Launch of e-flux Index #7
A journal of a thousand things
The seventh issue of the e-flux Index, e-flux's quarterly publication, is now available in print and for digital download.
How do we change our perspective when our sightlines are confined to perspectival alleyways, transfixed by the horrors playing out on our screens? Sensible apostles of objectivity tell us to zoom out, find a bird's-eye view—but what does it mean to take in a view from above? As Scottish painter Carol Rhodes remarked of her aerial view paintings, a vertiginous perspective enables a kind of spatial egalitarianism: “Front doesn't have priority over middle-ground, middle-ground over background... When you notice something, really notice it, you're inside it and outside it at the same time.” Distance, she reminds us, doesn’t need to mean detachment.
So begins the seventh issue of e-flux Index, an invitation to gain some perspective. Featuring 97 contributors, the 584 pages of this “publication of a thousand things” combine long-form essays on art, architecture, and contemporary culture; exhibition and film reviews; interviews; theory; and dispatches from live political conjunctures into eleven thematic sections.
Index #7 gathers together and recombines everything e-flux published between December 2024 and February 2025, floating upward to survey the terrain below. From aerial perspectives to underground resistance, algorithmic futures to the wet concrete of revolutionary foment, Index #7 surveys the landscape of contemporary critical thought.
The issue begins with Vegetarians Miss Fewer Flights, examining prediction and possibility in an age of AI-generated slop. Seeking Truth From Facts takes a hard turn into the sober world of contingency, facticity, and documentary, while Playtime stages games between Holy Fools, Tricksters, and socialist RPG enthusiasts. The Form Was Simple investigates the lingering Question of Form across artistic, political, and architectural discourse, from the postcapitalist form of the Commune to modernist hospital typologies (the “matchbox on a muffin.”)
Hardcore Diaries presents essays from e-flux Architecture's Reconstruction project, exploring a decade of Ukraine's grassroots rebuilding during wartime. Scratching on things I could disavow meanwhile spins the globe to examine what happens when imperialist, Occidental anchoring gets displaced. Purported centers and peripheries become recalibrated, producing new "intense proximities" through globalized supply chains and labor flows. Chronotopes tracks how multiple and often incommensurable timescales intermesh and overwrite one another.
Walls of Complexity reckons with increasing orders of epistemic bewilderment, from post-genomic cancer research to the forensic institutional mapping of Hans Haacke. Wet Concrete catches revolutionary time in that volatile moment after the old order is deposed but before new institutions set. We Want Everything explores how desire makes everything blossom while possession makes it wither, from speculative economic bubbles like Tulipomania to the insatiable new needs produced by advertising, from experimental eroticism to the repressed desires surfacing in contemporary cinema. Index #7 draws its closing breath with They Are Shutting Off the Lights, a meditation on health, death, therapy, and healing.
The printed edition of the Index is available to purchase from select art and design bookstores, as well as museums, throughout Canada, East Asia, Europe, North America, and the United Kingdom. The publication is distributed by Antenne Books (Europe and the UK), Les presses du réel (Europe), Asterism Books (USA), Art Metropole (Canada), The Book Society (East Asia), and Buchhandlung Walther König (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). Annual subscriptions, covering four issues, are available at both institutional and individual rates here.
The seventh issue of e-flux Index features contributions from: Maria José de Abreu, Yin Aiwen, Tom Allen, Carmen Amengual, Agnes Arnold-Forster, Hallie Ayres, Stephanie Bailey, Beauty Studio, Daniel Belasco, Crystal Bennes, Xenia Benivolski, Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Pietro Bianchi, Daniella Brito, Mikael Brunila, Gaby Cepeda, Leslie Chapman, Adeline Chia, Le Corbusier, Max Crosbie-Jones, Amica Dall, Tom Denman, Jacob Dreyer, Travis Diehl, Maria Dimitrova, Brian Dillon, Ben Eastham, Ren Ebel, Sergei Eisenstein, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Leopoldina Fortunati, Kenny Fries, Orit Gat, Alan Gilbert, Henry Giroux, Nilo Goldfarb, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Reinier de Graaf, Valeria Graziano, Max Grünberg, Alice Guy-Blaché, Thomas Allen Harris, Aslak Aamot Helm, Britta Hentschel, Jörg Heiser, Yuliia Holiuk, Ekalan Hou, Yuk Hui, Kateryna Iakovlenko, Isabel Jacobs, Kseniia Kalmus, Tamta Khalvashi, Bilal Khbeiz, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Sabu Kohso, Marci Kwon, Shigeko Kubota, Michael Kurtz, R.H. Lossin, Sven Lütticken, Kazimir Malevich, Ilan Manouach, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, Mohamed Amer Meziane, Evan Moffitt, Stanislaus von Moos, Serubiri Moses, Charles Tonderai Mudede, Michał Murawski, Luka Nakhutsrishvili, Musoke Nalwoga, Sean O'Toole, Andrii Palash, Tania Pashynska, Alexei Penzin, Andreas Petrossiants, Sofia Pinedo-Padoch, Yvan Prkachin, Jason Read, Émilie Renard, Alex Retegan, Svetlana Romanova, Kristin Ross, Kateryna Rusetska, Juan José Santos, Danilo Scholz, Nikolay Smirnov, Claire Staebler, Alina Stamenova, Thotti, Pramodha Weerasekera, Mathilde Walker-Billaud, McKenzie Wark, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Ada Wordsworth, Jenny Wu, Lydia Xynogala, Soyoung Yoon, Mi You, Yuliya Yurchenko, Innas Tsuroiya, Dingxin Zhao, Yiren Zhao, and Slavoj Žižek.
