11th July 2018
FORMAT Issue 8, organised and hosted by Shumon Basar
FORMAT is a ‘live magazine’ looking at the shapes that discourse takes. The eighth issue takes place at the AA in Summer 2018, and runs from July 4 to July 13. Open to the public, and free of charge, FORMAT No.8 focuses on ‘Self Format.’ Is the ‘individual’ being reinvented and redefined in our age of data capitalism? How much intimacy can be surrendered to surveillance? Is the opposite of the individual still the ‘crowd,’ or, something else? And, would you mind being cloned? Invited guests share their Self Formats from the worlds of art, design, literature, theory, media and more.
The end of privacy has made us all public figures, claims Jack Self, but what are these constructions we send out into the world? Can we ever be ourselves again? As a writer, novelist and filmmaker, Adam Thirlwell works inventively with characters, voices and forms of address: who speaks? Who listens? Here, he discusses ideas of embodiment, with reference to art, literature and cinema.
Jack Self is an architect based in London. He is Director of the REAL foundation and Editor-in-Chief of the Real Review. In 2016, Self curated the British Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. His work has been shown widely, including at the MAXXI in Rome and Tate Britain in London. Self’s writing has appeared in The Guardian, eflux, New Philosopher, BBC, CNN and elsewhere. His first book Real Estates: Life Without Debt (2014) is now in its second printing. He was previously Contributing Editor for Architectural Review (2009–2017) and is Editor-at-Large for 032c.
Adam Thirlwell is the author of three novels, Politics, The Escape, and Lurid & Cute; a novella, Kapow!; and Multiples, a project with international novels. His work has been translated into 30 languages. He is the winner of the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Somerset Maugham Award; and has twice been nominated as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. His criticism appears in the Guardian, The New York Times and the New York Review of Books. He is the London editor of the Paris Review.”
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