The Extreme Self: Age of You

The Extreme Self is a new kind of graphic novel that shows how you’ve been morphing into something else. It’s about the re-making of your interior world as the exterior world becomes more unfamiliar and uncertain.

The sudden arrival of the pandemic pushed the world faster and further into the 21st century. Now, life is dictated by two forces you can’t see: data and the virus. Are you really built for so much change so quickly?

Basar/Coupland/Obrist’s prequel, The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present, became an instant cult classic. It’s been described as, “a mediation on the madness of our media,” and, “an abstract representation of how we feel about our digital world.”

Like that book, The Extreme Self collapses comedy and calamity at the speed of swipe. Dazzling images are sourced from over 70 of the world’s foremost artists, photographers, technologists and musicians, while Daly & Lyon’s kinetic design elevates the language of memes into a manifesto. Over fourteen timely chapters, The Extreme Self tours through fame and intimacy, post-work and new crowds, identity crisis and eternity. This is an eye-opening, provocative portrait of what’s really happening to YOU



Contributor's include: Michael Stipe, Jarvis Cocker, Miranda July, Agnieszka Kurant, Amalia Ulman, Amnesia Scanner, Ana Nicolaescu, Ania Soliman, Anna Uddenberg, Anne Imhof, Asad Raza, Barry Doupé, Bogosi Sekhukhuni, Cao Fei, Carsten Höller, Cécile B Evans, Chen Zhou, Christine Sun Kim, Craig Green, Dennis Kavelman, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Emmanuel Iduma, Farah Al Qasimi, Fatima Al Qadiri, GCC, Goshka Macuga, Heman Chong, Ian Cheng, Isabel Lewis, Jenna Sutela, Johannes Paul Raether, John Menick, Jürgen Klauke, Koo Jeong A, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Liam Gillick, Liam Young, Lorraine O’Grady, Lucy Raven, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Miles Gertler, Momus, Pamela Rosenkranz, Pan Daijing, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Peter Saville & Yoso Mouri, Philippe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe, Precious Okoyomon, Rachel Rose, Raja'a Khalid, Samuel Fosso, Sara Cwynar, Satoshi Fujiwara, Simon Denny, Sissel Tolaas, Sophia Al-Maria, Stéphanie Saadé, Stephanie Comilang, Suzanne Treister, Tabita Rezaire, Thomas Dozol, Thomas Hirschhorn, Trevor Paglen, Urs Lüthi, Victoria Sin, Wang Haiyang, Yaeji, Yazan Khalili, Yu Honglei, Yuri Pattison.

“Shows how the near daily conveyor belt of change we experience impacts how we feel.” - Connect the World with Becky Anderson, CNN

“Three decades afterGeneration X, the authors wonder whether – after Y, Z and now C, for Covid – individuality will become obsolete.” - The Guardian

“Teeth-achingly self-aware, with biting humour and both crazed and insightful predictions for the now and near-future. Inhale it in one compelling, uncanny sitting, and you’ll have a mind-expanding understanding of our current crises.” - Dazed.com

“A forceful reminder that we are living through a moment of extreme change. Change that is affecting everyone.” - Wired

“The Extreme Self throws lists, images, questions and theses at you, in order to capture a present in which everything is different than it used to be. The self is no longer what it was.” - Welt am Sonntag

“A probing new graphic-novel-like-book that seeks to answer the big question: who are you really in the age of the Internet?” - The National

“Posits that the radical shifts in our reality supersede our ability to apprehend them in language.” - ArtReview

“A work of prescient graphic literature.” - Canvas Magazine

“We connect with ourselves through screens, and it is this idea of the self [which this book says] is under threat as a consequence of our widespread digitalization.” - Arab News

“Takes on the usurp of ‘real’ worlds by digital realms.” - Metal Magazine

“The Extreme Self bares the soul of our extreme present. It is a marker of emotional intensities that reveal the discombobulated stasis of our neurally networked selves.” - Ocula

“It’s superb. Expresses the zeitgeist of the moment.” - Jim Stoddart, Art Director, Penguin Books

“Poses a journey of reckoning and reconciliation with our parallel digital selves.” - Global Art Daily

“In awe of how contemporary it can be.” - Adam Thirlwell, author of Lurid and Cute

“Readers interact with individual pages which allow associations that are sometimes cringy, not always euphoric, often even dystopically frustrating. But that's the way it is in IRL.” - Monopol

“Tiny but packs a punch!” - coupland.corner

Shumon Basar is a writer and cultural critic. He is Commissioner of the Global Art Forum, a transdisciplinary summit held in Dubai and beyond, where recent editions focused on automation, trade, technology and the future. He is a founding member of the renowned ‘Thought Council’ at the Prada Foundation in Milan and is Adjunct Curator at Art Jameel. As Editor-at-Large for Tank magazine and Contributing Editor at Bidoun magazine, Shumon has written extensively about culture, technology and globalisation. Ever since his debut novel, Generation X, in 1991, Douglas Coupland has been a futurist oracle of contemporary culture. His novels Microserfs and J-Pod took place in tragi-comic tech settings, with Generation A fast forwarding to a near eco-apocalypse. Since 2000, Douglas’ return to visual art has included sculpture, paintings, installations and performances, exhibited in notable museums around the world. Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of London’s Serpentine Galleries, is known as the most influential person in the art world today. Intrepid and globally omnipresent, he has curated over 300 exhibitions and conducted 3,000 hours of interviews with the greatest minds of the 20th and 21st centuries. His recent books include Ways of Curating (2015) and Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects (2016).