CBA vol 66|67 is officially out today!
Go to CBK to see sample images from this 144 page issue where I was main editor and also made a comic, wrote a text with illustrations and did the cover. You can get it at Hybriden, where all the money goes directly to CBK but you have to pay for shipping. If you prefer other alternatives, there is a list in the end of the samples blogpost at CBK. Here are a few extra samples of my contributions.
The comic is called The 5D Weave Theory of Consciousness and is kind of a mash-up/remix of dialogue from The Troll with images from Piracy is Liberation 013 and some other sources. I made it originally for the KOLAŻ issue (CBA vol 65), but Kinga chose to use another collage comic of mine for that, so we included it in this issue instead.
I figured that not a lot of people have read The Troll, and I liked the theory I put forth there about how consciousness works, so I might as well re-use it. It also made sense for the concept to use a mix of images from different comics to go with the dialogue. Is this something I believe in, as a serious solution to the mystery of the mind? Not exactly in a scientific sense, but philosophically I think it kind of makes sense. You’ll have to judge for yourself if you read it:
In CBA vol 60: STORIES, I wrote a text titled Stories, myths and other narratives, where I talked a bit about stories as escapism, as a way to build community, and as the basis of religions (and a bit about religions as fandoms). Also about how political movements have their myths, especially the ones preoccupied with the myth of national identity.
So for this issue I wrote kind of a sequel, about Lost stories. How some old stories can appear new, how genocides can murder not only people but their stories, as well as how some pieces of information and media can get lost in the current whirlpool of algorithms and the conflict/interchange between streaming services and file-sharing. And about how current and colonial viewpoints can distort the view of history and “other” cultures, respectively.
Maybe I’ll figure out a way to turn it into a tied-together text trilogy in a text for the nect STORIES issue of CBA?
I also wrote an alternative version of my introduction, written from the perspective of an AI text generator. See if you can spot the difference:
In turn, we tell stories to try out ideas, to vent frustrations, to share thoughts and experiences, to explore concepts and actions we couldn’t or wouldn’t do in real life, sometimes just to see if we can get away with it. We experiment with unreliable narrators, shifting perspectives, autobiography or pure fantasies. Sometimes these stories simply come to us, whirl around in the back of our minds until they just need to be let out into the world.
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And in turn, we tell stories to try to emulate how people write, striving to represent how people normally go about creating a believable text, often to create something that will make people more susceptible to our marketing. If the reader can recognize what they’re used to liking, we can tap into the nostalgia factor and that means it’s a good text.
