It is now October, when the veils between worlds become thin. In this issue, there are human worlds and more-than-human worlds, and the university worlds, world wars, and art worlds that cross between them. Tam Donner plumbs the world we live in. Have you heard the one where universities give out honorary hoods to painters and warmongers alike? Take a look at the class pictures. Andreas Petrossiants follows the lead of Mount Etna, Europe’s oldest active volcano, where Pasolini may have seen a stage—or a screen—on which to feature the volcano’s ability to communize time, showing “linear, European time for the cruel joke of modernity that it is.”
“To actually be alive,” Deborah Bird Rose writes in an essay we present posthumously, “is to share in and contribute to the liveliness of the world”—where flying foxes are among the next of kin to a human Lawman in Yarralin and Lingara, and humans pay their respects to the megabats. In Amsterdam, Hypatia Vourloumis and Sandra Ruiz intervene to help a frog barely cross a road, which leads to the two thinkers enacting resonances, queer research, dirty methods, and a book on formless formation that saves “each other from the non-study that permeates the profession,” prompting an ongoing family reunion with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney.
Also in this issue, Alexander R. Galloway and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan fail to agree on whether computing can be understood as a visual or nonvisual medium, but end up debating the processes of translation by which the digital and the analog rub up against the domain of aesthetics. Hito Steyerl, Department of Decentralization, and GPT-3 open up a game and its game map. Are you an Admin? Do you think you are ready to make an art world—or two, or three, or more—obsolete? Go ahead and find out. You are invited to choose your own adventure and figure out who you are by deciding which (art) worlds to compost and resurrect.
Elizabeth A. Povinelli draws overlaps between who was there before the Alps in Italy were called that, and who was there before the Port of Darwin crashed into the Karrabing Indigenous world. In between is almost exactly the same amount of time, and “a world structured to care for the existence of some and not others.” Still, “the love of friendship is a form of wisdom always haunted by the our-ness that makes us unlike, and other than, all other social relationships. Good and bad news follows. I cannot be rid of you. Even death cannot end us.”