Issue 3, March 2020

Contents

Introduction

Firstly, thanks to all of you who purchased issues 1 and 2 of Imperica Magazine. We genuinely want to commission, publish, and champion new and emerging writing across a variety of topics. Please get in touch with us, for any reason: feedback, suggesting new topics, suggesting new authors, or just to say hello.

The world at the time of starting this issue seems like a very different one to the one that we are in now. We have simultaneously decomplexified and complexified ourselves and our situations. The futurists - those paid handsomely to soothsay the future for clients around the world - didn‘t really see this coming. None of us did. But, that‘s not to say that the futurists were wrong, or that what they do (did?) has no value. The reframing of our (near) futures through COVID-19 is allowing us to collectively imagine our future, and to imagine our collective future.

From our perspective, COVID-19 puts tremendous stress on freelancers. Many of them are ineligible for financial rescue packages. We want to continue to support them through publishing Imperica Magazine, and so we genuinely and personally thank you for your continued support of Imperica - magazine and website - to allow us to do that.

This issue has some splendid takes on the world. Dan Peeke returns to talk about that most fundamental asset of sound - silence. Elena Alston riffs on the creative capabilities of robots. We have interviews with AI artists and performance collectives. There‘s nightlife safety, an LGBT appraisal of British Gas’ recent campaign, and the loneliness of cities. Finally, we have insights on French postcolonialism and art, the disappointment of Dubai, and feminism in Iran.

Some of the articles in this issue were written before the global outbreak of COVID-19, so please do allow us some creative point-in-time freedom. But, if you are at home in lockdown, I do hope that you find enough in issue 3 for your mind to wander - and to soak up a wide, deep, and truly diverse range of words, pictures, views, insights, and thoughts.

Paul