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Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is an 1884 satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott. Writing pseudonymously as "A Square," the book used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to offer pointed observations on the social hierarchy of Victorian culture. However, the novella's more enduring contribution is its examination of dimensions.

Several films have been made from the story, including a feature film in 2007 called Flatland. Other efforts have been short or experimental films, including one narrated by Dudley Moore and the short films Flatland: The Movie and Flatland 2: Sphereland starring Martin Sheen and Kristen Bell.

The Hortus  project is an open investigation into the nature of seemingly common objects through 'Floriography', urban gardens, and the history of female rights. Hortus was inspired by urban gardens in West Amsterdam and created with its plants by Lilia Luganskaia. 

Joanna Cresswell about the 'Hortus':

History teaches us that a language of flowers can communicate endless things about the culture in which it emerged, and herein lies Lilia Luganskaia's interest. Taking inspiration from the world of 19th Century sentimental flower books, Hortus presents itself as a set of notes towards a modern handbook for contemporary floriography, considering what the discipline might look like today. By collecting common flora across one year in the urban gardens around her home in Amsterdam and cross-referencing their meanings with publications from the past, Luganskaia reflects on their natures, their roles, and the symbolic familiarity they might hold for the communities living with them. A female artist and reader of the twenty-first century, she seeks out the essence of modern life through her lens, and through flowers, just like the women who came before her. 

Lilia Luganskaia (1990) Russian - Dutch multidisciplinary artist and author, based in Amsterdam. In her artistic practice, Lilia uses her background in documentary techniques to focus on what she calls ‘investigating reality’.  Her practice is research-based, Lilia decodes abstract notions such as love, tourism, bureaucracy, politics, and feminism through the use of constructed images, sculptures, videos, and installations. One of the key elements of her work is to understand multiple aspects of the photographic image.

Dead Minutes is a storytelling game about systemic change in an undesirable afterlife. You, the players, will decide what this hell, underworld or land of the dead is like, what its problems are, how change happens there, and what the complications might be when altering something so big, involving so many dead people, over so much time. It’s a game about impossible seeming actions at impossible seeming scales, making difficult choices, and dealing with unexpected outcomes.

The first half of this book gives you everything you need to play a session of Dead Minutes, which takes 2-5 hours with 3-6 people.

The second half features an essay by Patricia Reed that expands on the concepts of heuristic fictions and vital zombies in relation to the afterlife, and a series of afterlife generating 'seeds' contributed by different types of writers - a demonic boardroom presentation by writer and art critic Habib William Kherbek, a ritual from horror game designer Samuel Clarice Mui Shen Ern, a premise by Arthur C Clarke award winning author Chris Beckett, and a letter from Selma Selman.

The book Taalbarrière brings together reproductions of a drawing's series linked to an audio creation about the border and the language barrier in Belgium through the eyes of secondary school pupils who are learning the language of the other community, French or Dutch.

The Posttraumatic is a newspaper created by creatives and artists. [eng, cast, cat]

Why a newspaper? The project believes that a newspaper is an important link between our social reality (built over the centuries by three-headed monsters and the occasional fairy godmother) and the individuals who live in it, because it is an essential communication element and because its content is a fucking drama almost always.

When Ulrich Beck, a literate man, assures us that “the media does not respond to the inspiration of the enlightenment but to that of the market and capital” we can only read the news with a distrustful and defenseless frown. Uncle Sam manipulates us to his likings and we satisfy our appetites by feasting on his words as if they were cocaine-coated cookies that only serve to fatten the need to win over arguments at our neighbor’s dinner-table conversations. We do not know if the information we swallow is invented, bought, if they are news clippings curated by a 4channer´s paranoid imagination, or if it is an objective, absolute, eternal truth.

Based on these fatalistic, dramatic and somewhat depressing theories on news and their consumption, 39 artists were contacted and each one was granted with a space, a sort of an article, to do whatever they wanted with it. It has not been intended to generate any specific ideological discourse and there is no gift flag.

