The Observable Universe An Investigation Heather Mccalden by Heather Mccalden 9780593596470, 9780593596494, 0593596471, 0593596498 instant download after payment.

“Brilliantly innovative . . . syncing a narrative of profoundly personal emotion with the invention & evolution of today’s cyberspace.”—William Gibson, author of Neuromancer & The Peripheral

In the early 1990s, Heather McCalden lost both her parents to AIDS. She was seven when her father died, ten when she lost her mother. Raised by her grandmother, Nivia, she grew up in Los Angeles, also known as ground zero for the virus & its destruction.

Years later, she begins researching online the history of HIV as a way to deal with her loss, which leads her to the unexpected realization that the AIDS crisis & the internet developed on parallel timelines. By accumulating whatever fragments she could about both phenomena—images, anecdotes, & scientific entries—alongside her own personal history, McCalden forms a synaptic journey of what happened to her family, one that leads to an equally unexpected discovery about who her parents might have been.

Entwining this personal search with a wider cultural narrative of what the virus & virality mean in our times—interrogating what it means to “go viral” in an era of explosive biochemical & virtual contagion—The Observable Universe is at once a history of our viral culture & a prismatic account of grief in the internet age.

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Heather McCalden is a multidisciplinary artist working with text, image, & movement. She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art & has been awarded residencies by the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity & Mahler & LeWitt Studios. The Observable Universe, winner of the Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize, is her first book. She lives in New York City.