$19.95
(available to order)
Summary:
We all have something in our lives that while not obviously valuable, is displayed as though it were a precious and irreplaceable artifact. Inquire about the object's provenance and you'll likely be treated to a lively anecdote about how it came into your host's possession. Keep digging, and you might even crack the code of what the thing really means. "Taking things(...)
Taking things seriously : 75 objects with unexpected significance
Actions:
Price:
$19.95
(available to order)
Summary:
We all have something in our lives that while not obviously valuable, is displayed as though it were a precious and irreplaceable artifact. Inquire about the object's provenance and you'll likely be treated to a lively anecdote about how it came into your host's possession. Keep digging, and you might even crack the code of what the thing really means. "Taking things seriously" is a wonder cabinet of seventy-five unlikely thingamajigs that have been invested with significance and transformed into totems, talismans, charms, relics, and fetishes : scraps of movie posters scavenged from the streets of New York by Low Life author Luc Sante; the World War I helmet that inoculated social critic Thomas Frank against jingoism; the trash-picked, robot-shaped hairdo machine described by its owner as a chick magnet; the bagel burned by actor Christopher Walken, moonlighting as a short-order cook. The owners of these objects convey their excitement in short, often poignant essays that invite readers to participate in the enjoyable act of interpreting things. You'll never look at the bric-a-brac on your shelves the same way again.
Industrial Design
books
Media art histories
$44.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Digital art has become a major contemporary art form, but it has yet to achieve acceptance from mainstream cultural institutions; it is rarely collected, and seldom included in the study of art history or other academic disciplines. In MediaArtHistories, leading scholars seek to change this. They take a wider view of media art, placing it against the backdrop of art(...)
Media art histories
Actions:
Price:
$44.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Digital art has become a major contemporary art form, but it has yet to achieve acceptance from mainstream cultural institutions; it is rarely collected, and seldom included in the study of art history or other academic disciplines. In MediaArtHistories, leading scholars seek to change this. They take a wider view of media art, placing it against the backdrop of art history. Their essays demonstrate that today's media art cannot be understood by technological details alone; it cannot be understood without its history, and it must be understood in proximity to other disciplines--film, cultural and media studies, computer science, philosophy, and sciences dealing with images. Contributors trace the evolution of digital art, from thirteenth-century Islamic mechanical devices and eighteenth-century phantasmagoria, magic lanterns, and other multimedia illusions, to Marcel Duchamp's inventions and 1960s kinetic and op art. They reexamine and redefine key media art theory terms--machine, media, exhibition--and consider the blurred dividing lines between art products and consumer products and between art images and science images. Finally, MediaArtHistories offers an approach for an interdisciplinary, expanded image science, which needs the "trained eye" of art history.
books
March 2007, Cambridge
Architectural Theory
Lewis Hine
$65.00
(available to order)
Summary:
In 1905, a young sociologist named Lewis Hine Wickes decided to pursue photography as the medium with which to denounce injustice and poverty. Hine was one of the first photographers to document the wave of mass immigration from an impoverished Europe to an economically booming America, and his portraits of immigrants at Ellis Island offered a more positive image of this(...)
Photography monographs
January 2012
Lewis Hine
Actions:
Price:
$65.00
(available to order)
Summary:
In 1905, a young sociologist named Lewis Hine Wickes decided to pursue photography as the medium with which to denounce injustice and poverty. Hine was one of the first photographers to document the wave of mass immigration from an impoverished Europe to an economically booming America, and his portraits of immigrants at Ellis Island offered a more positive image of this influx. But as he wearied of photographing poverty, Hine developed an idealized vision of the worker that emphasized the dignity of labor--a vision that culminated in his legendary Men at Work series, first published in 1932 and today a classic American photobook. “We call this the Machine Age,” he wrote in its introduction, “But the more machines we use, the more do we need real men to make and direct them.” This volume, which includes a complete facsimile of Men at Work, is compiled from the collection of the George Eastman House, to whom Hine’s son bequeathed his archive after his death. It includes both well-known series and recently discovered early works, plus rare family photographs, ephemera and a detailed chronology.
Photography monographs
$22.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Amid the cultural and political ferment of 1960s France, a group of avant-garde architects, artists, writers, theorists, and critics known as "spatial urbanists" envisioned a series of urban utopias--phantom cities of a possible future. The utopian "spatial" city most often took the form of a massive grid or mesh suspended above the ground, all of its parts (and(...)
