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In this volume in the "Pamphlet Architecture" series, the authors examine common architectural forms (chairs, doors, and walls) and programs (a cinema, a health club, a skyscraper) in order to dissect and reconfigure them. In the process they create ten(...)
small format
December 1998, New York
Pamphlet architecture #21 : situation normal...
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In this volume in the "Pamphlet Architecture" series, the authors examine common architectural forms (chairs, doors, and walls) and programs (a cinema, a health club, a skyscraper) in order to dissect and reconfigure them. In the process they create ten new projects that draw their power from an oscillation between the recognizable and the surreal. Cleverly undermining the conventions and norms of contemporary architectural design, the authors pose a direct challenge to the seemingly endless search for new styles, arguing instead that the greatest potential for architecture in the twenty-first century rests on an imaginative examination of what we take for granted. Designed by the authors, "Situation Normal..." weaves together text, photographs, and drawings. An introductory essay establishes the theoretical and historical position of the book.
books
December 1998, New York
small format
$71.95
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Although many people view virtual reality as a totally new phenomenon, it has its foundations in an unrecognized history of immersive images. Indeed, the search for illusionary visual space can be traced back to antiquity. In this book Oliver Grau shows how virtual art fits into the art history of illusion and immersion. He describes the metamorphosis of the concepts of(...)
Virtual art from illusion to immersion
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Although many people view virtual reality as a totally new phenomenon, it has its foundations in an unrecognized history of immersive images. Indeed, the search for illusionary visual space can be traced back to antiquity. In this book Oliver Grau shows how virtual art fits into the art history of illusion and immersion. He describes the metamorphosis of the concepts of art and the image and relates those concepts to interactive art, interface design, agents, telepresence, and image evolution. Grau retells art history as media history, helping us to understand the phenomenon of virtual reality beyond the hype. Grau shows how each epoch used the technical means available to produce maximum illusion. He discusses frescoes such as those in the Villa dei Misteri in Pompeii and the gardens of the Villa Livia near Primaporta, Renaissance and Baroque illusion spaces, and panoramas, which were the most developed form of illusion achieved through traditional methods of painting and the mass image medium before film. Through a detailed analysis of perhaps the most important German panorama, Anton von Werner's 1883 The Battle of Sedan, Grau shows how immersion produced emotional responses. He traces immersive cinema through Cinerama, Sensorama, Expanded Cinema, 3-D, Omnimax and IMAX, and the head mounted display with its military origins. He also examines those characteristics of virtual reality that distinguish it from earlier forms of illusionary art. His analysis draws on the work of contemporary artists and groups ART+COM, Maurice Benayoun, Charlotte Davies, Monika Fleischmann, Ken Goldberg, Agnes Hegedues, Eduardo Kac, Knowbotic Research, Laurent Mignonneau, Michael Naimark, Simon Penny, Daniela Plewe, Paul Sermon, Jeffrey Shaw, Karl Sims, Christa Sommerer, and Wolfgang Strauss. Grau offers not just a history of illusionary space but also a theoretical framework for analyzing its phenomenologies, functions, and strategies throughout history and into the future.
Epistemology
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Lotte Reiniger (1899–1981) is a much loved figure in the early history of animated film. At an early age Reiniger discovered the Chinese art of silhouette puppetry, and made her first silhouettes for a school performance. Growing up during the early years of cinema, she fell in love with the films of Georges Méliès and Paul Wegener, and found imaginative ways to adapt the(...)
Contemporary Art Monographs
March 2012
Lotte Reiniger: born with enchanting hands, three silhouette sequels
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Lotte Reiniger (1899–1981) is a much loved figure in the early history of animated film. At an early age Reiniger discovered the Chinese art of silhouette puppetry, and made her first silhouettes for a school performance. Growing up during the early years of cinema, she fell in love with the films of Georges Méliès and Paul Wegener, and found imaginative ways to adapt the craft of silhouette-making and shadow puppetry to the possibilities of animation. Reiniger elicited effects of motion from the inflexibility of silhouettes, and even introduced cultural quotations from the works of Charlie Chaplin or Josephine Baker into her magical films. This book reproduces three of her most beautiful silhouette series: versions of Mozart’s Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro, and an animal alphabet.
Contemporary Art Monographs
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We encounter the world through surfaces: the screen, the page, our skin, the ocean’s swell. Here on the sea is the surfer, positioned at the edge of the collapsing wave. And lurking underneath in a monstrous mirroring is the shark. When the two meet, carving along the surface, breaking through the boundary, is when death appears. Steering her analysis from the(...)
Sharks, death, surfers: an illustrated companion
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We encounter the world through surfaces: the screen, the page, our skin, the ocean’s swell. Here on the sea is the surfer, positioned at the edge of the collapsing wave. And lurking underneath in a monstrous mirroring is the shark. When the two meet, carving along the surface, breaking through the boundary, is when death appears. Steering her analysis from the newspaper obituary in and out of literature and past cinema, Melissa McCarthy investigates a fundamental aspect of the human condition: our state of being between life and death, always in precarious and watery balance. Sharks, Death, Surfers: An Illustrated Companion observes how sharks have been depicted over centuries and across cultures, then flips the lens (and dissects the cornea) to consider what sharks see when they look back.
Critical Theory
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This book makes available for the first time in English an important interview on the topic of photography that Jacques Derrida granted in 1992 to the German theorist of photography Hubertus von Amelunxen and the German literary and media theorist Michael Wetzel. Their conversation addresses questions of presence and its manufacture, the technicity of presentation, the(...)
