Basel Dialogues Vol. I: Real Intelligence (and Other Flows and Fictions)

“We talk—we always have.” So begins Real Intelligence (and Other Flows and Fictions), the first volume of Basel Dialogues, a new critical book series from the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW. Featuring recent conversations among artists, architects, designers, poets, historians, filmmakers, academics and other hybrid practitioners within the context (and sometimes campus) of the Basel Academy, Real Intelligence (and Other Flows and Fictions) is philosophical, fervent, and sometimes funny. Its winding conversations concern issues of intelligence, the documentary gesture and the real, the poor copy of coloniality, and fiction as a form of design. Flows—of images, peoples, waters, capital, and language, as algorithm or liquid—are repeatedly evoked, suggesting the speed at which our ideas move. In every case, though, the issues articulated transcend discipline, suggesting that the most imperative concerns of the present moment inevitably cross fields and form, just as those speaking mostly do.

Edited by Quinn Latimer and Claudia Perren, and designed by Marietta Eugster, Basel Dialogues launches with its first volume, Real Intelligence (and Other Flows and Fictions), in two distinct language editions, English and German. Its conversations include artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme in discussion with Quinn Latimer and Chus Martínez on how call-and-response structures, and aural forms of futurity operate in their spectral and sensorial filmic installations (“Sound Accumulates and Doesn’t Die”); Himali Singh Soin and Alexis Rider in conversation with Elise Lammer about southern summers and ancestral minerals (“Healing from Meteorites”); and Philip Ursprung in dialogue with Kambiz Shafei about the influence of image-making technologies on the buildings we do and don’t make (“Building The Real Through a Spectrum of Images”).

To that end, if voices fill our days and nights, our schools and homes, studios and stages, interiors and exteriors, fields and forms, so do they our built and unbuilt landscapes both. Spoken language—which preceded its earliest written forms by untold millennia—strobes and structures our intimate lives and artistic labors. What are we creating, then, with our insistent speech, our constant conversations, our theoretical discourse, our casual asides, our idle chatter? In the transmission of language—all its various tonalities and technologies—relation happens, thinking happens, culture happens, meaning happens, we know this. But what else?

Basel Dialogues attempts some answers. To be published every two years, the new critical book series centers conversation and the dialogic form to give insight into the voices that animate the contemporary academy and the most vital questions of the day. Gleaned from the five institutes that constitute the campus of the Basel Academy of Art and Design, the conversations held there shed light on the ideas and conditions, forms and materials, and poetics and politics that contemporary artists, architects, designers, thinkers, filmmakers, writers, thinkers and other practitioners are most concerned with, both in theory and practice, within the academy and beyond it.

The first volume of the series, Real Intelligence (and Other Flows and Fictions), will launch on June 11, at 4pm, during Art Basel week at CIVIC, on the campus of the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, and on June 13, at 5pm, at the I Never Read Art Book Fair Basel (walther bistrobar, Kasernenhof 8, 4058 Basel). The launches will include short readings from the book, which features conversations with Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Camila Lucero Allegri, Gabriela Aquije, Johannes Bruder, Ted Davis, Marcel Gygli, Anna Flurina Kälin, Ines Kleesattel, Quinn Latimer, Elise Lammer, Chus Martinez, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Claudia Perren, Mariana Pestana, Alexis Rider, Kambiz Shafei, Himali Singh Soin, Solveig Qu Suess, Casey Reas, Qingyi Ren, Evelyne Roth, Selena Savić, Hanna Sipos, Aylin Yildirim Tschoepe, Nicolaj van der Meulen, Philip Ursprung, Jeffrey Martin Vogt, and Andreas Wenger.

Real Intelligence (and Other Flows and Fictions) 
Volume I of Basel Dialogues, a new critical book series from the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW. Edited by Quinn Latimer and Claudia Perren. Designed by Marietta Eugster. Published by Christoph Merian Verlag, June 2024. 196 pages, 28 color illustrations, softcover, ISBN 978-3-03969-026-8.