identifying objects, vehicles, and incidents. Cofounder and CEO Drake Burciaga called the footage the "Erewhon of data" because of its premium quality.

Top, spread from Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, 1980. Via. Bottom, screen capture from A Woman’s Case, directed by Jacques Katmor, 1969. Via.

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It is not true that the more you love, the better you understand; all that the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but, instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with. I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know.

Top, screen capture from Eastern Promises, directed by David Cronenberg, 2007. Bottom, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jay Kiss, 1973, Mixed media. Via.

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Here I would suggest that Crowley’s sexual magick is a striking illustration of what Georges Bataille calls the power of transgression, which is a central aspect of eroticism, religious ritual and mystical experience alike. Transgression, Bataille argues, is not simple hedonism or unrestrained sexual license; rather, its power lies in the dialectic or “play” (le jeu) between taboo and transgression, through which one systematically constructs and then oversteps all laws. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of eroticism. Not a matter of simple nudity, eroticism arises in the dialectic of veiling and revealing, clothing and striptease, between the creation of sexual taboos and the exhilarating experience of overstepping them. So too, in ecstatic mystical experience or religious rites (such as blood sacrifices, carnivals, etc.), one must first create an aura of purity and sanctity before one can defile it with violence, transgression or the overturning of law. “The prohibition is there to be violated;” rules are made to be broken, for it is the experience of over-stepping limits that brings the blissful sense of continuity and communion with the Other.

Top, Ed Ruscha, Century Sickness, 1984, Dry pigment on paper, 73,7 x 58,4 cm. Via. Bottom, screen capture posted on Bluesky by 'viktor shtrum', Ok wait NOW he really is watching himself watch himself on Fox News, July 5, 2026.

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A cultural system of significance seeks to avoid events that are disruptive for a given system of significance or seeks to downplay or explain away the phenomena that are unavoidably disruptive . . . If we accept this general distinction, then we might explicate the exact nature of the “confusion” that induces horror in the following way. The backrooms start being terrifying not just when I find myself surrounded by the cultural cavities, i.e. by the disorder and decay of meaningfulness. It occurs when I obtain a first unclear feeling that here cavities are not anomalies but the constitutive principles of organization of this situation. A horror-situation, i.e. a setting where horror can meaningfully appear, is characterized by an inversed setting where something like a cultural cavity takes the position of cultural height and cultural heights are moved to the status of an anomaly that themselves call for an explanation and rearrangement; in backrooms, I myself become an anomaly.

Daniil Koloskov, from Beyond Reach: Horror and Phenomenal Life, 2024. Via.

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Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.”

Left, screen captures from Les Savates du bon Dieu, directed by Jean-Claude Brisseau, 2000. Right, screen captures from Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, directed by Leos Carax, 1991.

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There is directness and equipoise in the fervor, just as the greatest turmoil has precision. Like the discretion a tornado has when it tears down building after building, house by house. It is enough, Kafka said, that the arrow fit exactly into the wound that it makes.

Fette Sans, La Reprise (Dérive), 2020-ongoing May 30th, 2026, noon to midnight at Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin.

Fette Sans, La Reprise (Dérive) #310, May 24, 2026.

Left, Tatiana Trouvé, From here I disappear, 2009, Wood, mirror, plexiglas, metal, neon lamp, Dimensions variable, from the exhibition A Stay Between Enclosure and Space at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst Zürich, November 11, 2009 - February 21, 2010. Via. Right, Victor Simyan, A LARGE MINTON MAJOLICA TURQUOISE-GROUND 'PROMETHEUS' VASE, date cypher for 1867, 97,7 cm H, manufactured by Minton and Co., 1873. Via. More.

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This, then, is the paradox of drama and tragedy: how can essence come alive? How can it become the sensual, immediate, the only real, the truly "being" thing? Drama alone creates — "gives form to" — real human beings, but just because of this it must, of necessity, deprive them of living existence. Their life is made up of words and gestures, but every word they speak and every gesture they make is more than gesture or word; all the manifestations of their life are mere ciphers for their ultimate relationships, their life merely a pale allegory of their own Platonic ideas. Their existence can have no reality except the reality of the soul, the reality of lived experience and faith. "Lived experience" is latent in every event of life as a threatening abyss, the door to the judgement chamber: its connection with the Idea—of which it is merely the outward manifestation—is no more than the conceivable possibility of such a connection in the midst of the chaotic coincidences of real life. And faith affirms this connection and transforms its eternally improvable possibility into the a priori basis for the whole existence.

Left, illustration from An American text-book of obstetrics, 1897. Via. More. Right, Louka Anargyros, Now there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death., 2024, Leather and Paint, 260 × 2100 cm. Via. More.

Ignaz Semmelweis was a Hungarian born physician who received his MD degree in Vienna in 1844. In 1847 he was given a 2 year appointment as an assistant in obstetrics with responsibility for the First Division of the maternity service of the vast Allgemeine Krankenhaus teaching hospital in Vienna. There he observed that women delivered by physicians and medical students had a much higher rate (13–18%) of post-delivery mortality (called puerperal fever or childbed fever) than women delivered by midwife trainees or midwives (2%).

This case-control analysis led Semmelweis to consider several hypotheses. He concluded that the higher rates of infections in women delivered by physicians and medical students were associated with the handling of corpses during autopsies before attending the pregnant women. This was not done by the midwives. He associated the exposure to cadaveric material with an increased risk of childbed fever, and conducted a study in which the intervention was hand washing. Via.

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The Greek word, catachresis, means the rhetorical practice of misnaming something for which there would otherwise be no words.

[...]For Derrida, catachresis captures the inherent linguistic instability in all signifying practices and for Spivak it names the inherent colonial violence lurking in the practice of naming and identifying, systematizing and translating.

Jack Halberstam, from Female Masculinity, 1998. Via.

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I hope the heavens are ripped open (the moment when the intelligible disposition of objects, which though known have become alien, yields to a presence that is intelligible only to the heart). This I hoped for, but the skies never opened. There's a mystery in my crouching here like a beast of prey, flesh gripped by hunger. It's completely absurd: "Is God the animal I'd like to tear apart?" As if I was really a beast of prey. But I'm sicker than that. My hunger holds no interest for me. Rather than eat, my desire is to be eaten. Love eats my living bones, and the only release is quick death. I'm waiting for an answer from the dark in which I exist. What if it turned out that instead of being ground to pieces, I was just forgotten about, like some kind of waste? There isn't an answer in all this flailing about. Just emptiness. Now say that…. There's no God, though, for me to get down on my knees to.

Fette Sans, from the Cause that slew Me, 2026, surgical screw, thread, printed paper. Or a category for the pile books placed below it.