Silent whale letters
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As part of an ongoing collaboration between Ella Finer and Vibeke Mascini the letters consider how the silent document shifts the logic of the archive, figuring listening as a practice of preservation. As the letters attune to the ocean loud with communications across time and space, the authors write about the movement of matter, of energies, wavelengths, currents and(...)
Silent whale letters
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$27.95
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As part of an ongoing collaboration between Ella Finer and Vibeke Mascini the letters consider how the silent document shifts the logic of the archive, figuring listening as a practice of preservation. As the letters attune to the ocean loud with communications across time and space, the authors write about the movement of matter, of energies, wavelengths, currents and how the ocean preserves as it disperses what it carries. How does working with what we cannot see, or even hear within range, shift the parameters of attention? How does the energetic archival space of the ocean agitate and disrupt claims to knowledge, history, and power?
Art Theory
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This anthology presents work on cultures of assembly. It stresses the relevance of small-scale and decentralized spatial formats of local knowledge production to community building and embedded political decision-making in the context of the socio-ecological transition. It reinforces the role of both individual and collective action while proposing distributed assembly(...)
Agonistic assemblies: On the spatial politics of horizontality
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This anthology presents work on cultures of assembly. It stresses the relevance of small-scale and decentralized spatial formats of local knowledge production to community building and embedded political decision-making in the context of the socio-ecological transition. It reinforces the role of both individual and collective action while proposing distributed assembly and proximity as core attributes in the production of the contemporary and future city. It calls for a revised form of spatial politics. "Agonistic assemblies" asks: how can spaces—both physical and virtual—be envisaged to create publics? How is collectivity and society being generated spatially and in terms of policy? How do we “practice” society as a bodily, spatial form, and how does this practice contribute to spatial justice? Are there specific spatial settings that can intensify these practices? What kind of spatial design can we imagine as platforms for change?
Architectural Theory
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"On extinction" takes us on a breathtaking philosophical journey through desperate territory. As we face "the end of all things," Ben Ware argues we must face our apocalyptic future without flinching. In fact, extinction is the very lens through which we should examine our current reality. Radical politics today should not be concerned with merely averting the worst(...)
On extinction: Begining again at the end
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"On extinction" takes us on a breathtaking philosophical journey through desperate territory. As we face "the end of all things," Ben Ware argues we must face our apocalyptic future without flinching. In fact, extinction is the very lens through which we should examine our current reality. Radical politics today should not be concerned with merely averting the worst but rather with beginning again at the end. To think about the future in this way is itself a form of liberation that might incubate the necessary radical solutions we need. Combining lessons from Kant, Hegel, Adorno, and Lacan, as well as drawing on popular culture and ecology, Ware recasts the most urgent issue of our times and resolves that we can only consider our collective end by treating it as a starting point.
Critical Theory
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An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computer and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Auge calls 'non-space' results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Auge uses the concept of 'supermodernity' to(...)
Non-places: An introduction to supermodernity
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An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computer and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Auge calls 'non-space' results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Auge uses the concept of 'supermodernity' to describe the logic of these late-capitalist phenomena - a logic of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating and lucid essay he seeks to establish and intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity. Starting with an attempt to disentangle anthropology from history, Auge goes on to map the distinction between place, encrusted with historical monuments and creative social life, and non-place, to which individuals are connected in a uniform manner and where no organic social life is possible.
Architectural Theory
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What does it mean to design experiences? Traditional design practices invite us to design things, and to use those things to solve problems. But experience is not a problem; it is life. Experience designers engage with unpredictability and the unknown, partnering with their audiences to generate possibility and relationality. Experience designers create worlds, craft(...)
Design Theory
November 2023
Experience design: A participatory manifesto
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What does it mean to design experiences? Traditional design practices invite us to design things, and to use those things to solve problems. But experience is not a problem; it is life. Experience designers engage with unpredictability and the unknown, partnering with their audiences to generate possibility and relationality. Experience designers create worlds, craft narratives that leave the page and enter people’s lives, and structure transformation. In this book, Burickson lays out ten basic principles for this emerging practice. "Experience design: a participatory manifesto" invites the reader to stop making things and, instead, to craft the minutes and hours of human life. Rigorous and philosophical, the book guides the reader through the processes of empathic research; constructing worlds not just for fantasy fiction but in schools, communities, homes; and mastering the tools necessary to work coherently across disciplines to create new experiences. Whether you are a maker of immersive theater, an architect, a graphic designer, a community organizer, or just someone hoping to give a better gift, this book offers a vision of creating that is both new and as old as civilization.
Design Theory
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Probably written around 1940–41, this revelatory book discusses Rothko’s ideas on the modern art world, art history, myth, beauty, the challenges of being an artist in society, the true nature of “American art,” and much more. The Artist’s Reality alsoincludes an introduction by Christopher Rothko, the artist’s son, who describes the discovery of the manuscript and the(...)
Art Theory
November 2023
The artist's reality: Philosophies of art
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Probably written around 1940–41, this revelatory book discusses Rothko’s ideas on the modern art world, art history, myth, beauty, the challenges of being an artist in society, the true nature of “American art,” and much more. The Artist’s Reality alsoincludes an introduction by Christopher Rothko, the artist’s son, who describes the discovery of the manuscript and the complicated and fascinating process of bringing the manuscript to publication. The introduction is illustrated with a small selection of relevant examples of the artist’s own work as well as with reproductions of pages from the actual manuscript.
