-|- "I HAVE WITHIN ME THE ENTIRE AGE OF IMAGE" -|-
Watch digital native, Warhol, watch us watch him shatter the screen that mediates modern life. Through a dizzying collage of texts, chats, lyrics, and code, Warhol confronts the all-consuming influence of technology on art, love, and identity. From frenzied online hookups to zoom calls, from soulless corporate consultancy to impending climate catastrophe, Warhol searches for his lost love, Bea, within every image on his phone. As he endures the blurred lines between digital and physical reality, he questions the very nature of authenticity and human connection.
Incisive, audacious, and darkly funny, A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man is a searing critique of our hyperconnected world, a literary hand grenade lobbed into the heart of the digital dystopia we've built for ourselves. With his electrifying debut novel, Pierce Day announces himself as a bold new voice in modern literature, one that fearlessly probes the depths of our digitally defined lives and challenges us to imagine a future beyond the infinite scroll.
Part punk manifesto, part modernist love story, this book is a must-read for anyone who's ever stared into the black mirror of their phone screen and wondered what it means to be human in an age of ones and zeros.
Travis Diehl has written a review as part of a wider piece on "iPhone Modernism" for Spike Magazine (link below). KEY QUOTE: "A Phone’s excellently elliptical narrator lets you imagine yourself in the role of user. It has the antique tang of abandon, all balls and blood exposed, displaying a void you want to fill with the compound sorrow of every miscommunication ever missed. The affect of the Phone is revealed as a cracked modernist thrust. You approach it with commands, but it’s a black mirror, and it gives you loss."
Ella Stening (@esteningxo ) has written a three-part review of A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man published on Substack (link below). KEY QUOTE: "New manifestos, AI fascist speech, techno-death and polyglot propaganda melting together like battery acid and bodily fluids"
Scott Manley-Hadley has published a four part review on his blog Triumph of the Now (link below). KEY QUOTE: "I would have sold my dirty soul to write this book"
For those based in Wellington, the book can be purchased from Undercurrent Books at 118 Tory St. This was the site of the book's launch. In buying from a book store you help preserve a place where all are welcome to attend.
Pierce Day (b. 1999, Te Whanganui-a-Tara | Wellington; lives and works in Dublin, Republic of Ireland) is an artist and writer whose work explores value as both a system and a fiction: how technologies of exchange, language, and governance shape human and non-human futures. Trained in law and philosophy, his practice moves between research, writing, digital media, and painting.
ISBN: 978-0-473-73035-2 Publisher: Screenshot Books Publication Date: 7 December 2024 Final Edit Date: 6 November 2024 Pages: 369 Size (w x h x spine): 152 x 229 x 240 mm RRP: 35.00 NZD Format: Digital / Paperback Category: Art / Technology / Fiction Language: English+
A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man is a dizzying descent into digital madness, where one man's screen addiction and artistic ambitions collide in a genre-bending exploration of love, technology, and the disintegration of the modern mind. It's the first ever long-form screenshot.