Jess Henderson is a transdisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher. She is the author of Offline Matters: The Less-Digital Guide to Creative Work that critiques the techno-solutionism present in today’s creative industries.
Jess is co-editor of the new issue of Making & Breaking journal whose aim is provide a platform for critical discussion on issues concerning the relationship between cultural production and social change. She is a senior researcher at the Institute of Network Cultures where she also publishes in a space called NO FUN, and is part of the research group: Cultural and Creative Industries at Avans University’s CARADT Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology – where she has an independent research project on Art & Anxieties.
Alongside her transdisciplinary artistic research and practices, Jess continues to work as a brand consultant and cultural analyst. She is currently working on a new book related to mental health, labour, and psychosomatic phenomena, forthcoming in 2025.
Full list of publications and published work here.
CONTACT
You can follow her work and casual transmissions by subscribing to the No Fun newsletter.
For press enquires please contact press@bispublishers.com
For anything else or to say hi, hi@nofun.tips
ABOUT OFFLINE MATTERS
‘For any creative who has had to cater to corporate dimwits in order support their art, here’s a terrific guide to bringing your best work into the commercial sphere without selling out or compromising your craft. This is a book about how to break free from the data-driven expectations of your client’s spreadsheet, and retrieve the true novelty that makes you valuable in the first place.’
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DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF
Author of Team Human
‘This book is extremely timely. The pandemic has obliged everybody to stay online almost all the time. Offline Matters reminds us that life is (also) elsewhere. The neologism ‘offline’, which did not exist twenty years ago, has philosophical relevance. This book is hoping us to discover it.’
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FRANCO ‘BIFO’ BERARDI
philosopher, theorist and activist
‘Today we are all called upon to be the content providers of our own lives. This can be exhausting and estranging. Fortunately Jess Henderson has arrived to help us get offline, not into the pasts but into the presence of our lives. With compassion and humour Henderson brings us back to ourselves and it turns out we are not predestined to be profiled and branded. Offline Matters is the mutual help book we need right now!’
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STEFANO HARNEY
co-author of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study
‘Offline Matters is a much needed take-down of the whole ‘cult of creativity’ from the inside. This rattle gun attack on the perniciousness of the creative digital work will leave you aghast and amused in equal measure.’
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OLI MOULD
Author of Against Creativity
Offline Matters is a handbook of radical strategies for the creative worker. Consider it a counter-cultural trip through industry superstitions and the state of imposed digitality in creative work today, with a heart of worker activism. The book is born from, and culminates, three years of research working inside of the creative industries, during the period where Outsider was born.
NO FUN is a nod to the Stooges' anthem and its raw, gritty, honest expression of a feeling of disenchantment and disillusionment with life and everyday existence. Where notions of everyday struggle collide with instances where criticality is relegated to ‘killjoy.’
This NO FUN is an online assembly of artistic research and production, writings, interviews, and everyday fragments spanning the topics of our bored/busy/hyperactive/disconnected/loving/trying lives.
NO FUN 