Spike, Issue 87: Everything’s Computer

Spike, founded in 2004, is a place for criticism and unconventional ideas, mixing writing on themes urgent and forever unresolved, from “Web3” and “After Beauty” to “Plants” and “Patriarchy.” As a print quarterly, a digital broadside, and an event space, Spike offers a soapbox to cultural critics and literary essayists to chronicle our time in thought. Spike is also visually splashy, by turns pushy, poetic, unexpected – and not shy to start an argument. Published quarterly by the artist Rita Vitorelli, Spike is one of the last remaining independent art magazines.

In this issue:

Go on, admit it. There’s no longer a meaningful distinction between “real life” and life online, up to and including sitting around in the park. So why shouldn’t art reflect the furious, melancholic, psychedelic sensation that, even when we make our screens dark, we’ve all been permanently logged on? A new era deserves new aesthetics, but also fables, values, and protocols. Everything is interwoven. Everything’s computer.

Featuring Brian Droitcour on lore and NFTs; Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo on exocapitalism; the godmother of internet girlhood, Ann Hirsch; locating the tech-feminist to tech-fascist spectrum with Anan Fries; Anika Meier on the post-artist; a visual essay by Ruba Al-Sweel & Al Hassan Elwan (POSTPOSTPOST); a defense of useless images by Gideon Jacobs; the second life of memes by Dena Yago; a prophecy of a neo-oral age by Günseli Yalcinkaya; a primer on internet cinema with Dana Dawud; Gary Zhexi Zhang’s guide to Shenzhen, “China’s Silicon Valley”; and the never-miss backpage from Tea Hačić-Vlahović: “Underground communities prevail against odds. Like rats and nuclear bombs.” Plus! Our new lifestyle section, LIFEMAXXING