TEXTUAL ACTANTS
For a time, this was a regular journey, only before these tunnels were burrowed through (the better to spew the city’s innards into its own estuarine afterbirth).
TEXTUAL ACTANTS is a reflexive exploration of the things which hold things together, be they lengths of steel, programming protocols, recognised authors, or narratives of self. It pivots from the steel I-beam, and a pilgrimage to the steelworks in Wallonia that first made them, to the onscreen ‘I-beam’ cursor by which we navigate digital text. Via the supposed blankness of deserts and the techno-utopian imaginaries of Silicon Valley, six interweaving texts attend to
the slippery shifting relations of textualities and materialities, and where bodies and subjects (and authors and readers) sit within these.
‘You won’t read this and Adam Walker hasn’t authored it. Instead, and together, you’ll be in this book, mapping, systematising, and modelling—forming it from the material world’s governances, its archives and philosophies of such. This is a generous work for thinkers who will notice a baton being passed, and roll up their sleeves.’
–> Roy Claire Potter
‘Proceeding by drift and detour, by breakdown and rearrangement, in prose at once spare and restless, Walker takes us through deserts both material and imagined, through post-industrial ruins and mirrored dreamscapes,through the infrastructures that hold our texts and the texts that hold our infrastructures. The result is a lucid derangement: a meditation on art, labour, history, and exhaustion, where nothing stands alone and nothing quite falls.’
–> Frank Wasser
Adam Walker is an artist and writer. Their practice is research-led, critically and reflexively considering structures of inequality, not least their own complicit position amid these. Text lies at the centre of their practice, including its extensions into digital terrains as code and data. Interruption and impropriety are sought: subtexts and counter-texts that interrupt dominant textual flows. The works are sometimes written; other times they spill into performance, moving-image and digital forms, and have been exhibited, performed, published, and commissioned by institutions including the Serpentine, ICA, Tate, and Tyneside Cinema. Their monograph Art, Labour, Text and Radical Care was published by Routledge in 2023.
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TEXTUAL ACTANTS is a reflexive exploration of the things which hold things together, be they lengths of steel, programming protocols, recognised authors, or narratives of self. It pivots from the steel I-beam, and a pilgrimage to the steelworks in Wallonia that first made them, to the onscreen ‘I-beam’ cursor by which we navigate digital text. Via the supposed blankness of deserts and the techno-utopian imaginaries of Silicon Valley, six interweaving texts attend to
the slippery shifting relations of textualities and materialities, and where bodies and subjects (and authors and readers) sit within these.
‘You won’t read this and Adam Walker hasn’t authored it. Instead, and together, you’ll be in this book, mapping, systematising, and modelling—forming it from the material world’s governances, its archives and philosophies of such. This is a generous work for thinkers who will notice a baton being passed, and roll up their sleeves.’
–> Roy Claire Potter
‘Proceeding by drift and detour, by breakdown and rearrangement, in prose at once spare and restless, Walker takes us through deserts both material and imagined, through post-industrial ruins and mirrored dreamscapes,through the infrastructures that hold our texts and the texts that hold our infrastructures. The result is a lucid derangement: a meditation on art, labour, history, and exhaustion, where nothing stands alone and nothing quite falls.’
–> Frank Wasser
Adam Walker is an artist and writer. Their practice is research-led, critically and reflexively considering structures of inequality, not least their own complicit position amid these. Text lies at the centre of their practice, including its extensions into digital terrains as code and data. Interruption and impropriety are sought: subtexts and counter-texts that interrupt dominant textual flows. The works are sometimes written; other times they spill into performance, moving-image and digital forms, and have been exhibited, performed, published, and commissioned by institutions including the Serpentine, ICA, Tate, and Tyneside Cinema. Their monograph Art, Labour, Text and Radical Care was published by Routledge in 2023.
Next Book ->
184 pages
120 mm x 190 mm
80 mm French flaps (cover)
Format: Paperback
ISBN 978-1-9194826-0-6
£16.00
120 mm x 190 mm
80 mm French flaps (cover)
Format: Paperback
ISBN 978-1-9194826-0-6
£16.00