Noxious Sector Press
Noxious Sector is a formalized forum for informal inquiry. Noxious Sector Press provides a platform for the exploration of ideas that engage questions of art and theory, the material and the speculative, the real and the imagined - gesturing in the process towards new forms of creative and intellectual thought. Noxious Sector Press is founded on the belief that artistic practice and speculative theory yield different types of insights than more traditional forms of academic inquiry, and aims to provide a forum in which these differences can be shared in a spirit of creative and intellectual community.
Ted Hiebert & Duncan MacKenzie, eds. With contributions by Jane Blocker, Natia Ebanoidze, James Enos & Annie Simpson, Hilma's Ghost, Amy Hirayama, Kuras & MacKenzie, Ashok Mathur, Sarah Mills, Peter Morin, and Laura Perdrizet.
Forthcoming: Fall 2024
Post-rational Visuality seeks to rejuvinate ideas of suspended disbelief in a contemporary climate marked by suspicions of proof and too-frequent disregard of alternative worlds and worldviews. This is "post-truth" not as a tactic to produce confusion or make dangerous political claims but rather as a return to aesthetics as a strategy for sharing unrealized social and philosophical visions. At stake is the possibility of a form of contemporary art that is informed by irrationality, intuition, dreams, nonsense, or paradox and can thus gesture beyond the over-determining tendencies of a single or totalizing sense of reason. This book collects contributions from artists and thinkers whose practices look beyond the rational to take up artistic method as a form of knowledge creation not bound to conventional metrics of thought--seeking new possibilities and openings for creative contemplation and engagement.
Amanda Boetzkes & Ted Hiebert, eds. (2022). With essays by Julian A M.P., Amanda Boetzkes, bug carlson, Nicole Clouston, Silas Fischer, Ted Hiebert, Terrance Houle, Cavil S. Kentis, Jessica Jacobson-Konefall, Ryuta Nakajima, Sky O’Brien, and Amanda White. 312 pages.
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After humans destroy one another's worlds, what will be left are the jellyfish. At least, this is the suggestion of the biologist Jeremy Jackson, who argues that the synergistic effects of the 6th mass extinction have led to the flourishing of some species – such as jellyfish. Such thriving is almost certainly not what Joseph Beuys had in mind when he argued that we are creating the "total artwork of the future social order." But what would happen if we held these provocations together: that human auto-destruction is a creation for other worlds, other species ... other others? Artworks for Jellyfish collects writings from artists, theorists and scholars of science on the question of how art mediates and mitigates our imagination of the future in the wake of an extinction event - or, to put it a little bit differently, how to make artworks for jellyfish.
David Cecchetto, ed. (2022). With contributions by Colin Campbell, A.A. Cavia, Wolfgang Ernst, Ted Hiebert, Jennifer Rhee, and R. Joshua Scannell. 149 pages. Catalyst Book Series Volume 06.
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When M. Beatrice Fazi claims that "computation is computation," we know this is so precisely because computation is never simply contained within the skin of computers, but is instead singularly generative. That generativity—in the fullest sense of the term, and perhaps even a little more than that—is the premise of this book, and thinking with Fazi opens onto more-thans precisely because her analyses are so self-contained. Indeed, the thinkers in this collection demonstrate that because "computation is computation," attendant concepts of media, race, intelligence, digitality, aesthetics, and compression are troped in new ways, yielding novel trajectories.
Ted Hiebert, ed. (2021). With contributions by Théo Bignon, Richard Boulet, Blair Brennan, Michelle Lacombe, Aaron McIntosh, Mary-Anne McTrowe, Veronika Merklein, Mikiki, Christine Negus, Shanell Papp, Kristin Rodier, Zoë Schneider, and Stefanie Snider. 261 pages. Catalyst Book Series Volume 05.
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A mattress, conceived as a place to crash, together. A hot tub, imagined as a site to encounter the end of the world. In times of networked connectivity what's perhaps more radical than embracing virtuality is to think about the stakes of the body, community, and personal encounter. These are themes engaged by the work of performance artist Cindy Baker, whose projects speculate on the forms of intimacy and interaction that art is capable of generating. In Baker's words, her art uses the medium of "context" in order to explore questions of community engagement and social inquiry. Brought together by Baker as catalyst, the contributors to this volume share a spirit of creative community and the belief in context as an important element of transformative social practice.
William Brent and David Cecchetto (2020). 134 pages.
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Conflation is a poetic art with a purpose. A conflation is an amalgamation of two or more related expressions. In most cases, the combination results in a new phrase that makes little sense literally but nonetheless clearly conveys an idea in everyday conversation. The best conflations ring off the tongue naturally. Idioms do what they do because they are part of the ongoing and ever-changing doings of culture. Terms, expressions, and their meanings are always shifting. This book will help you take an active part in these processes, forging the state of the edge in the evolution of language.
Cindy Baker (2020). 510 pages.
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Never Seen Before is a collection of dreams by Canadian artist Cindy Baker. From fake snowball fights to writing school exams on her phone, these vignettes share the humor and the strangely relatable stories of personal night time experience.
College of 'Pataphysics (2019). Translated by Ted Hiebert and Alastair Brotchie. 188 pages.
