plates: issue 02 cipher

plates issue 02: cipher engages with concepts of code and code-switching. Using a diverse range of approaches that span both fiction and non-fiction, the seven contributions that appear in Issue 02 present insights into the languages both shared and secret, public and personal, that infiltrate and define the contemporary world.

Contents:

Letter from the Editor
"Cayuga Street" by Bre Skye
"Fugere Urbem: Aesthetics, Politics, and Class in Violeira’s Languages of the Non-Urban" by Cecília Resende Santos
"The Preset, the Generic, and an Ambivalent Politics of Non-Production: A Conversation Between Thomas Smith and Richard B. Keys" by Richard B. Keys
"The Gross Gloss: Scorpio" by Alan Perry; illustrations in collaboration with Richard Domenico
"P = NP" by I.L. Smith
"Green Flowers" by Jordan Davey-Emms
"Bird’s the Word: A Cipher in a 17th-Century Sampler" by Isabella Rosner

Contributors:

Jordan Davey-Emms lives and works in Aotearoa New Zealand. She graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts in 2016 with a BFA (Hons). She is interested in movement, flux, materiality, connection, and communication, and is currently researching indigenous pigments with friends. “Green Flowers” is her first long-form poem, and her first time writing about queerness publicly. Maybe the green carnations should be dyed purple. She’ll plant violets from now on, symbol to symbol, it’s just that she was shown a green ghost first.

Richard B. Keys is an artist, writer, and electronic musician working within the intersections of sound, the photographic image, and text. His current research interests involve the epistemological and aesthetic limits of representation, socio-technological assemblages & infrastructures, notions of rupture and failure, and the ecological crisis and its existential implications. He produces electronic music under the name Voronoi. He is from Aotearoa New Zealand and currently lives on Eora Nation land in New South Wales.

Alan Perry is an interdisciplinary artist working with new media, digital output, creative coding, and photography. He creates work that addresses the values ascribed to technology and non-human species. In his studio practice, he orbits the claim that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Alan lives and teaches in Chicago.

Cecília Resende Santos is a Brazilian-American researcher living in Chicago. Her interests include the social and intellectual history of the built environment and the constitution of modernity in the Global South. She earned a BA in art history from the University of Chicago and served as curatorial fellow at the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial.

Isabella Rosner is a current PhD student from Los Angeles living in London. She completed her BA at Columbia University and her MPhil at the University of Cambridge before undertaking a PhD at King’s College London. Her dissertation, entitled “‘Women Professing Godliness With Good Works’: British and American Quaker Women’s Decorative Arts Before Ackworth and Westtown, 1650–1779” focuses on 17th-century English women’s needlework and 18th-century Philadelphia wax and shellwork shadow boxes. She hopes to become a museum curator specialising in textiles after completing her PhD. She is passionate about early modern English needlework, vintage clothing, and good dogs.

Bre Skye is a PhD student in English Language and Literature at Cornell University, specialising in Indigenous literatures and intersectional Black-Indigenous histories across text and media. Originally from Niagara Falls, New York, Bre is a member of the Lower Cayuga band at Six Nations of the Grand River. Through storytelling and photo­graphy, she takes interest in making narratives of Indigenous ‘Rust Belt’ livelihoods more visible, particularly those upon Haudenosaunee homelands in New York State and Southern Ontario. She spends the remainder of her time thinking of claw machines.

I.L. Smith is a writer, artist, and journalist from Boston, Massachusetts. They have a degree in English and Russian Literature from McGill University, and are currently pursuing a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They are the managing editor at F Newsmagazine.