“ “ [sic] Goldie on Whitehouse

Electronic noise experimentalists Whitehouse (William Bennett and Philip Best) have given and received torrents of aesthetic abuse in their 20-year career, their ‘aural sadism’ and lyrical violence triggering accusations of misogyny, Nazism and banality from some and fanatic devotion from others.
“ ” [sic] Goldie goes beyond hagiography and demonology ‘to twist a political issue from the inside’

Forget the year 2000, the Mbug is already upon us. If you thought Michael J. Fox was just a figment of the silver screen you'd better think again – this time we really are going back to the future. Forget what all those postmodernists told you about the arbitrariness of the sign, this time the nought means business. Confused? Why not let Mark Fisher upgrade your theory chip for the Y2K. When was that again…?

Within the course of a year, Y2K has passed from being a non-event to being, briefly, a scare story (complete with a government awareness campaign) to being a taken-forgranted commonplace.

After the heady days of the dot com boom and the online corporate critique that followed in its wake, net artists’ and activists’ preoccupations are shifting towards the state. Raimundas Malasauskas reports on one New York example

‘Dear Director, I am writing to inform you that I am deeply troubled by your closure of White Box, an absolutely un-American thing to do. Please rescind the order as soon as possible and affirm our freedom of speech and assembly.’ So wrote one angry activist in an email to Carolyn Parker Mayes, the director of the Homeland Security Cultural Bureau (HSCB), after it ordered the White Box gallery in New York’s Chelsea to be shut down on September 11 2002.

Q is an intricate historical novel by four Bolognan authors deploying the name of the inglorious footballer Luther Blissett. Stewart Home, a champion of 'multiple identities' who has also published under this name, detects in Q's cultural bricolage an ascending dialectical movement between rebellious practice and theory.

Brian Dillon reviews Hatred of Capitalism

‘How do you talk about the past without it seeming like an epitaph?’ asks Chris Kraus in the introduction to this selection from four decades of Semiotext(e)’s covert operations. There was a time when the svelte volumes of its ‘Foreign Agents’ series functioned like passports to a cultural territory that was barely mapped by the institutionalised guardians of theoretical enquiry. These were talismanic texts, reports from the outskirts of academic orthodoxy that acquired mythic status for those on the fringes of institutional acceptance: a mobile army of the underfunded who passed the latest Baudrillard or Virilio around like contraband.

Stewart Home meets artist Annabel Frearson, postmodern ingenue, chatroom conceptualist and creator of BaudriR

What thing could be more fundamental in anyone’s universe than the existence of the universe itself?

This month we’ve put freelance scientist, environmental activist and free-range philosopher Mike Holderness on the spot. Unfazed by our request for his ‘PIN CODE’ to the universe, he’s given us the master key – the ontology of the universe itself

‘Tell us about something that’s fundamental to your universe,’ said Mute.

What thing could be more fundamental in anyone’s universe than the existence of the universe itself? Or, to put it another way, the nagging suspicion that there may not be anything at all.

As music journalists have often remarked Nick Currie aka Momus is “the most underrated man in pop”. With a career that spans Weil-style cabaret, top 10 J-pop hits, his polymathematical ‘thoughts for the day’, to some of the wittiest and wordiest songwriting there is, he’s probably too slippery to be spun. With a reputation like this don’t be surprised to find him explaining why folk is the way forward.

I’VE JUST STARTED RECORDING A PLASTIC FOLK ALBUM.