Kaleidoscope #40

in this issue: Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury has affirmed herself in the ’80s at the center of a new wave of feminism, by appropriating shopping bags, makeup palettes, and candy-colored rockets resembling giant vibrators. In an interview by Whitney Mallett, she shares her outlook on consumerism, superficiality, and celebrity spectacle. Martine Syms’s first full-length feature film exposes the narcissism of the still-so-white art world and the masturbatory nonsense of higher education. While Rindon Johnson shares his afterthoughts in an intimate letter, Nick Sethi takes it to the road with Diamond Stingily, Syms’ long-time collaborator and charismatic lead. Previously dismissed as an atmospheric soundtrack playing in the background of our daily life, ambient resurges as the central aesthetics of the early ’20s, perhaps as an instinctive reaction to global chaos and our infinite-scroll reality. Featuring contributions by Federico Sargentone, Nicholas Korody, and Drew Zeiba, our extensive trend report “Selected Ambient Works” addresses ambient not as a music genre but as a quality, a trope applicable to the entire spectrum of cultural production—with expansive, experiential, synesthetic immersivity making a comeback at the nexus of music, art, and architecture. ABSTRACT, our text-only editorial segment dedicated to urgent research questions of our time, explores the way identity-building has become an increasingly mediated process, where the notion of “performance” seems to be taking center stage. Through two essays by McKenzie Wark and Olivia Whittick and a piece of autofiction by Pablo Larios, “Performance Review” bounces back and forth between true and performed, theory and fiction, self-awareness and self-mythology, ego and gender, to interrogate how the algorithmic experience both pulls from identity and shapes it. And finally, “SEASON,” the magazine's opening section, accounts for the best of this Spring/Summer with profiles on Jan Vorisek, Cookie Mueller, Friends With Benefits, Berenice Olmedo, Willy Chavarria, Emily Barker, Whaam!, Crystal Murray, Poche Studio, 1909 Paris, Andrew Roberts, LA Timpa, Dylan Solomon Kraus, Cobrasnake, Guerriero Do Divino Amor, You've Never Been Completely Honest, Vitelli, Tohji, 120 BPM, Sun Woo, and James Bantone.