Editor's Introduction: Dissonances

Spatial compression is all around us whether through polarizing political rhetoric or the globalized economy.Instead of intimate encounters, this dissipation of space is stifling because we are forced to contend with our own contradictions.Famine and poverty persist despite (or rather due to) unprecedented global wealth.The world is more interconnected than ever, and yet borders are ever more impervious.Most insidiously, war is waged in the name of peace.Rather than self-affirming echo chambers, this issue of positions gestures toward dissonances to break the cycle of feedback loops.While dissonant sounds may feel unsettling, the sonic tension creates movement by inducing a sense of anticipation for elsewheres.Each of the contributions in this issue thus moves toward being otherwise, whether as artists and community organizers in the present or as "bandits" and "wandering ruffians" in the peripheries of past empires.