13th 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.
California, it is said, pioneered tools of personal liberation, from LSD to the iPhone. Brendan McGetrick charts the history of ‘Made in California,’ from counterculture to current techno-Utopianism, and by doing so, reveals the ideological unconscious behind Silicon Valley’s design of the self. In the novel Sympathy, by Olivia Sudjic, Alice Hare embarks on a journey of Instagram obsession around a Japanese writer called Mizuko. The story traverses the emotional terrain between coincidence and providence, between online and offline selves.
Brendan McGetrick is an independent writer and curator. His work has appeared in publications in over thirty countries, including The New York Times, Wired, The Financial Times, Art Review, Der Spiegel, Domus, and Vogue Nippon. In 2017, he co-curated California: Designing Freedom at the Design Museum. Since 2015, he has served as director of Global Grad Show, the world’s largest exhibition of graduate design and technology.
Olivia Sudjic is a London based writer and novelist. Sympathy, published in 2017, is her debut novel. Sudjic has written for publications including the FT Weekend, The Guardian, ELLE, Sunday Times’ Style, The Observer and Harpers Bazaar. She is currently working on her second novel and a personal essay, ‘Exposure’.
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