Five Alchemists. One book. A constellation of ideas. The second annual Alchemy Lecture was presented in November 2023 at York University to a sold out in-person audience and nearly one thousand live online viewers. Moderated by Dr. Christina Sharpe, the Alchemists—agile thinkers and practitioners working across a range of disciplines and geographies—convened to discuss their radical visions of the beautiful world, and the manifestos that may help to guide us there. Their treatises have been captured and luminously expanded in the pages of this book. Cherokee Nation citizen and professor Joseph M. Pierce asserts that “[f]or this decolonial future to become possible, the guiding force must no longer be capital but relations.” Informed by her practice of “curation as care,” Brazilian film curator Janaína Oliveira evokes music and movement as a means toward this relationality: “it's almost by falling that you live. . . . The beautiful world dances the stumbles. The beautiful world dances dancing.” Kenyan-British visual artist Phoebe Boswell uses the space of a virtual gallery to ask, “If we burn down the institution, what happens next? Do we trust ourselves to know?” and gestures toward the possibility of this “as yet unlived, unexperienced thing.” Professor and MacArthur fellow Saidiya Hartman asks us to consider our capacity to burn, stating that “[P]ragmatism yields a profound tolerance of the unlivable.” And Mexican-American author Cristina Rivera Garza gives us the language of the future in the subjunctive, which “lays the groundwork for the irruption. . . . The subjunctive is the smuggler who crosses the border of the future bearing unknown cargo.” Each Alchemist is intimately concerned with the shape of this cargo and our ability to bear its weight, together. Through these expansive, transformative essays, new ways of being are threaded and proposed, illuminating our path towards this possible beautiful world.
Worlding Raga: 4 - Who Worlds?
So far we’ve been discussing Worlding as an art . One that an individual creator can engage in on their own. As Venkat suggested , we are already living in an…
The InterBrain - How Collective DreamWeaving Can Heal the World
Aesthetics
Aesthetics[a] is the branch of philosophy that studies beauty, taste, and related phenomena. In a broad sense, it includes the philosophy of art, which examines the nature of art, artistic creativity, the meanings of artworks, and audience appreciation.
YOU NAME IT
Check out YOU NAME IT - This comprehensive publication focuses on the artwork and activism of Sasha Huber. A Helsinki-based visual artist and researcher of Swiss and Haitian heritage, Huber’s creative practice encompasses performance, photography, film, mixed media, reparative interventions, and collaborations to investigate colonial residues left in the environment. Her projects conceive of natural spaces—mountains, lakes, glaciers, forests, and craters—as contested territories, highlighting the ways in which history is imprinted onto the landscape through acts of remembrance, including memorialization through naming and the erection of monuments. For over a decade, Huber has produced work in relation to the cultural and political Demounting Louis Agassiz campaign, which seeks to redress the racist legacy of the Swiss-born naturalist and glaciologist. With her artworks, Huber challenges the terms by which we remember, asking not only who and what we memorialize, but also, and more importantly, how we do so. by Huber, Sasha on Bookshop.org UK!
Designs for the pluriverse: radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds
"Arturo Escobar presents a new vision of design theory by arguing for the creation of what he calls 'autonomous design'--a design practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth"--Publisher description
Interface Aesthetics: An Introduction
Rhizome champions born-digital art and culture through commissions, exhibitions, scholarship, and digital preservation.
Ali Alkhatib: On techno-optimism
Annick de Witt on Worldview Theory in a Time Between Worlds
Join us for the Life Itself Research Community Call#33. Annick de Witt discusses how her research on worldviews helps us respond to our current period of global societal transition.
Libra Season: iPhone Modernism by Travis Diehl
The shock-of-the-new is back in literature, rebooted for screen time – and with it, the question: To what end should writing reflect our networked selves?
Winners Take All — Anand Giridharadas
Anand Giridharadas is the author of Winners Take All. An insider’s groundbreaking investigation of how the global elite’s efforts to “change the world” preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve.
The Evolution of Creativity
Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.
Art alchemy / Infernal machines
Anna Merlan on Leonora Carrington, and Maria Bustillos on the battle against genAI “writing”
Mapping an Ecology of Integrative Approaches to Addressing the Metacrisis
Dear friends, The Institute of Applied Metatheory (IAM) is pleased to announce the release of a new white paper that charts the landscape of leading-edge responses to the global metacrisis. In “Mapping an Ecology of Integrative Approaches to Addressing the Metacrisis”, IAM scholars Brandon Norgaard, Nicholas Hedlund, PhD, and Claudia Meglin provide a sweeping (albeit
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
Check out A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None - <p><b>Rewriting the “origin stories” of the Anthropocene</b><br /><br /> No geology is neutral, writes Kathryn Yusoff. Tracing the color line of the Anthropocene, <i>A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None</i> examines how the grammar of geology is foundational to establishing the extractive economies of subjective life and the earth under colonialism and slavery. Yusoff initiates a transdisciplinary conversation between feminist black theory, geography, and the earth sciences, addressing the politics of the Anthropocene within the context of race, materiality, deep time, and the afterlives of geology.<br /><br /> Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.</p> by Kathryn Yusoff on Bookshop.org UK!
Everything I Love | Chia Amisola
Chia Amisola is devoted to the internet's loss, love, labor, and liberation, particularly of the third world experience. An artist & technologist, they unravel systems and narratives that condition & emerge from technology, and the intimacies & infrastructures beneath them. Their 'internet ambient' works build dense, durational, hypertextual worlds that entangle Philippine specificity and universal conditions.
Everything I Love | Chia Amisola
Chia Amisola is devoted to the internet's loss, love, labor, and liberation, particularly of the third world experience. An artist & technologist, they unravel systems and narratives that condition & emerge from technology, and the intimacies & infrastructures beneath them. Their 'internet ambient' works build dense, durational, hypertextual worlds that entangle Philippine specificity and universal conditions.