<nettime> *Out Now* Art, Activism, Academia: Changemaking in Contemporary Amsterdam

[Geert Lovink via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

The Institute of Network Cultures is proud to present the first publication of its last intern at HvA, Noah Pelikaan, produced at INC in the first half of 2026:

Art, Activism, Academia: Changemaking in Contemporary Amsterdam is a collected, fragmentary volume speaking on left-wing social movements in Amsterdam’s artistic and academic spheres, with an emphasis on the 2015-2024 period. This book contains writings and interviews of varying literary style and formula, with collaborators across and surpassing fields of academic, political, and artistic practice. It’s lessons are resultant from Amsterdam, yes, though applicable far beyond it. The intent of Art, Activism, Academia is that of the generative archive, to create and curate activistic memory so as to intervene toward a better today.

With contributions from Mumia Abu-Jamal; Harriët Bergman; Tashina Blom; Joost de Bloois; Floris Boudens; Deniz Buga; Sepp Eckenhaussen; Sam Hamer; Het Groene Veld; Image Acts Collective; Anouk van der Jagt; Willem Jebbink; Aylin Kuryel; Yfke Laureijssen; Alina Lupu; the Not Surprised Collective; Ahmet Öğüt; Noah Pellikaan; Prison Radio; Enzo Rossi; Hay Schoolmeesters; Jordi Viader Guerrero; M. Yuan; Fırat Yücel and Carine Zaayman.

From the introduction of the anthology editor, Noah Pelikaan:

This book comes into being in a time of uncertainty and loss-stagnation. Walter Benjamin’s phantasmagoria is becoming exposed as shadowplay12 (an adequate marker is seen in the popularization amongst United States liberals of the supposedly polemical view that The American Dream has died13), but an alterity of immanence and political anti-teleologism has not broken into the mainstream. Yet. Our period of rapidity and simultaneity, increasingly described as that of permacrises is elucidated in the 2024 MetaForumX: Permacrises handout as follows:

“While some speak of a ‘stack of crises’, others use terms such as polycrisis and metacrisis. Permacrisis emphasizes time: a never-ending end. It questions how to confront crises such as the hot wars in Ukraine or Gaza, or the warm wars across the global south, the rise of right-wing populism worldwide, the impending environmental catastrophe, and the growing social disparities globally. None of these crises can be separated from the current ascent of technocracy or the exploitative nature of digital capitalism.”

Or as girl theorist Mela Miekus elaborates: “Everything happens in the now, but this now is not an embodied present moment; rather it is a hyper-now that scatters into many parallel nows. The now is essentially everything everywhere all at once”. Though an unenthused view of the now(s) does not dispute that this is also a time of great resistance. A time which blends the hedonic and the anhedonic; which is marked by oscillation and unsurety, and which recognizes that unsurety and destabilization may precondition emancipation. The schism is our most consequential ally.

More info and the download link of the pdf you can find here: https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/art-activism-academia-changemaking-in-contemporary-amsterdam/
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