Sensing Earth: Cultural Quests Across a Heated Globe

Over the last few decades the term ‘bootlegging’—a practice once relegated to smugglers and copyright infringers—has become understood as a creative act. Debates about homage, appropriation, and theft that are common in the art world, are now being held in the spheres of corporate branding, social media, and the creative industry as a whole. Today, bootlegging has become fetishized as an aesthetic in and of itself, influencing everything from underground record labels to DIY T-shirts, publishing ideologies, to acts of high fashion détournement.

UNLICENSED contains twenty-one interviews with a range of creative practitioners on the topic of bootlegging. The conversations in UNLICENSED investigate bootlegging’s creative and critical potential, and explore new ways bootlegging can be deployed in order to thrive as an impactful cultural force.

Interviews with: A March Issue (Line Arngaard & Sonia Oet), Babak Radboy, Clara Balaguer & Czar Kristoff, BLESS (Desiree Heiss & Ines Kaag), Boot Boyz Biz, Akinola Davies Jr, Eric Doeringer, Experimental Jetset (Marieke Stolk, Erwin Brinkers, Danny van den Dungen), Elisa van Joolen, Hassan Kurbanbaev, Urs Lehni & Olivier Lebrun, Jonathan Monk, Matt Olson, Online Ceramics (Elijah Funk & Alix Ross), Mark Owen, Printed Matter (Jordan Nassar & Christopher Schulz), Nat Pyper, Hassan Rahim, Shanzhai Lyric, SHIRT, Oana Stanescu

Productive Archiving discusses a variety of problems of archival organizations. It mainly focuses on the following three issues that are usually overlooked: first, the question of inclusion in or exclusion from the archive; second, the loss of individuality in the archive, the danger of homogenization; and third, that archiving may become a form of pigeonholing, boxing specific identities into a confined space.

Avoiding the archive because of these problems is not an option, because archival organization is a basic symbolic mode on the basis of which we organize our lives, the past, the present and the future. What this book suggests is that it is best to explore constructive and creative solutions for these problems. Especially artistic archives seem to be able to develop these possible solutions, because they offer speculative, unexpected ways to order, select, and narrate specific information, and bring about new connections and archival organizations.

From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism's most complex conversations. Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story—mostly lesbians and including women of color—measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability.

At bookstores like BookWoman in Austin, the Toronto Women's Bookstore, and Old Wives' Tales in San Francisco, and in the essential Feminist Bookstore News, bookwomen changed people's lives and the world. In retelling their stories, Hogan not only shares the movement's tools with contemporary queer antiracist feminist activists and theorists, she gives us a vocabulary, strategy, and legacy for thinking through today's feminisms.

Lorsqu’Allen Ginsberg s’enregistre sur un magnétophone et capte fortuitement des émissions de radio, le souffle du vent et des conversations, des agents du FBI et de la CIA l’écoutent, à la recherche d’aveux involontaires. En considérant ces agents comme de sérieux théoriciens de la poésie, Lytle Shaw montre qu’ils s’inspirent des expérimentations d’avant-garde et transforment une technique libératrice en un outil répressif.

Lytle Shaw enseigne la littérature à l’Université de New York. Il a publié Frank O’Hara : The Poetics of Coterie en 2006 (University of Iowa Press) et Fieldworks : From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics en 2013 (University of Alabama). En 2021, est paru New Grounds for Dutch Landscape (OEI).

Entropia (vol. I & II) – written by William Kherbek and edited in collaboration with Jack Clarke – is a publication which seeks to recount and re-examine a decade of artistic curation, production, and critique between London, Berlin, and other urban art centres from 2010 to 2020.

Comprised of two volumes, this publication contains a compendium of over one hundred reviews and interviews with luminaries of contemporary art (Vol I), as well as a speculative attempt to create a newly generated algorithmic art(ificial) critic (Vol II). Together they serve to document, excoriate, and theorise an art world which is simultaneously hegemonic and precarious, complicit and constructive, driven by values, yet fed by extraction, all filtered through Kherbek’s precise, aphoristic, acerbic, lens.

