A rich collection of essays tracing the relationship between art and sound.

In the 1970s David Toop became preoccupied with the possibility that music was no longer bounded by formalities of audience: the clapping, the booing, the short attention span, the demand for instant gratification. Considering sound and listening as foundational practices in themselves leads music into a thrilling new territory: stretched time, wilderness, video monitors, singing sculptures, weather, meditations, vibration and the interior resonance of objects, interspecies communications, instructional texts, silent actions, and performance art.

Toop sought to document the originality and unfamiliarity of this work from his perspective as a practitioner and writer. The challenge was to do so without being drawn back into the domain of music while still acknowledging the vitality and hybridity of twentieth-century musics as they moved toward art galleries, museums, and site-specificity. Toop focused on practitioners, whose stories are as compelling as the theoretical and abstract implications of their works.

Inflamed Invisible collects more than four decades of David Toop’s essays, reviews, interviews, and experimental texts, drawing us into the company of artists and their concerns, not forgetting the quieter, unsung voices. The volume is an offering, an exploration of strata of sound that are the crossing points of sensory, intellectual, and philosophical preoccupations, layers through which objects, thoughts and air itself come alive as the inflamed invisible.

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In her long poem “The Text”, Nora Amin uses a surrealistic form of poetic writing to deconstruct gender roles, sexual trauma and patriarchal authority, while composing a humane story of creation.

This book is the result of a collaboration between Amin, the visual artist Katharina Marszewski, and the graphic design studio Eps51. Marszewski responded to “The Text” by creating cryptic drawings that reveal the movements central to Amin’s choreographic poetry. Bilingual script and artwork interpenetrate in Eps51’s unique design, which allows readers to determine the reading direction of the book, depending on their preferred language (Arabic / English).

“The Text” is accompanied by an afterword by Christian Junge, scholar of Arabic literature.

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Earth Café is an interactive culinary flipbook for all ages. The book invites the reader to scramble and rearrange dishes from around the world, revealing an expansive* glossary of invented culinary creations. It offers a new knowledge of food: its locality, substances, accidents and boundaries are suddenly as fluid as the imagination itself.

The 35 dishes that make up the book– chimichurri, hamburger, chorizo, spumoni, etc.– are sourced from around the world and defined (using words and images) in very simple terms. Most typically, an adjective or flavor + a predominant ingredient + a category of dish.

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Emergence Magazine is an online publication with an annual print edition.

It has always been a radical act to share stories during dark times. They are regenerative spaces of creation and renewal. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the earth, we look to emerging stories. In them we find the timeless connections between ecology, culture, and spirituality.

It’s hard to reflect on the past year without feeling like we’ve entered a fictional tale. And yet here we are: not only has COVID-19 taken root around the world, but wildfires have raged across the Arctic Circle, Brazil, Australia, and the western United States; people have risen up to stand against racial injustice, and it feels as though we’re witnessing only the beginning of a deep fracturing of this civilization. We do not yet know the changes that will come to light locally and globally.

Volume II of our print edition speaks to the multiple crises and opportunities unfolding around us: plague, extinctions, and loneliness grip us ever tighter even as they affirm our connection with the living world. Across 400 pages—and through essays, photography, adapted multimedia, poems, and original artwork—this collection considers the stories that we want to seed in these mythological times.

Contributions by Fred Bahnson, Diane Barker, Alex Boersma, Sheila Pree Bright, Aletheia Casey, Stephen Crotts, Bathsheba Demuth, Camille T. Dungy, Paul Elie, Beth Evans, Charles Foster, CMarie Fuhrman, Forrest Gander, Jay Griffiths, Bear Guerra, David G. Haskell, Lisa Lee Herrick, Brenda Hillman, Linda Hogan, Sophy Hollington, Katie Holten, Nick Hunt, Amaud Jamaul Johnson and more.

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How do we create ideas, paths, and actions for a more sustainable world? How can art function as a catalyst for change? The project Sustainable Societies for the Future is founded on some of today’s most complex and urgent challenges. This publication, released on the occasion of the concurrent exhibition on view at the Malmö Art Museum and a number of seminars and events, directly addresses issues surrounding how cities and human settlements can be transformed into inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable environments.

The statements in this book feature individual and collective contributions by artists and scholars from the Nordic and North American art scenes to awaken discussion, reflection, and perspectives that reflect sustainable pathways for the world. Designed by Olga Prader, the navigation of each text is conceptually categorized through a visual lexicon that follows the mission of the 11 Global Goals set out by the UN, including biodiversity, housing, and gender equality, health and safety, and environmental justice, among other key issues.

We are at a point where sustainability alone is not sufficient. As the pages within Sustainable Societies for the Future suggests, contemporary art can serve as a key speculation into how issues of ecological challenges, access to and preservation of natural resources, social exclusion, balance of economy, forms of protest, and collective responsibilities can be approached via a political and social lens.

The exhibition Sustainable Societies for the Future runs at Malmö Art Museum from 1 February to 23 May 2021.

