Subject grouping in the Essays & Articles archive.
Conducted for Codigo, a Mexican art and design magazine, in 2014. Pinchbeck calls for repurposing mass and social media to shift planetary consciousness, citing Jose Arguelles on the sacred function of art, Joseph Beuys on social sculpture, Bernard Lietaer’s Terra currency, and Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics. He mentions his talk show Mind Shift and the film 2012: Time for Change.
From Pinchbeck’s 2011 Dazed & Confused column. It argues that the hipster is an exhausted construct whose detachment is manufactured by the media industry and serves corporate control, and traces cool from enslaved Africans and jazz musicians to Che Guevara T-shirts. Thomas de Zengotita’s Mediated supplies the blob; Antonio Negri supplies the reminder that capital is only a social relation.
A September 2010 Reality Sandwich memoir tracing the origins of Evolver: a failed first company in Venice, California, Ken Jordan’s Augmented Social Network paper for PlaNetwork, and the 2007 founding of Reality Sandwich. Pinchbeck also recounts his magazine years at Open City with Thomas Beller and Rob Bingham, whose heroin overdose pushed him away from literary culture.
Written for Reality Sandwich in May 2010, the essay draws on the self-distribution campaign for 2012: Time for Change with director Joao Amorim and Mangusta Films to argue that independent film is becoming a process rather than a product, citing Peter Gabriel’s subscription model. Pinchbeck faults Facebook’s architecture for blocking deeper discourse and calls for networks designed to raise collective intelligence.
A Conscious Choice column from January 2008. At a Phoenix conference on UFOs and crop circles, Pinchbeck meets Dr. Nick Begich and takes up his long campaign against HAARP and the wider class of technologies that act directly on the brain — Philip K. Dick’s dystopias, he notes, are better read than lived.
On how digital reproduction was undermining the contemporary art world’s economics — an art market built on scarcity and the unique object confronting a medium in which copies cost nothing and originals do not exist. Written for Wired in December 1994.