Welcome to Art Signal Contemporary Art Magazine’s premiere issue. Dear reader, if you wish to be notified when Issue 1 is published, please consider joining our Newsletter mailing list. Enjoy the reading!

• Editorial: ‘The journey is the Omega’

• In his curious work entitled “Worstward Ho”, the Irish writer and playwright Samuel Beckett wrote what is a profoundly true declaration regarding any project which we try to undertake in our lives: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better”. Some would say that this quote is the first commandment of a loser, and no doubt the gurus of marketing would…

• Nodes and Meetings: ‘Shrinking Cities’ by Vagner Whitehead

• When thinking of urbanization, the first image most of us conjure is that of the inflated city, and its problems. During the last two centuries hordes of people migrated to cities in quest for better opportunities. The rise of super-cities is an escalating and current phenomenon. This exaggerated growth is directly linked to the industrial revolution, …

• Interviews: ‘Confronting Confrontation: An Interview with Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’ by Brian Curtin

• Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s output makes the work of a critic easy. Since turning to video in the late 90s she has unfolded an oeuvre that approaches questions of the relationship between life and death in the manner expected of all great art. By turns, Araya’s imagery is contemplative, mysterious, questioning, illuminating and provocative.

• Files: ‘Photographs’ by Laura Burlton

• I am a native Houstonian and have lived in the Houston/ Galveston area for most of my life. My love of photography started early on when my parents gave me my first camera, a Kodak tele-instamatic at around the age of 9. My current arsenal of cameras mostly consists of lo-fi, pinhole and toy cameras. I have continued my study of photography…

• Camera lucida: ‘What to do with Invidious Distinctions?’ by Jim Johnson

• Critical discussion of contemporary photography is shaped by a largely unchallenged distinction between “documentary” and “art”. We expect photographers practicing the former to concentrate on the realism, veracity, and accuracy of the images they produce, while those engaged in the latter are freed from such preoccupations, and so…

• Monographs: ‘Barbara Rubin: The vanished prodigy’ by Daniel Belasco

• Barbara Rubin’s 29-minute Christmas on Earth is the filmic record of an orgy staged in a New York City apartment in 1963. This double projection of overlapping images of nude men and women clowning around and making love is one of the first sexually explicit works in the American postwar avant-garde. Today Christmas on Earth…