Frances Scholz and Mark von Schlegell premiere Amboy, a new horror film project that interlaces passages of genuine documentary (for instance with Lydia van Vogt, widow of the celebrated sci-fi writer A.E. van Vogt) with carefully scripted and acted sequences that serve the loose narrative arc of the film. The film charts the journey of an artist-filmmaker who is led astray from her attempts to make a documentary in Los Angeles by the mysterious history of a deceased male artist named Amboy. Amboy’s storyline is expressed with a disorienting array of cinematic strategies taken from feature films, documentaries, B-movies, and ...

A book of theory, essays, stories, and poems released in association with the exhibition Hyperobjects at Ballroom Marfa, which explores the overwhelming scale of today’s ecological crisis.

MILTON FANGLINN: My name is Milton Fanglinn. I don’t teach, no. I work in the antiquities industry as a kind of. . . well let’s say a freelance scholar. I run a small consulting business, first out of New York but now from London, authenticating and researching the provenance of ancient objects in the field. Most of these don’t things have paper- work, or known owners, and are probably never going to be seen by the public. I have worked discreetly for many of the finest museums in the world, none of which would ever want its competitors to know ...

John talks with writer Mark von Schlegell about a whole bunch of things: Jacques Derrida in NYC, Dublin’s Forty Foot, 19th century American literature, Mark’s unique fiction and criticism, LA in the 1990s, science fiction, being Lawrence Weiner’s archivist, Raymond Roussel. Also bonus—the author reads his work! And the Rapid Fire Question Round is quite circular this time around…

Science fiction auteur, paperback revolutionary, agile co-occupant of literary and art worlds, admirably independent mind Mark von Schlegell is an ideal curator-guide for the bizzarro world of nineteenth century American literature. The rift in history made in the writing of Poe, Emerson, Douglass, Dickinson, Melville, Hawthorne, Henry James et al, Schlegell identifies as a fictional machine through which literary worlds become possible words, then makes a Carrollian flip into the mirror, a splash into the glass, as Cocteau showed us in Orphée. Burroughs called it the “pre-recordings”—the deep code out of which reality is projected. Schlegell calls it the Realometer…

Reverse Hallucinations in the Archipelago unfolds an itinerant encounter with nineteenth-century European naturalists in the Malay world, where the theory of evolution by natural selection emerged alongside less celebrated concerns about mass extinction and climate change; by re-considering the reverse hallucinatory condition of colonial science in the tropics—how scientists learned to not see what was manifestly present—the reader-as-exhibition-viewer may exhume from the remains of this will to knowledge an ethical conviction of particular relevance for confronting forms of neocolonization in the Anthropocene.