This book is a new kind of graphic novel that shows how you’ve been morphing into something else. It’s about the remaking of your interior world as the exterior world becomes more unfamiliar and uncertain. The sudden arrival of the pandemic pushed the world faster and further into the 21st century. Now, life is dictated by two forces you can t see: data and the virus. Are you really built for so much change so quickly? The Extreme Self collapses comedy and calamity at the speed of swipe. Dazzling images are sourced from over 70 of the world’s foremost artists, photographers, technologists and musicians, while Daly & Lyon’s kinetic design elevates the language of memes into a manifesto. Over 14 timely chapters, The Extreme Self tours through fame and intimacy, post-work and new crowds, identity crisis and eternity. Crazed, hilarious, unsettling, true. No other book today so presciently predicts how the present and the future have become the same thing. The Extreme Self is an accelerated tale for an even more accelerated culture. Welcome to the Age of You.
About the Authors
Shumon Basar is a writer. He is the author of Do You Often Confuse Love with Success and with Fame? and some of his (co)edited books include Translated By, Cities from Zero and Hans Ulrich Obrist Interviews: Volume 2. He’s Editor-at-Large at Tank magazine, Contributing Editor at Bidoun magazine, director of Format at the AA School, London, an advisor to the Fondazione Prada, Milan and Commissioner of the Global Art Forum in Dubai, the city where his novel World!World!World! is set.
Douglas Coupland has written thirteen novels published in most languages. He has written and performed for England’s Royal Shakespeare Company and is a regular columnist with The Financial Times. He began a visual art practice in 2000, and his first museum retrospective opened in summer 2014 at the Vancouver Art Gallery and travelled to Munich’s Villa Stuck for the summer of 2015. Since 2015 he has been an artist-in-residence at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris.
Hans Ulrich Obrist is a curator and writer. Since 2006 he has been co-director of the Serpentine Gallery, London. His previous books include Ai Wei Wei Speaks, written with Ai Wei Wei, and Ways of Curating, published by Allen Lane. He is widely considered one of the most influential contemporary curators in the world.
About the Publisher
Koenig Books is an imprint of Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig (VWKG) which was founded in 1968 in Koln/ New York by Walther and Konig is the sole publisher of VWKG, which specialises in artists’ books and artist-led catalogues. With an estimated 2, 500 titles, they publish mainly on modern and contemporary art, photography, architecture and aesthetic theory.