Real Review No. 16
Real Review No. 16
2024 / Uk
Real Review is “what it means to live today”. Real Review assesses contemporary culture. Real Review looks backwards to look forwards. Real Review appears timely and timeless. Real Review interrogates the current mood. Real Review deconstructs everyday norms. Real Review reviews reality.
Issue 16—REGIME SHIFT
There is no snow on Mount Fuji. Any hack will tell you the phase change is here, the restructuring of the world is underway. That would be a relief, like a broken fever. But they are wrong. We are still waiting. This period is merely the static on the skin, the rising pressure and building tension before the impending climax of a deluge. We live under a lavender sky, silver and green; this is the time of unsettled air, heavy with that metallic smell of the earth. Soon the wind will awake, driving the rain forward like a cloud of smoke. The tremendous powers by which our lives are encompassed are stirring.
English, published quarterly
104 pages, 6/12 x 16 cm, Softback
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2022 / Uk
Real Review is “what it means to live today”. Real Review assesses contemporary culture. Real Review looks backwards to look forwards. Real Review appears timely and timeless. Real Review interrogates the current mood. Real Review deconstructs everyday norms. Real Review reviews reality.
Issue 12—interview with archaeologist David Wengrow on the dawn of everything. Philosophers Slavoj Zizek and Timothy Morton agree about the future of humans on planet Earth. Design studio Metahaven contribute an insert on the stuff of experience and sensation. Photographer Tacita Dean captures a boat abandoned at sea. An essay by Ursula K. Le Guin reviews the Hero narrative, with photography by Magali Reus. Film curator Róisín Tapponi reviews fake nails, while Jack Self reviews lateral flow tests and mindfulness. And much more!
English, published quarterly
104 pages, 6/12 x 16 cm, Softback
2022 / Uk
Real Review is “what it means to live today”. Real Review assesses contemporary culture. Real Review looks backwards to look forwards. Real Review appears timely and timeless. Real Review interrogates the current mood. Real Review deconstructs everyday norms. Real Review reviews reality.
Issue 13—MINING THE PAST
All times appear equally and at once. The past no longer recedes in an orderly way, but threatens to resurface at any moment in the guise of the contemporary. Nostalgia cycles are getting faster. Old material artefacts return as integral components of current trends. The future is no longer desirable or unforeseen. The contemporary is a mess of memetic references, where relevance is more valued than newness. Simultaneously, the chaos of our epoch masks a vast project of algorithmic derisking to make tomorrow identical to today: who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.
English, published quarterly
104 pages, 6/12 x 16 cm, Softback
2023 / Uk
Real Review is “what it means to live today”. Real Review assesses contemporary culture. Real Review looks backwards to look forwards. Real Review appears timely and timeless. Real Review interrogates the current mood. Real Review deconstructs everyday norms. Real Review reviews reality.
Issue 14—DIRECT PERCEPTION
We spend almost a third of our lives connected to the internet, in a space-time of total internal reflection. Online lacks any randomness or chance; and this illusion of fate and order is at odds with the actual structure of the universe. Online we are not social beings but commodified identities; immersed in diluted ideas, weak connections and fleeting emotional states that neither originate within us, nor belong to us. We are possessed by the internet, and so dispossessed of life.
English, published quarterly
104 pages, 6/12 x 16 cm, Softback
2018 / Spain
Polpettas On Paper is a biannual magazine about contemporary arts and culture. Issue 4 features interviews with artists Wendy Macnaughton, Osamu Yokonami, Ricardo Cases, Studio Swine, Barnaba Fornasetti, Edouard Taufenbach, Arunà Canevascini. Reportages by Fragmento Universo and Ignacio Bandera.
English + original versions, published biannually
160 pages, 17 x 24 cm, softback