From Work to Frame, or, Is There Life After "The Death of the Author"?

CSV Edition + CSV Edition (Extended Version)

Essay #16

Editor: M. Sullivan
Design in collaboration with S. De Bondt

An essay in the form of painting studies - including persons, dogs, a frog, a hoofed animal, fish, hare, trees and plants.

We are not where we need to be but, we ain't where we were is the first volume of a new series of publications by the collective Wages For Wages Against that reports on active research engaged within the artistic professions and institutions since 2017. Its aim is to question the underlying neoliberal logics in the contemporary art world, by orienting our object of study towards the struggles that impact it. With this publication, our hope is to put into practice various values specific to the campaign: the existence of a systematic and fair remuneration, a desire for transparency, the sharing of knowledge, and the visibilization of demands proper to the field of the visual arts and concomitant struggles. It is the result of militant experiences, at the convergence of our individual experiences and collective questionings.

With texts by Tiphanie Blanc, Antonella Corsani, Fanny Lallart, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Ramaya Tegegne and an interview with Outrage Collectif.

After diagnosis, the fact was that Austin Gross lived in his home country. He sat on the porch squinting like a potato and it was a comforting thing to imagine: rock-climbing with a blindfold. ‘Can swim, eyes open,’ he jotted and covered his eyes again. Sun, centrifuge, prognosis, bird-listening. The collision shaped genres like tectonic ripples. Windows open, a story while forgetting. ‘I am a memory eater.’
Aras was furloughed from prison that summer. Five years before, she’d missed their movie plan, and the fact was that since then, she lived in her home country. Furlough, Aras wrote, was ‘no-time.’ They investigated the situation together.

Austin Gross is an essayist and collaborator in elliptical orbit. His home discipline is philosophy and language English, on one condition: having left home. Trans-disciplinarity gives us a chance to be hosts and guests.

Derrida’s essay “Aletheia” discusses the work of Japanese photographer Kishin Shinoyama. Reading Derrida, Rabaté investigates how, behind the classical concept of truth as a beautiful naked woman, Derrida argues that any photographic image tells the Truth, but a truth obscured as it comes to light: “nothing is more black than the visibility of light.” Staging a critical conversation with Roland Barthes’s theses in Camera Lucida and Paul Celan’s poems from Breathturn to Lightduress, Rabaté argues for a theoretical approach to truth that counters the prevailing truth-discourses of today. 

Who is the Oriental Cyborg? asks Aditi Kini in this collection of notes, jokes, and queries into the provenance of a creature designed for labor, 3-D printed in the technoscientific post-colonies, modeled on old automata. Race is a technology, that we know, and technology can be raced — so why inquire into this at all? Perhaps this, the Oriental Cyborg, is a fantasy more than a memory, or an echo more than a form — or just an essayist’s extraction of personal anguish and humor from globalist decay.

Taking on the form of historical analysis / lyrical essay / documentary poem / experimental buzzword / positionality statement, this chapbook and its titular character might still be an elusive mystery even after reading.

“’What is a ghost but a person removed from corporeality?’ This is one among layers of questions Aditi Kini poses in Oriental Cyborg, a lyrical excavation into survival in the era of techno racial capitalism, and its “deleting touch” that so easily voids—reduces to faceless services—the exploited individuals performing various acts of techno-labor. A grieved searching drives this hybrid essay, which feels urgent and necessary as threats from AI grab headlines. This work compels us to see our culture’s love affair with technological progress as a means for continued colonization and domination. It also reminds us, and celebrates, that those erased don’t stay silent forever. We privileged may not be able to hear them yet, but those who are listening know. They roar.” — Allison Cobb

“In the mirror of Aditi Kini’s Oriental Cyborg, I become the monster—a hopeless automaton, an intelligence stripped of roar. With titanium-threaded theory, Kini radiantly stitches together the ideal Asian working machine. Get your own Oriental cyborg today: super dazzling and sexy, historically embroidered, an oracular truth who never tires, never complains, forever mute, what perfection!” — Lily Hoàng

Aditi Kini is an undisciplined writer. They’ve done both NYC and the MFA (at UC San Diego). They were a finalist/alternate for the 2020-22 Jerome Award for Literature. They edit Lumpenpockets, “a nonquarterly sick rag.” Read their words in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Rumpus, Denver Quarterly, The New York Times, and elsewhere. They’re at work on multiple projects, all at once. They are blessed with two dogs, Lucy the Happy and Charly Kong, who make life worth living.

Read Me gathers the tools necessary to make sense of contemporary problems so ubiquitous they seem too big to name. Spanning a multiplicity of genres, media, and tonal registers, this book surveys Holly Melgard’s formally experimental poetic works produced between 2008 and 2023, including sound poems, essays on poetics, and books that exploit print on demand to, for example, counterfeit money. In often wildly comic turns of thought, Melgard’s work cleaves personal agency from automated defaults by mapping trauma and technocracy from the inside out.

From critical talks to fictional monologues, the poet translates into language the unremarkable torments of neoliberalization in the digital age.