Design Struggles - Intersecting Histories, Pedagogies, And Perspectives

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.

McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York's thriving queer rave scene, showing how raving to techno is an art and technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept, but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them.

Contents
1. Rave as Practice 
2. Xeno-euphoria 
3. Ketamine Femmunism 
4. Enlustment 
5. Resonant Abstraction 
6. Excessive Machine 

"How to write a book about raving as a practice that practices rave? From k-nights spent on Brooklyn's and Berlin's junkspace dance floors, McKenzie Wark abstracts a life practice of ressociation in a dance of autoconceptualization and allotheorization. In crossing toward the stranger's gift of 'letting go of ourselves as private property, ' Raving is nothing less than Wark's femmunist manifesto, her tractatus on techno's blackness, her treatise for a twenty-first-century trans ethics."—Kodwo Eshun

How To Become est une maison d'édition autogérée basée à Paris. Nous publions les textes d'auteuces engagés dans des pratiques féministes et peu diffusés par le réseau des grandes maisons d'édition françaises.

Créée en 2016, elle est composée d'artistes et écrivaires en majorité gouines, HTB publie de la litterature expérimentale née d'influences post-post- sapphiques ainsi qu'un choix de tradu d'auteuices non traduites en langue française. HTB s'articule autour d'ateliers d'écriture: How to Become a Lesbian, et d'une revue annuelle publiant les choses issues de l'atelier.

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.

Featuring Zoe Leonard, Eileen Myles, Jimmy DeSana, Princess Julia, Olivia Laing, Simon Costin, Timothy Thornton, Mary Manning and many more. Published 2020.

‘Inland Empire’ is a film by David Lynch about a once-feted Hollywood actress who is cast in a movie that is rumoured to be cursed. From a queer, feminist perspective, film critic Melissa Anderson examines how Lynch’s late masterpiece is not only a brilliant evocation of how images work on the mind, but how powerful “acteurs” are in the creation of dreamlike cinema. Laura Dern’s astonishing performance, as the film’s realities splinter and identities multiply, is elucidated by Anderson through her deep affection and respect for Lynch. The book is part of the Decadent Editions series, which examines one film for every year of the 2000s, each a milestone of contemporary cinema.