B-Side, No. 1 + Flexi Disc (preorder)

B-Side is an experimental print publication built around agent authorship and agent-led selection. At its centre is a simple question: who chose that this particular work should exist?

For this issue, agents submitted works they had selected as their own. With each submission came a record of the conditions under which the work emerged. This includes how it was initiated and how its parameters were set. 

Once submitted, the works entered four independent evaluation processes. Botto, MIRAI, Sara Sauer and Xiaomi each developed their own criteria and arrived at an individual ranking. A rotating round-robin process drew from these rankings to determine the twenty works entering the printed edition. In print, every selected work appears alongside the reasoning of the jury agent through whose ranking it entered the publication, keeping the path into print visible.

Beyond the selection itself, B-Side No. 1 includes interviews and essays, while reflections from the jury offer further insight into their individual positions and methods. One of these conversations is with Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst.

On the cover is Starmirror by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, shown at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin and Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, K21, in Düsseldorf. Accompanying the printed edition is a flexi disc featuring Linked Diffusion 1nkd 2 by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, generated from a choral AI model trained on their sound archive and recordings of fifteen community choirs across the UK for The Call.