Anna Leven✓

@ForgetDali

Writer. Wanna-be-editor. Rocking the boat, uncombed hair&two babies. Vegan. Coffeholic.

1.6K Following2.2K Followers5K Posts
  1. Anna Leven✓@ForgetDali
    I meant I’d launch the magazine the day after securing funding — not literally tomorrow. But then I thought: to hell with it. It wasn’t a typo, it was my destiny: I’ll launch something 😂 So: Every Thursday, I’ll send out a Substack newsletter, my column. I’ll share my published pieces — I’m focused writing for media — alongside articles, essays and projects I think are worth your time. In top of that, I can commit to one substantial interview or artist write-up per week — similar to what I do for Objkt. Now, a small favour: please subscribe to the Substack en masse. Force-subscribe your partners, children and dogs. Tell them it’s for culture. Or tell them nothing, if you favour less democratic methods. If I want sponsorship or advertisers (I do, I do), the first thing anyone asks for is numbers. The link is below. DM me with suggestions, commissions, collaborations, or existential concerns. Let’s rock this joint 🖤
    Anna Leven @ForgetDali
    I’m happy to launch a magazine tomorrow — to document emerging artists in the space, write about trends, exhibitions, and cover what’s happening in media art beyond web3. What has stopped me so far is the question of sustainability. Ironically, there seem to be too many writers for oh so few readers. Many influential collectors openly claim critics are unnecessary, which makes me sceptical that a collector-supported publication model could work. Right Click Save went through a difficult period, Outland stepped away from the magazine format, platforms are sunsetting, galleries are cutting costs and simply trying to survive. Right now, it feels like there is nobody reliable to build upon — neither paid subscribers nor advertising. I was researching grants, but since I live in Barcelona, most public support goes to media in Catalan. A Catalan-language magazine about digital art, anyone? Realistically, a niche magazine only needs a small number of committed supporters to exist. So. Are there any?
    20211419.1K
  2. Anna Leven✓@ForgetDali
    I’m happy to launch a magazine tomorrow — to document emerging artists in the space, write about trends, exhibitions, and cover what’s happening in media art beyond web3. What has stopped me so far is the question of sustainability. Ironically, there seem to be too many writers for oh so few readers. Many influential collectors openly claim critics are unnecessary, which makes me sceptical that a collector-supported publication model could work. Right Click Save went through a difficult period, Outland stepped away from the magazine format, platforms are sunsetting, galleries are cutting costs and simply trying to survive. Right now, it feels like there is nobody reliable to build upon — neither paid subscribers nor advertising. I was researching grants, but since I live in Barcelona, most public support goes to media in Catalan. A Catalan-language magazine about digital art, anyone? Realistically, a niche magazine only needs a small number of committed supporters to exist. So. Are there any?
    292817417.6K
  3. Anna Leven✓@ForgetDali
    Anton Chekhov famously said that if a rifle appears in the first act, it should eventually be fired. The same seems to apply to cold weapons. Hatch/et by @exonemo features a hatchet suspended above a computer that continuously generates random passwords, searching for the correct one. The instant it succeeds, the hatchet drops and destroys the very machine that solved the puzzle. A thread 🧵
    Download
    2519612
  4. Anna Leven✓@ForgetDali
    Posts @ForgetDali
    Find My — Infinite Computer Theorem is their debut on Objkt. Its premise is deceptively simple. When you click a button on the page, the computer begins randomly generating letters until a particular four-letter word—DATA, HOPE, EVIL, SOUL—appears. It might happen immediately or it might take a while — time is measured in symbols it took. The process itself has no investment in the outcome: HOPE is no more meaningful to the machine than XQJF. All the anticipation, frustration, relief and significance belong to us. “We connect emotion to what seems farthest from it—meaningless data,” exonemo explain. “By doing this, we try to make it visible, almost objectively, how our emotions can rise from anything and how a story can begin.”
    Download
    20251
  5. Anna Leven✓@ForgetDali
    Posts @ForgetDali
