shelf system ​(2025)
PLA, wood, vinyl, LCD screen, speakers, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, hardware
contains copies of Inter Ice Age 4 (1969) by Kobo Abe and Googiewaumer Comics (1969) by Wendell Allen Pugh
4’x2’x1’








Inter Ice Age 4 is a science fiction novel by Kobo Abé, an author often referred to as “the Kafka of Japan,” for his work’s existentialist themes and uncanny qualities. The book, originally serialized in the journal Sekai from 1958-59, was prescient in combining subject matter as wide ranging as AI, climate change and genetic engineering. The convoluted plot follows Professor Katsumi of the Institute for Computer Technique, who, as “the only person in Japan specialized in programming,” has been tasked by his country’s government to create a “forecasting machine” capable of predicting the future. Katsumi’s quest to gather data to feed his machine for testing, leads to him discovering a conspiracy involving scientists using genetic engineering to create a new species of amphibian humans. This species, with their webbed feet and gills, will allow a new version of humanity to survive in underwater societies after climate change causes the ice caps to melt and ocean levels to rise.
Inter Ice Age 4 cover and illustrations by Machi Abé, wife of Kobo Abé
 Abé studied to become a doctor, partially to appease his father by following in his profession, as well as to avoid the WWII draft, stating "those students who specialized in medicine were exempted from becoming soldiers. My friends who chose the humanities were killed in the war.” Abé never practiced medicine (and claimed to have graduated in exchange for promising a professor to never do so) but this experience may have influenced one of the stylistic hallmarks of his writing, surreal events that are grounded through clinical description. Indeed, as far as sci-fi novels go, Inter Ice Age 4 is relatively dry and tamped-down in terms of action. Much of the book is dialog-driven and large portions are dedicated to describing the minutia of technical subjects like the complex international regulations regarding the use of forecasting machines that Katsumi must navigate in his research.

Having grown up with his family moving between different locations in Japan and China, Abé described himself as “rootless,” eventually coming to reject all forms of nationalism and ceremony. In a 1986 interview he claimed, for this reason, to have refused to attend his daughter’s wedding and that he planned to not attending his mother’s funeral after her death. He was a leftist, and at one point a member of the Japanese Communist Party, but became disillusioned with communism after a visiting the Soviet Union and witnessing the state of the country first-hand. For many years he was also best friends with Yukio Mishima before the rift between their politics became too large for the two of them to bear.

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Googiewammur is an obscure underground comic book created by Wendell Allen Pugh. Most of the comic consists of "The Adventures of Super Ghurb” following a blobby creature with ambiguous and plastic features, broken up by shorter pieces of hippie-commentary on American consumerism and conformity. Storylines are noneseniscal and imagery is heavy with forests, factories, computers, and cars. Pugh was a marginal member of the 60’s underground comics scene and Googiewammur is his only published material outside of a few small strips featured in other publications. The only interview he ever gave appears to have been for Mark James Estren’s A History of Underground Comics where he commented on the influence of his education, having earned an MFA at Southern Illinois University, stating "My stuff is all fucked up because I went to school for six years and got all involved in aesthetics and professionalism, which I've decided is all bullshit. Wish I'd never learned to draw.”
Googiewaumer Comics cover and select pages
According to comixjoint.com, “Googiewaumer is a good example of The Print Mint being willing to print anything that walked through the door. They printed 10,000 copies of this comic book at the beginning of the underground frenzy and three years later, after millions of undergrounds had been sold, The Print Mint still had copies of Googiewaumer gathering dust in their warehouse.”

Despite the unbeloved status the comic seems to have among enthusiasts, as well as its own creator, Googiewammur stands out as one of the most avant-garde works to emerge from the 60’s underground comics scene, pushing the medium into territories neither seen before nor since. The shapes of the panels mimic the organic, goopy appendages of the “Super Ghurbs”, drawing styles and orientation of panels change on the same page, and word bubbles are sometimes filled for pages with just made-up words and images. Googiewammur is a testament to the free space created by 60’s counterculture that allowed artists to create and distribute truly strange work, regardless of its commercial viability or lack-there-of.



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