Pataphysics is the science of exceptions: this book shares the science in the form of 101 words. Pataphysics is also the "science of imaginary solutions," a science--according to Père Ubu--"that was invented in order to satisfy a need that was generally already felt." In short, "Science." Following in the footsteps of Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), the College of 'Pataphysics now cultivates the Science. These 101 entries outline the organization (Vice-Curator, Satrap, Order of the Grand Gidouille), its key concepts (Clinamen, Beatitude, Zimzum), and its relationships with ideas such as the Serious, the Humorous, and Desertion. These keywords also reveal the pataphysical brilliance of figures such as Dr. Faustroll, Raymond Queneau and Fernando Arrabal.
David Cecchetto, ed. (2018). With contributions by Louis Bury, Anita Chari, Ted Hiebert, Anneleen Masschelein, Gerhard Richter, and Patrick Seniuk. 131 pages. Catalyst Book Series Volume 04.
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Consisting in historical scholarly work, art-criticism, and fiction, S.D. Chrostowska's writing exhibits a vitality that seems always on the edge of breaking differently, while also limning a solidity that suggests each trajectory has always been fated to be exactly what it is. The complementarity of these forces -- the thing that in their being together as one makes it impossible that they are the same -- makes Chrostowska's oeuvre irreducible, unabstractable, unrepeatable, and -- yes -- catalytic. In this, Chrostowska's work doesn't simply stage another freedom/fate conundrum, but also constitutes the conundrum itself in its aesthetic profile.
Ted Hiebert, ed. (2017). With contributions by Warren Cariou, Louise Chance-Baxter& and IAIN BAXTER&, George Gessert, George Gessert & Beth Franks, Christian Kuras, Marta de Menezes, Natasha Myers, Kira O'Reilly, Melentie Pandilovski, Paul Vanouse, Amanda White & Alana Bartol and Robert Zwijnenberg. 254 pages. Catalyst Book Series Volume 03.
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In the 21st century, a humanly-impacted climate is the natural state of planetary affairs: a global environmental disaster but perhaps also an artwork of geological scale. Responding to this idea requires an artistic spirit with an ecological conscience--perfectly espoused by the work of artist Jennifer Willet. From speculations on the genetic future to reflections on the ways that art challenges engagement, interaction and analysis, the contributions in this book share a key concern of Willet's: a recognition of the complexities of artistic engagement in a time when the stakes of technological living have never been higher.
Ted Hiebert, ed. (2016). With contributions by Shannon Bell, David Cecchetto, Mark Cheetham, Ted Hiebert, Doug Jarvis, Serena Kataoka, Anne Pasek, Andrew Pendakis and Maria Whiteman. 185 pages. Catalyst Book Series Volume 02.
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Our earth is no longer the solitary blue marble pictured from outer space by the Apollo 17 crew in 1972. Now, scholars such as Amanda Boetzkes imagine it as a plastic blue marble, mediated as it is through the paradoxes of intersectional and elemental thinking, anthropogenic change, and the ongoing project of imagining the futures we are building together. From visions of catastrophe to poetic journeys through the urban, social and artistic imagination, the contributions in this volume redistribute the currents of Boetzkes's ecological and theoretical insights. They discover new terrains of consideration, styles of thinking and creative forms of engaging with art, philosophy and ecological speculation.
David Cecchetto, ed. (2016). With contributions by G Douglas Barrett, Marc Couroux, Émile Fromet de Rosnay, Ted Hiebert, Nicola Masciandaro, Juliana Pivato, Gary Shipley and Amy Tang. 222 pages. Catalyst Book Series Volume 01.
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Eldritch Priest's work does not often figure sounds as waves, but instead favours earworms and egregors ... abstractions that are themselves equally figured through sound. This field is one of phono-fictions, and the contributions to this volume variously figure out (and in) Priest's work by leveraging, interrogating, and promulgating the waves of boredom, bullshit, imagination, and analysis that drive it. These contributions are thus (sometimes true) fictions of a special type: they redound in (non)sonic bodies that are never isomorphic with themselves, instead moving parasitically in modulatory resonances that aggregate and dissemble according to logics that exceed sensibility.
Ted Hiebert (2015). 134 pages.
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This volume collects the curatorial writing produced at Noxious Sector Projects, a window gallery in downtown Seattle, curated by Ted Hiebert between 2011-13. The gallery had as its mandate to be a "formalized forum for informal inquiry" and to exhibit works that creatively challenged the boundaries between the imaginary and the everyday. Featuring the work of: Jackson 2bears, Cindy Baker, Cedar Tavern Singers, Tanya Doody, Neal Fryett, Tetsushi Higashino, Doug Jarvis, Arthur & Marilouise Kroker, Christian Kuras & Ben Tanner, Christian Kuras & Duncan MacKenzie, David LaRiviere, Nate Larson & Marni Shindelman, Urich Lau, Deirdre Logue & Allyson Mitchell, Susan MacWilliam, Ingrid Mary Percy, M.E.D.I.U.M., Steven Rayner, Janet Marie Rogers & Alex Jacobs, Scott Rogers, Second Front, Nathan Shafer, Cara-Ann Simpson, Jason Tentor, Jennifer Willet & Kira O'Reilly.