This issue loops around NUMBERS and was produced in the ambient glow of a reprogrammed electronic scoreboard clock which first appeared in Venice one year ago. Bulletins this time arrive from Angie Keefer, John Dewey and James Mclellan, James Langdon, Rosie Cooper, Mathew Kneebone, Philip Ording, David Foster Wallace, David Reinfurt, Cory Arcangel, Justin Warsh, Perrine Bailleux, Byron Cook and Tauba Auerbach, Dan Fox, Katherine Pickard, and Vincenzo Latronico.

Newly published by ROMA Publications in a yearly format, this inaugural issue of The Serving Library Annual is realised in collaboration with Public Fiction, a journal and exhibition-maker based in Los Angeles. Public Fiction’s next project, which runs broadly concurrent to this new Annual’s lifespan, is named The Conscientious Objector — a multifaceted endeavour commissioned by West Hollywood City Council that unfurls in parts from September 2017 to April 2018. These bulletins have been conceived as one part: they deal with acts of civil disobedience and other forms of resistance, particularly in view of the relationship between entertainment and power. Contributors ...

This year’s Annual is published in tandem with a long-term installation of The Serving Library’s collection of (mostly) framed objects at 019, an artist-run exhibition, performance and work space in a former welding factory in Ghent, Belgium. Apparently, the sole common denominator of the objects in the collection — which range from paintings, photographs, and record sleeves, to a can of green paint, a German car license plate, and an ouija board — is to have appeared as illustrations in an issue of The Serving Library Annual or one of its immediate antecedents, Bulletins of The Serving Library or Dot Dot ...

The genesis of this issue of The Serving Library Annual was a pre-pandemic proposal for a group show at the Clark Art Institute, themed on the meander. That project evolved into the two-person exhibition Tauba Auerbach and Yuji Agematsu: Meander (16 July – 16 October, 2022). The line that animates both, however, continues indefinitely. The Serving Library Annual 2022/23 includes contributions by Yuji Agematsu, Tauba Auerbach, Canal Street Research Association, Tamara Colchester, Laura Coombs, Anuja Dhir, Lauren Elkin, Jason Fulford, Anthony Huberman, Julije Knifer, Philip Ording, Federico Pérez Villoro, Emilie M. Reed, Eden Reinfurt, Ab Rogers, Laurel Schwulst, Mindy Seu, Tamara ...

The computer is already a hypnotic device. Staring at a fixed focal length, scrolling, and swiping all induce what hypnotherapist Daniel Ryan calls “subtle learning states.” And on the screen, what we repeatedly learn is a bent set of values including ravenous consumerism, preposterous ideas of hierarchy, race, gender, beauty, and spirituality. We consume these more deeply than we realize. Hypnotists have used pendulums, repeating sounds, vanishing points, particular vocal cadences, and a variety of other means to produce a state of consciousness and brain activity marked by calm focus and extra sensitivity to suggestion. These tools facilitate what’s called “induction.” Can ...