Vol. 1 No 2 | Fall 2020

Communication

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Happy October to our beloved Bait/Switch community! I love how spooky the Fall always feels. Although the darkness feels deeper than usual this year, the autumn colors (at least here in Boston) are especially lovely. The other day I said to my husband, “I just can’t get over the colors this year!” To which he replied, “Yes, you’ve been saying that all year!” And it’s true. The flowers were especially luscious this Spring. The trees were especially verdant this Summer. And now the leaves are especially vibrant this Fall. Our neighborhood has boasted many varieties of roses, some of which are still flowering. I’m not sure if nature is happier because pollution is down, or if I’m just noticing more of it because I’m not constantly bolting to my next appointment across town.

I am delighted to present this amazing collection of work to you, made by some extremely talented people. These twelve works are as different from each other as any group of works in the Bait/Switch corpus, but they all seem to consider some question about communication. Layers of meaning and the ways we communicate ideas. Conversing with our own inner voices and reacting to external forces. Notes. Telephone calls. Text messages. AI. Speaking with symbols. Attempts to communicate who we would like to be through our actions. Actions that bely the things we say.

This has been a very heavy year, and many of the topics present in this issue telegraph that. Suicidal ideation is beautifully explored by two different contributors. We talk about LGBTQ rights, racism, and social justice. We get political. It’s impossible not to these days- politics seep into everything. But also, art is political, and this is an art publication. Although some of this feels risky, I keep coming back to something contributor Ariel Knoebel said during our interview: “It felt disingenuous to leave it out for the sake of not wanting to be wrong.”

The patterns that emerged while putting this issue together really floored me. For example, on three separate threads, we have written text presented in innovative ways: a poem presented as an image, a fiction piece presented as a text message conversation, and an interactive piece of writing that is accessed through a digital experience. We had never previously had anything like that come in- it’s pretty damn cool that we got three at once! I am continuously amazed by these coincidences, and the other things this work is constantly teaching me.

I am also beyond excited to unveil our new interactive map of the full Bait/Switch corpus, created by our Programmer in Residence, Jordyn Bonds. This map has felt like a pipe dream for a very long time. It means a lot to me personally, because since this project began I have had the frustrating feeling that I am the only one who is able to see this project in its entirety. This is a publication that transcends time, space and sensory experience, and it can be hard to really see how truly big it is. This map is our first attempt at a visual modeling- we hope you enjoy perusing it!

Stay safe, stay present, and stay awesome.

Lu Valena, Executive Director

Map of Works in This Issue

Bait/Switch is an interdisciplinary exquisite corpse project. Every work is a creative response to a piece made by another artist. The project is divided into three branches- cyan, magenta and yellow. This map/diagram shows how the works in this issue fit together, and what came before.