EXTRACTION: The MEGAZINE

CATALOG AND EXHIBITION GUIDEBOOK

The “Megazine” is the CODEX Foundation’s publication for Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss. Like the Extraction Project itself, this book was many different things at once. Partly a group catalog of extraction-related artwork, each artist or creator’s individual contribution documented their own personal investigations into the extraction question, addressing a specific issue or set of issues under the broader umbrella of the Extraction Project. The project was by no means limited to the visual arts—in these pages you also found poetry, critical writings, philosophical treatises, manifestos, musical scores, conversations, historical or found photographs, and much more. The words and images collected here could thus be seen as discrete stories and aesthetic investigations that nonetheless made up part of a larger ongoing story in which we are all participants (the reader included).

A number of the submissions printed here offered snapshots of research projects that were ongoing, while others provided merely a small window into a larger body of work. For this reason the reader was encouraged to dig deeper. We distributed 5,000 copies of the publication to the participating galleries, museums and exhibition spaces, before the beginning of the main Extraction program.