Best of Rhizome: September 2013

Performance by Genevieve Belleveau featuring Mikey Coyte at "gURLs."

In September, as we prepared for Ann Hirsch's play in early October, feminism was very much on our minds. We published a report by Rachel Rabbit White from a girls-only event at Transfer Gallery in Brooklyn (pictured); we urged you to go see Alien She at the Miller Gallery in Pittsburgh; we re-printed an article by Jacob King that used Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's writing as a way of thinking about last summer's online debate about the "Man-Child;" we commissioned a preview of Hirsch's work by Moira Weigel (a co-author of the original "Man-Child" article). Megan Heuer brought a feminist slant to Jonathan Crary's 24/7, arguing that sleep is merely one "affective" dimension of human life that is undervalued by neolibaral capitalism, along with things like care and empathy that have historically been coded as female.

On the internet literature front, Brendan C. Byrne wrote an excellent analysis of Tom Disch's "Endzone," a Livejournal kept by the sci-fi author for two years before his death, now serving as a virtual memorial. That piece garnered the most intriguing comment of the month, from someone going by "Donovan's Brain," who described "Endzone" as "a treasure chest full of gems, sticky with blood...still taking comments like a ghost ship grows barnacles." Daniel Rourke, meanwhile, looked to popular cinema, where the summer blockbuster Man of Steel made use of glitch aesthetics to represent a space known as "The Phantom Zone."

We ran an Artist Profile of Rachel Reupke, a long-form interview with James Richards, and another interview with Studio for Propositional Cinema, which could be an artist collective or maybe a curatorial collective, but, as they say, "We have no idea." 

We published a letter by Constant Dullaart to Jennifer Knoll, who appeared in a early Photoshop meme. She hasn't yet responded, but we'll be doing more first-person writing by artists in the future. We decided to shelve "The Week Ahead," our weekly roundup of listings, and replaced it with occasional short-form preview posts about specific, promising-looking things in the world of art and technology, like this one about Speculations on Anonymous Materials at Fridericianum

Finally, we wrote a short post about an emerging genre of music known as Black Midi, which came to our attention via the inimitable Goto80.