Octavia Estelle Butler was born in 1947 in Pasadena, CA. Known in her early years as “Estelle,” she was raised by a single, widowed mother who worked domestic jobs to make ends meet.

French writer, who gained fame at the age of forty-three with his first novel, Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique (1967, Friday; or, The Other Island), an ingenious reworking of the classic Robinson Crusoe theme. Michel Tournier's parodic and sometimes disturbing works can be read as comments upon the contemporary world, but are often based on old myths and stories.

Robinson was too exhausted to measure the full extent of his misfortune. "Since it isn't Más a Tierra" he reflected simply, "then it is the Island of Desolation," summing up his own situation with this impropmptu babtism. (in Friday, 1967)

Independent curator and critic Bartholomew Ryan interviews Nicholas Bourriaud, author of the seminal book Relational Aesthetics and curator of the fourth Tate Triennial, Altermodern, which remains on view in London at the Tate Britain through April 2009.

BR: What is the 'Altermodern?'

NB: First, it is an attempt to reexamine our present, by replacing one periodizing tool with another. After 30 years into the ‘aftershock’ of modernism and its mourning, then into the necessary post-colonial reexamination of our cultural frames, ‘Altermodern’ is a word that intends to define the specific modernity according to the specific context we live in – globalization, and its economic, political and cultural conditions. The use of the prefix “alter” means that the historical period defined by postmodernism is coming to an end, and alludes to the local struggles against standardization. The core of this new modernity is, according to me, the experience of wandering — in time, space and mediu