Pastelegram no. 4, “The Extra Earth Analog”
Guest editor: Mary Walling Blackburn
In this issue: Beatriz E. Balanta, Regine Basha, Huma Bhabha, Mary Walling Blackburn, Kabir Carter, Won Cha, Che Chen, Dwayne Dixon, Katrina Dodson, Ariel Evans, Rees Evans, Jason Fox, Dan Gleason, Michelle Hyun, Ariel Jackson, Bhanu Kapil, Rafael Kelman, Steven Lam, Erin Ming Lee, Nathan Lee, Claire Light, Glenn Ligon, Natasha Marie Llorens, Sara Marcus, Sofía Gallísa Muriente, Tim Ridlen, Noah Simblist, Benjamin Stewart, Deborah Stratman, Hong-An Truong, Roger White, Brian Kuan Wood, and Sarah Workneh.
Pastelegram no. 4, “The Extra Earth Analog,” guest edited by artist Mary Walling Blackburn, is available now.
“The Extra Earth Analog” is an anti-authoritarian sourcebook that pleasures and nauseates, radicalizes and fortifies, aliens and their allies. Adapting the 1960s counterculture publication The Whole Earth Catalog, Walling Blackburn invited thirty writers to review a selection of resources—books, LPs, videos, artworks—in order to consider some aspect of the alien. Here, “alien” conflates the word’s two meanings: alien as expatriate and alien as extraterrestrial (a metaphor condensed into a single word). These catalog entries, interwoven with writings by Dan Gleason, Claire Light, Bhanu Kapil and Glenn Ligon, address the alien, covering concepts and texts designed to help others perceive the strange and become strange themselves.
Covered topics, figures and sites include abduction, alien ethnography, colonists, dematerialized beings, drugs and space, psychic and quantum entanglement, the Good Samaritan, heterotopia, the Immer, the imposter, inaccessible numbers, the intruder, migration, the not here and not now, nowhere, protagonists, refugees, sexed monsters, street encounters, transmigration, the traveler’s dick and urban evasion.
“The Extra Earth Analog” also contains texts, photographs, interviews and video stills documenting Walling Blackburn’s research on extraterrestrial encounters in militarized zones, from European drug smuggling routes of the 1950s–1970s to the present-day U.S.-Tijuana border.
Read “The Extra Earth Analog,” and let us endeavor to contaminate the safe and self-righteous ways in which we compartmentalize the alien. Together, let’s wantonly move towards and provoke these unstable categories. The use of the word wantonly is deliberate—the etymology points towards an engagement with rebellious, sexual and violent play, but more importantly, an embrace of bad training.
Pastelegram no. 4, “The Extra Earth Analog,“ is available now at bookstores and at pastelegram.org/purchase.
Pastelegram focuses on archive and artistic process. It releases an annual print issue and an array of online projects, and each features a body of work from a single living art worker, commissioned specifically for Pastelegram. Accompanying that work is its archive, a collection of material chosen by Pastelegram’s editors and art worker-collaborators. Letters, process sketches, works by other artists, poetry—original and republished essays from literature, theory, mathematics, or more—any and all of these might fall into the work’s archive.