P001 → #VALUE!
Unknown Quantities
Edition 13
2025
Charged by a world demanding perfection, we’re choosing to explore the opposite: failure.
UQ 13 celebrates the so-called worthless, reclaiming value in processes and expressions typically seen as discordant, unconventional, or unworthy of being showcased.
We asked ourselves:
What happens when we stop trying to get it right? What creative energy is unleashed when we embrace mistakes, glitches, and detours? When we honour our instincts rather than what is expected of us?
Our theme is a principle that guides the making of this issue. Across both design and editorial functions, we displace value.
This project grants the permission to question established standards, and to let our process be as unpredictable as our subject.
At its core, this issue critiques the rigid structures that govern creativity in the workplace, the university, the gallery, and beyond. It’s an anthology of shared experiments and stands as a testament to what happens when one dares to break, to stumble, and to gleefully fail.
About Unknown Quantities:
Unknown Quantities is an annual serial project from MA Culture, Criticism and Curation and MA Graphic Communication Design. The potential of Unknown Quantities as a creative experiment lies in its non-hierarchical approach to the relationship between design and intellectually driven approaches to publication. The content is a productive crossover between art and design, cultural criticism and politics. Unknown Quantities aims to be rigorously eclectic but not antiquarian; visually experimental while practically communicative; politically urgent though not expedient.Editorial Team:
Ant Beltrán
Eduardo Dias Loureiro
Wonjoo Gu
Harry He
Samuel Christopher Ng
Neyomi Parikh
Harriet Shepherd
Han Xu