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Titre:
Automatic cities: the architectural imaginary in contemporary art

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Résumé:
The "architectural imaginary" describes architecture in its broadest sense: images of cities drawn from collective experience and imagination. Hailing from 11 countries, each of the 14 artists who have contributed to Automatic Cities engage the psychological and sociopolitical aspects of architecture through their work, mapping the influence of the architectural imaginary on contemporary visual art. The book is organized into four thematic groupings. Matthew Buckingham, Ann Lislegaard and Paul Noble treat architecture's relationship to language; "Architecture and Memory" includes installations by Saskia Olde Wolbers, Hiraki Sawa and Rachel Whiteread; "Architecture as Model" encompasses installations by Michael Borremans, Los Carpinteros, Catharina van Eetvelde and Katrin Sigurdardottir; and the theme of surveillance is explored by Jakob Kolding, Sarah Oppenheimer, Julie Mehretu and Matthew Ritchie.

Titre:
Architecture without place, 1968/2008 : unbuilt visionary, ephemeral architecture & installations

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Résumé:
The exhibition 'Architectures without Place (1968-2008)' presents a series of works that either were never built or no longer exist : a vast field which ranges from theoretical speculations, visionary prefigurings and ideas competitions to modified projects, ephemeral installations and botched buildings. This variegated realm of the unbuilt (or of the now non-existent) allows us to analyse the conceptual heritage of a long period of Catalonian cultural history; in other words, it lets us dissect forty years of architecture produced locally, highlighting the prevailing ideas at each step of the way. This is a heterogeneous field of project design in which converge other disciplines fuelled by a powerful desire to articulate and transform space : comics, theatre, film, ephemeral installations and the visual arts in general.

Titre:
Fantastic frameworks: architectural utopias + designs for life

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Catalogue of the exhibition at the Art gallery of greater Victoria, Victoria, British-Columbia on november 2006-marsh 2007.

Titre:
2001: a space odyssey

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$20.00
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Written when landing on the moon was still a dream, made into one of the most influential films of our century, brilliant, compulsive, prophetic, 2001: A Space Odyssey tackles the enduring theme of man's place in the universe. Including a new Foreword by the author and a fascinating new introduction by Stephen Baxter, this special edition is an essential addition to every SF reader's collection. On the moon an enigma is uncovered. So great are the implications that, for the first time, men are sent out deep into the solar system. But, before they can reach their destination, things begin to go wrong. Horribly wrong.

Titre:
Space

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Titre:
Crash

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Résumé:
The novel explores themes such as the transformation of human psychology by modern technology, and consumer culture's fascination with celebrities and technological commodities. When our narrator smashes his car into another and watches a man die in front of him, his sense of sexual possibilities in the world around him becomes detached. As he begins an affair with the dead mans wife, he finds himself drawn with increasing intensity to the mangled impacts of car crashes.

Titre:
Omon Ra

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A rising star in the Russian literary firmament Pelevin, winner of the 1993 Russian Booker Prize for short stories, has written a parody of life under Communism refracted through the prism of the Soviet space program. This clever parable about a young cosmonaut ordered to make the ultimate sacrifice? Killing himself after secretly piloting a supposedly unmanned lunar expedition? is sprinkled with throwaway gags, absurdist humor and wickedly ironic touches, as well as with the eerie beauty of space exploration. Obsessed with space travel since early childhood, Omon Krivomazov identifies with Ra, the ancient Egyptian falcon-headed sun god, a fixation that reflects his desire to escape the gray conformity of Soviet life and his yearning for a soul. Omon learns that more than 100 of his fellow cosmonauts have already been sacrificed as guinea pigs after taking part in supposedly automated, manless launches. Pelevin portrays the Russian space program as a vast propaganda enterprise, a distraction to paper over the tawdriness and fear of everyday life. Many allusions will be lost on American readers. And, in light of the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction state of contemporary Russian society, some of the Soviet-era satire seems oddly tame.

Titre:
Prague palimpsest : writing, memory, and the city

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A city of immense literary mystique, Prague has inspired writers across the centuries with its beauty, cosmopolitanism, and tragic history. Envisioning the ancient city in central Europe as a multilayered text, or palimpsest, that has been constantly revised and rewritten — from the medieval and Renaissance chroniclers who legitimized the city’s foundational origins to the modernists of the early twentieth century who established its reputation as the new capital of the avant-garde — Alfred Thomas argues that Prague has become a paradoxical site of inscription and effacement, of memory and forgetting, a utopian link to the prewar and pre-Holocaust European past and a dystopia of totalitarian amnesia. Considering a wide range of writers, including the city’s most famous son, Franz Kafka, Prague Palimpsest reassesses the work of poets and novelists such as Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Gustav Meyrink, Jan Neruda, Vítzslav Nezval, and Rainer Maria Rilke and engages with other famous authors who “wrote” Prague, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Ingeborg Bachmann, Albert Camus, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald. The result is a comparative, interdisciplinary study that helps to explain why Prague—more than any other major European city—has haunted the cultural and political imagination of the West.

Titre:
Can't and won't

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Résumé:
Her stories may be literal one-liners: the entirety of “Bloomington” reads, “Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never been here before.” Or they may be lengthier investigations of the havoc wreaked by the most mundane disruptions to routine: in “A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates,” a professor receives a gift of thirty-two small chocolates and is paralyzed by the multitude of options she imagines for their consumption. The stories may appear in the form of letters of complaint; they may be extracted from Flaubert’s correspondence; or they may be inspired by the author’s own dreams, or the dreams of friends. What does not vary throughout Can’t and Won’t, Lydia Davis’s fifth collection of stories, is the power of her finely honed prose. Davis is sharply observant; she is wry or witty or poignant. Above all, she is refreshing. Davis writes with bracing candor and sly humor about the quotidian, revealing the mysterious, the foreign, the alienating, and the pleasurable within the predictable patterns of daily life.

Titre:
Silly novels by Lady Novelists

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Résumé:
Describing the silliness and 'feminine fatuity' of many popular books by lady novelists, George Eliot perfectly skewers the formulaic yet bestselling works that dominated her time, with their loveably flawed heroines. She also examines the great women writers of France and their enrichment of the culture, and the varying qualities of literary translations.