NXS ed.
NXS #4 Algorithmic Anxiety explores the spectrum of algorithmic authority over our lives (whether perceived or not). The contributors question or reveal the inconspicuous influence of algorithms, in their various forms, on our behavioral patterns, emotions, and self perceptions of our position in the world.
From December 11, 2015, until April 10, 2016, the German Library in Guangzhou, China, became The German Library Pyongyang, a reimagining of an initiative of the Goethe-Institut that originally operated in North Korea between 2004 and 2009. This temporary intervention by Sara van der Heide is an imaginary transformation of the current geography of the German Library in Guangzhou. Van der Heide’s project is a contemporary version of the Goethe-Institut’s original library initiative in North Korea, devised as a vessel to discuss national cultural policy in a post-Cold War and postcolonial era that looks critically toward the parallel histories of Germany and the two Koreas. The German Library Pyongyang offers a space for critical questions, but it also functions as a context for transcending thinking that is prescribed by the lines of the nation-state, language, and geography. The several artistic, linguistic, and graphic interventions in the library merge with the continuing activities of the German learning center in Guangzhou, and all institutional printed matter in Chinese is replaced by Korean.
This publication brings together the four original exhibition booklets in German, Korean, English, and Chinese. An additional reader is included with critical reflections as well as documentation of the exhibition and the organized seminar.
Design by Dongyoung Lee
English/German/Korean/Chinese
Dorota Czerner, Elaine Radoff Barkin
Special issue of this US magazine dedicated in its entirety to the late Australian artist/compositional linguist/raconteur Chris Mann, who died in 2018. The magazine contains tributes from Mann associates and admirers, including Warren Burt, Amanda Stewart, Pi-0, Ronald Robboy, Linda Kouvaras, Alvin Lucier, Ruark Lewis, Annea Lockwood, as well as Mann’s own writing and an interview with him by Philip Blackburn.
88 pages bound in soft-cover glossy colour cover by Brigid Burke.
Forlaget emancipations frugten
Text by Eleanor Ivory Weber
Published by Forlaget emancipa(t/ss)ionsfrugten
Edited and produced by Eller med a △ Åbäke
Edition: 200 ex.
Format (b*h): 20 * 26,5 cm
Pages: 48 sider
Print: Grafiche Veneziane
Paper: Munken Pure 170g
Typeface: Base12 by Zuzana Licko
More info at https://www.cecilieskov.com/Works/Wet-With-Dew
The publication If You Don’t Believe in Yourself, Someone Else Should is between a monograph and an artist book with a text by Florentine Rungrama Muhry and a conversation between Anna Schachinger and the artist. Together with the graphic designer Alexandra Möllner, they developed a book concept that makes the various strands, the instinctive, methodical and processual working methods as much as the joyful experimental approaches in Katharina Höglinger's work tangible and entertaining.
"The image pulsates with alternating contrasts of light and dark. A sweeping, purple- coloured line unites a human countenance in half profile with the little head of a blue dog. Red strokes in the middle of the canvas, perhaps the arms of an animal-like being, reach into the widened eyes of the one facing it. Expressing its pleasure, the lively creature cheekily sticks its tongue out of its mouth, while the facial expression of the person remains indifferent, in spite of the affront."
(Excerpt from the text "Wandering Thoughts" by Florentine Rungrama Muhry, Translation: Miriam Stoney)
Bridget Mullen is the ruler of an unruly roost. Between 2021 and 2023, she gave birth to forty-seven paintings, each twelve-by-nine inches: kin ugly and cute, monstrous, fleshy, repulsive, droopy-eyed, and sneering as they cross the universal threshold into the no less frightening world that awaits. Birthday reunites Mullen's uncanny litter alongside a conversation between the artist and Lucas Blalock.
The paintings in New York-based artist Bridget Mullen's Birthday series utilize two distinct parameters to guide the creation of the iterative works: a vertical orientation at an intimate scale of 12 x 9 inches and a visualization of perhaps the ultimate creative act—the moment of birth. Through this consistent scale and thematic hyper focus, the artist employs endless formal variations in composition, color, and paint application. The result is a series of paintings that share a common structure yet champion individuality.
Contrasting colors provoke a visible tension, one that is at times compressed and, in other moments, elastic. Suddenly, abstract shapes come into focus as human anatomies, capable of expressing emotion. Undulating lines of various thicknesses and layered colors squeeze together, revealing peculiar faces and gestures that emerge from a central point. The repetition of thin lines creates a visual stutter of pigment, alluding to the passage of time or rapid movement.
The works in Birthday build on Mullen's practice, combining color, decisive mark-making, intuition, and experimentation to conjure psychedelic configurations. Sculptural dimensionality and flatness, representation and abstraction, and solidity and fluidity, serve not as dichotomies within these works, but as two complementary halves of a whole. Together, the forms and figures of the Birthday series are imbued with a sense of life, pregnant with agency and potential.