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 ...

Shifter 14 was released in conjunction with a group show featuring Lindsay Benedict, Joshua Hart, Abhishek Hazra, Pat Palermo and Kiran Subbaiah curated by Sreshta Rit Premnath. A weekly series of lectures and presentations accompanied this show. On Certainty includes a group show, a new issue of the magazine Shifter (co-edited by the participating artists), and a series of public dialogues with economists, neurologists, physicists and writers. The participants contemplate the notion of certainty and its sibling, uncertainty: How and why do we constitute a unified self from which to speak and construe meaning in this world? When we say, “I know…” ...

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.

Most libraries around the world use the Dewey Decimal Classification System (DDCS) to list and categorize books. The DDCS is a library classification system developed by Melvil Dewey in 1876. By categorizing items within a library it serves as a tool for people searching for specific knowledge. It was an attempt to organize all knowledge into ten main classes, which are further subdivided into 100 divisions and 1000 sections. This makes the DDCS appear purely numerical and infinitely rational. However, DDCS is regularly revised, reflecting how culture, ideology, and the perception of knowledge change over time. As a result of ...

When Will shot Joan he did not mean to. He wanted to shoot the apple balanced on her head. The cactus wine may have put the gun in his hand. The spirit may have provided the reckless confidence. And in the spirit of its will he pointed his gun and squeezed the trigger. It may have been at the moment he squeezed the trigger, or perhaps a split second before, that the world had already begun to rip. Space and time had torn the future into an infinite set of possibilities. The set could be divided into two subsets: He ...