Profane #15

Profane issue 15.

Notes from the publisher:

I Am Not a Number

Type in the words editorial / amateur / collection / Instagram /pleasure / hands / make / trance / flights of fancy / decor / necklace / tree / courtyard / uniform / loaf.
Let the algorithm do its work. And wait. A little. We would love to see this introduction write itself before our amazed eyes, in a joint and joyful effort between machine and human, but perhaps our request is not clear and specific enough, as the artificial intelligence is reluctant to deliver. And yet, full of hope, galvanized by our opening invitation (p. 6), as we watched images generated by binary encoding appear, we thought it might. Our reflection (p. 46) also confirmed the progress of robots, ousting man from the workforce. But it is obvious that amateurs don’t give in easily to calculations, as they prefer to explore unreasonable and unfathomable paths to
achieve contentment. Their own Eden. All that remains then is to stop loafing in order to draft this introduction which says, each time and always a little more pointedly, that our table of contents does not follow any agenda, but flourishes unconstrained. When this new issue is opened, two paper
legs perform a mean split: from social media (p. 120) to a shop in Puglia (p. 184), from a demiurge vegetation (p. 164) to a tenement building (p. 86), from a shell (p. 130) to a slice of bread (p. 226), from mountain (p. 30) to closet (p. 96). That’s just the way Profane is, welcoming everyone that wanders off the beaten track, especially those who create their own paths, and too bad for computer science.

Carine Soyer

Profane