COPY, 1: Understudy (2010)

“COPY is a publication of critical/experimental writing as or in the field of visual art and performance.

This issue of COPY is launched as part of The Plaza Principle, curated by Derek Horton and Chris Bloor in the partially vacant 1980s Leeds Shopping Plaza; an exhibition that aims to acknowledge the economic context in which artists are invited to occupy vacant shop units to disguise or compensate for economic decline in the nations town, city and district centres, supplementing commercial inactivity with cultural activity.

COPY proposes understudy as a point from which to consider, reflects and interrupt this context through a collection of art writing around the stand in – the temporary, illusory, consumed or performed; smoke and mirrors; the assessed, inquired or theorized. The works in this issue address, allude to or form tangents from these ideas and present a range of approaches to the use of the page, print and the form and nature of writing as or within practice.”

Contributors include Huw Andrews, Fabienne Audeoud, David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Emma Cocker, Sam Curtis, Charlotte A Morgan, Flora Robertson and Rebecca Weeks.

Developed by Critical Writing Collective, a network and platform for art writing and critical dialogue based in the Yorkshire region, UK.
Free to take away, copy and disseminate
26 pages

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Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, No. 1-54 (1974-2011)

JUMP CUT: A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA is run on a nonprofit basis by its staff and is not affiliated with or supported by any institution. Begun in 1974 as a film publication, JUMP CUT now publishes material on film, television, video, new media, and related media and cultural analysis. As a print publication till 2001, JUMP CUT circulated 4000 copies per issue in North America and internationally to a wide range of readers including students, academics, media professionals, political activists, radicals interested in culture, film and video makers, and others interested in the radical analysis of mass culture and opposition media. Now, with free online access, the readership is much larger and more international.

Editors: John Hess, Chuck Kleinhans, Julia Lesage
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

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Reza Negarestani: Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008)

“Cyclonopedia is theoretical-fiction novel by Iranian philosopher and writer Reza Negarestani. Hailed by novelists, philosophers and cinematographers, Negarestani’s work is the first horror and science fiction book coming from and written on the Middle East.

‘The Middle East is a sentient entity—it is alive!’ concludes renegade Iranian archaeologist Dr. Hamid Parsani, before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. The disordered notes he leaves behind testify to an increasingly deranged preoccupation with oil as the ‘lubricant’ of historical and political narratives.

A young American woman arrives in Istanbul to meet a pseudonymous online acquaintance who never arrives. Discovering a strange manuscript in her hotel room, she follows up its cryptic clues only to discover more plot-holes, and begins to wonder whether her friend was a fictional quantity all along.

Meanwhile, as the War on Terror escalates, the US is dragged into an asymmetrical engagement with occultures whose principles are ancient, obscure, and saturated in oil. It is as if war itself is feeding upon the warmachines, leveling cities into the desert, seducing the aggressors into the dark heart of oil …

At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire, CYCLONOPEDIA is work of theory-fiction on the Middle East, where horror is restlessly heaped upon horror. Reza Negarestani bridges the appalling vistas of contemporary world politics and the War on Terror with the archaeologies of the Middle East and the natural history of the Earth itself. CYCLONOPEDIA is a middle-eastern Odyssey, populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, corpses of ancient gods and other puppets. The journey to the Underworld begins with petroleum basins and the rotting Sun, continuing along the tentacled pipelines of oil, and at last unfolding in the desert, where monotheism meets the Earth’s tarry dreams of insurrection against the Sun.”

Publisher Re.Press, Melbourne, August 2008
Anomaly series
ISBN 0980544009, 9780980544008
268 pages

Publisher

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