C Magazine #155: "Codes"

Issue 155

As sets of visible and invisible instructions, codes move within and beyond the digital imaginary. Expanding on codes as ethical, social, political, and legal boundaries, the Fall 2023 issue of C Magazine probes the visual culture of an array of codes as reflections of the world’s existing mechanics, and as ways of reimagining the future.

Features, interviews, and experimental texts in this issue consider programming languages as poetry, challenge settler ideas of an inanimate wilderness using paranormal readings with the land, and probe the mind of an AI art critic. Contributing artists and writers explore the material consequences of codes, and ask how they might be re-inscribed to understand or lay form to (alternate) conditions of life.

Each issue of C Magazine opens and concludes with an original Artist Project featuring new work specially commissioned by a guest curator. C155 presents Born in a Body, a project by Brody Weaver and Elliot Ciz, based on their experimental documentary film about access to trans healthcare. Born in a Body mobilizes what curator Excel Garay calls apparitional aesthetics—a trans methodology that skirts unfettered access to trans being and “highlights how various lenses and constant (re)codings continually transform trans subjects.”

Features:

spirit-flesh-soul-icon
– by Meech Boakye

Joyful, Poetic Microworlds
– by Matt Nish-Lapidus

Petal by Petal: Feminine Desire as a Conduit for Home
– by Christina Hajjar

masus wəλəɫəʔos? we hear the brook
– by Mercedes Webb / maḻ idi / məlidi and Kaylee Maciejko

“A Political, Ethical, Existence Practice”: In Conversation with Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva
– by Coco Zhou

You Only Live Twice
– by Erin Reznick

Untangling Beauty from the Elite
– by Stevie Ada Klaark

From Algorithms to Aesthetics: Unlocking the Mind of CritBot.AI, Pioneering Critic
– by Cat Bluemke, Jonathan Carroll, and Hannah Hanski

Letters:

Letters from Sherry Chunqing Liu, Jeannette Pang, and Ashley Culver reflect on Issue 154 “Gossip.”