The exhibition “The Promise of Total Automation” investigated our relationship to a world of machines, technological objects, and electronic devices. The prospect of a fully automated future—while acutely reshaping the notions of work, production, and value creation—also feeds emancipatory scenarios ultimately leading to the end of labor. Total automation is upon us but its liberating promise is yet to be claimed.

This collection of art and theory analyzes today’s post-digital conditions for critical media practices—across and beyond the analog and the digital, the human and the nonhuman. The contributions also look across and beyond the field of media art, staking out new paths for understanding and working in the transversal territories between theory, technology, and art.

Today we live in a world that can be described as an “internet of things,” one that embraces digital technologies, and fulfills the dream worlds envisioned by twentieth-century writers, architects, and artists. The internet is an ever-growing storage space of information that we have come to rely on—but what does this thing called the internet really mean? And does it still exist?

The essays in this collection were written in the first decade of the new millennium by the critic, editor, and curator Chantal Pontbriand. Pontbriand examines themes of being-in-common in today’s world and their relation to the development of art practices.

Martin Beck’s exhibition “Panel 2—‘Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes…’” draws on the events of the 1970 International Design Conference in Aspen and the development of the Aspen Movie Map to form a visual environment that reflects the interrelations between art, architecture, design, ecology, and social movements. The Aspen Complex documents two versions of Beck’s exhibition.