Other than money, art is the only phenomenon in modern capitalist society whose use value is a product of collective imagination. This is a tension we can – and should – exploit. Money’s imagined value lashes us to a life of doldrum, of giving away the bulk of our time, stressing our bodies into ruin and boring our minds into sludge. All in the futile hope that if we do it intensely enough, we will achieve some transcendent level of freedom.

Hamilton’s discordant will weaponizes differentiated totality into a cacophony of revolutionary justice, a mountain falling down upon the oppressors; with a bearing and movement that denies capitalist realism and its reduced expectations.

We wouldn't consider the more imaginative gangster or revenge films to take place in a dystopia because we recognize that while they might be stylized and grandiose, they take place in the hell of our world. If Squid Game is dystopian, it is only against the future of the past, some future that was once imagined but never came to be. 

To the fading and warping strains of Sammy Davis Jr.’s “Candyman,” the opening scene of the 2021 version of Candyman emerges with shadow-puppets, silhouetting a Black man being chased. A very aware little Black boy, named Billy, plays out this theme on the wall of his home in the Cabrini-Green projects of Chicago. From there, the film takes up the brutalities of racism, and the theme of police predation resonates through the entire movie.

I put the book down … at the explanation of what happened with the Exactus Desirus spell; because I couldn’t help but imagine how drastically different things would look if people were able to manifest exactly what they needed exactly when they needed it.

The dominant UFO visitation myths echo popular occultism in capitalism. The individual is abducted or visited, enweirding their life with either trauma or good fortune, or both. Left occultism responds to everyday kismet, individualized and randomized by the precarity of the worker, with a social kismet, the realization that individual fate is interwoven with the social and collective.

What if the cosmos -- and space exploration -- were part of a great utopian impulse, positioned against war, against privation, and against death itself? What if this imagination was projected onto the surface of Mars instead of Elon Musk’s banal acquisitiveness? This is, in part, the history of Russian Cosmism.

Laura Grace Ford’s Savage Messiah is a wondrously strange experience, part art book, part punk zine, part diary, part manifesto of urban revolution, all spun together into an acid-trip imagining of a future that might never come. We are left wondering how – or where – it might be reclaimed.

We are well acquainted with the unease by now. It’s that feeling that nothing we see in front of us is eternal, that at any moment it could all be thrown off balance. The streets and buildings in front of you that once seemed so immovable and impregnable begin to slide into each other, becoming pliable and ephemeral, responsive to greater forces. This revelation of history is neither good nor bad. It simply is.

How to break out? From the isolation, the despair, the stultifying routines? We are surrounded by the alien, the uncanny, by that which promises the freedom of a good life but inevitably leaves us empty and disappointed. Barbarism disguises itself as stability, and though more and more of us see through the veneer, we often have no idea what to do about it. Imago is an attempt to help generate the necessary ideas of jailbreak.