Artist book
The Academy of Realness, 2023
148 × 210 mm (portrait)
Perfect bound
196 pages
Full-colour printing
Edition of 45
The Naked Lunch is a publication constructed through acts of borrowing, recombination, and image drift. Taking its title and conceptual point of departure from William S. Burroughs’ 1959 novel, the book does not attempt to illustrate the original text but instead treats it as a procedural device — a machine through which images, fragments, and cultural debris are reorganized. Burroughs’ methods of discontinuity and the cut-up become displaced into a contemporary image condition shaped by algorithmic production and network circulation.
Produced through computer-augmented and AI-generated imagery, the publication assembles a shifting field where advertisements, robots, celebrity images, anatomical fragments, cartoon forms, consumer products, architecture, found photographs, and digital artifacts enter unstable relationships with one another. Figures appear and disappear; identities dissolve into interfaces; bodies become synthetic surfaces. Narrative is interrupted before it stabilizes.
If Burroughs’ Interzone operated as a hallucinatory geography of addiction, bureaucracy, paranoia, and control, this publication proposes another kind of territory: one formed through endless image circulation and machine interpretation. The grotesque body-horror of the original novel becomes informational rather than biological. Control no longer appears through doctors and institutions alone, but through systems of recommendation, automated image production, media repetition, and synthetic desire.
The publication emerged from concerns that later became central to both The Academy of Realness and The New Rare: the instability of authorship, the movement of images across contexts, and the possibility that meaning increasingly arrives through editing and arrangement rather than invention. Images are not treated as fixed illustrations but as temporary occupants moving through a larger structure. Names become stand-ins; images become relatives; cultural memory becomes reorganized through juxtaposition.
Rather than functioning as an adaptation of Burroughs, The Naked Lunch operates as a secondary object — somewhere between artist publication, visual archive, speculative fiction, and image inventory. A literary work passes through another system and returns altered.
Original period publication. Edition released through The Academy of Realness, 2023.
