ILSI, the International Life Sciences Institute, has your health in mind.

January 9, 2020

It describes itself as “a nonprofit, worldwide organization whose mission is to provide science that improves human health and well-being.” Since its foundation more than forty years ago (by a Coca-Cola executive), it has rosily convened “scientists from the public and private sectors to collaborate in a neutral forum on scientific topics of mutual interest.”

Monkey Shines

November 14, 2019

This scroll depicting a snow monkey mother and child is not very good (I’m still learning how to paint with ink) and the calligraphy is atrocious, but I hope the message is clear: The Earth does not belong solely to humans.

Shock of the new

November 14, 2019

On January 2, 1911, German painter Franz Marc took his new friend Wassily Kandinsky to a concert by Arnold Schoenberg. On this fateful evening, the Viennese composer stunned the crowd with a strange new music in which tonality had been completely suspended. The crowd was confused if not dismayed, but Marc and Kandinsky – they were riveted.

Ray Materson

November 14, 2019

Ray Materson’s works are all little tapestries stitched out of threads from socks. He was in jail for some 15 years and used socks were, apparently, the only fabric he had access to.

Ben Hickling

November 14, 2019

n an age of virtually ubiquitous mental illness, with ecological and political collapse just around the corner, Outsider Art deserves a second look. What once appeared most peculiar about the genre—its despairing creators, its blunt interfaces with the political, its pyromaniacal relationship to official culture—now belongs more to the center of modern life than its margin. Originally meant to provide establishment with a static frontier, Outsider Art today seems proof that borders everywhere are on the move, that the periphery is pushing in on the heart of our shared intellectual and artistic life.

Alys Tomlinson

November 14, 2019

In the shadow of the colossal French Pyrenees, at the fringes of the historic region of Occitanie, lies the town of Lourdes. There, a major Catholic shrine has attracted scores of millions of pilgrims since visionary apparitions beset a denizen in 1858. Some hundred and sixty years ago, at the nearby Grotto of Massabielle, an illiterate peasant named Bernadette Soubirous claimed to have received a rosary-like series visions of the Immaculate Conception.

Miroslav Tichý

November 14, 2019

The world is bright. The sun shines, tempting you to idle by a sleepy Moravian town’s only swimming pool. The day’s balmy embrace leaves your skin aglow, as if with its own modest radiance. As you approach the poolside, a tepid breeze half-heartedly churns the dust on the road and stirs the leaves on the trees into a chorus of hushed murmurs.

What is the sound of extinction?

November 14, 2019

With apt gravity, artist-activists Crystelle Vu and Julian Oliver have chosen the solemn timbre of a traditional Chau Gong. Bearing “the stark neo-primitivist image” of the Extinction Symbol — an hourglass (for time, swiftly depleting) within a circle (for the planet) — their automated instrument is called “The Extinction Gong.”

Never go

November 14, 2019

Never go to art school. Never go to New York. Never rent a loft. Dump your font folder. Forget symmetry and colour coordination. Stop taking text from editorial that you don’t read and packaging it in eye-catching ways. Walk away from your computer.

Friends, comrades, brothers, sisters

November 5, 2019

Not Radicals, But Self-Propagandizers & Fashionistas

September 18, 2019

Hitler’s mass-rally appearances were constructs of words, military symbols, architectural backgrounds and nationalistic emblems designed to have maximum effect on giant mobs gathered in the open air. Propaganda today has evolved to an entirely different level. We are no longer propagandized exclusively as part of an audience that attends the showing of a documentary or listens to a demagogue’s speech.

To: Justin Trudeau

September 18, 2019

To: Justin Trudeau RE: Trans Mountain Pipeline No. No, and again, no. A hundred billion times, no. Absolutely and unequivocally no. No under any circumstances, no with zero possibility for a later change of mind. 100% concentrated absolutely not no.

Millennial Mess

September 18, 2019

I was a fucking millennial mess. In and out of the psych ward, psychotic, bipolar, whatever comorbidity du jour; for a year I ended up chemically lobotomized by antipsychotic wunderkind Abilify, and it’s out-of-vogue older brother Seroquel.

The Emancipation of the Future

September 18, 2019

Ha! Wild how time flies, and ideas grow. Bill Mollison and David Holmgren would be proud papas, were they to see the world today. Their permababy has flourished into a permaworld! It took a while to really get anywhere, but after the Global Food Apartheid in the 2020s, there was no going back. Renegades like Ron Finley boiled down the heart of permaculture—creating your own system—into a simple action: grow your own food!

What Good Is ‘Community’ When Someone Else Makes All the Rules?

September 18, 2019

‍We imagine community as a co-created project in which everything can be negotiated, in which everyone has a stake, in which democracy can flourish. The digital platforms present rich, human-built spaces where we can gather, have a voice and feel supported. But their promise of community masks a whole other layer of control — an organizing, siphoning, coercive force with its own private purposes. This is what has been sinking in, for more of us, over the past months, as attention turns toward these platforms and sentiment turns against them.