Statement

Welcome to the debut issue of Influence, our new magazine about the ever-changing forms of artistic ideas. Influence was created not so much with a particular niche or pursuit in mind, like art, music, fashion, or even culture in general, but out of the desire to explore how the ideas that shape those creative ventures are continually mutating to fit our lives.

We'll discuss the amorphous definitions and fluid interactions between what have previously been considered discrete categories: various media, past and present, "high" and "low," sublime and ephemeral. We'll ask about the meaning of original gestures, and utlimately the value of the individual in a hyperspeed society. Influence traces the infinitely complex web of ideas and relationships that binds each of these worlds together, inspires the genesis of new forms, and ultimately determinds what the world comes to perceive as the contemporary narrative.

We've purposely built the flow of the magazine to echo the pace and fractured pattern of contemporary life. You'll find randomized images and discursive strands of conversation interspersed throughout the magazine, ideas that drift in and out of focus unexpectedly.

For our first issue, we explore the metaphoric concept of fracture as it relates to our everyday experience: how the things we take for granted can so suddenly appear alient, untenable, and infinite. It's that zone of knowledge within our sight but just beyond our grasp that all approaches, with trembling and wonder in equal measure.

In keeping with our wide field of view, our assembled contributors have taken on a dizzying mix of topics. Louise Neri talks about Grimm's Fairy Tales and SARS, Ulf Lundin stalks his next-door neighbors, Walead Bershty contemplates the zombification of the American landscape, Inex Van Lamsweerde destroys a Vermeer, Danny Goodwin mounts spy cameras on weather balloons to make surveillance photographs of his own backyard, and Kurt Anderson and Lawrence Weschler discuss soundbites, the adoption of standardized time, manufactured authenticity, capital punishment, and harmonic convergences.

If it sounds overwhelming, that's just as it should be.