New knowledge emerges out of lateral thinking and intuition, long-term preoccupations and unexpected turns, raw evidence, reality checks, and other motives.

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Amateur Attractions: Insects, Instinct, Descriptive Love

Willy Smart

If only we could stay in the beautiful loop forever, free of thought and free of any fantasy but this one of good friends and pleasing form.More

How Not What: Anthropocene Landscapes of St. Louis

Michael R. Allen

The dream of the river that runs through our city may be freedom from the strange parade of settlement—the tortuous, inflicted and inflected presences of people across its high and low lands. But such a condition is unknowable, past or future. We are left to dwell in-between.More

Subtle Affinity

Elise Adibi

Learning about plant communication, it occurred to me, was I somehow communicating with the plants when I was painting?More

land of words: a collection of poetry by plants

Lindsey french, Echinacea purpurea, Quercus macrocarpa, Asclepias tuberosa, Tsuga canadensis, and Pinus strobus

Included here are a selection of poems written by plants, where I have taken the role of editor, albeit an active role, and I must admit to having involved myself deeply with the poets in the process of their creation.More

Francisco Goya: Mortal Designs

Herbert Marder

Like the young goat that gives the Caprichos their name, these etchings, unpredictable as goats leaping from boulder to boulder among the hills, evoke the painter Francisco Goya who made them after a sudden illness.More

Light from Dead Stars

Norma Marder

Sierpc, Poland: a world of graves for my parents. A mythic world for me.More

A Psalm from David

David Gissen

When we translate a text, we typically do so into a particular language—defined by geographical space and time—but other possibilities can be cultivated within translations.More

Stochastic Cities: Four Ways of Arranging 3,750 Images of Chicago

María Urigoitia Villanueva

Algoritmos, the Spanish word for algorithms, was the title of one of my mathematics books in middle school. I remember being fascinated by this term whose meaning or power I did not fully grasp: a magic word or spell with which to open a universe of possibility.More

The Shape of Things: Reimagining landscape parliaments in the Anthropocene

Karl Kullmann

We are standing in the parliament in the rain. Following parliamentary protocol, a cold clear river crosses the floor from left to east. From the margins, basalt walls move motions at a rate of half a millimeter every week. In the midnight twilight, it dawns on us that this fluidic chamber reports to an ad hoc committee of continents and islands.More

Digressions on Falling: Departing from the work of Henri Michaux

Berkay Ustun

Not knowing what to fear more: touching the bottom or not touching the bottom. If I blank in touch down, then it must be a big fall. In any touch whatsoever the blank evokes a fall too. What is more, falling is the most lawful thing there is, yet it feels unnatural and unforeseen and is experienced as a voiding of law.More

portrait of X’s empty

Eric Ellingsen

Bernadette Mayer’s poem X at Half Inch intervals was broken up into half inch intervals.More

Red Ribbon Trail

Norma Marder

Today is the thirtieth anniversary of my father’s death. The date usually approaches and vanishes like headlights on a country road. Oh-my-god, tomorrow is August sixth ... damn-it, yesterday was August sixth.More

Civic Experiments: Tactics for Praxis

Frances Whitehead

Artists today are seeking greater social engagement, moving beyond entrenched roles circumscribed by the culture industry, towards the compelling issues of our time. More

Virginia Woolf: Letters from the Lumber Room

Herbert Marder

—These letters are two-faced, Sasha says, where Virginia is praising Ethel and then ripping her to shreds behind her back.More

Operas, Ethics, and Elektra: A Return to the Recordings of John Culshaw

Ryan M. Prendergast

Perhaps the most preclusive ethical component of opera recording is the act of listening, and, with it, the ethics and politics of listening. [...] For the makers of records, listening involved actively scrutinizing what was acceptable and what was not acceptable. For the audience of a record, listening was ostensibly more passive, though more than once Culshaw entertained the idea of a technology that would give the listener more control over what was aurally presented.More

The Satellites’ Progeny: Digital Chorography in the Age of Drone Vision

Karl Kullmann

Recently, imaging technology has shifted nearer to the ground as drones—the miniaturized progeny of satellites—saturate altitudes below 400ft. Gyroscopically-stabilized multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles have been available to consumers since 2009 and have reliably carried high definition cameras since 2012. In addition to this now familiar optical utility, drones are also purposed as micro-freighters, with experimental payloads including merchandise and humanitarian aid delivery, seed and insect dispersal, and fire ignition and suppression. In an extreme payload up-scaling, a British hobbyist travelled in a tethered swarm of 54 drones, with the homemade space-frame reminiscent of the Wright brothers’ first efforts.More