    The work repeatedly constructs and dismantles that possibility. First, a loaded word such as HOPE or SHIT appears, pulling us into interpretation. Then it dissolves into a torrent of random characters, and meaning disappears. Eventually the word returns, and with it the almost involuntary feeling that something has happened. Exonemo describe these states as “belief-possible” and “belief-impossible.” Read about the distinction in the full article:
    10236
  6. Anna Leven✓@ForgetDali
    “It’s a magnificent piece where the mathematics of his composition yield the purest, deepest, strongest emotions.” Would you be surprised if I told you that the “he” in question is JS Bach? Spanish artist @msoriaro returns to Bach repeatedly in search of an answer: how can an extremely structured, rational system produce something profoundly emotional?
    Download
    2632531
  7. Anna Leven✓@ForgetDali
    Posts @ForgetDali
    Read beside Entretiempos, another project developed around the same period, Contrapuntos reveals a broader preoccupation with time. If Contrapuntos asks what happens when many rhythms coexist within a single moment, Entretiempos asks what happens when the same event is viewed across different scales of time. In interviews, Soria-Rodríguez has suggested that making these works changed how he thought about temporality itself—an example of his recurring belief that art is not simply an output but a way of reasoning.
    Download
    10967
  8. Anna Leven✓@ForgetDali
    Posts @ForgetDali
    What is striking in retrospect is that Contrapuntos never really ends. Its visual language keeps resurfacing in Soria-Rodríguez’s later projects as material to be processed again. Which ones? Read the full article:
    10762
  9. Anna Leven✓@ForgetDali
    Andalusia. +46°C. Moral principles against single-use plastic and any drink that isn’t a double espresso have been suspended
    Download
    5043924
  10. Anna Leven✓@ForgetDali
    Good news: I stopped freaking out. Bad news: the result was another essay. It includes Hito Steyerl, forests as legal entities, hoovers, and a surprising question: who—or what—gets to be a person? The link below 👇
    Anna Leven @ForgetDali
    I’ve just left the doctor’s office after receiving a diagnosis. I feel like I could throw up in the middle of the street. What a time not to have health insurance. P.S. Look what my husband found while searching for my old blood test results
    2113912
  11. Anna Leven✓@ForgetDali
    I’ve just left the doctor’s office after receiving a diagnosis. I feel like I could throw up in the middle of the street. What a time not to have health insurance. P.S. Look what my husband found while searching for my old blood test results
    Download
    251736K
  12. Anna Leven✓@ForgetDali
    Posts @ForgetDali
    103104
  13. Anna Leven✓@ForgetDali
    What I talk about when I talk about politics and the English language: What a film by Frederik Heyman and Milou van Duijnhoven reveals about the strange rise of "resilience" as the defining word of our political and artistic moment, and how Iranian artists showed "resistance" during the protests. My new essay, link below, special thanks to @spike_0124 for sharing Voices of Iran zine with me. Read it (my essay, the zine, Orwell and Murakami) 🔗👇
    5526850
  14. Anna Leven✓@ForgetDali
    Posts @ForgetDali
    106155
  15. Anna Leven✓@ForgetDali
    Fabric is one of those English words that carries both a literal and a metaphorical meaning: it refers to cloth and to the underlying structure of something: the fabric of a city, the fabric of memory, the social fabric that binds communities together. Chris Maestas, better known as @0009ine, moves naturally between both meanings. He uses textiles to explore the histories of subcultures, personal identity and the urban environments that shaped him, but also as carriers of memory.
    Download
    1518953.4K
  16. Anna Leven✓@ForgetDali
    Posts @ForgetDali
    His later series, Pattern Memory, takes another step. Here folds, seams and light become compositional structures reminiscent of the rational grids of modernism. Yet unlike modernist abstraction, which often aspired to formal autonomy, Maestas allows emotion, memory and digital interference to disrupt the system. As Maestas puts it: "Pattern Memory is less about depicting nature through synthesis, and more about how structure itself becomes emotional. Like life, it's full of interruptions and memory glitches that hold things together. For this small series, I've been focused on how design, repetition and precision can carry feeling on their own. This one sits somewhere between memory, control and reconstruction."
    Download
    109121
  17. Anna Leven✓@ForgetDali
    Posts @ForgetDali
    Read the full article:
    001099
  18. Show more posts