Promotional card for Nick Land’s Fanged Noumena

Sequence Press, 2011, text excerpt from “ziigothiC–=XCoDA=–(CookIng-lobsteRs-with-jAke-AnD-Dinos),” in Fanged Noumena, 7.5 x 10.5 cm
The seemingly jargonized aspect of Land’s writing was, in fact, the result of his toying with the characters and coded imagery that were already dominating the language of mass culture at the time (e.g. alpha-numeric characters bundled for optimal character recognition, then the stylish mainstream appropriation of the same) and so, it forged a link between concept engineering and social engineering. Land’s writing commandeered latent popular awareness by extracting choice elements of style to create its own ciphered syntax, which the reader, almost certainly, continually decodes in turn. Through the act of decoding, she lays bare her vulnerable subconscious as it is hijacked by the libidinal, cultural, and technological realities of Capitalism at the end of the 20th century. Land expertly exploited these modes of transmission, and with the tools for recognition and reading firmly in place, even if the reader doesn’t comprehend the text beyond these stages, as a good citizen, she likes it! 

–“ziigothiC–=XCoDA=– ...,” Katherine Pickard, Bulletins of The Serving Library #7, 2014

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