Over the course of a year, Shifter hosted a series of public discussions, each concentrated on unraveling a keyword – a term that carries with it both a sense of urgency and agency in our present climate. By inviting artists, writers, activists, philosophers and others to propose terms and lead discussions, we opened up our editorial process to the motivations of others. The yearlong series culminates in Shifter’s 22nd issue Dictionary of the Possible. This dictionary catalogs the keywords taken up for discussion over the course of a year, accompanied by a list of questions provoked during each discussion. Rather ...

Eric Anglès compiled press releases published by NY art galleries from the month of January to February 2007. The amount of production and information is simply too much to absorb. The cover is taken from a Christmas wrapping paper. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all.

Shifter’s 16th issue, titled Pluripotential, presents scores, scripts, instructions, critical essays and more. Its title invokes a term that describes the innate ability of stem-cells to differentiate into almost any cell in the body in order to think through the possibility of criticality and cultural change through aesthetic strategies. This play between structural constraints and a potential for continuous change is seen in forms such as scores, scripts and instructions; and strategies including “detournement” and remix, which hold within them the potential to be performed and reconstituted in multiple ways.

Shifter published ten issues between 2004 and 2007. Issues 1 to 9 were distributed as free PDFs. With the 10th issue a short print run accompanied its digital counterpart. This anthology presents re-edited and reformatted versions of first ten issues, in order to consider them together and take stock of the early period of Shifter.