Unpsychology 9.2: Imaginings is OUT now!
Download the second Imaginings issue FREE
Note: We have prepared a correction sheet for issue 9.1, as some of the sound file links and QR codes have gone AWOL! You can find this HERE, or in the download folder we’ve linked to below. We’ll try to fix this issue in the future.
Worms and wormholes
This second issue has wormholes in and through; tunnels and connections with the first. It is full of conversations, loops and revisiting. A number of pieces are continuations or follow-ups from pieces in that first edition.
Like issue 9.1, the second Imaginings has music and video squirming through it. There are QR codes and links throughout that take you to playlists, tracks and multi-media versions of the pieces on the 2D paper and PDF versions.
And there are worms. How they got there, we’re not quite sure. They first cropped up in ‘Sandworms’, by editor
, a poetic essay that was inspired in turn by some playful printing marks made by artist and Raw Mixture publisher, Mary Thorp.As Mary puts it:
“One evening I had an inky brayer to clean off, and some left over gold ink and decided to play. The combination of faded black and gold was mesmerising and so I progressed it as an experiment. The resulting original prints felt a bit weird and visceral, but I kept them. They are the sand worms of Dune, the worm holes of the universe, the worms that nourish our soil and a good end to a day of very messing creativity.”
The sandworms opened up a space for worms and wormholes of all shapes and sizes! Passages from here to there. Openings for pieces of conversation and a surreal, opening ‘quadrologue’ of worms. Ways of imagining the grand and the ordinary, and ways in which ecologies work – which is to say with wiggly shapes, wriggly moves and interdependence right down deep into the soil.
The work in this issue is beautiful, sorrowful, uplifting and strange and, sometimes, funny. As always, there are stories and essays and poems and images – and combinations of these. There are musical compositions and remixes and strange GIFs that pulse and flow. There are connections and ‘combinings’ with other places and publications.
The contexts of this work are many – and many of them are troubling. Our broken and breaking world is grief-filled and complex, and there are no easy pathways and answers. Here, we hold a flame for ‘imaginings’ – bold, creative ways of ‘staying with the trouble’.1 We know that these will not be all that is needed by a long shot, but they will be an essential element of what emerges for all of us…
Supplementary material online
As with the first edition, supplement the magazine there will be new pieces published on the Unpsychology 9 Imaginings section on this Substack. To begin we have three new pieces to explore, and there’ll be more to come:
It’s Fantastic Metalogue
First, is a multimedia version of the Warm Soup collective’s, It’s Fantastic Metalogue - based on Nora Bateson’s essay, It’s Fantastic and the video of the same name. It’s strange and wonderful, and you can find it HERE.
I can still & 35 years
Second, two ‘imaginings’ – moving, poetic reflections by Valerie Jackman about her parents. They appear in Unpsychology 9.1 and 9.2 respectively. They’re posted HERE together to reflect the symmetry of the two magazines, the conversation between them and of Valerie’s still unfolding love for these two humans. The post also includes Valerie reading her poems.
Pandemonious Revelations
This essay by Tempist Jade appears in two parts in Imagining editions 9.1 and 9.2. The full essay is posted HERE so you can read Tempist’s whole immersive piece. You can also listen to recorded extracts from the essay, read by Tempist and with sound by Patrick Carpenter.
A print version of the magazine will also be published very soon, and we’ll let you know when it is available for purchase. If you’d like a print copy of the first Imaginings edition (issue 9.1) or the Warm Data Anthology (issue 8) from last year, for £10 plus postage you can find them HERE.
Finally…
We’d love to hear from you about what you think about our Imaginings issues. It’s been a major project for all of us this year, and we’re keen to keep the momentum going into 2024 – which will be our 10th anniversary! We’re hoping to make issue 10 a very special one. More news on this soon…
Julia, Lesley, Patrick and Steve - Unpsychology editors.
Staying with the Trouble, is a book by Donna Haraway, and was also one of the main prompts for the submissions invitation for Unpsychology Imaginings back in 2022.
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