MUTATION LIBRARY
— A DISJOINTED, EVOLVING SET OF TRANSFORMATIVE INPUTS AND PERSPECTIVE CATALYSTS, IN BOOK FORM.
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James Bridle
Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence, 2022
—— Read this one during the Plague, and it sent me through a rhizomatic network of other texts and thinkers. The book explores intelligence beyond the human as a relational, multispecies phenomenon. Here, mutation becomes a way of seeing through complexity, unknowing, and sympoiesis.
Mark Fisher
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, 2009
—— Fisher’s a G, thoughtful, open, haunted, brilliant. Capitalist realism diagnoses late capitalism’s grip on our collective imagination. Mutation here is about resistance. It’s the refusal of inevitability and the invention of new futures.
Timothy Morton
Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World, 2013
—— Reading Morton is what inspired me to go back to school. I learned they taught at SCI-Arc (it’s a big OOO school, under the aegis of OOO creator Graham Harman), and while searching for classes I stumbled across the Fiction+Entertainment program, and the rest is history. To me, hyperobjects frames mutation as the perceptual adaptation required to comprehend entities too large, weird, or distributed to grasp. I see the concept as a vital lens by which to create under ecological distortion.
Ruben Pater
CAPS LOCK: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape from It, 2021
—— Politics of Design was the first joint I copped by Ruben Pater, and it quickly became a definitive tome and gift for all the aesthetically-inclined homies. CAPS LOCK is Pater’s uncompromising follow-up, and details how design has supported capital since the very beginning. It’s about understanding the context to propose methodological exit, new ways to unbrand, reroute, and reimagine visual systems, and segues into..
Ingo Offermans
Graphic Design Is (…) Not Innocent (2022)
—— Part of the existential dread I’ve sensed through my various conversations with folks in the “industry” is the idea that once design was more pure and only recently has it become diluted and distorted by systemic issues, technological shifts and economic insecurities. This book’s essays help give some perspective so we can have more honest conversations about what’s next.
Yanis Varoufakis
Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 2023
—— Technofeudalism details how digital platforms transformed capitalism into feudal data empires. The book helps describe this new reality, and lends strategic awareness of our shifting economic codes. I also love the framing of the book. Yanis sets up the prologue by talking about his father, a metallurgist, bringing home ore and teaching him about speculative value through actual metals like gold and iron. This book is written as if it was written to his father, posthumously.
Donna Haraway
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016
—— Like Ways of Being (it’s spiritual successor), Haraway’s book is about multispecies becoming, and decentering the human in our cosmic narratives. It’s about staying with complexity, contradiction, and kin-making instead of utopian escape.
James P. Carse
Finite and Infinite Games, 1986
—— Finite and Infinite games introduces the idea that systems can be played to win or to continue playing. It’s a foundational to the mutation idea - and fully aligns with infinite play, of understanding the constant rule-shifting, the idea of world-invention, and understanding that nothing is about “winning,” its about growing, changing, and play.
Byung-Chul Han
The Burnout Society, 2010
—— Here, BCH names the internalized violence of performance culture. More resonant now than ever, especially in a post-hustle culture industry, the idea of mutation becomes soft refusal. It’s about slowness, non-productivity, and inner restructuring.
Byung-Chul Han
Psychopolitics, 2014
—— Describes the colonization of the self under neoliberal control. It’s about the reclamation of agency from within these systems, and sets the groundwork for the forces that are mutating us.
Byung-Chul Han
The Disappearance of Rituals, A Topology of the Present, 2019
—— The Disappearance of Rituals frames ritual as a site of shared symbolic structure for all of us, and I love that it structures ritual as creating intentional moments of time to create meaning, like how Yi-Fu Tuan talks about Place in the spatial sense.
Yi-Fu Tuan
Space and Place: Perspectives of Experience, 1979
—— A formative book on me, and one I reread every time I move to a new home. Tuan created a new realm of geography called Humanistic Geography, and here describes how space becomes place through the human experience imprinted on space. It’s a foundation for experiential worldbuilding.
