URGENCY READER 1 (2019)
252 pages + cover
Risograph printed book with black ink on Domtar Earthchoice paper
Hand-bound with 5/8 inch staples and partial wrap-around cover adhered to back page
Edition: 110 copies
Urgency Reader is a quick assembling of texts, risograph printed in Pawtucket, RI, and bound as a book at the last minute to launch at the Odds and Ends Art Book Fair at Yale University Art Gallery on December 6, 2019. Suggested topics from the open call included ⊹urgency, ⊹craft ⊹queerness ⊹gender ⊹transformation ⊹kinship ⊹race ⊹survival ⊹post-apocalyptic practice ⊹futurity ⊹pedagogy ⊹surveillance capitalism ⊹death of capital ⊹radical publishing ⊹decolonization ⊹augmentation ⊹resistance ⊹sci-fi ⊹collective care ⊹joy
Inspired by Omnibus News #1 (1969), Assembling (1970–87), and other assembling publications, Urgency Reader is an experiment in publishing as a gesture of call and response: the quick circulation of a charged collection of texts—in some cases raw, in-progress, or sketchy—to a small but deeply engaged audience. As the poet Karl Young wrote in his foreward to Assembling #12, such publications “can be read as chance-generated collages, and as spontaneous pieces of printed performance art.”
A total of eighty contributors far and wide sent 467 pages of work in just under two weeks, signaling a need to publish urgently, but less preciously, on non-corporate platforms.
Our stapler’s maximum capacity was used to determine the page count (126 sheets + cover bound with 5/8 inch staples). The goal of the edit was to be as inclusive as possible, at times asking contributors to compact their submissions in order to free up space for others. The order of the texts as they appear in the book was determined by chance by assigning a series of random integers from random.org to the alphabetical list of contributors.
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Contributors and contents—
nicole killian—A CIRCULATION ON DISTRIBUTION
Rey Carlson—PRAYER
Kenneth Reveiz—MOP, MOPE(<)
Joseph Imhauser—Mother Earth
Helen Taranowski—Security Switch
Lauren McCarthy—Reading List for Network Media, Fall 2019
LaTefy Dolley
Porpentine Charity Heartscape—THE MAXIMUM SOFTNESS CAPABLE OF BEING EXERTED BY ALL MACHINERY
Ant Lobo & Anna Barlow—THIS IS A BRICK.
Zach Deocadiz—The Internet Saved My Life
Chris Cote—Reminders
Juliana Castro—Instructions on winning someone’s love
Jerome Harris—Failed attempts at busting a nut as a result of faulty communication bewteen horny strangers via text message.
Will Kuria—Redacted from us to you. Now it’s just me and I am nothing.
Max Evans—I am rewriting my history as a gallery
Ritu Ghiya—devious and conniving
Lukas Eigler-Harding—To interface
Genevieve Flavelle—What’s queer in THE CLIMATE CRISIS?
Nikki Juen—EXCERPT FROM CYBORG MATR
Jason Lipeles—i mean this
Kirslyn Schell-Smith—Virtual Reality
Sal Randolph—Sharawadji Mix
Anna Stein—@windowspaints
Elaine Lopez—MyDataDownload
Rodrigo Moreira—AABC, 2019
Darian Razdar—NIGHTWALKERS
June T. Sanders—All fists in a dive on the southern tear, daughter of something, FORAGIRL, IDAHO GIRL (by Abigail J. Hansel)
Rachel Atakpa—a burning, GLITCH
Travess Smalley—1 Number colors burn randomly: 2 The first recorded use of jade green
Eliza Chen—Ears, Eyes, and Blood Boiling: Notes from Electronic Music Concerts
Daedalus Li—on intimate thoughts
emma rae norton—complication of the computer mouse
Lauren Traugott-Campbell—SQUISHY PLAY
nicolas baird—LITTLE CREATURE
nènè myriam konaté—koulikoro
Bobby Joe Smith III—(UN)COMMON GROUND
Luiza Dale—A trip into a void
Tiger Dingsun—Dearest Salve-maker
Mena Kamel—Have You Ever Seen a Whale
Elite Kedan—PITCHDECK
Kelsey Elder
Somnath Bhatt & Rin Kim—Dialogue between me and Rin Kim
Vuthy Lay—REFUGEE REPAIR: KHMERICANA,
Kitt Peacock—Walter Malici and the Dark Water
Leon Butler—Notes on Algorithmic Dysmorphia
Be Oakley & Noah LeBien—Failure as Future Making
Christopher Clary—FkN-JPGs-on-PAOM
Kelsey Dusenka—Untitled
Kelsey Sucena—Tofu, or some notes on the weight of bodies
Celia Shaheen
American Artist—COLORED TIME
Sara Kaaman—wave to print
Madeline Zappala—computer love notes
Sam M-h—the evening- by the factory and the strip club, in the small sports bar on it’s karaoke night, where old elementary school teachers hid from hometowns, men placed bets, metallic balloons crowded the back seat of a car outside
Cassandra Hradil—FLOWER FUTURES
Nic Wilson—Notes On Drawing as Masturbation and the Pursuit of Solitary Pleasure
Olive B. Godlee—several edits down
Marisa Fulper Estrada—THE SCARCITY OF QUEER SPACE
Emma Kemp & Matthew Altman—poem1, poem2
noa machover
Trevor Bashaw—notes on my project (un)be cum: a queer archive of the ecological self-in-relation
Zack Wilks—“QUEER ETIQUETTE”
Loizos Olympios—excerpt from Αντί- ( *a text that prints itself)
Ramon Tejada—FUKU
Edited by Paul Soulellis
