States of the Body Produced by Love

A modern mystical journey through love – a many-headed snake twisting through devotion, sacrifice and the dream of returning home. In her visionary debut, Nisha Ramayya conjures an opalescent world by way of Tantric ritual and myth.

More Detail

Unknown Language

A mutant fiction of speculative mysticism: time travel, visions and inner paths to outer space.

More Detail

Weird Technology Bundle—30% off Pharmako-AI + Atlas of Anomalous AI + The White Paper

30% off Pharmako-AI + Atlas of Anomalous AI + The White Paper

More Detail

Mystic Bundle—30% off Spells + States of the Body Produced by Love + Unknown Language

30% off Spells + States of the Body Produced by Love + Unknown Language

More Detail

Pharmako-AI

The first book to be co-created with the emergent AI, Pharmako-AI is a hallucinatory journey into selfhood, ecology and intelligence via cyberpunk, ancestry and biosemiotics. Through a writing process akin to musical improvisation, Allado-McDowell and GPT-3 together offer a fractal poetics of AI and a glimpse into the future of literature.

More Detail

Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry

Spells brings together thirty-six contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. These poems unmake the world around them, so that it might be remade anew.

 

More Detail

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin tells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination.

More Detail

Atlas of Anomalous AI

Like a snake eating its tail, artificial intelligence exists in a circular relationship with its human creators.

Please note: due to the Covid-19 pandemic there are delays on our usual shipping times, especially for international orders. We can’t accept any liability for any items that don’t arrive within the timeframe you expect as a result of disruption from the pandemic, as this is out of our control. Thank you for understanding.

Atlas of Anomalous AI presents a hyperdimensional view of the world, through a broad range of perspectives that explore the question of what AI has been and what it is becoming.

More Detail

Leave Husband, Practice Witchcraft Tote

“Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” — Pat Robertson

More Detail

Culture Is Not Your Friend Tote

“Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend.” — Terence McKenna

More Detail

Altered States

What are altered states of consciousness? Can altered states produce altered worlds? Altered States explores the varieties of consciousness and revelatory experience. These poems stand at the thresholds of alterity to propose a new psychedelic style for the 21st century.

 

More Detail

Worlding: Amelia Winger-Bearskin – SKY WORLD/CLOUD WORLD

Thursday 20 January,

Please note: This event starts 1 hour earlier than the other events in the Worlding series — at 6 pm GMT/ 1 pm EST/ 10 am PST

This event is 'pay what you want': all profits made will be donated to NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led organization dedicated to building Indigenous power.

Artist Amelia Winger-Bearskin gives an illustrated lecture about her project SKY WORLD/CLOUD WORLD, which examines the sacred nature of our 'cloud'-based communications.

SKY WORLD/CLOUD WORLD tries to understand 'the cloud' as both a spiritual place and a vehicle for the ephemeral way in which we choose to communicate with our kin over distance and time. This concept of the cloud in web-based applications has interrupted our notion of a SKY WORLD/CLOUD WORLD which is the grand connective tissue all humans have with one another. We must maintain and honour our SKY WORLD/CLOUD WORLD, the layer of sky which protects our world, maintains our atmosphere, and which has given us the ability to communicate through invisible signals through satellites, tubes and more importantly through dreams and imagination.

Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist who innovates with artificial intelligence in ways that make a positive impact on our community and the environment. She is a Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair and Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Arts, at the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida. She is the inventor of Honor Native Sky, a project for the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture: Honor Native Land Initiative. She founded Wampum.Codes which is both an award-winning podcast and an ethical framework for software development based on indigenous values of co-creation.  Wampum.codes was awarded a Mozilla Fellowship embedded at the MIT Co-Creation Studio from 2019-2020 and was featured at the 2021 imagineNative festival. She continued her research in 2021 at Stanford University as their artist and technologist in residence made possible by the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in Honor of Roberta Bowman Denning (VAF).

In 2019 she was a delegate at the Summit on Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion  for His Holiness, The 14th Dalai Lama, at his World Headquarters in Dharmsala India.  In 2018 she was awarded a MacArthur/Sundance Institute fellowship for her 360 video immersive installation in collaboration with the artist Wendy Red Star (supported by the Google JUMP Creator program). The non-profit she founded IDEA New Rochelle, in partnership with the New Rochelle Mayor’s Office, won the 2018 $1 Million Dollar Bloomberg Mayor’s Challenge for their VR/AR Citizen toolkit to help the community co-design their city.  In 2018 she was awarded the 100k Alternative Realities Prize for her Virtual Reality Project from Engadget and Verizon Media. Amelia is the founder of the stupidhackathon.com.

