In March 1993, aged 14 and living in the Ida B. Wells housing project in South Side Chicago, LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman were given tape recorders and asked to keep an audio diary of their lives. For a week, Jones and Newman recorded everything from going to school to hanging out in the streets to adventuring together. They interviewed their families and friends and told the stories of their lives into microphones while lying in bed late at night. The boys named their poignant radio documentary Ghetto Life 101. The result was a portrait both of two children growing up in poverty and the enormous struggles they faced, and of their boundless strength, resilience, humour and extraordinary humanity. Following its broadcast on the national radio show All Things Considered, Ghetto Life 101 became one of the most requested programmes in the history of public radio.

Read poetry and prose in the first-ever book written by a computer, from 1984 – The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed. Programmers William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter wrote Racter (the computer program) to generate random prose and poetry. This is the outcome, scanned from an original publication. Racter later became an interactive program and early chatbot.

Fertile Souls: Evolving Covid Resource Doc

Initiated by artist Ayesha Tan-Jones, who as part of Shadow Sistxrs Fight Club was an ICA Social Creative Network artist-in-residence, Fertile Souls is a roaming survival school offering skill shares for collective healing. As part of the school’s online offerings, Tan-Jones created this evolving resource document which includes a recipe for an immunity-boosting fire cider, and will soon announce an open call for a digital survival handbook.

Contesting both the terms ‘future’ and ‘greatness’, Jesse Darling writes about Adam Farah’s practice (aka free.yard) in Art Review’s ‘Future Greats’. Farah’s work is situated in a place of embodied research, highlighting the multiplicity of their practice(s), as well as the possible mutations of free.yard as both curatorial platform and brand identity. Here Darling’s writing works with the practice, rather than attempting to crystallise it within the existing matrix of the art-world’s often corrupted canon.

Alice Hattrick’s reading as part of the ICA presentation On Cripping was a resonant reminder of the importance of finding a language for the ill feelings that speak in and through the body. Drawing upon the diary-writing practices of sick women who have gone before her – Susan Sontag, Virginia Woolf, Louise Bourgeois, this essay emphasises the importance of authoring your own experience. She writes: ‘ill feelings can be silencing, but they are also an effect of silencing’.