Arts
Uncertainty in Architecture
Or, the blip
How do we work with uncertainty? Uncertainty suggests undesirable and uncontrollable outcomes. It also suggests opportunity. Deriving from my architectural thesis …
A Springsteen Fan's Daughter
When I was 14 years old, my father sat down on the piano bench with me and placed some sheet music …
Past Tense
Notes on nostalgia
The latest season of Black Mirror opens with the cheeriest episode in the history of the bleak, techno-dystopic series. San Junipero …
Rooms For Fear
Imagining art after Trump
In her essay “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear,” Toni Morrison recalls in the Nation a moment after President …
Performing Intimacy
A conversation with Rashaun Mitchell
As Rashaun Mitchell speaks to me over the phone I can make out below his voice the faint familiar hum of …
A Distance From The Moon
Coded empathy in Moonlight and American Honey
Early in the film Moonlight, released this past week, a young boy named Chiron asks his mentor Juan how he can …
Houseworks
Exploring the limits of the home
Mall-House In 2003, artist and RISD graduate Michael Townsend devised a plan to create a luxury apartment in a 750-square-foot space …
International Art Spam
Specimen: The Artist’s Museum begins with the impulse to collect and connect, bringing together large-scale installations, photography, film, and videos that …
Vulgar in Vogue
A look at taste's effect on fashion
On October 13, curator Judith Clark and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips debuted their joint exhibit The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined at London’s Barbican …
Most Suitable Candidate
A complicated love letter to Hillary Clinton's pantsuits
“Fashion! Turn to the left./Fashion! Turn to the right.” —David Bowie, “Fashion” (1980) Fashion matters. Though it’s tempting to think of …
In a Million Different Pieces
A conversation with poet Rachel Zucker
Before calling up New York City-based poet, teacher, and doula Rachel Zucker, I came across a line from her poem "The …
How to Write in the Human Realm
Notes on Ben Lerner and the politics of poetry
In a video that the MacArthur Foundation produced after awarding Ben Lerner a genius Grant last year, Lerner poses the question, …
Reclaiming Endangered Languages
When language death means culture death
Spanish missionaries were the first Westerners to begin documenting the indigenous languages of the ‘Viceroyalty of New Spain.’ Travelling to newly …
Found in Translation
Jhumpa Lahiri in Italian
Try reading without reading. The first thing your eyes encounter is the appearance of the words, the absurdity of the shapes, …
Forever in Love with Bertha
On Deathly Kitsch at Funtime Junction
Of the many junctions I know and love (and there are many, in this lattice-bound society) very few self-identify as junctions. …
First Vacation to the Sun
march 31st mountain view, california we sprawled ourselves under leaves, hanging caterpillars. listened to quiet voices that guide our eyes through …
Notes on Gay Softcore Camp
When Gay Sex Loses its Politics
The first ‘gay-themed’ feature-length film I watched was Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds. Like many closeted eighth graders, I had turned …
Gestures in Absence
On the 15 Year Memory of 9/11
A thousand 9/11 stories are the same. Ask any New Yorker who watched the event in real time what they saw …
The Artist Formerly Known As...
Prince has never been a human. As he immortalized in I Would Die 4 U, he was not a woman, he …
Public Space is the Place
Art and Politics in Battery Park City
Wheatfields - A Confrontation, Agnes Denes, 1982 Before the World Financial Center, the glass skyscrapers, the open-air cafes, the high-end boutiques, …
Two Manifestos and a Strongly Worded Suggestion
The Mini Manifesto (It is important for the purposes of this argument that you note the semantic difference between Minimalism and …
Soft Systems
On the East End of London in 1961, theater producer Joan Littlewood was thinking about ways to disrupt theater-going experiences that …
Sin of SimCity
Victory and failure in virtual urban space
To a 15-year old Providence Journal writer named Joseph Braude, it made a lot of sense: invite five of the candidates …
Late Lunch
On the third and fourth floors of an old revival building in the southern tip of Bombay lives an institution so …
Spaces We Might Not Have Inhabited
Fragments on Ambient Media
“This which yields or fills / All space, the ambient air wide interfus’d” –John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667) The term ‘ambient …
Black Is the Color
Colorism in Nina Simone's Biopic
Watch the trailer for the upcoming biopic Nina, out April 22, and you might think Zoe Saldana inhabits the role well. …
Donna and the Whitney
Thoughts on Museum Curation
The Whitney Museum in New York was the first museum dedicated solely to the work of living American artists. Eighty-four years …
Cannon Cloth
Thoughts on T-Shirt Guns
Walk into any Goodwill and you can find an anthology of cotton t-shirts that span a certain American experience. There’s Megan’s …
Notes on Mom Books
Elena Ferrante's Visual Aesthetics
When I was in high school, I worked in a small bookstore in Virginia. I mostly helped out, shelving books and …
RISD Confidential
On Foundations and Boundaries
A mythic aura hangs about RISD Foundations year like a thin layer of spray fixative in an art student’s lungs. When …
Return of the Franchise
The Force Awakens to Disney
The triumphant return to Star Wars, the opening crawl, like every preceding Star Wars film, plants us in the thick of …
Documentary Analysis
The PDF, the STL, and the Future of Documentation
In an early effort to digitize their libraries’ vast archive of texts and documents, the archivists and librarians of MIT began …
$HORT-¢HANGED
The Language of the Financial Crisis
Vocabulary Short When someone “shorts” a security, they are betting that it will fall in value at some point after the …
Black Boxes and Black Mirrors
A black box is a unit, a unified system, or a discrete object which takes inputs and produces outputs but whose …
The Failed OG Was a GOP
When Music Taste Turns Political
News outlets have been prying into each bit of Dr. Ben Carson’s autobiography, vetting stories from his childhood in which he …