A Faggot is a Unit, 168 pages US letter format with screen printed manila cover, 2024

///

Edition of 300 + 15AP

Edited and designed by Lele Buonerba and Laurel Hauge

Published by Have a Nice Day Press

Printed and bound in Chicago, IL

Cover photograph “Abgeschaelte Fichtenrinden” 1977 courtesy Ruth Waltz

///

A placeless file. An archive-less faggot looking forward and backward. A provisional form waiting to be acted upon by imaginations.

The original screenplays “The Jealousy of Sagittarius A*” (2023) and “/Imagine Prompt: Catfish Monogamy” (2023) draw on the energies and anxieties surrounding AI — as yet another complexity in the de valuation of labour, thinking, words, and time. Perhaps there is something to be said about bio-poetics here, in that each imagines their own version of the films. The title “A Faggot is a Unit” evokes the rumoured, 16th Century origins of the word “faggot” as an insult against older women forced to make additional income by selling units of fire lighting sticks (faggots). No longer desired, that is, in the emotional soup of a feudal economy that from then on could only insult them. Following the screenplays is a selection of working notes, research, planning, and sketches forming the backgound of two books and a feature film. Each page, designating one month, is the substrate for a retrograde, 7-year calendar titled “A Faggot is a Unit (Homage to Hanne Darboven)”. Given the explicit homage to temporal concentration and “writing work”, can traditions of bio-poetic effort in art ever be replaced as a post-war (which war?) artificial intelligence?