Writing

Made ground is the engineer’s term for land that people build: rubble, fill, the leavings of whatever was there before. It looks like ground. You walk on it, build on it, farm on it, feed your family from it. But you cannot assume it will always bear weight, and no drawing will tell you. You have to go and stand on it and find out.

Our moral ground is made ground. Assembled over a long time, out of whatever was at hand, and now being asked to carry things it was never surveyed for. A machine that talks. Seasons that no longer arrive when they should. Systems giving way underneath. Most of what I write starts there — with the ordinary business of standing somewhere, answerable, on ground that will not hold still.

Books

In Praise of Disorder — UKAI Projects, 2023. On the generative potential of disorder: not as a problem to be managed but as the condition from which culture and meaning emerge. ISBN 978-1-7386464-0-1

Poetics of Synthetic Language — UKAI Projects, 2024. An art book following a nine-month residency with artists and writers working with generative language. Includes a site visit to Milan on the politics and aesthetics of contemporary printing. Designed by Mida Fiore. Printed at Press Press Milano.

Please Don’t Understand This — UKAI Projects, 2022. A decentralized residency and print publication, premised on the observation that nearly every ethical framework for AI extends from Western traditions. Micro-residencies at Dzaleka refugee camp in Malawi, a hutong in Beijing, and an Arabic-speaking design community in Cairo. Designed using only mass-produced stationery appropriate to each region of production. ISBN 978-1-7386464-1-8

GROUND — UKAI Projects, 2022. A tabletop role-playing game and print publication in which players inhabit worlds settled entirely by ideas. Characters cannot improve, only deplete. Play sessions in Toronto, Berlin, Bristol, and Milan.

Essays and Criticism

The Japanese Words for Space Could Change Your View of the World — Quartz, 2018. The publication’s most-read piece of that year; more than 50,000 shares. Watsuji Tetsurō’s fūdo applied to contemporary spatial experience.

Centering Aesthetics in Community Development — Research Handbook on Community Development, Edward Elgar, 2020.

Collaborative Creativity and Creative Collaboration as Future Work Paradigms — The Future of Education and Labor, Springer, 2019.

Poor Footing

An essay every second week on living where the footing is bad — technological, ecological, political. Some pieces come with audio. The archive also holds Local Disturbances, a media series of thirty-eight episodes and the documentation for Shipwreck. Free to read.

It Ended Before Sunset — a Bon Odori in Nagoya, a festival in Toronto, and a year I got wrong.

One of the Small Fires — in 1916 my family started one of the fires that became the Matheson Fire. Then we went south.

Bred to Travel Well — peaches, intimacy, and the quiet enclosure of the space where we used to meet.

In Progress

Material Culture Under Authoritarianism — research into how cultural objects are produced, distributed, and received under conditions of political closure: what the relationship between form, distribution, and resistance reveals when the usual channels are surveilled or co-opted. In development as a book and through a record label partnership.

Commissions

Available for essay commissions. hello@jerroldmcgrath.com