Black Box ― A Record of the Catastrophe

As the serial disasters of capitalism’s current crisis?economic, political, environmental?continue to batter the world, Black Box: A Record of the Catastrophe is a device for recording, analyzing, and transmitting events as they happen. But it offers neither dire predictions nor false hopes. Instead, it embraces the mystery of what might transpire. The word ?catastrophe” has not always signified ?disaster”; during the sixteenth century, especially in theater, it came to mean ?a reversal of what is expected.” Black Box is ultimately a documentary project, a record of the catastrophe, but it’s an open question where the inquiry will take us. It may be a record of the disastrous end. Or it may be a record of the turning. The second volume brings together reports from North African refugee camps in Europe; thinkers ruminating on Walter Benjamin while walking the streets of Palestine; a freezing night in Tucson, Arizona; a London cityscape that reflects the architectural power of finance capitalism; meetings of French Maoists in the 1960s; a film screening that never happened; and much more. Contributors to Black Box include Mott Green, Byung-Chul Han, Isabella Gresser, Micaela Sahhar, Stuart Smithers, Miranda Mellis, Jonathan Stafford, Moniro Ravanipour, Eirik Steinhoff, Peter Wieben, Gunter Gassner, Matt Longabucco, Sam Dolbear, Oriel María Siu, Bhanu Kapil, Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, Maged Zaher, Neve, Roberto Harrison, Eske Mollgaard, Alejandro de Acosta, Blake Shaw, Ron Haas, William Kupinse, Luis Berríos-Negrón, Michael Paninski, Renee Simms, Andrea Lawlor, Teju Cole, and Sarah Rupp.

The Black Box Collective is composed of poets, journalists, academics, metaphysicians, artists, and strategists who gather regularly at a retired dairy farm in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains north of Seattle to explore themes of consciousness, community, and circulation of the communizing current?and to discover and assemble a critique that will wake us from the dream world that is seamlessly reproduced by capitalist culture. They are based in Seattle.