What do you think?
Rate this book
BLACK HYPERBOX
Contributions by Florin Flueraş, Alina Popa, Ioana Gheorghiu, Ștefan Tiron, Gabriel Catren, Irina Gheorghe, Garett Strickland, Sina Seifee, Bogdan Drăgănescu, Cătălina Gubandru, Eleni Ikoniadou, Cristina Bogdan, Cosima Opartan, Nicola Masciandaro, Ben Woodard, Blake Victor, Adriana Gheorghe, Cătălina Gubandru, Gregory Chatonsky, Dorothée Legrand & Georges Heidmann, Matt Hare, Larisa Crunţeanu, Dylan Trigg, Ion Dumitrescu.
A point alienates from itself and becomes a line. A line alienates from itself and becomes a square. A square alienates from itself and becomes a cube. A cube alienates from itself and becomes a hypercube. Black Hyperbox is a dimension of productive alienation from concepts through experience and from experience through thinking. Black Hyperbox is a productive lie, a future-oriented spatiotemporal ruse, where the conceptual horizon is mutilated through doing and the horizon of imagination is mutilated through thought. In Black Hyperbox, any known can be black-boxed and the unknown can turn out to be most banal.
This was the text that announced Black Hyperbox, initiated by Florin Flueraș and Alina Popa in 2015. Black Hyperbox started as a frame for performance and text based on the alienation between practice and conceptualization. Meanwhile, individual artworks, mostly performances, emerged from its process. They are circulating sometimes independently, sometimes together. Now Black Hyperbox is also a book, the outcome of the discursive section of the project. Its contributing authors were immersed in Black Hyperbox or gravitating around it, at least conceptually. In the book, Black Hyperbox comes forth as a place that holds incompatible conceptual zones and spatiotemporalities together: Old World and New World, theater and jungle, jaguars and AI, prehistory and futurism, the earthly home and the alien space, Mecca and the North Pole, spaceships lost in cosmos and the politics of Isis, Malevich’s black square and the moon travel, thought and hallucination.
A point alienates from itself and becomes a line. A line alienates from itself and becomes a square. A square alienates from itself and becomes a cube. A cube alienates from itself and becomes a hypercube. Black Hyperbox is a dimension of productive alienation from concepts through experience and from experience through thinking. Black Hyperbox is a productive lie, a future-oriented spatiotemporal ruse, where the conceptual horizon is mutilated through doing and the horizon of imagination is mutilated through thought. In Black Hyperbox, any known can be black-boxed and the unknown can turn out to be most banal.
This was the text that announced Black Hyperbox, initiated by Florin Flueraș and Alina Popa in 2015. Black Hyperbox started as a frame for performance and text based on the alienation between practice and conceptualization. Meanwhile, individual artworks, mostly performances, emerged from its process. They are circulating sometimes independently, sometimes together. Now Black Hyperbox is also a book, the outcome of the discursive section of the project. Its contributing authors were immersed in Black Hyperbox or gravitating around it, at least conceptually. In the book, Black Hyperbox comes forth as a place that holds incompatible conceptual zones and spatiotemporalities together: Old World and New World, theater and jungle, jaguars and AI, prehistory and futurism, the earthly home and the alien space, Mecca and the North Pole, spaceships lost in cosmos and the politics of Isis, Malevich’s black square and the moon travel, thought and hallucination.
- GenresPoetry
368 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2016
3 people are currently reading
84 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 8, 2020
Fiction theory (mostly) made in Romania (authors especially with background in the performative and visual arts scene, far more cutting-edge and up-to-date than the literary scene), which acts as a bunch of ambitious fanfic disseminating elements of accelerationism, speculative realism, decolonialism, etc.
Perhaps the only characteristically Romanian twist of this affair is how the likes of Alina Popa (RIP) and the elusive underground theorist Tiron make the notion of black boxes a stand-in for a number of any liminary, initiatic spaces. Otherwise, many authors make a compelling point out of assembling a wide variety of references from a variety of disciplines, from theology to film theory.
In the right mindset, some of this can be life-changing, mind-shattering and most definitely influential, while the rest can fall flat or even almost determine you to give up on the book (Gabriel Catren's philosophical treatise being probably the worst offender). I keep coming back to more than a few texts here, but some of the most interesting ones are Sina Seifee's "Zolmat and the Black-Boxed Medium of Beyond" (a 10-page text that made me perceive in a different light the notion of spirituality) and, of course, the contributions of Alina Popa, Tiron, and Ion Dumitrescu (one of Romania's first queer theorists), that were included or expanded in other separate books published by PUNCH or frACTalia.
At least for the comparatively provincial space of Romania, the publishing of this book was an unacknowledged event that might leave scars years from now.
Perhaps the only characteristically Romanian twist of this affair is how the likes of Alina Popa (RIP) and the elusive underground theorist Tiron make the notion of black boxes a stand-in for a number of any liminary, initiatic spaces. Otherwise, many authors make a compelling point out of assembling a wide variety of references from a variety of disciplines, from theology to film theory.
In the right mindset, some of this can be life-changing, mind-shattering and most definitely influential, while the rest can fall flat or even almost determine you to give up on the book (Gabriel Catren's philosophical treatise being probably the worst offender). I keep coming back to more than a few texts here, but some of the most interesting ones are Sina Seifee's "Zolmat and the Black-Boxed Medium of Beyond" (a 10-page text that made me perceive in a different light the notion of spirituality) and, of course, the contributions of Alina Popa, Tiron, and Ion Dumitrescu (one of Romania's first queer theorists), that were included or expanded in other separate books published by PUNCH or frACTalia.
At least for the comparatively provincial space of Romania, the publishing of this book was an unacknowledged event that might leave scars years from now.
Displaying 1 of 1 review