Mark von Schlegell. Ickles, Etc. /// Critical Spatial Practice 5
Book Presentation with Mark von Schlegell, Nikolaus Hirsch, Markus Miessen
It’s the late twenty-first century. Technological, environmental, and social catastrophes have changed the meanings of culture, nature, and landscape forever. But in what remains of the international urban scene, architecture still refuses to admit it hasn’t been modern since the early twentieth century. Enter Ickles, Etc.
Helming Los Angeles’s most misunderstood info-architecture practice is Henries Ickles, “the man without self-concept.” Time and again Ickles offers practical solutions to the most impenetrable theoretical entanglements of art, architecture, and science in the 2090s.
In the fifth book in the Critical Spatial Practice series, Mark von Schlegell’s fusion of theory and fiction puts the SF back in notions of “speculative aesthetics.” A collection of interconnected comical sci-fi stories written for various exhibitions, Ickles, Etc. explores the future of architectural practice in light of developments in climatology, quasicrystalography, hyper-contemporary art, time travel, and the EGONET. Occupying New Los Angeles, visiting the Danish Expansion, Nieuw Nieuw Amsterdam, and 1970s St. Louis, the practice finds selves embroiled in very spicy mustards indeed, redefining info- architecture and jettisoning the burdensome “self-concept” of the Western tradition in the process. Just don’t expect a visit to the ruins of Disney Hall!
Mark von Schlegell is the author of the novels Venusia, Mercury Station and the forthcoming Sundogz from Semiotext(e) as well as of two books of literary theory, Realometer and Dreaming the Mainstream, from Merve Verlag, Berlin. His stories and essays occupy art publications over the world. Von Schlegell has directed the Pure Fiction Seminar at Staedelschule, Frankfurt since 2012.
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Edited by Nikolaus Hirsch, Markus Miessen
Featuring artwork by Louise Lawler
Design by Zak Group
