Basel Dialogues: Real Intelligence (and Other Flows and Fictions)
A Critical Book Series by the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW
“We talk—we always have.” So begins Real Intelligence (and Other Flows and Fictions), the first volume of Basel Dialogues. Featuring recent conversations among artists, architects, designers, historians, poets, and filmmakers with professors and students from the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, the book’s dialogues—philosophical, fervent, often funny—concern issues of intelligence, the documentary gesture and the real, the poor copy of coloniality, and fiction as a form of design. Flows—of images, capital, and language, as algorithm or liquid—are repeatedly evoked, suggesting the speed at which our ideas move. In every case, though, the issues articulated transcend discipline, suggesting that the most pressing concerns of the present moment inevitably cross fields and form.
Conversations include artists and filmmakers Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme in discussion with Quinn Latimer and Chus Martínez on how call-and-response structures, feminist poetics, and aural forms of futurity operate in their spectral and sensorial filmic installations (“Sound Accumulates and Doesn’t Die”); Himali Singh Soin and Alexis Rider in conversation with Elise Lammer about southern summers and ancestral minerals (“Healing from Meteorites”); and Philip Ursprung in dialogue with Kambiz Shafei about the influence of image-making technologies on the buildings we do and don’t make (“Building The Real Through a Spectrum of Images”). Additional contributors include Camila Lucero Allegri, Gabriela Aquije, Johannes Bruder, Ted Davis, Marcel Gygli, Anna Flurina Kälin, Ines Kleesattel, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Mariana Pestana, Solveig Qu Suess, Casey Reas, Qingyi Ren, Evelyne Roth, Selena Savić, Hanna Sipos, Aylin Yildirim Tschoepe, Nicolaj van der Meulen, Jeffrey Martin Vogt, and Andreas Wenger.
Open Source PDF Download (PDF, will be published in June 2025)