Author: Jack Sparrow

SUBLEVEL is an online literary magazine devoted to the nexus of literature, poetics, art, criticism, philosophy, culture, and politics. SUBLEVEL inherits and reflects the dynamism of contemporary Los Angeles as a hub of literature, art, and activism, while also stretching beyond our locality. Based in the CalArts MFA Creative Writing Program, an innovative and interdisciplinary…

“We come from your future.” This joker’s refrain has echoed throughout the history of our collective. It has taunted us and challenged our grip on what it means to make art, particularly political art, and speaks to the continual movement of an analysis derived from the experience of one context to another. With each iteration…

This conversation developed over several days through various media, including text, email, and Google chats. Rickey Laurentiis: — Or so at least we imagined that was the start. When SUBLEVEL approached us with this idea for a formal conversation, I remember we both jumped at the idea. At least I did. In your measured, cynical…

Kiki Kogelnik, detail from Hanging, 1970. Acrylic, sheet vinyl and hangers on canvas. Courtesy of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation.  This is our Speculative issue. As we see it, to speculate is to call into question not only what could be, but: what is, might be, or might have been. Within the eight features of our…

They stood by the heat, watching the wood pop open to unveil sunlight. Noemi was the teacher tonight, sifting through the memory to find wisdom, to find some guidance. It had been an exhausting long day after months, years of pushing beyond the limits of their bodies. * Task: Be revolutionary. Need: The changes we…

This conversation was recorded on January 24th, 2018, over the phone, between Brooklyn and Las Vegas. It was transcribed and later edited for this page. In preparation for their “Dialogue,” Martine Syms and Jenna Wortham received a series of questions from the editors of Sublevel, these prompts were tailored to their mutual interests in language, new technologies, pop culture,…

In this issue’s Session, we were eager to push “speculation” as far as we could by inviting four speculative artists who had never met before to speculate together via one of our arguably most speculative mediums: email. Their conversation was guided by simple rules: each participant was asked to come up with a prompt and…

Film has long been fertile ground for the speculative genre. From science-fiction blockbusters that gross millions to smaller independent and artistic productions, film is a medium in which we visually confer about the present, the future, about human nature, and even what it means to be watching a film, to be transported from one temporal…

The Contemporary Mind: Pointless Rural Fragment “…lateral thinking is generative… Richness is what matters in lateral thinking. -Edward de Bono The mind, systematically scattered during our current phase of late Democracy has been presented to itself as unquestioned design imbued with itself as being no more than a partially functioning fragment. A fragment that has…

Candice Lin, detail from Putrefaction, 2016, Installation view at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles Contagion is most commonly associated with the spread of disease, poison, corruption, harmful practices or ideas, but its Latin root — con- (together) + tangere (touch) — opens the term in a slightly different direction: co-touching, touching together. Thus: emotional contagion,…