Archive, library and the digital
August 2010
Copy, archive, signature: A conversation on photography
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This book makes available for the first time in English an important interview on the topic of photography that Jacques Derrida granted in 1992 to the German theorist of photography Hubertus von Amelunxen and the German literary and media theorist Michael Wetzel. Their conversation addresses questions of presence and its manufacture, the technicity of presentation, the volatility of the authorial subject, and the concept of memory. Derrida offers a penetrating intervention with regard to the distinctive nature of photography vis-à-vis related technologies such as cinema, television, and video. Questioning the divides between so-called old and new media, original and reproduction, analog and digital modes of recording and presenting, he provides stimulating insights into the ways in which we think and speak about the photographic image today.
Archive, library and the digital
Stan Douglas: Ghostlight
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Since the 1980s, Canadian artist Stan Douglas (born 1960) has created films, installations, photographs and other multidisciplinary projects that address moments of rupture where "history could go one way or the other." Across formats, his images recall things that haunt: unresolved moments, political tumult and violent turning points; plots that retain a hold, however(...)
Stan Douglas: Ghostlight
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Since the 1980s, Canadian artist Stan Douglas (born 1960) has created films, installations, photographs and other multidisciplinary projects that address moments of rupture where "history could go one way or the other." Across formats, his images recall things that haunt: unresolved moments, political tumult and violent turning points; plots that retain a hold, however imperceptible, on the present. His work operates within the genres of cinema, photography and theater to present a point of view that is always staged. Douglas' rigorous explorations of these charged histories show us how to "think historically in the present" and frame contemporary crises in a longer timeline. ''Stan Douglas: Ghostlight'' accompanies the artist’s first survey in the United States in more than twenty years, charting his global influence and innovation across forty works from the 1990s to the present.
Photography monographs
Hiroshi Sugimoto
$102.00
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The series by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto are characterized by matchless clarity and presence. His works are always an absolute embodiment of his chosen visual motif, reduced to its essence. Our monograph is the first to feature works selected from all of the series produced to date - including, of course, his most famous: Sugimoto's celebrated portraits of(...)
Photography monographs
November 2005, Ostfildern
Hiroshi Sugimoto
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The series by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto are characterized by matchless clarity and presence. His works are always an absolute embodiment of his chosen visual motif, reduced to its essence. Our monograph is the first to feature works selected from all of the series produced to date - including, of course, his most famous: Sugimoto's celebrated portraits of wax figures seem to face up to their living audiences; his "Seascapes" show us nothing less than a person's first conscious view of the ocean; the extremely long exposures of "Theaters" elevate the white, luminescent cinema screen, transforming it into a magical image of an altar; and the fascinating "Dioramas" - photographs of scientific display cases - allow us to travel with the artist far into the past to observe extinct animal species or the daily life of early man.
Photography monographs
Martine Syms: She mad
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A source book documenting five episodes of Martine Syms's fragmented imagined television series, "She mad".Works by Martine Syms explore how mass media shapes and frames identities and cultures. Drawing from early cinema, television, the internet, social media, and ambient footage produced by phones and surveillance, Syms addresses the ways in which representations of(...)
Martine Syms: She mad
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A source book documenting five episodes of Martine Syms's fragmented imagined television series, "She mad".Works by Martine Syms explore how mass media shapes and frames identities and cultures. Drawing from early cinema, television, the internet, social media, and ambient footage produced by phones and surveillance, Syms addresses the ways in which representations of black identity and gender appear in the public imagination. "She mad" gathers materials and documentation on Martine Syms's seminal episodic project of the same name. Each episode of this series takes a different format, using various narrative formats, from sitcoms to TikTok videos, and includes filmed footage as well as research materials. Each episode revolves around a protagonist, also named Martine—an overachieving, stoner graphic designer who lives in Hollywood and wishes she were an important artist.
Contemporary Art Monographs
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This illustrated book explores the cultural conditions for photography in Hungary in the first half of the twentieth century and the exodus of groundbreaking Hungarian artists, many of whom journeyed to Berlin, Paris, or London before settling in the United States. The story of the bounty of intellectual and artistic talent that departed Hungary during this period is told(...)
American, born Hungary: Kertesz, Capa, and the Hungarian American photographic legacy
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This illustrated book explores the cultural conditions for photography in Hungary in the first half of the twentieth century and the exodus of groundbreaking Hungarian artists, many of whom journeyed to Berlin, Paris, or London before settling in the United States. The story of the bounty of intellectual and artistic talent that departed Hungary during this period is told in depth, from the photojournalistic legacy of the Capa brothers and Martin Munkácsi to the deeply experimental work made in the United States by artists such as László Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes to the portraits of cinema icons by André de Dienes, including Marilyn Monroe, which helped fuel Hollywood’s Golden Age. The book also introduces the major but underrecognized talent of artists, including John Albok, Anna Barna, Ferenc Berko, Michael Simon, and Paula Wright.
Photography Collections
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This one-volume gathering of Benjamin's dialectical writing on media of all kinds, ranging from children's literature to cinema, has at its heart the second, most expansive version of his path-breaking essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.' Readers familiar only with partial versions of this piece, where Benjamin began to record the(...)
The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility and other writings on media
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This one-volume gathering of Benjamin's dialectical writing on media of all kinds, ranging from children's literature to cinema, has at its heart the second, most expansive version of his path-breaking essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.' Readers familiar only with partial versions of this piece, where Benjamin began to record the melancholy loss of aesthetic presence at the turn of the twentieth century, will find their understanding transformed-- for this second version, like all the essays and supplemental texts included here, explores a set of latent, utopian possibilities inherent in mechanical means of art-making. Benjamin, the visionary magus of particulars, reveals profoundly, and repeatedly, both the grounds and the consequences of our ever-changing image of the made world. --Susan Stewart
Critical Theory