Shifter 10 : Transparent White

Welcome to Shifter's 10th issue, "Transparent White." This issue includes work by:

Eric Angles
Kathleen Miller + Clifford Borress
Joseph Bradshaw
Mark Cooley
Melissa Dubbin + Aaron S. Davidson
Eric Gottesman
Branden Koch
Reuben Lorch-Miller
Matthew McAlpin
Kiki Petrosino
Andre Spears
Christopher Stackhouse
David Samuel Stern
Edwin Torres
Genya Turovskaya
Avinash Veeraraghavan
Ruben Verdu


Editor: Sreshta/Rit Premnath
Co-editor: Pieter DeHeijde


Transparent White

“Milk is not opaque because it is white, - as if white were something opaque. If ‘white’ is a concept which only refers to a visual surface, why isn’t there a colour concept related to ‘white’ that refers to transparent things?” -Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Colour”


Things that can be imagined but not seen. Things that can be seen but not named. Things that can be imagined but not articulated, nor seen. Things that can be said but not seen or imagined. I think “Transparent White” belongs to the last of these categories.


Of course, I use words loosely here.


But imagine, for instance, contemplating a picture of a Martian landscape. We imagine a place, like a red desert. We look toward its hazy horizon as if we could actually see it. In a way, we imagine the object - the target of our gaze - knowing that we do not (cannot) actually stand on Mars. In fact the only way we can access the object is by seeing it in terms that are imaginable. We look from the wrong context, we are displaced, yet we transpose our horizon onto the picture’s and we see a desert. Desolate but nameable.
Can a word mean without representing something? Or can a word be understood if we do not know or have not seen what it represents?

Shifter’s 9th issue Ruin|Monument focussed on the way in which the empty ruin signifies. Like a vacuum it absorbs everything. Like a mirror it reflects back our pointing fingers. The Monument, it was proposed, is the past (memory) embodied, hurtling backwards towards the future.

If the “Ruin” is an absence, which is transformed into object by our projections, then “Transparent White” is fully formed language which does not stick to an object. In a way they are mirror images of each other. While the Monument like the ruin exists physically (it occupies space, we can walk around it, we can photograph it), “Transparent White” occupies a conceptual site of contention. One is not sure if/ what it could represent. Yet one can imagine using the phrase “Transparent White”, in a poem for instance, and meaning something.


Shifter’s 10th issue “Transparent White” will attempt to engage this untethering of utterances from straightforward representation.


-Sreshta/ Rit Premnath

This and all previous issues of Shifter can be downloaded at www.shifter-magazine.com

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call for entries
SHIFTER 11 : Intimate
This topic was proposed by Steven Lam who will co-edit Shifter 11.

The intimate is one of proximity and familiarity. As a relational category, intimacy is a quality of closeness, attachment, and belongingness. To be intimate with someone or some thing is to have an innermost connection. Intimacy, or intimus, designates interiority or an inward sensation, as in under one’s skin. To intimate is also to communicate with a hint, to imply subtly. This process requires a codified reception, a circle of acknowledgement and recognition. Intimacy not only designates issues pertinent to the discussion of home, sexuality, identity, the slippage between the private and public, but also relationships made out of kinship, friendship, and neighborliness.

What mobilizes an intimate attraction? What prompts someone to have such a deep connection? Can it be collectively produced? How can one locate intimacy in this time of hatred, fanaticism, and terror? Can intimacy arise out of estrangement? What role does the intimate have on the construction of belief?

Shifter's 11th issue will attempt to re-narrativize mechanisms of connectivity: it seeks to complicate notions of proximity, interiority, and attachment by inserting the concept of intimacy into a different economy of associations — one pertinent to the shifting language of globalization and its post-colonial realities.

How can artists/theorists/designers, etc. remap a new thinking of intimacy pushing it away from a private emotional ideal frequently narrativized in consumer culture to a zone that seems capable of addressing our time of social upheaval marked by hatred, fanaticism, war, vulnerability, estrangement, and immobility?


-Steven Lam