By Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland, Hans Ulrich Obrist.
A graphic-novel guide to the demented present from the authors of the bestselling The Age of Earthquakes
If you’re wondering why the inside of your head feels so strange these days, this book has the answers. The Extreme Self is a new kind of graphic novel that shows how you’ve been morphing into something else. It’s about the remaking of your interior world as the exterior world becomes more unfamiliar and uncertain. Basar, Coupland and Obrist’s cult prequel, The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present, was hailed as “a meditation on the madness of our media” (Dazed) and “an abstract representation of how we feel about our digital world” (Hello!). Like that book, The Extreme Self collapses comedy and calamity at the speed of swipe. Dazzling images are sourced from over 70 of the world’s foremost artists, photographers, technologists and musicians, while Daly & Lyon’s kinetic design elevates the language of memes into a manifesto. Over 14 timely chapters, The Extreme Self tours through fame and intimacy, post-work and new crowds, identity crisis and eternity. Crazed, hilarious, unsettling, true. No other book today so presciently predicts how the present and the future have become the same thing. The Extreme Self is an accelerated tale for an even more accelerated culture. Welcome to the Age of You. Cultural critic Shumon Basar (born 1974) is the author of Do You Often Confuse Love with Success and with Fame? (2012). Canadian novelist and artist Douglas Coupland (born 1961) is the author of Girlfriend in a Coma: A Novel (2008), Life After God (1994) and Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991). Swiss art curator, critic and art historian Hans Ulrich Obrist (born 1968) is the artistic director at the Serpentine Galleries in London and the author of numerous books, including Hans Ulrich Obrist: Infinite Conversations (2020), Ways of Curating (2014) and A Brief History of Curating (2008).
Featured image is reproduced from 'The Extreme Self'.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Jim Stoddart
It’s superb. Expresses the zeitgeist of the moment.
Adam Thirlwell
In awe of how contemporary it can be.
coupland.corner
Tiny but packs a punch!
Monopol
Readers interact with individual pages which allow associations that are sometimes cringy, not always euphoric, often even dystopically frustrating. But that's the way it is in IRL.
Global Art Daily
Anna Bernice
Poses a journey of reckoning and reconciliation with our parallel digital selves.
Ocula
Dorian Batycka
The Extreme Self bares the soul of our extreme present. It is a marker of emotional intensities that reveal the discombobulated stasis of our neurally networked selves.
Metal Magazine
Lucy McLaughlin
Takes on the usurp of ‘real’ worlds by digital realms.
Arab News
We connect with ourselves through screens, and it is this idea of the self [which this book says] is under threat as a consequence of our widespread digitalization
Canvas magazine
A work of prescient graphic literature.
ArtReview
Posits that the radical shifts in our reality supersede our ability to apprehend them in language.
The National
A probing new graphic-novel-like-book that seeks to answer the big question: who are you really in the age of the Internet?
Welt am Sonntag
The Extreme Self throws lists, images, questions and theses at you, in order to capture a present in which everything is different than it used to be. The self is no longer what it was.
Wired
Iain Akerman
A forceful reminder that we are living through a moment of extreme change. Change that is affecting everyone.
Dazed.com
Teeth-achingly self-aware, with biting humour and both crazed and insightful predictions for the now and near-future. Inhale it in one compelling, uncanny sitting, and you’ll have a mind-expanding understanding of our current crises.
The Guardian
Three decades after Generation X, the authors wonder whether – after Y, Z and now C, for Covid – individuality will become obsolete.
CNN
Becky Anderson
Shows how the near daily conveyor belt of change we experience impacts how we feel.
Eye on Design
George Kafka
As laid out in The Extreme Self, the book endures as a technology to help us see; to help us make sense of our mediatized lives in anxious times.
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Featured spreads are from The Extreme Self, the new, multilayered, collaborative graphic-novel-esque guide to accelerated current-day “reality” by Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist—three of this ever-more perplexing era’s most preeminent thinkers. Pairing images by 70 of the world’s foremost artists, photographers, technologists and musicians along with memes and phrases, questions and short texts by the authors, this is a timely analog manual for the insanity of now. continue to blog
FORMAT: Pbk, 4.5 x 7.25 in. / 256 pgs / 52 color / 57 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $18.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $24.5 ISBN: 9783960989738 PUBLISHER: Walther König, Köln AVAILABLE: 7/20/2021 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Published by Walther König, Köln. By Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland, Hans Ulrich Obrist.
A graphic-novel guide to the demented present from the authors of the bestselling The Age of Earthquakes
If you’re wondering why the inside of your head feels so strange these days, this book has the answers. The Extreme Self is a new kind of graphic novel that shows how you’ve been morphing into something else. It’s about the remaking of your interior world as the exterior world becomes more unfamiliar and uncertain. Basar, Coupland and Obrist’s cult prequel, The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present, was hailed as “a meditation on the madness of our media” (Dazed) and “an abstract representation of how we feel about our digital world” (Hello!). Like that book, The Extreme Self collapses comedy and calamity at the speed of swipe. Dazzling images are sourced from over 70 of the world’s foremost artists, photographers, technologists and musicians, while Daly & Lyon’s kinetic design elevates the language of memes into a manifesto. Over 14 timely chapters, The Extreme Self tours through fame and intimacy, post-work and new crowds, identity crisis and eternity. Crazed, hilarious, unsettling, true. No other book today so presciently predicts how the present and the future have become the same thing. The Extreme Self is an accelerated tale for an even more accelerated culture. Welcome to the Age of You.
Cultural critic Shumon Basar (born 1974) is the author of Do You Often Confuse Love with Success and with Fame? (2012).
Canadian novelist and artist Douglas Coupland (born 1961) is the author of Girlfriend in a Coma: A Novel (2008), Life After God (1994) and Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991).
Swiss art curator, critic and art historian Hans Ulrich Obrist (born 1968) is the artistic director at the Serpentine Galleries in London and the author of numerous books, including Hans Ulrich Obrist: Infinite Conversations (2020), Ways of Curating (2014) and A Brief History of Curating (2008).
