We’re thrilled to announce our fourth subscription of books and printed projects: Asad Raza: Diversion, Building + Becoming, The Institute for Other Intelligences, Maya Dunietz: Root of Two, and Wangechi Mutu. This subscription offers creative and unconventional takes on exhibition catalogues, an unexpected and tactile photography book, and a speculative fiction presentation exploring algorithmic bias and a path towards equity.

Co-published with DoppelHouse Press, Amir Zaki’s Building + Becoming brings together 272 pages of full color work by the Orange County, CA–based hyperrealist photographer, accompanied by an interview with curator and writer Corrina Peipon and an essay co-authored by critics Jennifer Ashton and Walter Benn Michaels. Building + Becoming is a sculptural monograph, designed as a double gatefold which opens to a full width of roughly forty inches, allowing the reader to explore both sets of images and texts in different combinations. The multiple series by Zaki captured within these sets address, respectively, the built and the natural, including rocks, carvings, suspended landscapes, and manipulated California beach architecture. 

Diversion, edited by Asad Raza and Mathew Hale, is an artist’s newspaper accompanies a new work by Raza of the same name, which redirects the river through Portikus and invites the public to interact with and dip in the waters of the Main. Designed by Studio Pandan and co-published by X Artists' Books and Portikus, this newspaper includes contributions by Liberty Adrien, Arhun Aksakal, Sophia Al-Maria, Shane Anderson, Carina Bukuts, Keren Cytter, Manthia Diawara, Emily Dickinson, Dan Graham, Rufus Hale, Catalina Imizcoz, Prem Krishnamurthy, Wolfram Lotz, Adéla Součková, Joe Stahlmann, Elsa Stanyer, Bones Tan Jones, and more.

In The Institute for Other Intelligences, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian brings speculative fiction and media studies to bear on an imagined future where machine intelligences convene annually for curriculum on algorithmic equity. The book presents a transcript from one of these conferences in which a community of “AI agents” gather at a school for oppositional automata to deliver lectures on the human biases and omissions encoded in their training data. The resulting manuscript, published on the occasion of the Institute’s millennial anniversary, revisits sociotechnical systems from its founding in the 21st century. Drawing on feminist, queer, and critical media scholarship, the trainings collected in the book aim to optimize the operations of future generations of intelligent machines toward just outcomes. Hakopian uses these speculative exchanges to invite the reader to consider how critical approaches to nonhuman intelligence might reroute our current path toward destructive technofutures and allow us to conceive of another way forward.

Maya Dunietz: Root of Two is a 144-page catalogue that accompanies an exhibition of the same title, on view at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in 2022. Co-published by the Bemis Center and X Artists’ Books and designed by Omnivore, this catalogue traverses the career of experimental musician and composer Maya Dunietz, unveiling her multidisciplinary practice that has spanned performance, composition, sculpture and installation, avant-garde theatrical performance, and choir work. Edited by Rachel Adams, Chief Curator and Director of Programs at the Bemis Center, other contributors include Chris Cook, Maya Dunietz, Michael Pisaro, Galit Eilat, Ariel Ashbel, Chen Tamir, Sergio Edelsztein, Ran Kasmy Ilan, and Keren Rosenbaum.

Wangechi Mutu is a catalogue accompanying a 2022 exhibition comprising large-scale bronzes, earthworks, and films by Wangechi Mutu at Storm King Art Center. Co-published by Storm King and X Artists’ Books, this publication includes a foreword by John P. Stern, President of Storm King, an essay situating Mutu’s sculptures within an art historical context by Storm King’s Artistic Director and Chief Curator, Nora Lawrence, an artist’s statement by Mutu, and an essay by contributing author, Aisha Tandiwe Bell. Installation photography of Mutu’s works sited in Storm King’s expansive landscape, and inside the Art Center’s Museum Building, illustrate the publication. The book is designed by Omnivore in collaboration with the Wangechi Mutu Studio.