Topologies: the urban utopia in France, 1960-1970
Actions:
Price:
$22.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Amid the cultural and political ferment of 1960s France, a group of avant-garde architects, artists, writers, theorists, and critics known as "spatial urbanists" envisioned a series of urban utopias--phantom cities of a possible future. The utopian "spatial" city most often took the form of a massive grid or mesh suspended above the ground, all of its parts (and inhabitants) circulating in a smooth, synchronous rhythm, its streets and buildings constituting a gigantic work of plastic art or interactive machine. In this new urban world, technology and automation were positive forces, providing for material needs as well as time and space for leisure. In this first study of the French avant-garde tendency known as spatial urbanism, Larry Busbea analyzes projects by artists and architects (including the most famous spatial practitioner, Yona Friedman) and explores texts (many of which have never before been translated from the French) by Michel Ragon, the influential founder of the Groupe International d'Architecture Prospective (GIAP), Victor Vasarely, and others. Even at its most fanciful, Busbea argues, the French urban utopia provided an image for social transformations that were only beginning to be described by cultural theorists and sociologists.
Architectural Theory
$69.95
(available in store)
Summary:
As Timothy Leary's tune-in-turn-on-drop-out message spread across the country, idealistic and anarchic enclaves mushroomed with names like Drop City and Morning Star - many experimenting with alternative forms of energy, recycling, and means of sustainability. For the first time, in rich documentary illustration material, these ephemeral spaces are brought together in(...)
Spaced out: crash pads, hippie communes, infinity machines, and other radical environments of the psychedelic sixties
Actions:
Price:
$69.95
(available in store)
Summary:
As Timothy Leary's tune-in-turn-on-drop-out message spread across the country, idealistic and anarchic enclaves mushroomed with names like Drop City and Morning Star - many experimenting with alternative forms of energy, recycling, and means of sustainability. For the first time, in rich documentary illustration material, these ephemeral spaces are brought together in this book. Many of the photographs have never been published before. They are explained and displayed in detail by an extensive text by acclaimed author Alistair Gordon.
Architecture since 1900, Europe
books
$64.95
(available to order)
Summary:
The art of networked thinking consists in making complexity easier to handle and creating scope for new ideas. The approach, which is now applied in all spheres of knowledge, is one which also defines artistic practice. The subject of this book is some two dozen atlases, charts, and diagrams of Russian history and the history of art from antiquity to postmodernism that(...)
Maciunas' learning machines: from art history to a chronology of Fluxus, second revised and enlarged edition
Actions:
Price:
$64.95
(available to order)
Summary:
The art of networked thinking consists in making complexity easier to handle and creating scope for new ideas. The approach, which is now applied in all spheres of knowledge, is one which also defines artistic practice. The subject of this book is some two dozen atlases, charts, and diagrams of Russian history and the history of art from antiquity to postmodernism that were designed between 1953 and 1973 by Fluxus initiator George Maciunas. Without such visualization of the past, so Maciunas believed, there could be no real understanding of how art and politics have evolved. His maps, charts, and diagrams, more than half of which are published for the first time here in this second edition, attempt in various ways to draw a picture of history made up of dates and facts, and lines and arrows. The result is fascinating, for both science and art.
books
November 2005
Contemporary Art Monographs
$84.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Arthur Brown Jr. (1874-1957) is celebrated by his peers for such masterpieces as the City Hall, War Memorial Opera House, Temple Emanu-El, and Coit Tower in San Francisco; the Pasadena City Hall; and the Labor-ICC block of the Federal Triangle in Washington, DC. Brown epitomized the idea that architecture not only houses society’s daily rituals and defining events but(...)
Arthur Brown, Jr. : progressive classicist
Actions:
Price:
$84.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Arthur Brown Jr. (1874-1957) is celebrated by his peers for such masterpieces as the City Hall, War Memorial Opera House, Temple Emanu-El, and Coit Tower in San Francisco; the Pasadena City Hall; and the Labor-ICC block of the Federal Triangle in Washington, DC. Brown epitomized the idea that architecture not only houses society’s daily rituals and defining events but also can itself shape the sociopolitical landscape of America. "Arthur Brown Jr.: progressive classicist" unifies the varied strands of the architect’s life, from the architectural forms and methods of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris to the reforming spirit and self-reliant confidence of San Francisco after the earthquake and fire of 1906 to the challenging economics and changing aesthetics of machine-age America. It details the development of Brown’s major works and many other civic, commercial, religious, academic, and residential buildings. It chronicles his unflagging commitment to the classical tradition, which he employed in contemporary, forward-looking institutional buildings that emphasized continuity with the past while meeting the needs of the future. To Brown, the classical tradition was not a sacrosanct, unchanging body of knowledge; it was an expanding and evolving set of ideas about architectural design that permitted, and even demanded, change as new conditions and technologies were developed.
