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It is midnight when I discover a tiny elevator in the back of my closet. I’m certain it wasn’t there when I moved in. The closet had been plain, empty, and had come with the house. A nervous girl with sunken cheeks wouldn’t sell me the place without it, made me promise to never get rid of it. I was in need of a closet, so I thought things had worked out in my favor.
— from “ How To Get Your Elevator Body Before The Doors Disappear” by Esmee de Heer, via Ergot
J.W.Anderson | Spring Summer 2023 by Jonathan Anderson | Full Fashion Show
Contemporary British artist Sir Isaac Julien
The room turns to a field and the field turns to the ocean where it’s just the two of us swimming and singing, no longer lost.
— from "Nocturne" by Lisa Marie Oliver, via The Dodge
Contemporary German artist André Butzer
We may reflect the sun back onto itself We may sequester & gather in chambers below the earth on which we kneel or stand or slumber.
— from “Carbon” by Triana Reid, via Terrain
“Between the Black Radical Tradition and the Digital”
SA Smythe, André Brock, Zoé Samudzi, J. Khadijah Abdurahman
What would it mean to take the Black internet seriously? How do we call in Black studies scholars to imagining technologies of black freedoms in addition to grappling with the racial regimes wrought by artificial intelligence and machine learning models? The dominant approach to mis/disinformation is policing, reporting and suspending individual users but what if we oriented towards abolition and affirming black joy? What can the black radical tradition offer in addressing new modes of surveillance and social control that begin from black indigineity instead of reinscribing the nation state?
Contemporary South Korean artist Jung Lee
…the cross-currents of sensations when the lights go up after a Morrison movie are akin to those when emerging from an ocean swim: immersive renewal and arduous grasping, struggling to retain the flood of ideas that breached your consciousness while afloat but that inexorably ebb back beneath the sea by the time your toes touch the beach.
— from “The East Village Detective: On Bill Morrison’s Historical Poetics” by Seth Fein, via LARB
Contemporary Danish artist Nina Beier
Contemporary Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto
The tunnel is darkened as I enter it. You stand surrounded by black but lit by the crimson on the fields behind me, closing in, and we know we have to move. You have the box, we have the coins, and we’ll find someone to sell them to, the collectors in these days more fervent than ever, seeing importance in their act of preservation.
— from "Indigo Clover" by Rebecca Gransden, via the Action Books Strange Fiction series
Ontavia Roulette | Spring Summer 2023 (Heavenly Host) | Full Fashion Show
Contemporary Swiss artist Louise Bonnet
The woman opens the man at the bone. His body widens out, as if his ribcage is a pantry door. The video is silent except for professional voice-over work, so we do not hear the creak-crack of marrow or the slither of hot blood exposed to cold air. But we do see what is inside, how veins and muscle snake around one another in an erotic dance. How organs, blue and purple, are squashed together. The man’s lungs heave. His intestines coil. Vital fluid stays packed tight, as if held up by an invisible barrier, suspended like a jelly.
— from “Break Me Open” by Joe Baumann, via Hobart
Contemporary Chinese artist Cui Jie
'Return To Slygo' by Nicholas Daley & NOW Gallery
Director: Akinola Davies
Contemporary Dutch artist René Daniëls
I’ll say it again: a novel is a novel, not a life. The morals of the novel exist inside the novel, which exists inside our world and not the other way around—and gratefully, we are allowed to have a look without burning our skin off, so that the experience itself might harbor change through imagination and relation rather than judgement and the overlording rule of law, whether its shell calls itself democratic or fascistic, realistic or ridiculous, in the past or in the future; unspeakable or here and now.
—from “Vladimir Sorokin's Telluria” by Blake Butler, via Dividual
Cemican - Guerreros de Cemican (Official Music Video)