Pan American Trust: On Property, Speculation, and Boundary Maintenance at Tres Piedras Estates

Jesse Vogler

In the summer of 1962, Bill Irons—a 14-year-old boy from Erie, PA—and his parents turned their family car to the west. Wrapping their teal Cadillac around the Great Lakes, across the Great Plains, and over the Cascade Range, the Irons family brought their Cold War road-trip to a halt at the heart of the aerospace race: Boeing's Seattle. Their destination: the Century 21 Exposition—otherwise known as the Seattle World’s Fair.More

The Aeronauticists

Adam Bobbette

For Santoso, the air was the medium that connected him to Suparno. Even more, it did so for all humans, animals, and nature, across their different locations and great diversity of bodily forms.More

Listening to a speech, among large crowds, in an open landscape, in the mid-19th century

David Gissen

Forsworn in seven years I know how far they brought for our discontent: A new nation, can it see liberty?More

Living on the Edge: Urban Animals at the Margins of Buildings

Ants of the Prairie

How might urban architecture provide habitable (or, at least, non-lethal) conditions for birds, bats, and other wildlife?More

Crop Circles: Windows of Perception

Lucy Pringle

Strange things often happen when I talk about crop circles. There's a sort of strange energy around and the most mysterious things happen. The most reliable technology fails.More

Under the Banner of Street Observation

Terunobu Fujimori

Now, whatever you might say, The gods dwell in the streets.More

Simone Weil: Sketches for an Unwritten Biography

Herbert Marder

She was small and wiry, five feet two inches, thin as a rail but able to carry heavy loads and operate heavy machinery. Idleness was a deadly sin.More

Sacred States of America

Ellen R. Hartman

Predicting the locations of future sacred sites is a multi-phased process, the first step of which is to cast geomantic charts to determine whether such sites can be located and, if so, how many are possble.More

Cartography of Naps

Eva Hagberg Fisher

Jonathan Solomon was like hey why don’t you write something for Forty-Five and I was like fine but can it be about naps and he was like yes and I was like okay fine.More

Architecture AND Landscape: Beyond the Magic Diagram

Alessandra Ponte

Such unanimous enthusiasm for a diagram, which appears magically to offer solutions to any sort of dilemma, raises at least some perplexity.More

Patent and Place: Intellectual Property and Site-Specificity

Richard L. Hindle

Among the more than 9 million U.S. patents granted since the Patent Act of 1790, a representational anomaly exists in which intellectual property and place converge in an evocative yet confounding hybrid at the interstices of technology and environment.More

(Non-)Essential Knowledge for (New) Architecture

David L. Hays

What is essential knowledge for architecture, and how is that knowledge best obtained?More

Key Points: Between Figure and Ground

Georges Teyssot

In his book Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (1958), the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon refers to “key points”—objects at once technical and aesthetic—structuring the territory [...].More

Eyes Wide Shut: Picturing Outer Space

Alessandra Ponte

Chile, and in particular the Atacama Desert’s region, has been repeatedly labeled astronomy’s paradise.More

Monument as Ruin

Charles Stankievech

“The centre cannot hold,” writes W. B. Yeats while reflecting on the spiritual ruins of World War I.More

Arms Race

Yusuke Obuchi

An arms race is on in the worlds of computation and architectural fabrication research.More

Ramble Landscape

Catherine Seavitt Nordenson

Sometimes there is buried treasure in an archive, which for me might be defined as something that no one has really thought about or read in a long time but that perhaps should be re-read today.More

Nothing Here

Keith Mitnick

Rainy Sea is a small piece of land located in the middle of a large river separating the United States and Canada.More

.45 or .44?

Benjamin Nicholson

When these two numbers are put together, people usually sit up and pay attention. More

Plastic Imagination

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen

This essay connects a material substance—plastic—to a particular kind of cognitive process—imagining. More

Reading in a Very Dark Room on a Moonless Night in the 17th Century: An Environmental Translation

David Gissen

This work uses the increasing illegibility of a text set in black-letter to conceptually represent the experience of reading in a very dark space.More

Sentences on a Glass House and Other Sentences

Nora Wendl

This is the history of a woman and her glass house. It is as true an account as I can devise.More

W@r aga1nst the F1lters: Spam as the Inheritor of High Modernism

Octavian Esanu

For some time I have been captivated by a form of writing that has been captivating my email inbox.More

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