Critical and Creative Inquiries

We produce well-researched publications, texts, talks, artwork, workshops, and walking tours related to social, political, and environmental themes. We are experienced in teaching and particularly enjoy bringing complex topics to life for broad audiences through visualisations and engaging narratives.

 

Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows

This book foregrounds architecture into storytelling. Natalie, an architect, describes the city of Berlin governed by algorithms where human participation is rewarded with creature comforts as well as ecstatic experiences. She and her friend Winter, a daring software programmer, begin to have doubts about how to direct their own lives amidst these accelerating control mechanisms. They start to dissect their digital and physical realities and, eventually, Winter resolves to test these limits no matter the cost. Along the way, they encounter humans, software, and architecture that challenge their perspectives and the stability of the world they live in.

ISBN: 978-1-7394041-0-9

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Three Pathways to Get Anywhere

Three Pathways to Get Anywhere (Except When There Is a Dead End) is a book of experimental non-fiction on travel and cities in East Asia. It was published by Rough Beast in 2015 and was made in close collaboration with Joey Horan and designed by Studio YUKIKO. The book is a constellation of essays, poems, impressions, and photos curated from journals written during six weeks of travel through China, Japan, and Singapore. It integrates personal anecdotes, urban and architectural analysis, and musings on how the foreign may or may not inhabit global practices.

SOLD OUT

 

Berlin: A Morphology of Walls

This book project is about creating the drawings that are missing from history books, and revealing the forces that have shaped the built environment around us. In Berlin, historic walls dating back to the city’s beginnings have been the strongest forces to form the physical environment, even if they have now vanished from view.

ISBN: 978-3-94362013-9

SOLD OUT

 
 

Alex Head

 

Ricochet - Cultural Epigenetics and the Philosophy of Change

The term ‘ricochet’ is a means to discuss unintended consequences, rapidly delivered information and viral outbreaks, but it is also used to describe the way in which sound echoes or reverberates against objects in space.

Ricochet is a work of history, art and biology that is explained in detail through over 100 graphic elements developed with the artist Jørn Aargaard. It is 304 pages, full colour and offset printed including sources from contemporary and ancient historical records. Among other culturally silenced artefacts, it connects the history of the sacred date palm tree from the tenth millennium to the German Secret Service building of 2016.
Image: Ivar Kvaal

ISBN: 978-82-999761-6-9

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Here Comes Trouble, An Inquiry into Art, Magic & Madness as Deviant Knowledge

Imagine the infinitely tiny size of an atom. Focus on the size of this microscopic particle in relation to your own human body. Now scale up to the size of the planets, galaxies, to the solar system as a whole. The weight of your body exists between these vastly different scales.

Here Comes Trouble, An Inquiry into Art, Magic and Madness as Deviant Knowledge, is not about thermodynamics, negative feedback or refrigerators. Neither have I written a book about geology, black holes or migration, yet each of these material systems offer insights into the slippery topic of deviancy.
Image: Ivar Kvaal

ISBN: 978-3-945659-09-0

THIRD EDITION
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