Invited to Stockholm in spring of 2015 to work with the graduating MA and BA students of the Royal Institute of Art on “making a publication,” the two foreign editors of A:Art (Stuart Bailey and Angie Keefer) instead found themselves swept into the death throes of a decades-old struggle between rival institutions over the current identity and possible future of a national art scene. The book is a chronological account of events that unfolded among the Academy, the art school, its students, assorted government ministries, and the Swedish press, with accompaniment from various outside texts, including Raymond Williams’ Keywords, an ...

Alternative lexicons, sonification of thought, cultural software, hauntologies and political bodies, are some of the possibilities that are offered here as a means to contribute to a renewed set of ideas towards design agency. Presented here as both lecture and prompts, sections may be read aloud as scripts, as action with others; or single pages torn out to become a tactic for experimentation; or an image to evoke a totem of belief that might interact with others. Active Agency is a series of speculative lectures on design as an agentive phenomena encompassing language, matter, ontology and sound. Supported by Research at Camberwell, ...

Astroturfs of Offense is a diagram and glossary of terms related to the topic of astroturfing. The project is a collaboration between the New Models community and Shifting Uncertain Situations (S.U.S.). S.U.S. is an agency that seeks out public discussions and intervenes to produce documents that sow productive suspicion and ambiguity into wider conversations and unsettle ingrained patterns of thought. The agency encourages protesters to download and distribute their flyer at grassroots and astroturfed events. This item is publicly available as part of the Library Stack Public Branch at NN Contemporary Art.

This issue brings together poetry, visual art, prose essays, and an interview organized around the theme “Charismatic Facts.” It also includes additions to our ongoing project, Climate Change & Art: A Lexicon. What is the relation between charisma and information? How fast can a well-turned phrase move? How does it age? In this issue of The Distance Plan we consider how, occasionally, facts or argumentative claims float free from their point of origin to become hyper-portable and cross-disciplinary. We call these memorable, animated phrases “charismatic facts” and suggest they can be found at the intersection of flair and research, savvy and ...

This issue features artist pages by Louise Menzies and Michala Paludan, an essay by Lina Moe on the closure of New York’s L Line, and, through our ongoing Climate Change & Art: A Lexicon, surveys the language currently surrounding anthropogenic climate change. Through proposing neologisms and promoting less well-known terms, we wish to propel interdisciplinary discussion, and by extension accelerate the pace of action. Through this lexicon we propose that the science around climate change is developing so rapidly that we need new language to articulate its processes and effects. The lexicon is also based on the recognition that evolving science ...

We live in an age of sticky problems, whether it’s climate change or the decline of the welfare state. With conventional solutions failing, a new culture of decision-making is called for. Strategic design is about applying the principles of traditional design to “big picture” systemic challenges such as healthcare, education and the environment. It redefines how problems are approached and aims to deliver more resilient solutions. In this short book, Dan Hill outlines a new vocabulary of design, one that needs to be smuggled into the upper echelons of power. He asserts that, increasingly, effective design means engaging with the ...

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 ...

The Focal Vocabulary Index consists exclusively of Lexical Items used by Studio for Propositional Cinema for the construction of works, performances, and exhibitions since 2013, and will accrue all future Items used in such a manner.

This set of five pamphlets documents a seminar given recently by Alexander R. Galloway at the Public School New York, a self-organizing educational program where class ideas are generated by the public. “French Theory Today” explores a new generation of French voices—Catherine Malabou, Bernard Stiegler, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Quentin Meillassoux, and François Laruelle—whose work has, to varying degrees, only recently emerged in the English-speaking world. Each night of the seminar consisted of a lecture followed by questions from and discussion with class participants. As Galloway suggests in the online class proposal, the goal was “not to set in aspic a ...

Abstract Lightning is a massive electrostatic discharge between the electrically charged regions within clouds or between a cloud and the Earth’s surface. While many may find lightning visually appealing due to the immediacy of its appearance (10 microseconds or less), as well as the nonlinear, relative complexity and nonuniformity of its structure due to the short step size and random distribution of higher conductive regions, generally causing a current to channel an indirect pathway for the transfer of electric charge through normally nonconductive media such as air, glass, leaves, and soil, lightning is also dangerous. In the past, lightning functioned as ...

From its earliest use in the mandatory Jewish quarter of sixteenth century Venice to its association with Black segregated areas in postwar America, the term “ghetto” has held a variety of meanings and invoked myriad feelings. Daniel Schwartz traces the history of this controversial word.

Originally written on a Toyota diary/day-planner, which is faithfully reproduced for this edition, La Méthodologie de la Nouvelle Écriture Africaine “Bété” is Fréderic Bruly Bouabré’s work with what he calls the “primordial tool” at the base of all human creation: language. Having discovered that syllables are the “vital organs” of all human diction, he set about creating a kind of alphabet for syllabic pronunciation. Composed of anthropomorphic hieroglyphs, this African Alphabetic System was first created in 1956 and published in 1958. This book, written to teach others, was completed in 1984 but was not released until now. Sixty pages of ...