Alison O’Daniel discusses her recent exhibitions and her on going work in video, performance, sound, and installation.

A city square is occupied by hundreds of shouting voices, and transformed by hundreds of sleeping bodies building together a polis for action as well as a home for repose. High-rises are erected and builders hunch and squat in tight quarters, catching breath between shifts. As houses are boarded up, the occasional scene of an underground bench occupied by a bundled figure under blankets becomes more frequent. Shifter’s 21st issue, Other Spaces, considers the body as a site where architecture’s traditional polarities of private and public collapse. This polarity, mirrored in the distinctions we draw between individual and social freedoms and ...

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 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.