Tribulations of a Westerner in the Western World

Imprint:

Published: 03/14/2024

Someone has taken a trip and taken photographs of that trip and someone else has been invited to watch a slideshow of the trip taken. There is a road, there is an abstract painting, there is a viewer who wishes he could live in a televised loop of a sunset, and another who wonders why[…]

Nairobi Becoming: Security, Uncertainty, Contingency

Published: 02/09/2024

Echoing the edgy, disjunctive, ever-emergent city of Nairobi that it explores, Nairobi Becoming: Security, Uncertainty, Contingency strives to be several things-in-the-making. It is a historically and anthropologically minded examination of a shifting cityscape, an experimental, collaborative exercise in curated juxtaposition and assemblage, and an interdisciplinary, subjunctive urban ethnography. It brings together curated interventions by twenty-seven[…]

Tall, Slim & Erect: Portraits of the Presidents

Imprint:

Published: 08/03/2023

After stumbling upon a wooden box containing a complete set of miniature wax mold figurines of US presidents at a flea market, artist Alex Forman began photographing each little man, minus their pedestals. Presented for the first time in book format, Forman’s elegant black and white portraits are accompanied by brief biographies composed entirely of[…]

The Goths & Other Stories (2nd edn.)

Published: 02/28/2023

In the winter of 476 AD, the Ostrogoths, hungry and exhausted from wandering for months along the barren confines of the Byzantine Empire, wrote to Emperor Zeno in Constantinople requesting permission to enter the walled city of Epidaurum and just kinda crash and charge their phones. Closer to home, Orpheus walks Eurydice through a suburban[…]

Diseases of the Head: Essays on the Horrors of Speculative Philosophy

Published: 09/24/2020

Diseases of the Head is an anthology of essays from contemporary philosophers, artists, and writers working at the crossroads of speculative philosophy and speculative horror. At once a compendium of multivocal endeavors, a breviary of supposedly illicit ponderings, and a travelogue of philosophical exploration, this collection centers itself on the place at which philosophy and[…]

Imperial Physique

Published: 11/19/2019

In 2008,  JH Phrydas wrote a story about how bodies talk without words. He wanted the story to not just describe the silent ritual of nonverbal communication but to perform it. The interaction would be visceral – the exchange melancholic, yet full of lust. He wanted words to retain the unsayable: the subtle movements of[…]

Metagestures

Published: 05/31/2019

What kinds of knowledge and understandings of the world can be generated – and shared – when we use para-academic techniques and sensibilities to decode or respond to relatively orthodox intellectual objects? And what worlds might be possible if we practiced scholarly work from a place of collaboration and pleasure, as joyful fellow explorers? In[…]