Cassie Packard
Renee Gladman: Narratives of Magnitude
By Cassie PackardSince 2006, experimental poet-novelist Renee Gladman has been making drawings, often characterized by diagrammatic or architectural elements, that tap into language’s rich capaciousness. Gladman garnered acclaim for her Ravicka novels (2010–17), fictions in which bodies move through a shifting city-state with its own language.
Tishan Hsu: skin-screen-grass
By Cassie PackardTishan Hsu has been exploring the messy entanglement of bodies and technology for over three decades. Spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and video, his work is characterized by a slippery lexicon of biological and technological motifs—lingering on the touch in touchscreen and the face in interface—that probes the more visceral, affective, and lived aspects of our relationships to machines.
Masaomi Yasunaga: Looking Afar / 遠くを見る
By Cassie PackardA former student of Sōdeisha member Satoru Hoshino, contemporary Japanese potter Masaomi Yasunaga carries some of the school’s avant-garde predilections forward, deftly melding traditional and experimental techniques to make inscrutable and compelling objects with a constitutional aversion to orthodoxy.
Emilie Louise Gossiaux: Significant Otherness
By Cassie Packard“How might an ethics and politics committed to the flourishing of significant otherness be learned from taking dog-human relationships seriously?” asks scholar Donna Haraway in The Companion Species Manifesto (2003), a characteristically nimble and excursive text on the imbricated past, present, and future of canines and people. In the follow-up to her 1985 cyborg manifesto, Haraway frames people and dogs as co-constitutive categories—the term “companion” hinges upon a relation or contingency—and characterizes “significant otherness” as a nonhierarchical form of relating that springs from a cognizance of difference and an ethics of attention.
The Yes Men
By Cassie PackardIn response to the socio-ideological landscape that late capitalism presents as donnée, the Yes Men pose as corporate or governmental bodies in mass media “hijinks” that either take consensus reality to its ludicrous extremes or demonstrate that consensus reality has already reached said extremes, highlighting our entrenchment in its naturalized frameworks.
Eileen Myles’s Pathetic Literature
By Cassie PackardRejecting the urge to erase, minimize, or turn away from an unsightly feeling, the writers included in this anthology audaciously inhabit a sentiment that society exhorts its high-functioning citizenry to disown. The beautiful, weird aggregate that results is profoundly, pathetically human.
