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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

I decide to drop by Arseny Zhilyaev’s workshop at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow last November, only to find that instead of sitting quietly in the corner and listening to presentations, I am expected to assume the role of artist myself Along with my new-found colleagues, I am to make art as part of a role-playing game set in the Russian Cosmic Federation of the near future By this point in human history, all art is created by AI, but man’s input is still required to advance the performance of machines What we produce is to be evaluated by an assistant curator at Garage, and Zhilyaev himself, who will decide which of us is to represent the Russian Cosmic Federation at an Intergalactic Biennale   I am nervous before the game starts, and bubble with excitement as everyone around me transforms into inhabitants of a post-futurist art world But I get prematurely bored after the first two rounds of producing concepts as a member of the collective, Experimental Zombie Formalism Turns out the art world’s grip on creative freedom can feel suffocating, even in the future In response, my comrades and I go on strike, organize an alternative (and highly irreverent) annual biennale, and end up establishing a cult, of which I am the chief goddess Fictional CEO of a fictional cult, with a divine status acknowledged by a board of devoted disciples – not the worst outcome for a struggling artist in a precarious sci-fi future My brief period of art making, however, does not bring me intergalactic institutional recognition, nor does my work make it into planetary collections I shall perish, nameless and forgotten, as my body dissolves into the ether   Zhilyaev’s work – a mixture of installation, fiction, archival research, publishing, and most recently role-play games – combines Russian cosmist philosophy with a vision of a dystopian soon-to-come The philosophy of cosmism – a mind-boggling combination of science, technology, and spirituality – was originally dreamed up by the nineteenth-century Russian thinker Nikolai Fedorov Fedorov advocated for immortality, and the resurrection of all human beings, proposing that our ever-extending

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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feature

January 2016

Suite

Pierre Senges

TR. Jacob Siefring

feature

January 2016

‘Suite’ was born of an invitation Pierre Senges received to contribute to an anthology on the future of the novel (Devenirs...

fiction

July 2014

Zone

Mathias Enard

TR. Charlotte Mandell

fiction

July 2014

I remember the day Andrija the invincible collapsed for the first time, the warrior of warriors whom we’d never...

Interview

March 2017

Interview with Lidija Dimkovska

Sara Nović

Interview

March 2017

I met Lidija Dimkovska at the Twin Cities Book Festival in October, fleetingly, and completely by accident. I had...

 

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