INFORMATION
Culture criticism that explores the personal.
An Inside Out explores the interplay between the personal and the critical. Meaning is built in the conversation between the work, its reader, its creators, and their intermingling contexts. We want to play in the uncertain spaces between those sources of meaning, to think about how the ideas contained in art relate to our lived experience, and to discuss how they shape our ideas of ourselves.
Keep An Inside Out writing with Patreon︎︎︎.
WRITE FOR US
An Inside Out is looking for writers to work with.
We’re looking for arts criticism that incorporates a personal, emotional response to the subject matter. Personal essays that use critical rigor, critical essays with a personal throughline, or something experimental, there’s flexibility in approaches we’ll accept. What we want is essays that stand as artistic works in themselves. There is no limit on what can be written about, we’re open to writing about any aesthetic work. A book, a film, a painting, an event, a haircut.
Every writer will get an equal cut of any money left from the patreon after the site’s running costs have been paid each month. If no piece runs in a month, the budget will roll over.
Email submissions, pitches, or questions to Contributing Editor Edward Haynes at aninsideoutEd@gmail.com ︎︎︎
CONTACT
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Discovering Dandelion Wine
“The World, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him. And he knew what it was that had leaped upon him to stay and would not run away now.
I’m alive, he thought.”
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︎ JUN 30, Tiffany Babb
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Song Exploder X R.E.M.
Poet and Illustrator Sara Gervais responds to Song Exploder’s documentary about R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion.
When I was little I daydreamed of joining Jesus/
So I could travel with him and his disciple friends and not worry about lonliness or meaning or money/
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︎ MAY 31, Lou Gervais
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Non-Fungible Tokens
The last couple of weeks has seen a lot of discourse about the selling of digital art as Non-Fungible Tokens, a stupid and environmentally damaging idea, wherein a piece of digital art or media is linked to a non-reproducible, unique bit of code, thus creating scarcity and therefore monetary value...
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︎ MAR 31, Edward Haynes
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Sex Criminals Volume 1
Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky’s comics series Sex Criminals ended recently. It tells the story of Jon and Suzie, a couple who freeze time when they orgasm, throwing them into a lonely, liminal space that Suzie calls The Quiet and Jon calls Cumworld, in which they rob banks to get money to save a library from foreclosure. Or at least that’s how it started. A lot can happen in six years and thirty-odd issues.
Almost exactly three years ago, half way through the book’s run in terms of years, I wrote...
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︎ DEC 07, Edward Haynes
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Minecraft
In the popular video game Minecraft, there are ghosts, and zombies, and living skeletons. You can step in and out of hell through a purple portal. It’s a procedurally generated haunted world, unique for each player’s world. There are a lot of ways to play Minecraft, but the monsters are rarely the point. They exist as background detail, you can farm them for resources, you can fight them in survival. But the monsters stand out in a game which is mostly calm and benign, nonviolent and constructive...
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︎ NOV 02, Edward Haynes
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The Loneliness of Killing & Dying
Adrian Tomine’s comics are direct and affecting tales of minute moments in people’s lives, including his own life. In his latest memoir, The Loneliness of The Long-Distant Cartoonist he finds awkward, cringe-worthy humor and sentimentality in his long career and family life. The title story of his collection Killing And Dying shows a teen girl attempting to find comedy in a dire situation as her mother dies of cancer. Humor has a deep connection to emotion in Tomine’s work...
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︎ OCT 16, Edward Haynes
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Boy Parts
The protagonist of Boy Parts, Irina, takes photographs of nude men. She finds ‘average’ men on buses and in shops and invites them to have their pictures taken in her garage studio. These images are inversions of the male gaze, a woman artist objectifying and sexualising her subjects through her lens, often using the icons of kink to cement an switching of the assumed power dynamic. The flipping of gender roles in art isn’t new, but Boy Parts does bring an interesting perspective...
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︎ SEPT 29, Edward Haynes
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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Starting a relationship during a pandemic isn’t ideal. But that is what I did. In March I matched with someone incredible on Tinder, their make-up looks were really cool and we spoke about Talking Heads. I was excited and anxious.
And then everything stopped. The country was locked down, my work shut, everything was overwhelmingly still...
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︎ SEPT 02, Edward Haynes
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DEVS/Ex Machina
Why am I making this website? Or should that be why have I made this website? I’m writing this before An Inside Out really exists (it will exist as a consequence of me finishing this essay). But by the time anyone reads this, the website will exist...
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︎ AUG 10, Edward Haynes
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