Mute Vol 2 #8 features hi-saccharine cover art by the inimitable John Russell, a prizewinning essay by Simon Yuill (winner of the Vilém Flusser theory award at Transmediale 2008), Plastique Fantastique’s comic-strip satire of fashionable theory and metropolitan aesthetes and, returning to our coverage of the 2012 London Olympics, a text by Benedict Seymour on the prospects for utopian currents in both art and sport. Scanning the bleak post-credit crunch horizon for novel cultural forms, the issue finds ample signs of life among the ruins of late capitalism.