A transient moment may seem permanent. But neither sign or referent are stable within capitalism.

The critical potential of installation art is that it can act as a counter-totality — a counter-narrative — to this ideological gesamtkunstwerk.

Digital media seems to encourage a dematerialization of political and cultural practice, facilitating an abstraction of theory in both online digital and academic discourse.

Marxism is a specific philosophical method; the theory and practice of working-class self-emancipation. It deals with things that are, of course, problematic, but its purpose is not the disturbance of ideological contradictions or theoretical concepts per se. In his “Five Theses on Actually Existing Marxism,” first published in 1996, later elaborated and republished, Frederic Jameson sketches a number of insightful points. But he misidentifies the core logic (or core dialectic) of Marxism itself, and therefore displaces the Marxist subject. By describing Marxism as a “science of capitalism” or “science of the inherent contradictions of capitalism,” the working-class, oppressed, and subaltern become a secondary concern.

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.

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.

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.

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.