Last week Runner Magazine published the play Is It Morning Yet? by will street. In this interview, he discusses his play, past works and influences throughout time...
Interview by Ashley Cook
February 13, 2023
The ambition of the world’s superpowers to travel to space, leaving our earthly home through sheer force of will and scientific progress, is the same ambition which led them to construct massive social housing complexes like Cite Gagarine, New York’s Queensbridge Houses, my own city’s Frederick Douglass Homes (known colloquially as the Brewster Projects), the Techwood Homes in Atlanta, and to an extent the entire city of Brasilia...
Walter Lucken IV
June 6, 2022
I interpret Trudell’s concept of “being human” as defined by a union of “being” - a physical and psychological body event - with conscientious acts of humanity that disrupt colonial power structures. This alignment of the embodied self and the thinking mind allows us to unsettle normative conditioning and connect to a decolonized version of ourselves. I outline how “being human” simultaneously eschews colonial identities and helps one internalize a decolonized paradigm....
Andrew Kaplowitz and Paris La Don
November 29, 2021
What transforms in the body when it becomes ill—not just physically, but its entire essence?
Marissa Jezak
October 25, 2021
It is not a surprise that the importance of imagery on our society has been growing exponentially for decades, with the adoption of technology solely used to create, produce, edit, distribute, and syndicate it. There are over 3 billion images shared daily, and over a trillion images copyrighted every year. There is an entire system running parallel to culture that stores, showcases, and hides the content created...
Chris McGraw
August 9, 2021
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” I kinda think like people are a wrapper around the animalistic void. At certain times the wrapper gets thin or goes away. And hence the human instrumentality initiative seeks to unify the void inside all of us lmao
Palm Treat and an Anonymous Media Theorist
May 10, 2021
It has always been convenient to implement hierarchies and categorization as a way to understand differences, but in effect, this practice has robbed everything that exists within this framework of its right for more autonomous, natural, wild and enchanting ways to “be” and “engage”.
En·chant·ment (n) a feeling of great pleasure or delight; the state of being under a spell, magic...
Ashley Cook
March 1, 2021
On July 31st of this year, the Twitter account belonging to Wayne State University’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors tweeted that "lowering Black student enrollment by 40% is nothing to celebrate!" and that the Wilson administration had moved the university "away from its mission to serve our community in Detroit"...
Walter Lucken IV
December 7, 2020
In the early 2000s self portraiture started to become a central component in defining youth subcultures, with the increased manufacturing of cell phone cameras and escalating popularity of online social networking. People have been making self portraits forever, but before digital photography became such an effortless and widely accessible tool, the self portrait was more of a niche form of art reserved for traditionally skilled artists and photographers. Now it’s omnipresent...
Marissa Jezak
November 9, 2020
It can be interesting to examine a certain complex that seems to mark the tone for the 21st century of Modern humankind; this complex, and it’s contradictions, occur from the experience of existing in a body that is between an “animal” and a “human”. By recognizing the constant interplay between these two states, which can be abruptly broken, or fluidly linked, we can attempt to communicate our experiences as “modern” humans in the modern world, and unpack its profound impact on our understanding of mental health, gender, race, class, nature, species...and machine...
Ashley Cook
October 5, 2020
I grew up in a very small Midwestern town. The type of quaint and sleepy place where every neighbor waved to one-another and knew your brother, your cousin and your great grandmother. The private Christian elementary and middle schools I attended had a 100% white staff and student population. My public high school in the same town maintained roughly 98%. I believe the homogeneity of my surroundings and complete lack of representation or education about any other races, creeds, or colors, wove an intentional fabric of “blissful” ignorance which has taken me half my life to begin to unravel and reconstruct...
Christiana Laine
August 24, 2020
This is not an essay as such; it is not expository nor is it persuasive. I have no argument to make. Rather this is an attempt to account for the events that have defined the year. It is a patchwork analysis. It is not a new summation of the present crises by any means, but through repetition and slight iterations, comes a grain of nuance which develops the conversation ever so slightly. The decade commenced with symbolic significance. 2020 was employed to inscribe inspirational social media posts with “Vision is 2020,” suggesting finally that “this would be the year!” But, the year for what?..
Olivia Gilmore
July 20, 2020
As artists we are conditioned to believe that our worth is synonymous with the capital we generate and the admiration we receive. But what power does our work hold, apart from its role in this social exchange? The way art functions not only in a social & political context, but as a tool for healing & self liberation is very relevant in late capitalist society. The exhausting and alienating effects of the economic system we live in tend to be overwhelming, and can cause us to gravitate toward self destruction...
Marissa Jezak
July 6, 2020
What would it mean, as contemporary moderns, to recognize these areas, the hybrids, the blocks of movement of something which is in transition between what it was and what it will be? As many contemporary philosophers and anthropologists are beginning to see this need for control as paradoxical and highly problematic, they are asking “how do we break from these tendencies?” And what kinds of potential comes with the suspension of our need for control?..
Ashley Cook
June 8, 2020
“Conscious awareness is a powerful tool to transcending unconscious patterns. It fosters an expanded perspective and openness to new possibilities. It is a process of recognizing what is going on inside and out, the effects of decisions and actions, and the interaction between the complex array of factors and forces. It is seeing, observing our thoughts, recognizing our feelings and the effect they are having on us and others; it functions as...
Ashley Cook
April 24, 2020