The publications include contextual contributions from both Josie Thaddeus-Johns, writer for the New York Times, The Financial Times, Frieze; and Rozsa Farkas, director of London-based gallery Arcadia Missa.

Who is the Oriental Cyborg? asks Aditi Kini in this collection of notes, jokes, and queries into the provenance of a creature designed for labor, 3-D printed in the technoscientific post-colonies, modeled on old automata. Race is a technology, that we know, and technology can be raced — so why inquire into this at all? Perhaps this, the Oriental Cyborg, is a fantasy more than a memory, or an echo more than a form — or just an essayist’s extraction of personal anguish and humor from globalist decay.

Taking on the form of historical analysis / lyrical essay / documentary poem / experimental buzzword / positionality statement, this chapbook and its titular character might still be an elusive mystery even after reading.

“’What is a ghost but a person removed from corporeality?’ This is one among layers of questions Aditi Kini poses in Oriental Cyborg, a lyrical excavation into survival in the era of techno racial capitalism, and its “deleting touch” that so easily voids—reduces to faceless services—the exploited individuals performing various acts of techno-labor. A grieved searching drives this hybrid essay, which feels urgent and necessary as threats from AI grab headlines. This work compels us to see our culture’s love affair with technological progress as a means for continued colonization and domination. It also reminds us, and celebrates, that those erased don’t stay silent forever. We privileged may not be able to hear them yet, but those who are listening know. They roar.” — Allison Cobb

“In the mirror of Aditi Kini’s Oriental Cyborg, I become the monster—a hopeless automaton, an intelligence stripped of roar. With titanium-threaded theory, Kini radiantly stitches together the ideal Asian working machine. Get your own Oriental cyborg today: super dazzling and sexy, historically embroidered, an oracular truth who never tires, never complains, forever mute, what perfection!” — Lily Hoàng

Aditi Kini is an undisciplined writer. They’ve done both NYC and the MFA (at UC San Diego). They were a finalist/alternate for the 2020-22 Jerome Award for Literature. They edit Lumpenpockets, “a nonquarterly sick rag.” Read their words in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Rumpus, Denver Quarterly, The New York Times, and elsewhere. They’re at work on multiple projects, all at once. They are blessed with two dogs, Lucy the Happy and Charly Kong, who make life worth living.

Is it the computerization of the planet
Or a loosening of my fidelity to suffering
I don’t understand the intensity
I’ve hidden here but I know I despaired
Of finding a physical place to keep
My tears. Now what. Seas that go turquoise
When you stop looking at them . . .
 
Wrestling with the mind of war, at times shocking in its self-analysis, Wave of Blood is a furious and sincere essay, an eclipse notebook, a family chronicle, all told in the poetry of witness.

Praise for Ariana Reines:

Ariana Reines is a go-for-broke artist who honors her traditions by being like no one else. Some of us have made a fetish of our stupidity, pretending to forget history, and some of us have made a fetish of despair, congratulating ourselves on melancholia, but Ariana is too brilliant and too alive for either of those sad luxuries... I am convinced of the authenticity of the summonses she receives and the summonses she issues and when I read her I am reminded that all of this is a calling before it's an identity or career. Her voice-which is always more than hers alone is a dialectic between the very ancient and the bleeding edge. - Ben Lerner

Reines's books are works of intellectual commitment and structural sophistication; at the same time, they allow the raw stuff of being, in all its messiness, to enter the page. -The White Review

Mind-blowing. - Kim Gordon

Her writing is queer and raunchy, raw and occult, seemingly never pulling away from her deepest vulnerabilities. Yet Reines simultaneously maintains a feeling of epic poetry, of ancient intention. She moves between worlds in search of the divine and the self. - The New York Times

These are the kinds of poems that reorient you in the world, make you understand how little you know, but how much is inside you. - NYLON