CATALOGUE · EDITORIAL PROTOCOL · LIVE MATTER — HANDLE ACCORDINGLY
What we publish.
Uncommon Future Press is open to almost every medium, genre, and discipline. But we are not interested in using new formats simply to repackage ideas developed elsewhere.
We publish works in which form is part of the thinking. Where there is a clear understanding that the medium is part of the message.
We are drawn to projects that are hybrid, embodied, interactive, visual, spatial, sonic, speculative, or difficult to contain within a single inherited genre. The medium should not merely communicate the idea. It should alter what the idea can become.
Our central editorial question is:
Does this form think, or does it merely carry thought?
We are especially interested in:
- 01graphic treatises, visual essays, atlases, dossiers, lexicons, manuals, and fictional archives;
- 02animation, speculative film, essay-film, and other moving-image works that invent their own intellectual grammar;
- 03interactive fiction, games, simulations, browser-based works, and playable arguments;
- 04sound works, performances, installations, and exhibitions;
- 05design objects, apps, instruments, and other built things whose argument lives in their use;
- 06literary works that formally transform the knowledge they contain;
- 07projects that combine forms in ways that could not be reduced to a single text, film, or object.
Conventional forms are not excluded. A documentary, podcast, essay, novel, or interview may belong at UFP when it breaks open the usual machinery of its genre.
We also accept work that is not yet formally transmuted: serious research still trapped in the article, whose author suspects it wants to become something else but doesn’t yet know what. Come in with the argument; finding the body it wants is editorial work we can do together. And work may arrive at any scale or stage — a finished film, a staged exhibition, a playable build, a draft, a maquette.
FORMAL, ADJ. — OF FORM, THE BODY AN ARGUMENT TAKES. NOT THE OPPOSITE OF INFORMAL.
We are less interested in conventional explainers, talking-head documentaries, filmed lectures, interview-led podcasts, or illustrated texts in which one medium simply decorates another. We are not looking for academic research made marginally easier to consume.
We are looking for what we call formal transmutation: work that asks what happens when an argument becomes a character, an environment, a sequence, a game mechanic, a sound, a body, or a world.
THE HOUSE HAS FORM HERE — ITS PRIMITIVE ARTEFACT WAS ONE SUCH TRANSMUTATION. THE LORE →
Intellectual seriousness matters. So do provenance, editorial scrutiny, and genuine engagement with the material. But rigour does not require inherited solemnity, and accessibility does not require simplification.
The strongest proposals will make us feel that the work could not have existed in any other form.
You’ve read the criteria. The inaugural round is open.
( PROTOCOL 01 OF THE HOUSE · FURTHER CLAUSES ACCESSION AS THE PRESS GROWS )