This volume collects the curatorial writing produced at Noxious Sector Projects, a window gallery in downtown Seattle, curated by Ted Hiebert between 2011-13. The gallery had as its mandate to be a “formalized forum for informal inquiry” and to exhibit works that creatively challenged the boundaries between the imaginary and the everyday. Featuring the work of: Jackson 2bears, Cindy Baker, Cedar Tavern Singers, Tanya Doody, Neal Fryett, Tetsushi Higashino, Doug Jarvis, Arthur & Marilouise Kroker, Christian Kuras & Ben Tanner, Christian Kuras & Duncan MacKenzie, David LaRiviere, Nate Larson & Marni Shindelman, Urich Lau, Deirdre Logue & Allyson Mitchell, Susan ...

After humans destroy one another’s worlds, what will be left are the jellyfish. At least, this is the suggestion of the biologist Jeremy Jackson, who argues that the synergistic effects of the 6th mass extinction have led to the flourishing of some species — such as jellyfish. Such thriving is almost certainly not what Joseph Beuys had in mind when he argued that we are creating the “total artwork of the future social order.” But what would happen if we held these provocations together: that human auto-destruction is a creation for other worlds, other species … other others? Artworks for ...

A mattress, conceived as a place to crash, together. A hot tub, imagined as a site to encounter the end of the world. In times of networked connectivity what’s perhaps more radical than embracing virtuality is to think about the stakes of the body, community, and personal encounter. These are themes engaged by the work of performance artist Cindy Baker, whose projects speculate on the forms of intimacy and interaction that art is capable of generating. In Baker’s words, her art uses the medium of “context” in order to explore questions of community engagement and social inquiry. Brought together by ...

When M. Beatrice Fazi claims that “computation is computation,” we know this is so precisely because computation is never simply contained within the skin of computers, but is instead singularly generative. That generativity—in the fullest sense of the term, and perhaps even a little more than that—is the premise of this book, and thinking with Fazi opens onto more-thans precisely because her analyses are so self-contained. Indeed, the thinkers in this collection demonstrate that because “computation is computation,” attendant concepts of media, race, intelligence, digitality, aesthetics, and compression are troped in new ways, yielding novel trajectories.

In the 21st century, a humanly-impacted climate is the natural state of planetary affairs: a global environmental disaster but perhaps also an artwork of geological scale. Responding to this idea requires an artistic spirit with an ecological conscience–perfectly espoused by the work of artist Jennifer Willet. From speculations on the genetic future to reflections on the ways that art challenges engagement, interaction and analysis, the contributions in this book share a key concern of Willet’s: a recognition of the complexities of artistic engagement in a time when the stakes of technological living have never been higher.

Eldritch Priest’s work does not often figure sounds as waves, but instead favours earworms and egregors … abstractions that are themselves equally figured through sound. This field is one of phono-fictions, and the contributions to this volume variously figure out (and in) Priest’s work by leveraging, interrogating, and promulgating the waves of boredom, bullshit, imagination, and analysis that drive it. These contributions are thus (sometimes true) fictions of a special type: they redound in (non)sonic bodies that are never isomorphic with themselves, instead moving parasitically in modulatory resonances that aggregate and dissemble according to logics that exceed sensibility.

Our earth is no longer the solitary blue marble pictured from outer space by the Apollo 17 crew in 1972. Now, scholars such as Amanda Boetzkes imagine it as a plastic blue marble, mediated as it is through the paradoxes of intersectional and elemental thinking, anthropogenic change, and the ongoing project of imagining the futures we are building together. From visions of catastrophe to poetic journeys through the urban, social and artistic imagination, the contributions in this volume redistribute the currents of Boetzkes’s ecological and theoretical insights. They discover new terrains of consideration, styles of thinking and creative forms of ...

Consisting in historical scholarly work, art-criticism, and fiction, S.D. Chrostowska’s writing exhibits a vitality that seems always on the edge of breaking differently, while also limning a solidity that suggests each trajectory has always been fated to be exactly what it is. The complementarity of these forces — the thing that in their being together as one makes it impossible that they are the same — makes Chrostowska’s oeuvre irreducible, unabstractable, unrepeatable, and — yes — catalytic. In this, Chrostowska’s work doesn’t simply stage another freedom/fate conundrum, but also constitutes the conundrum itself in its aesthetic profile.