“Reading inquisitively over each others’ shoulders, the poems, meditations, analyses and experiments in this volume respond with audacity and adventure to the challenge of characterizing what reading, this most familiar yet renewedly strange occupation, has been and may yet become.”

For How To Sleep Faster we were looking for contributions that focused on The Body in Pain. The title is taken from the book by Elaine Scarry, which examines pain with regard to ‘making’ and ‘unmaking’ the world. Thinking about Guantanamo Bay as the emblem of the time we’ve come of age, thinking about the political use and the political meaning of pain inflicted: war, torture, natural disaster and disaster capitalism, shock therapy economics and shock therapy for uncooperative or dysfunctional subjects. Institutional violence and the violence of institutions Pain is what we know and the limit of what we know: ...

Torque brings together a diverse collection of essays and artworks, many newly commissioned for the project, that reflect upon the plasticity of the brain, the adaptability of technology and the malleability of language, and their twisting together through past, present and future cultures. The contributors and their work each offer unique models of navigating this territory, making their own artefacts, writing their own scripts, forging critical space and examining the blind spots. Torque#1: Mind, Language and Technology is the result of a wide range of cross-disciplinary conversations, taking place across symposia, online forums, live events and workshops, produced by the book’s editors: ...