Art Theory
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''Broken relations: infrastructure, aesthetic, and critique'' is a symptom and an outcome of a collectively experienced crisis — one that has produced a new, widespread sensorium for often invisible and overlooked infrastructures and highlighted their importance for all aspects of life, including politics, both local and global, and art and curatorial practices and their(...)
Broken relations: infrastructure, asesthetics, and critique
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''Broken relations: infrastructure, aesthetic, and critique'' is a symptom and an outcome of a collectively experienced crisis — one that has produced a new, widespread sensorium for often invisible and overlooked infrastructures and highlighted their importance for all aspects of life, including politics, both local and global, and art and curatorial practices and their systemic analysis. The reader views infrastructures not only as material phenomena and physical networks but also as immaterial relations and symbolic actions, which, in visible and invisible ways, form our present and, hence, our horizon of aesthetic perception. The interplay between the material and ideological conditions of production, distribution, and presentation directs our gaze, schooled as it is in institutional critique, onto real and symbolic orders, sites, and economies. The book is based on a cooperation between the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna: this started in Leipzig in 2021 with the lecture series and exhibition ''Broken relations: infrastructure and interruption'' and continued in Vienna in 2022 with the exhibition ''Conditions and frameworks: infrastructure as form and medium'' and the conference ''Broken relations: infrastructure, aesthetics, and critique''.
Art Theory
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According to the writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, "we humans cannot pre-exist our origin myths any more than a bee can pre-exist its beehive." Drawing inspiration from her seminal essays "The ceremony must be found" (1984) and “The Ceremony Found” (2015), "Ceremony" draws on Wynter’s thinking to suggest that "modernity," contrary to its own self-image as(...)
Ceremony: Burial of an undead world
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According to the writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, "we humans cannot pre-exist our origin myths any more than a bee can pre-exist its beehive." Drawing inspiration from her seminal essays "The ceremony must be found" (1984) and “The Ceremony Found” (2015), "Ceremony" draws on Wynter’s thinking to suggest that "modernity," contrary to its own self-image as rational and secular, is also determined by origin myths that emerged through the "mutations" of Christian cosmology after the dawn of capitalism in the Middle Ages. With over twenty-five unique contributions and commentaries on Wynter’s propositions from artists and writers, this publication will constitute a critical reference point for those seeking to construct and envisage a "counter-cosmogony" to the dispossession, slavery, and extractivism of modernity — which together endangers planetary life.
Art Theory
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We are living through a global catastrophe. Buildings affect how we feel, moment by moment, day by day. They have the power to lift us up and make us feel awestruck, playful, safe, and inspired, just as they can make us feel alienated and sad. But many of the places where we live, work, learn, and heal have become monotonous and disposable. We’re surrounded by cheap,(...)
Humanize: A maker's guide to designing our cities
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We are living through a global catastrophe. Buildings affect how we feel, moment by moment, day by day. They have the power to lift us up and make us feel awestruck, playful, safe, and inspired, just as they can make us feel alienated and sad. But many of the places where we live, work, learn, and heal have become monotonous and disposable. We’re surrounded by cheap, boring buildings that make people stressed, sick, and unhappy. In short, much of our world has been crafted in a way that is hostile to human experience. Now, drawing on his experience of the last thirty years in making bold, beautiful objects and buildings, Thomas Heatherwick offers both an informed critique of the inhumanity in most of today’s contemporary building design, and a rousing call for action. Looking through Heatherwick’s eyes, we see familiar landmarks and cityscapes around the world, from London, Paris, Barcelona, Singapore, New York, Vancouver, and beyond, both old and new, famous and obscure, to learn how places can either sap the life out of us—or nourish our senses and our psyche. The time has come, he says, to put emotion back at the heart of the design process, and the reasons to do so could not be more urgent. Design is not superficial: it has an impact upon economics, climate change, our mental and physical wellbeing—even the peace and cohesion of our societies.
Urban Theory
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Jacopo de' Barbari's "View of Venice," a woodcut first printed in the year 1500, presents a bird's-eye portrait of Venice at its peak as an international hub of trade, art, and culture. An artistic and cartographic masterpiece of the Renaissance, the View depicts Venice as a vibrant, waterborne city interconnected by canals and bridges and filled with ornate buildings,(...)
A view of Venice: Portrait of a Renaissance city
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Jacopo de' Barbari's "View of Venice," a woodcut first printed in the year 1500, presents a bird's-eye portrait of Venice at its peak as an international hub of trade, art, and culture. An artistic and cartographic masterpiece of the Renaissance, the View depicts Venice as a vibrant, waterborne city interconnected by canals and bridges and filled with ornate buildings, elaborate gardens, and seafaring vessels. The contributors to "A view of Venice: Portrait of a Renaissance city" draw on a high-resolution digital scan of the over nine-foot-wide composite print to examine the complexities of this extraordinary woodcut and portrayal of early modern Venetian life. The essays show how the View constitutes an advanced material artifact of artistic, humanist, and scientific culture. They also outline the ways the print reveals information about the city's economic and military power, religious and social infrastructures, and cosmopolitan residents. Featuring methodological advancements in the digital humanities, "A view of Venice" highlights the reality and myths of a topographically unique, mystical city and its place in the world.
Art Theory