With Contributions by: Escif, Ampparito, Aida Gómez, Mas Siedentop, Jofre Oliveras, Flavita Banana, Helen Bur, Michael Beitz, Biancoshock, Milu Correch, Luce, Marta Aguilar, Jan Vorman, Igor Ponosov, Ana Vilamú, Vas Ban Wieringen, Gigi Ei, Vlady, Val Rovatti, Octavi Serra, Nicolás Garcia, Valentina and the Electic Post and Others. 

Published 2021

This fourth issue of MsHeresies republishes the chapter *Daffodils* — a warped monologue about a domestic poisoning — from Rosalind Belben’s book Is Beauty Good (1989).

It is typeset alongside a collage of material from two medieval manuscripts: Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae and De natura rerum (circa 1130–74), which was illuminated and transcribed by a group of eight nuns at the Benedictine abbey of Munsterbilzen in Maastricht; and the so called Claricia Psalter (late 12th–early 13th century) from the abbey of saints Ulrich and Afra in Augsberg, also made by a group of nuns and named after the novice Claricia who is believed to have drawn herself hanging like the tail of a drop-cap Q in the psalter section of the book.

What do we start with when telling a story — What tensions activate it — What does it promise — What do we want from it — How do we deliver it — Must it have an end — What about a story which never began — Stories we wish were told — Stories which have always been there — Stories we don’t know how to start.

Beginnings is a collective attempt at questioning protocols and forms of narration, initiated by Manon Michèle. The publication gathers textual and visual works from twenty-nine artists, writers and collectives. With two covers, ninety-six pages, and no end, the publication remains in flux, with no definitive conclusions but the shape of an ongoing question: Where do we start and where might the act of arriving lead.

There’s bodies thrusted through motion, accelerations, collapses, into the folly of life, death, borders and language. There’s following intuition, rabbits, leaders, and the shape of clouds, switching from script to script to escape latched circles and compliance. There’s braiding together clashing dimensions and vital landmarks, processing ghosts to reclaim space, feeding them to trusted spirits. There’s foreseeing new shapes, and believing in what grows. There’s the poetry of saving what can be saved and the pull of letting go. There’s so much to begin with

Contributors
Alice dos Reis, Anaïs Fontanges, Anna Bierler, Auriane Preud’homme, Bravas Graphix, Calli Uzza Layton, Clara Pasteau, Cleo Tsw, D-E-A-L, Elina Birkehag, Eliott Déchamboux, Emilie Pitoiset, Heleen Mineur, Hyo Young Chu, Josefina Anjou, Juliette Lepineau, Kimberley Cosmilla, Manon Michèle, Maria Paris, Marie-Mam Sai Bellier, Mathis Perron, Mia Trabalon, Pablo Bardinet, Pays de Glossolalie, Philip Ullman, Raphaël Massart, Sanae Oujjit, Silvana Mc Nulty, Yunie Chae

Beginnings was edited and designed by Manon Michèle and Oliver Boulton, and published by Ex. Coda, 2025.

A New Program for Graphic Design is the first communication-design textbook expressly of and for the 21st century. Three courses—Typography, Gestalt and Interface—provide the foundation of this book.

Through a series of in-depth historical case studies (from Benjamin Franklin to the Macintosh computer) and assignments that progressively build in complexity, A New Program for Graphic Design serves as a practical guide both for designers and for undergraduate students coming from a range of other disciplines.

Synthesizing the pragmatic with the experimental, and drawing on the work of Max Bill, Beatrice Warde, Muriel Cooper and Stewart Brand (among many others), it builds upon mid-to-late 20th-century pedagogical models to convey contemporary design principles in an understandable form for students of all levels—treating graphic design as a liberal art that informs the dissemination of knowledge across all disciplines. For those seeking to understand and shape our increasingly networked world of information, this guide to visual literacy is an indispensable tool.

David Reinfurt (born 1971), a graphic designer, writer and educator, reestablished the Typography Studio at Princeton University and introduced the study of graphic design. Previously, he held positions at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University School of Art. As a cofounder of O-R-G inc. (2000), Dexter Sinister (2006) and the Serving Library (2012), Reinfurt has been involved in several studios that have reimagined graphic design, publishing and archiving in the 21st century. He was the lead designer for the New York City MTA Metrocard vending machine interface, still in use today. His work is included in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. He is the co-author of Muriel Cooper (MIT Press, 2017), a book about the pioneering designer.