System Failure:

In information systems: a malfunction which can be attributed to correspondence failure, process failure, interaction failure, and/or expectation failure.

TRISTAN DUKE: TRANSITIONAL LENSES

Patrick J. Reed
Issue: 60ScneSS292n

Artist Tristan Duke photographs the Placerita Oil Field and the Tehachapi Wind Resource Area using lenses made from frozen drinking water. Fulcrum Arts’ Curator, Patrick J. Reed, goes along for the ride.

  • Digging
  • Extraction
  • Generation
  • Growth
  • Invisibility
  • Land and Sea
  • Networks
  • Perception
  • System Failure
  • Visualization

Doctor, Doctor

Em Kettner
Issue: 921en3S26g25

The following story unfolds with a cadence all its own. It rewards the curious yet meets the overeager with a measured wait and see.

  • Digging
  • Fictions
  • Growth
  • Invisibility
  • Perception
  • System Failure
  • The Body
Cover - The Erosion of Silicon Beach

The Erosion of Silicon Beach

Nina Sarnelle
Issue: 933c4igqn5gg XXL

The tide line is a soft transition. Where capital meets the sea, it creates brittle structures, likely to shatter. The ocean’s edges may not be as fluid as they seem.

  • Digging
  • Extraction
  • Growth
  • Invisibility
  • Land and Sea
  • System Failure
Numbers "1134" appear on a marbled calculator.

Square Hole

Ryan Kuo
Issue: 20nii3en5Sin

An NFT offers a generic something: some thing, neither here nor there, which exists in order to escape being worthless (a born loser). It escapes to the address it is given, and its value is held precisely there.

  • Fictions
  • Generation
  • Networks
  • System Failure
Multicolor singular disk with a cube pattern on it. Out of focus ocean and horizon background.

The Erosion of Silicon Beach

Nina Sarnelle
Issue: 933c4igqn5gg

discomforting circularity turns in my stomach, thinking about Santa Monica’s full-circle from place of work to ‘workplace.’

  • Digging
  • Extraction
  • Growth
  • Invisibility
  • Land and Sea
  • System Failure
Featured image for Suzanne Kite - Three Diffractions of LA

Three Diffractions of LA

Suzanne Kite
Issue: 8ec0S21qS01i

I talk to my cousin Corey Stover on the phone and he teaches me hokšíkilowaŋpi (to sing a lullaby); we are both cruelly out of tune. He is in Oglala Nation, I am in LA, and we perform our distance. He sings to me and I to him, a short melody. I watch LAPD helicopters out the window of 242 East Avenue 41 and compose a short drone.

  • Cosmology
  • Extraction
  • Fictions
  • Generation
  • Invisibility
  • System Failure
  • Visualization
A 2D image of a black and white ghost holding a flower stands in front a toilet and a red leather sofa. A mirror reflects an image of a child in the middle of the room. Below the image is a caption explaining the context of the image.

Ghosts and Flowers

Phillip Birch
Issue: g8e 6u7 73en

I kept considering what happens when liminal space becomes static—how we are all stuck in this transition with the expectation of a return of normalcy, but in actuality there is no neutral, there is no normal. Normal is a veneer in which a few have the privilege of living under.

  • Cosmology
  • Generation
  • Invisibility
  • System Failure
  • The Body
  • Visualization
AI-generated textile, cotton, training: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite images, 2020

ABOVE BELOW

Sarah Rosalena Balbuena-Brady
Issue: 086n7n94i4 n

Colonialism is rooted in the planetary imagination which fails to account for histories of structural racism based on geologic relations and the violent dispossession of indigenous lands. This resulted in legacies of destructive cartography and mapping now used in machine vision in space.

  • Cosmology
  • Extraction
  • Generation
  • Land and Sea
  • System Failure
  • The Body
  • Visualization