Amidst austerity measures today, we find ourselves increasingly precarious and pixelated; atomized, alienated, and irreparably glitched. Yet rather than attempt to definitively theorise, analyse, and explicate this contemporary situation, we found ourselves returning to these few questions: How do you speak a place? How do you speak from a place, or non-place? What might the reader expect to see from a certain region, and why? Who speaks, and in whose vernacular? We might also wonder: what came first, the tablet or the book?

THE STATE is a journal and sociohistorical forum. It investigates the space between print and audio-visual experiences and their transition to mediated online forms; transgressive cultural criticism and the sensuous architecture of this “printernet.” On the 19th of March, 2012, from 6pm, the forum and inaugural issue of THE STATE will be launched at Satellite in Al Serkal Avenue, Dubai. It will also be available as a downloadable PDF from www.thestate.ae.

The first volume is themed ‘Voicings/Articulations/Utterances.’ Fifteen writers from around the world collaborated for this inaugural issue. These pieces are joined by two website-specific installations: Fayçal Baghriche performs joblessness on a hurtling train, and Cora Kobischka explores the multilingual utterances of speaking in tongues.

Featured in this issue:

Jaymes Baassiri on the strange odysseys of single parenting throughout the ages
Jaswinder Bolina on an immigrant, a girl riding a unicycle, and post-9/11 Ohio
Sophie Chamas on precarity and returning to the Gulf with your tail between your legs
Alex Casper Cline on a critical theory of chiptune, eight bits, and the Spanish real de a ocho
Margaret Eby on Money, Mississippi and the age of civil rights tourism
Megan Eardley on Church of England conversions and thick, unarticulated anxieties
Roman Gautam on appreciating programming code as poetry
Malcolm Harris on Bifo’s program of senilisation, robots, and fetishes
Sean Higgins on a Krzysztof Wodiczko sonic installation, empathy, and the affective dread of war
Linnea Hincks on conspiracy and misogyny in Sweden, via Julian Assange and the Girl with a Dragon Tattoo
Wilfried Hou Je Bek on adventuring in the Utrechtian cryptoforest and weedy messiahs of globalisation
Claudia Merhej on the politics of food under austerity and a resonant wartime Britishness
Mena Odu on experiences of Afropolitanism from okada-dodging in Lagos to coupé-decalé on the Upper West Side
Olivia Rosane on the church and the corporation, from medieval artisan through to graphic designer
Anand Vivek Taneja on albino alligators, manholes, sewers, and the miasma of modernity

In addition, Fayçal Baghriche will be exhibiting 4 videos, a photograph and an 82 ton installation entitled ‘Nothing more concrete’ for the launch of THE STATE at Satellite.  The works of Fayçal undermine our most familiar points of reference by staging fundamental actions. Playing on discrepancy, he invites us to distance a normalised reality. Mixing performance, installation, video and photography, he reveals, the better to annihilate them, the systems of identification, behavioural models or language structures that determine what we are and become a pretext for the poetic construction of another reality.

THE STATE is curated and published by Rami Farook. It is edited by Rahel Aima and Ahmad Makia.

Queries? Please get in touch at info@thestate.ae