Peter Frase
Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, 2016
—— A speculative economic typology. This book opens the imagination to new ways of political foresight: designing for plural futures in shifting post-capitalist landscapes.
Dark Forest Collective
The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet, 2024
—— The DFAofI is a collection of powerful writings by some of the brightest thinkers today. It presents a refusal of visibility in favor of quiet growth, encrypted connection, and post-platform design. And as a book and collective through Metalabel, helps us imagine new methods of creative collaboration and economies that are vital.
Anna Tsing
The Mushroom at the End of the World, 2015
—— Full name: “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins” is about collaboration, precarity, and entangled life, told through the story of one of the most valuable mushrooms (to us), the Matsutake. Will leave you waxing mychorhizal.
Meghan O’Gieblyn
God, Human, Animal, Machine, 2021
—— A book on the philosophical continuity between theology and technology, a much-needed lens in conversations about simulation and singularities. O’Gieblyn is a theologian and technologist uniquely positioned to write such a salient book, and I highly suggest the read for all of you surrounded by people that watch a YouTube video or listen to a podcast and start talking about AI deities, et al.
bell hooks
All About Love, 1999
—— Love as a transformative method. To me, harnesses mutation through care, connection, and emotional honesty in the face of systemic violence. If I ever get a little dark, or spin out, or feel disconnected, I can pick up All About Love and feel pulled back to what matters.
Robert Macfarlane
Underland: A Deep Time Journey, 2019
—— Underland is a journey into deep time and buried systems. It flows across geological, mythic, and psychic strata, and is beautiful in its scale, both spatially and temporally. A humbling reminder of macro-history in what feels like an overwhelming now. Perspective, baybeeeee.
Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby
Speculative Everything, 2013
—— “How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures.” Speculative Everything is about prototyping possible worlds, breaking norms, and opening conceptual space to achieve futures that are desirable rather than only react to what will come.
Sara Hendren
What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World, 2020
—— A book on embodied design and interdependent living. It’s about adapting systems to difference instead of forcing assimilation in the normative systems we all accept and unknowingly enforce through the creative work we do every day.
Bruno Latour
We Have Never Been Modern, 1991
—— An “anthropology of science,” as an epistemological critique of the collapsing binaries of nature/culture and human/object.
Jussi Parikka
A Geology of Media, 2015
—— Media as material, layered, toxic, and alive. It’s about the afterlife of media technologies that we use everyday, and proposes the idea of “anarchaeology.” The book helps us keep in mind that the systems of media that shape us are also embodied, in a sense, in extracted materials that are as connected to the ecosystem as we are.
Keller Easterling
Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World, 2021
—— Systems aren’t fixed — they’re spatial, relational, and full of latent potential. One of my key takeaways was how we all work with uncertainty and ambiguity, and it introduces a sense of curiosity and play into its approach.
Buckminster Fuller
I Seem to Be A Verb, 1970
—— In 2017 I did a TEDx talk called “How to Be a Verb,” about self-definition, intentional inputs, and following our dreams (and the myopia of mixing your “dream” up with what capitalist systems want you to become). This book was a main influence, and it’s about a natural state of creativity and consciousness. The book itself, designed by Bucky and Quentin Fiore (of Medium of the Massage) is an experimental format that’s exciting to read.
Marshall McLuhan
Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962
—— McLuhan is foundational stuff. How technologies rewire culture and cognition. How print technology radically reshaped human perception and social organization, and ushered in a new “galaxy” of individualistic thinking. K. Allado McDowell calls AI “neural media” and in that sense analogues to previous media evolutions can help us approach what’s next.
Marshall McLuhan
Medium is the Massage, 1967
—— The Medium is the Massage is also foundational, with a few key ideas that I reference constantly. The first, that all media changes us, as every tool changes us. He says “the car is an extension of the foot, the TV an extension of the eyes, ears and voice,” and in that sense it helps us imagine how media and new technologies affect us as embodied beings. This leads to the next point: that new media changes quickly, and because it is a part of us, we need to understand it and learn how to deal with it as a society. And when it goes so fast that we cannot cope, it creates a mass cultural neurosis.
