Michael Lent asks what role art has in colonization and subsequent dissolution. He proposes a practice informed by the fatal strategies and "raw" phenomenology of Jean Baudrillard as a challenge to a system of disappearance. Focusing on the otherness of space to prevent its ultimate dissolution, Lent promotes a spatial practice of radical alterity. Examining ideas of disappearance put forth by Baudrillard and Paul Virilio, he utilizes art as a means for investigating loss of potentiality and experience through the representation of space, shifting their ideas – originally ascribed to objects – into a new emphasis. This book ultimately attempts to break a cyclical system that causes everything to disappear into representation and equivalency.
Michael Lent's new graphic novel is The Man Who Wasn't There published by Global Comix, comixology and Amazon Books.
Honored as a ‘Google Author’ in 2007, his writing/experience spans films, fiction and nonfiction books, biographies, graphic novels, animation, video games, and reality television. He has written nine books including On Thin Ice, published by Disney/Hyperion, based on the top-rated reality television series Ice Road Truckers. Research for this project entailed spending winter in the Arctic where Lent froze his pens off. His credits also include more than a dozen graphic novels and comics including Prey published by Marvel Comics, In 2014, Lent adapted into a graphic novel E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops.”