Amelia is Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan.

This event will take place via Zoom. We will send you your Zoom link about one hour before the event starts.

This event is 'pay what you want': all profits made will be donated to NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led organization dedicated to building Indigenous power.

More Detail

Worlding: Reza Negarestani – We do not need to be saved from a world we could have: of worlds and humans

Thursday 3 February, 7pm GMT / 2pm EST / 11am PST

Neither entirely philosophical nor fully science-fictional, this presentation by philosopher Reza Negarestani seeks to define what it means to live in or inhabit a world, all things considered. Its title refers to Christopher Nolan's latest movie Tenet, in which the protagonists flaunt their time-policing powers of saving us from a different world we could have.

By virtue of living in a world, one has, also, the wherewithal to think about what else could have happened. Eventually, one arrives at an ethical and communist responsibility to travel to the past to postulate and exemplify what sort of worlds and humans we could have, and which the time cops' narratives deprive us of.

Reza Negarestani is a philosopher and writer. Since the early 2000s, he has contributed extensively to journals and anthologies and lectured at numerous international universities and institutes. Negarestani’s writings have been translated into more than twelve languages, including Russian. His latest philosophical work, Intelligence and Spirit (Urbanomic/Sequence Press/MIT, 2018), is an inquiry into the meaning of intelligence at the intersection of artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, theory of computation, and the philosophy of German Idealism. Negarestani’s most recent project focuses on worldmaking and the question of what it means to inhabit a world as what Wittgenstein would have called a lifeform.

This event will take place via Zoom. We will send you your Zoom link about one hour before the event starts.

This event is 'pay what you want': we thank you for your support of independent publishing in these challenging times!

More Detail

Worlding: John Tresch – Cosmograms, or How To Do Things with Worlds

Thursday 17 February, 7pm GMT/ 2pm EST/ 11am PST

All cultures have composed and deployed representations of everything that is – cosmograms – to convey the fundamental entities, relations and processes that make up the universe.

Studying cosmograms as pictures, sculptures, books, rituals, buildings, cities and so on is a way to compare worlds – their components, histories, aesthetics and modes of being – as they are proposed, debated and imposed: as they come together and fall apart.

In this talk, John Tresch draws from a forthcoming book looking at the creation and impact of scientific cosmograms alongside those of religion, myth and art.

John Tresch is professor of history of art, science, and folk practice at the Warburg Institute, University of London. He’s the author of The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science and The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon, and an editor of the History of Anthropology Review.

This event will take place via Zoom. We will send you your Zoom link about one hour before the event starts.

This event is 'pay what you want': we thank you for your support of independent publishing in these challenging times!

More Detail

Visions Bundle—30% off Pharmako-AI + Altered States + Unknown Language

Visions Bundle—30% off Pharmako-AI + Altered States + Unknown Language 

Give generously to yourself and loved ones this January with our themed bundles, catering to all tastes: from tech gnostics to the mystically inclined to the cosmically fearful. 

Pharmako-AI by K Allado-McDowell

The first book to be co-created with the emergent AI, Pharmako-AI is a hallucinatory journey into selfhood, ecology and intelligence via cyberpunk, ancestry and biosemiotics. Through a writing process akin to musical improvisation, Allado-McDowell and GPT-3 together offer a fractal poetics of AI and a glimpse into the future of literature.

Pharmako-AI reimagines cybernetics for a world facing multiple crises, with profound implications for how we see ourselves, nature and technology in the 21st century.

Altered States edited by Sarah Shin and Ben Vickers

What are altered states of consciousness? Can altered states produce altered worlds? Altered States explores the varieties of consciousness and revelatory experience. Bringing together thirty-six contributions, Altered States includes encounters with dreams, panpsychism, artificial intelligence, grief, plant allies, mushrooms, ritual and journeys in sound and beyond. These poems stand at the thresholds of alterity to propose a new psychedelic style for the twenty-first century. 

Unknown Language by Hildegard of Bingen and Huw Lemmey

A mutant fiction of speculative mysticism.

In this story of survival and miracles,  young Hildegard of Bingen encounters love, both queer and divine, and great peril. As the visionary healer travels through the unfamiliar landscape following a great cataclysm, she discovers the mythic quantum energy of viriditas in the natural world around her. Her journey becomes one of return, to the sacred truth of her own being. With an introductory story by Bhanu Kapil and an afterword by Alice Spawls.

More Detail

Poetry Bundle—30% off Spells + Altered States + States of the Body Produced by Love

30% off Spells + Altered States + States of the Body Produced by Love

Give generously to yourself and loved ones this January with our themed bundles, catering to all tastes: from tech gnostics to the mystically inclined to the cosmically fearful. 

Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry

Spells brings together thirty-six contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. These poems unmake the world around them, so that it might be remade anew.

Kaveh Akbar, Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Vahni Capildeo, Kayo Chingonyi, Elinor Cleghorn, CAConrad, Nia Davies, Kate Duckney, Livia Franchini, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Rebecca May Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Ursula K. Le Guin, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Dolly Turing, Jane Yeh.

Altered States edited by Sarah Shin and Ben Vickers

What are altered states of consciousness? Can altered states produce altered worlds? Altered States explores the varieties of consciousness and revelatory experience. Bringing together thirty-six contributions, Altered States includes encounters with dreams, panpsychism, artificial intelligence, grief, plant allies, mushrooms, ritual and journeys in sound and beyond. These poems stand at the thresholds of alterity to propose a new psychedelic style for the twenty-first century.

States of the Body Produced by Love by Nisha Ramayya

A modern mystical journey through love – a many-headed snake twisting through devotion, sacrifice and the dream of returning home. 

In her visionary debut, Nisha Ramayya conjures an opalescent world by way of Tantric ritual and myth. Thousand-petalled lotuses bloom inside skulls, goddesses with dirty feet charm honeybees, strains of jazz standards bleed into anti-national anthems. States of the Body Produced By Love weaves essays, poetry and images together to offer fierce meditations on diasporic identity, language and resistance. From grief to bliss, this book explores the many states of the body seized by love in an incantation that never leaves its hold. 

30% off Spells + Altered States + States of the Body Produced by Love

More Detail

Worlding: Alice Bucknell – Aquaform, Terraform, Aeroform: Worlding the Interplanetary

Thursday 3 March 2022, 7pm GMT / 2pm EST / 11am PST

For millennia, Mars has saturated public imagination with alternative worlds, fantastical ecosystems home to high-tech canal cities, cephalopod dwellers, and communist utopias. But as our image of the Red Planet pivots increasingly towards that of a site for human habitation and resource extraction – with billionaire tech despots at the helm – how can worlding help us envision the many possible futures for Mars, as a host for both human and nonhuman life? What are the legal, political, ecological, and existential frameworks in which these worlds could take shape?

Drawing on speculative fiction strategies, as well as materials science, linguistics, space law, and prophetic applications of AI, artist Alice Bucknell explores a trifecta of possible Martian worlds, from a bio-infrastructure business vending clean water and air back to Earth, to a mystic cult of plant worshippers auguring ancient polyglot ecologies on the Red Planet. Bucknell takes us behind the scenes of interplanetary worlding processes, including collaborations with space lawyers, arctic researchers, Scottish drone pilots, NLP specialists, and the Language AI GPT-3.

Alice Bucknell is an artist and writer based in London. Working primarily through game engines, she explores interconnections of architecture, ecology, magic, and nonhuman and machine intelligence. She is the organiser of New Mystics, a platform exploring magic, mysticism, ritual, and technology.

This event will take place via Zoom. We will send you your Zoom link about one hour before the event starts.

This event is 'pay what you want': we thank you for your support of independent publishing in these challenging times!

More Detail

Worlding: Flavie Audi and Aliya Say – Other Worlds

What are other worlds? How is the invisible made visible, felt and sensed? What forms and shapes can the divine take in the contemporary context – and how close can we get? In conversation through the form of a visual essay, Flavie Audi and Aliya Say explore tools, approaches and media that have been used to visualise and narrate spirit realms by artists including Wassily Kandinsky, Hilma af Klint, AbEx and Janet Sobel, and in their own speculative practices looking towards the future utilising innovative materials and methods. 

They ask what it means to engage with the unseen and unknowable in a Westernised society that remains underpinned by rationalism and the mode of the visible, and what the current surge of interest in esotericism might portend. Are there parallels between the present moment and 150 years ago, when these questions were raised by a wide number of thinkers, writers and mystics during the Spiritualist movement? Both historically and today, how is spirituality connected with social issues – and what are the dangers of its capture and colonisation?

 

Flavie Audi explores otherworlds in relation to her practice, working with the manipulation of glass. For the artist, glass provides a point of departure for making visible the invisible, highlighting the concrescence between physical and immaterial worlds. Audi presents her work, which contemplates a speculative world of cosmic fragments and new types of landscape formations.  

 

This event will take place via Zoom. We will send you your Zoom link about one hour before the event starts.

This event is 'pay what you want': we thank you for your support of independent publishing in these challenging times!

More Detail