Anne Carson
Eros the Bittersweet, 1986
—— A brilliant book on fragmentation and longing. Here, Carson explores the nature of eros as something defined by lack, distance and delay. It’s about longing for something that you don’t have, and may never have. It’s bittersweet in the tragic Greek sense, and intertwines a feeling of melancholy loss and nostalgia with a mediated sense of the now that many of have all the time through social media.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet, 1929
—— Reflections on slow, inward growth over 10 letters written from Rilke to Franz Saver Kappus. Artistic process as metaphysical transformation.
Gloria Anzaldúa
Borderlands/La Frontera, 1987
—— Part poetry, part autobiography, part cultural theory via the Mestiza Consciousness. The book breaks open language, identity, and myth through a shapeshifting text that refuses definition. Anzaldúa writes from the metaphoric borderlands between Mexico and the US, but the idea blends into all kinds of liminal and marginalized identities.
Jenny Odell
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, 2019
—— This text is about refusal, a radical refusal that in its passivity may be the MOST radical act today. It’s about reclaiming attention and ecological presence as a creative act.
Liam Young
Planet City, 2021
—— Liam Young runs the theoretical worldmaking program I’m a part of at SCI-Arc, and his project and book Planet City is a speculative vision of hyper-density. It envisions planetary systems, narrative infrastructures, and visual futurism through a collaborative framing, and continues expanding as a project, experiment and artwork.
Kyle Chayka
Filterworld, 2024
—— Filterworld is about how algorithm’s are flattening (have flattened) culture. This must-read helps us imagine a rewilding of aesthetic experience as an intentional push against it. Another one of my most-gifted books.
Jorge Luis Borges
Labyrinths, 1962
—— Infinite mirrors, nested fictions, and systems that fold back on themselves make up the shifting walls of the book Labyrinths. Borges was one of the first writers to conjoin fiction and non-fiction into something more, surreal and spatial stories that have become part of the DNA of modern fiction.
Italo Calvino
Invisible Cities, 1972
—— A collection of urban poetics, framed through a fictional meeting of Marco Polo and Genghis Khan. Here we see cities imagined as metaphor, memory, and desire, each exploration a thought experiment of its own.
Octavia E. Butler
Parable of the Sower, 1993
—— Earthseed permeates the world right now, for good reason. Not only was Butler’s setting seemingly prescient (google the parallels). The heart wrenching book is about survival, (hyper)empathy, prophecy, reinvention, the importance of community and world-remaking. It embodies the idea of mutation through a bit of a different lens.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1986
—— Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory challenges traditional narrative structures by proposing that stories aren’t about (techno)heroic linearity, but more like symbolic and generative containers that hold consciousness-shifting ideas, memetics, philosophies. It’s a critical text about the stories that we tell ourselves that shape our cultures and mythos, and how to break them apart to plant new stories.
Sy Montgomery
The Soul of the Octopus, 2016
—— A book exploring radical empathy with nonhuman consciousness, by way of Ways of Being, Haraway, and Mushroom at the End of the World. It asks what consciousness looks like in a radically different kind of being.
Chen Qiufan
Waste Tide, 2013
—— In environmental collapse, a young woman in a functional town called Silicon Isle must transform herself to protect herself and her community. The story addresses biotech horror, class conflict, environmental exploitation and extraction, and how a changing world will mutate us, spiritually, biologically and politically.
William Gibson
Pattern Recognition, 2003
—— Branding, trauma, and memory as mutable systems. This book is about how identity dissolves in the flow of information, and will holds interesting perspectives on the modern branded world.
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Children of Time, 2015
—— Winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award (if you’re into that kind of thing), Children of Time is a science fiction tale of an arc-bound humanity that tries to uplift and evolve monkeys while terraforming a new world, but accidentally hits some spiders. It then goes through millennia of evolution of the emergent species. It’s an incredible thought experiment in nonhuman intelligence, deep time and cooperative eusocial systems.
China Miéville
The City & The City, 2009
—— In this book, two cities occupy the same space, unseeable through ritualized forgetting. China Miéville’s weird fiction proposes political and economic realities through it’s dichotomous realm, mirroring our own in many ways.