Materializing Six Years: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art; Edited by Catherine Morris and Vincent Bonin; Preface by Lucy R. Lippard:

In 1973 the critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard published Six Years, a book with possibly the longest subtitle in the bibliography of art: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones) edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard. Continue reading

Evil Media by Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey, MIT Press:

Evil Media develops a philosophy of media power that extends the concept of media beyond its tried and trusted use in the games of meaning, symbolism, and truth. It addresses the gray zones in which media exist as corporate work systems, algorithms and data structures, twenty-first century self-improvement manuals, and pharmaceutical techniques. Evil Media invites the reader to explore and understand the abstract infrastructure of the present day. From search engines to flirting strategies, from the value of institutional stupidity to the malicious minutiae of databases, this book shows how the devil is in the details.

The title takes the imperative “Don’t be evil” and asks, what would be done any differently in contemporary computational and networked media were that maxim reversed. Continue reading

Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process by Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, MIT Press:

In Life after New Media, Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska make a case for a significant shift in our understanding of new media. They argue that we should move beyond our fascination with objects — computers, smart phones, iPods, Kindles — to an examination of the interlocking technical, social, and biological processes of mediation. Doing so, they say, reveals that life itself can be understood as mediated — subject to the same processes of reproduction, transformation, flattening, and patenting undergone by other media forms.

By Kember and Zylinska’s account, the dispersal of media and technology into our biological and social lives intensifies our entanglement with nonhuman entities. Continue reading

Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship — A searing critique of participatory art by an iconoclastic historian, Claire Bishop, Verso Books:

Since the 1990s, critics and curators have broadly accepted the notion that participatory art is the ultimate political art: that by encouraging an audience to take part an artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Around the world, the champions of this form of expression are numerous, ranging from art historians such as Grant Kester, curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Nato Thompson, to performance theorists such as Shannon Jackson.

Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as “social practice.” Continue reading

Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts, Hannah B Higgins (Editor), Douglas Kahn (Editor), University of California Press:

Mainframe Experimentalism challenges the conventional wisdom that the digital arts arose out of Silicon Valley’s technological revolutions in the 1970s. In fact, in the 1960s, a diverse array of artists, musicians, poets, writers, and filmmakers around the world were engaging with mainframe and mini-computers to create innovative new artworks that contradict the stereotypes of “computer art.” Juxtaposing the original works alongside scholarly contributions by well-established and emerging scholars from several disciplines, Mainframe Experimentalism demonstrates that the radical and experimental aesthetics and political and cultural engagements of early digital art stand as precursors for the mobility among technological platforms, artistic forms, and social sites that has become commonplace today. Continue reading

Community without Community in Digital Culture by Charlie Gere, Palgrave Macmillan:

The word ‘digital’ refers to both digital data, as used in computers, and also the digits, fingers, of the hand, and thus by extension touch, which has long been a trope for connectivity, community, and participation. Thus, in its drive towards greater connectivity, our culture is digital in more than one sense, in that it increasingly encourages such contact (from the Latin, ‘com’, together, and ‘tangere’, to touch). But at the same time such technologies always involve separation, gap and distance.

Community Without Community in Digital Culture suggests that networks always involve this other aspect of touch, separation, distance and gap, as a necessary concomitant of our fundamental technicity. Continue reading

We Won’t Fly For Art: Media Art Ecologies by Ruth Catlow, Culture Machine Vol 13: Paying Attention (2012):

“The insights of American anarchist ecologist Murray Bookchin into environmental crisis hinge on a social conception of ecology that problematises the role of domination in culture. His ideas are becoming increasingly relevant to those working with digital technologies in the post-industrial information age, as big business daily develops new tools and techniques to exploit our sociality across high-speed networks (digital and physical). According to Bookchin, our fragile ecological state is bound up with a social pathology. Continue reading

Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics by Richard Shusterman, Florida Atlantic University:

This book provides a richly rewarding vision of the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics. Composed of fourteen wide-ranging but finely integrated essays by Richard Shusterman, the originator of the field, Thinking through the Body explains the philosophical foundations of somaesthetics and applies its insights to central issues in ethics, education, cultural politics, consciousness studies, sexuality, and the arts. Integrating Western philosophy, cognitive science, and somatic methodologies with classical Asian theories of body, mind, and action, these essays probe the nature of somatic existence and the role of body consciousness in knowledge, memory, and behavior. Continue reading

The Unconscious Performance of Identity: A Review of Johannes P. Osterhoff’s “Google” by Owen Mundy, Rhizome.org:

As part of this year’s Transmediale festival in Berlin, media artist Johannes P. Osterhoff organized an online collaborative performance of search engine queries, simply titled, “Google.” For one week, Osterhof convinced myself and 36 other participants to add a unique search method to our default web browsers so that everything we “googled” — from the personal to the mundane — became instantly visible online at google-performance.org. Continue reading

IMAC2012 Expanded Proceedings: Cybernetics Revisited – Towards A Third Order?, Leonardo Electronic Almanac (Senior Editors for this volume: Lanfranco Aceti and Morten Søndergaard) :: Call For Papers - Deadline: August 31, 2012.

Von Foerster coined the idea of a ‘cybernetics of cybernetics’ as a way to analyze the control of control and the (set-up of) communication of communication(-systems). The question is if a ‘third order’ cybernetics is emerging… and, if so, what would it entail? (Related) Continue reading