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Edition of 125
numbered

What did the generation that came of age during the sixties do for an encore? Many of the answers seemed to have slipped below the media’s plumb line. A Letter to My Father and My Unborn Son, a journal by Aram Saroyan with art by Gailyn Saroyan, takes us to the American bicentennial year, 1976, as the young poet and artist await the arrival of their third child in Bolinas, a small coastal village in rural Northern California. Here is the day-to-day journey of a young family–at once intimate, surprising, and funny.

Printed in Los Angeles, California
2018

Harvard Design Magazine 45 – Into the Woods | Spring/summer 2018

To go “into the woods” is to enter both nightmare and wonderment, chaos and serenity. The woods are the threatening realm of wolves and witches, yet also a space of peace and introspection. They confound and illuminate, disorient and clarify, endanger and protect. The woods are where we “come to our senses,” and where we embrace our wilder selves. They are a space of complex life forms and ecological destruction; of growth and decay; of fantasy and ritual; of secrets and control; of hiding and? the hidden.

The woods are often framed as a nonurban place; an entity separate from, and opposed to, the city—even the world; an eternal refuge that can smoothly be entered and exited, gone into and back out of. But how much of our woods still remains to go into—and on what terms?

As designers, we encounter the woods as building site, as obstacle, and as resource—territory to be cleared, but also to be preserved, cultivated, tamed, or simulated. Wood itself—along with its products like lumber, wood pulp, silvichemicals, and charcoal—fuel the building industry and feed architecture. In a period of accelerated climate change, the planet’s woods are disappearing, burning up, threatening and threatened by human existence. How can we holistically address the woods and its ecosystems, and the life and life-giving power they contain?

This issue of Harvard Design Magazine treks into the woods to come to terms with its precarious status as habitat and resource, and to challenge assumptions about wood as material. We won’t be “out of the woods”—this looping conundrum—any time soon, even if the woods as we once knew it, and might still imagine it, has ceased to exist. At the intersection of wilderness, urbanization, and myth, “Into the Woods” embraces contradiction, challenges destruction, and revisits our roots, biological and architectural alike.

“Into the Woods” combines contributions by noted critics and theorists including Milica Topalovic, Lawrence Buell, T. J. Demos, Rosetta Elkin, Jack Halberstam, and Maria Tatar; practitioners Dogma, Alexander Brodsky, Dilip Da Cunha, Eelco Hooftman, and Paulo Tavares; as well as artists Tang Chang, Maria Thereza Alves, Janet Cardiff, and Bas Princen; anthropologists Anna Tsing and Eduardo Kohn; and philosopher Giorgio Agamben.

Harvard Design Magazine 45 is edited by Jennifer Sigler and Leah Whitman-Salkin, and published by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD).

For those who would seek to influence others, the dissemination of ideas is
paramount. Similarly, for those holding ambition to secrete knowledge for reasons of
authority, or to protect the fruits of intellectual labour for reasons of profit or ethical
concern, distribution is key. Certainly before, but more importantly since the
Gutenberg Bible, the predicament of the power of knowledge has lain not with its
generation but with the control of its dispersion.

This new volume in the critically acclaimed Occasional Table series of books
published by Open Editions focuses attention on the act of distribution as a subject
for serious creative consideration and one of great social and economic importance.
Contributors from a variety of backgrounds paint a big picture that embraces the
actions of the individual alongside the workings of global markets. From the
attention-seeking impulse of the poseur, to the democratisation of art and knowledge
in the form of books, pop music, digital networks, self-organised libraries, and the
question of what can be known, and by whom, the urge to disseminate is explored
here as an elemental phenomenon of our time.

Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994) remains one of the most important landscape architects in the history of the field. His distinctive and widely acclaimed work has been featured and referenced in numerous sources, yet few of Burle Marx’s own words have been published.

This collection of a dozen of Burle Marx’s lectures, most of which have never before been available in English, fills that void. Delivered on international speaking tours, they address topics such as Concepts in Landscape Composition, Gardens and Ecology and The Problem of Garden Lighting. Their publication sheds light on Burle Marx’s distinctive ethic and aesthetic of landscape, as “the real art in living.”

“By their very nature secret practices, being secret, are generally hard to comment on. Still, we can imagine that the institution of secret marriage must be at least as old as that of the public one, possibly older, in fact, if one is to imagine the birth of ‘coupledom’ as taking place between two people alone under the cover of night. Secret marriage today remains an incalculable part of the institution – and perhaps one of its most romantic forms. […]

As though to compensate, we celebrate the secret ceremony – gay, straight or non-binary – not with equal but greater fervour. Just as a stolen glance is more arousing, a forbidden tryst more urgent, so too is the secret marriage more alive, more keen. Marry in secret in solidarity, in lust, out of an exhaustive need. Marry in secret and do with the heart what the gun cannot: melt the frozen conflicts, be they in Abkhazia or in Glendale.”

Excerpt from the publication

Offset print, 26 × 20 cm, 16 pages, stitched binding, mimeograph print
Edition of 35

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