Vol 2 No 3 | Fall 2021

Letters from the Editors

What’s that old parable about blind guys describing an elephant? They each could only feel the one part they were touching, so they all had different ideas of what the big picture could be. “It’s like a wall!” “It’s like snake!” “It’s like a tree trunk!” “It’s like a fan!”

I am intimately familiar with Bait/Switch, so of course it’s obvious to me what this entire project is and how it works. Once you’ve seen some pieces and learned how they relate to each other, it makes sense. However, it seems that if you’ve only seen one isolated part (or less), it’s hard to envision the whole thing. It’s not a difficult big picture to grasp, but it’s a hard one to concisely explain. Have you tried it?

Take a moment to ask yourself: In one sentence, what is Bait/Switch?

Easy! “It’s an interdisciplinary chain of artwork.” It’s a start, but it leaves a lot out. You could try a more esoteric approach. “It’s an ongoing project that explores artistic collaboration and inspiration.” Okay, but how does it work? I like to give a hypothetical example of some different works leading into each other, but that takes a whole paragraph to explain.

This resistance to simple definition is part of what makes Bait/Switch so compelling. It includes as many different art forms as we can possibly rope in, and its collaborative nature often leads it in unpredictable directions. Plus, Lu and I continually try to paint ourselves into a corner. (“Let’s challenge this vegan chef to encapsulate that animated gif as something edible, and then try to publish the experience in a magazine!”). These qualities make this simple structure feel surprising and wild. And that’s not a bad thing.

Perhaps we aren’t meant to have an elevator pitch. Maybe we should expect to have to hit the emergency stop button to buy us enough time to properly explain. It may well be that the easiest way to understand the relationship between switches is to just look at a few. So let’s do that. Let’s look at a few and learn how they relate. I’ll meet you there.

Happy Autumn to our wonderful community! This season always kind of sneaks up on me. I think part of me struggles to admit that it’s not summer anymore. But if I’m honest with myself, this feeling of melancholy is less about the change of seasons and more about the passing of time generally, something that seems to happen faster all the time.

Shifting temporal perspective, that phenomenon of time moving faster as the years go by, is a natural part of life. And yet, if it is so natural, why does it feel so strange? But then again, doesn’t so much of life feel paradoxical? If the present moment is always here, and change is the only constant, how can we stay grounded in reality while also imagining better things for the future? What does it mean to accept life on life’s terms while also daring to dream of change?

All of these deep questions have been running through my mind as I review the stellar works that make up this edition. There are so many themes that run through these works, but many of them seem to point to the theme of Relate. How people relate to each other. The relationships between birth and death, outer space and inner space, light and darkness, color and form.

As usual, we have some exciting firsts to celebrate in this issue. For the first time ever, we have allowed a prompt to be passed along organically from one friend to another (it seems that some rules are meant to be broken sometimes). We have the longest written piece we have ever published, and our first piece of wearable artwork (I think we settled on haberdashery?) to be included in the corpus. This was also the first time I personally have ever contributed artwork, and it was just as thrilling and wild as I expected it to be. A lovely bright spot in the midst of a difficult season.

It’s still kind of weird out there, so please take care of each other, tend to the ones you hold dear, and be gentle with yourself. Stay strong, stay present, and stay awesome.

Map of Works in This Issue

Bait/Switch is an interdisciplinary exquisite corpse project. Every work is a creative response to a piece made by another artist. The project is divided into three branches- cyan, magenta and yellow. This map/diagram shows how the works in this issue fit together, and what came before. You can see the entire corpus on our maps page.