Author Description

Strange Attractor takes its name from the inherent order embedded in various forms of chaos. Expanding on ideas and connections forged in the 2017 Ballroom Marfa exhibition of the same name organized by Gryphon Rue, Strange Attractor explores the uncertainties and poetics of networks. Rue, a experimental sound artist and curator, brings together artists and practitioners from a variety of fields to converse on the chaos, connections, and interpretations that narrate everyday experiences. The topic of sound pervades the book as a guide and narrator throughout a web of increasingly complex relationships between systems that reveal a backdrop of socio-political power, transmigration, and asylum. Strange Attractor includes artworks from Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Thomas Ashcraft, Robert Buck, Alexander Calder, Beatrice Gibson, Phillipa Horan, Channa Horwitz, Lucky Dragons (Luke Fishbeck and Sara Rara), Mark Lombardi, Herbert Matter, Haroon Mirza, Elias Sime, and Douglas Ross, as well as conversations between tropical ecologist Merlin Sheldrake, novelist Chloe Aridjis, and economic sociologist, Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, as well as texts by media art historian, Douglas Kahn, and poet, Bernadette Mayer, among others.