Architecture Monographs
Design through making
$54.99
(available to order)
Summary:
Most architects who build do not make buildings; they make information that makes buildings. Making buildings requires acquiring knowledge not only of the world of information exchange, but also of the world of making things. It is an expertise that goes beyond the architectural drawing and an expertise that many designers cannot claim to fully possess or practice.(...)
Design through making
Actions:
Price:
$54.99
(available to order)
Summary:
Most architects who build do not make buildings; they make information that makes buildings. Making buildings requires acquiring knowledge not only of the world of information exchange, but also of the world of making things. It is an expertise that goes beyond the architectural drawing and an expertise that many designers cannot claim to fully possess or practice. "Design through making" is not only directed at architects, but engineers, educators, fabricators, machine operators, and anyone with an interest in the manifestation of ideas. It seeks to challenge outmoded notions that building production is preceded by design, and making is merely the cooking of the raw, or the end game where no further design ideas are explored. Here, a hybrid mode is recognised where the investigation of ideas is fully engaged with the tactile, physical nature of architecture and building processes. It is an issue that celebrates the re-emergence of making, not merely as an immense resource for ideas, experimentation and customisation, but as a critical resource that will redefine architectural practices. This title includes the work of Block Architecture, Mark Burry, Thomas Heatherwick Studios and Walter Pichler; there is also a special feature on Japanese traditions in architecture. Contributors include: Iain Borden, Sarah Chaplin, David Dunster, Jonathan Hill and Mark Prizeman.
Architecture since 1900, Europe
$25.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Ants are legion: at present there are 11,006 species of ant known; they live everywhere in the world except the polar icecaps; and the combined weight of the ant population has been estimated to make up half the mass of all insects alive today. When we encounter them outdoors, ants fascinate us; discovered in our kitchen cupboards, they elicit horror and disgust.(...)
Ant
Actions:
Price:
$25.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Ants are legion: at present there are 11,006 species of ant known; they live everywhere in the world except the polar icecaps; and the combined weight of the ant population has been estimated to make up half the mass of all insects alive today. When we encounter them outdoors, ants fascinate us; discovered in our kitchen cupboards, they elicit horror and disgust. Charlotte Sleigh’s 'Ant' elucidates the cultural reasons behind our varied reactions to these extraordinary insects, and considers the variety of responses that humans have expressed at different times and in different places to their intricate, miniature societies. Ants have figured as fantasy miniature armies, as models of good behaviour, as infiltrating communists and as creatures on the borderline between the realms of the organic and the machine: in 1977 British Telecom hired ant experts to help solve problems with their massive information network. This is the first book to examine ants in these and many other such guises, and in so doing opens up broader issues about the history of science and humans’ relations with the natural world. It will be of interest to anyone who likes natural history or cultural studies, or who has ever rushed out and bought a can of Raid™.
Fauna and flora
What comes after farce?
$33.95
(available to order)
Summary:
If farce follows tragedy, what follows farce? Where does the double predicament of a post-truth and post-shame politics leave artists and critics on the left? How to demystify a hegemonic order that dismisses its own contradictions? How to belittle a political elite that cannot be embarrassed, or to mock party leaders who thrive on the absurd? How to out-dada President(...)
What comes after farce?
Actions:
Price:
$33.95
(available to order)
Summary:
If farce follows tragedy, what follows farce? Where does the double predicament of a post-truth and post-shame politics leave artists and critics on the left? How to demystify a hegemonic order that dismisses its own contradictions? How to belittle a political elite that cannot be embarrassed, or to mock party leaders who thrive on the absurd? How to out-dada President Ubu? And, in any event, why add outrage to a media economy that thrives on the same? 'What Comes After Farce?' comments on shifts in art, criticism, and fiction in the face of the current regime of war, surveillance, extreme inequality, and media disruption. A first section focuses on the cultural politics of emergency since 9/11, including the use and abuse of trauma, paranoia, and kitsch. A second reviews the neoliberal makeover of art institutions during the same period. Finally, a third section surveys transformations in media as reflected in recent art, film, and fiction. Among the phenomena explored here are “machine vision” (images produced by machines for other machines without a human interface),“operational images” (images that do not represent the world so much as intervene in it), and the algorithmic scripting of information so pervasive in our everyday lives.
Critical Theory