Shifter
Series Editor Sreshta Rit Premnath
Editors Steven Lam, Jane Jin Kaisen, Kajsa Dahlberg, Avi Alpert, Abhishek Hazra, Warren Neidich, Matthew Metzger, Thom Donovan
Editors Steven Lam, Jane Jin Kaisen, Kajsa Dahlberg, Avi Alpert, Abhishek Hazra, Warren Neidich, Matthew Metzger, Thom Donovan
Shifter is a topical publication that aims to illuminate and broaden our understanding of the intersections between contemporary art, politics and philosophy. Shifter remains malleable and responsive in its form and activities, and represents a diversity of positions and backgrounds in its contributors.
Originally conceived as an online magazine in order to create an inter-continental “commons,” Shifter now engages in a multiplicity of formats including print publications, public dialogues and exhibitions. This has allowed for extended discourse and additional access to Shifter’s content by diverse audiences.
Shifter was first published in 2004 by its founding editor Sreshta Rit Premnath. Issues 11 to 16 were co-edited by Steven Lam, Jane Jin Kaisen & Kajsa Dahlberg, Avi Alpert, Abhishek Hazra and Warren Neidich respectively. Shifter 17 to 21 were coedited by Matthew Metzger. Shifter 22 and 23 are coedited by Avi Alpert and Thom Donovan respectively.
Series Titles
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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. -
The intimate is one of proximity and familiarity. As a relational category, intimacy is a quality of closeness, attachment, and belongingness. To be intimate with someone or some thing is to have an innermost connection. Intimacy, or intimus, designates interiority or an inward sensation, as in under one’s skin. To intimate is also to communicate with a hint, to imply subtly. This process requires a codified reception, a circle of acknowledgement and recognition. Intimacy not only designates issues pertinent to the discussion of home, sexuality, identity, the slippage between the private and public, but also relationships made out of kinship, ... -
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 ... -
Shifter’s 13th issue focuses on the importance and impact of this philosopher, who, though unknown, seems to have been one of the most important thinkers of the late 20th and early 21st century. Belissop’s thought has been instrumental in changing the entire terrain of intellectual, artistic and activist practice over the past seven decades of her immense production. Her revolutionary work in activist “interventionism,” and her Marxist, materialist commitment never seemed to conflict with her important contribution to experimental poetry. Her philosophical treatises managed to comfortably accommodate both psychoanalysis and neuro-psychology while simultaneously problematizing both disciplines. Her expertise and influence ... -
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…” ... -
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 ... -
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. -
Re___ing, exists both within Rethinking Marxism’s upcoming issue (Vol. 23 No. 2) as well as a new issue of Shifter. This folding of one identity into another, a re within a Re and the resultant destabilization of both frames of reference, is precisely the nature of Re___ing. While re proliferates additives, doubles and fissures within the sphere of cultural production, it also implies multiple temporalities – to renew and to rewind. ing on the other hand, asserts the present continuous, it is always and already. Paradoxically, re is also to reify. When you call me and I respond I am born. When ... -
Shifter’s eighteenth issue gathers conversations and interviews between various cultural practitioners that elaborate on the subject of intention. To intend is to have a conception of the future. To direct and extend attention to a moment that is yet to arrive. To construct a contingent model of the future, while negotiating and adjusting it at any given moment against countless uncertainties, thus providing the greatest possible chance of this future’s arrival. To reflect upon an action and determine its intention is then to trace the arc of this willed movement – looking back, culling through layers of events, interactions, and gestures, ... -
Shifter’s 18th issue considered the temporality of intention as a prior condition for action—an impetus that is often understood only after an action has already been performed and is then reformulated and narrativized in one’s consciousness. For Shifter 19 we have invited a small group of artist-educators to each contribute a “proposal.” We see the proposal as an embodied form of intention that often requires collaboration in order to be realized, trusting in another’s willingness to extend and enact one’s desire. When a proposal enters into a social contract, its pulsating potential constitutes the conditions of possibility for alternate ways ... -
Shifter’s 20th issue, What We Can Knot draws from George Bernard Shaw’s quip “He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches.” In this issue we would like to parse out and challenge what we see to be Shaw’s false binary, and to explore the value of negotiation and collaboration as important elements both in the studio and in the classroom. To this end we have invited several individuals who are both artist and educator, to consider the active relation between art practice and teaching in their life. We have invited them to do this through a conversation or correspondence with ... -
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 domestic and political action are challenged every day by spontaneous, collaborative re-imaginings of space. Other Spaces considers the body as a self-sufficient albeit precarious architecture. It not only builds, but also becomes the very material with which to build. Tremulous bodies alone and together flout the sacred dictum that not only divides private and public space but also interior and exterior space, improvising and instituting another space ... -
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 ... -
A book of metadiscourse, Withdrawn: A Discourse consists of 50 letters composed by Thom Donovan to the proper names of living personages which appear in his currently unpublished second book of poems, Withdrawn. In response to his letters and copies of Withdrawn in manuscript, thirty-two addressees offer images, letters, drawings, poems, essays, dream journal entries, art works, documents, and manifestos. Withdrawn: a Discourse also includes Donovan’s correspondence for the project; an essay regarding the “authorless” book; as well as a review of Withdrawn by poet and translator, Ian Dreiblatt. -
In Learning and Unlearning, which began as a series of discussions held from 2017-19, we ask questions about world-making. By unlearning our relationship to the places and temporalities we occupy, can we learn new ways of inhabiting the world? And by reconsidering our relation to work and well-being, can we find new ways to see, feel and understand the world? This recalibration of how we see the world and consequently how we live our lives is the central concern of the artists, educators and thinkers whose writings follow. Unlearning, for us, is not a reactionary opposition to intellectualism and the academy. ...
