From early robots to toys like the iconic Speak & Spell to Apple’s Siri, Vox ex Machina tells the fascinating story of how scientists and engineers developed voices for machines during the twentieth century
Category Archive: book reviews
The book analyses how the remnants of utopias and ideologies of the 20th century continue to influence and interact with contemporary culture, capitalism and the environment
While acknowledging the potential of some AI, AI Snake Oil uncovers misleading claims about the capabilities of AI and describes the serious harms AI is already causing in how it’s being built, marketed and used in areas such as education, medicine, hiring, banking, insurance and criminal justice.
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The book outlines new approaches to understand scientific practice in general and art-science in particular, showcasing how art can provide a unique perspective on the meaning and potential of collaboration
15 years of investigation by the Center for PostNatural History. Featuring essays and photography by founder Rich Pell, and a catalog of PostNatural organisms
The book chronicles the many tactics that ordinary people develop to evade (even if only temporarily) the constraints of algorithmic power and pursue their own political, economic, cultural or social agendas
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Photography and video games are products of the industrial, military and ideological apparatus of the West and embody its cultural biases. Both are characterised by the presence of a code, which conditions the user’s freedom, and by the link with exploitation processes typical of late capitalism that monetise the investment of time and energy of players/photographers. Playing then becomes an act of exploration, deconstruction and negotiation…
“Rather than producing a meaningful order, design might be just about inhabiting chaos”
Across twelve case studies, this book charts the emergence of diverse forms of artistic practice and brings together accounts of how artists, scholars and activists are creatively responding to environmental destruction
Ressler takes a stand on the problem of increasing carbon emissions and accompanies civil disobedience activities that illuminate the inseparability of environmental issues and sociopolitical as well as economic conditions
A systematic theory of DIY electronic culture, drawn from a century of artists who have independently built creative technologies
Over the past few years, Vladan Joler has been collaborating with data analysts, media theorists and cyber forensic experts to bring to light some of the hidden layers of digital infrastructures
The book considers such topics as the presence of plants in the history of philosophy, the shifting status of plants in various traditions, what it means to make art with growing life-forms and whether or not plants have moral standing
Wherever you look, money is being replaced by tokens. Digital platforms are issuing new kinds of money-like things: phone credit, shares, gift vouchers, game tokens, customer data, etc. But what does it mean when online platforms become the new banks?
the research project explores the affective meanings and implications of drone technologies on warfare, surveillance and protest
How the pervasively used notion “green” is used to symbolically mask the increasing technical manipulations of nature and the environment
Artists and curators on the human and nonhuman agencies that affect and are affected by the sea within contemporary art and visual culture
How the Pentagon became the world’s largest single greenhouse gas emitter and why it’s not too late to break the link between national security and fossil fuel consumption
Nesvold calls on experts in ethics, sociology, history, social justice and law to launch a hopeful conversation about the potential ethical pitfalls of becoming a multi-planet species
In an era of sensationalised news, artists around the world are observing politics and raising awareness on issues like authoritarian regimes, sustainability, climate change, diversity and immigration
Impatient with the hype that so often accompanies innovation, Vaclav Smil offers in this book a clear-eyed corrective to the overpromises that accompany everything from new cures for diseases to AI
The essays collected investigate the relationship between capitalist accumulation and the photographic image, and ask whether photography might allow us to refuse capitalism’s violence—and if so, how?
A sharp overview of artworks that respond to the Anthropocene and its detrimental impact on our world, from scenes of nature decimated by ongoing extinction events and landscapes turned to waste by extraction, to art from marginalised communities most affected by the injustice of climate change
An analysis of the different contexts in which artists, museums and curators face restrictions today, investigating political censorship in China, Cuba and the Middle East; the suppression of LGBTQ+ artists in ‘illiberal democracies’; the algorithms policing art online; Western museums and ‘cancel culture’; and the narratives around ‘problematic’ monuments
We literally inhale and ingest our own anthropogenic indicators – for example, as the particulate exhalations of burning forests, as isotopes from nuclear testing, as metallic dust from global extractions
It is not about B as an individual, nor is it about a society whose name starts with the first letter of the alphabet. It is neither about Jeff Bezos nor Amazon. B is no one in particular. A is a symptom
The book looks at art practices that do not conform to a Western concept of art and where the boundaries between art, design, research and activism dissolve
The book takes our planetary state of emergency as an opportunity to imagine constructive change and new ideas. How can we survive in an age of constant environmental crises?
The curious afterlives of an obsolete disk storage through the words of those involved with the medium today
The book maps, critiques, celebrates and historicises cultural activism, from the dual perspective of a commentator (as scholar and writer) and insider (as activist artist)
The book reflects on Lisboa Soa’s ongoing investigation into the spatial, visual but also social and ecological dimensions of sound
Server Farms as Sites of Participatory Power
In the Black Fantastic celebrates the ways that Black artists draw inspiration from African-originated myths, beliefs and knowledge systems, confounding the Western dichotomy between the real and unreal, the scientific and the supernatural
The author looks at a range of psychiatric and neurological disorders that result when body and brain are out of sync, including not only the well-known phantom limb syndrome but also phantom breast and phantom penis syndromes; body integrity identity disorder, which compels a person to disown and then amputate a healthy arm or leg; and such eating disorders as anorexia
“Text is not the only way to make arguments,” writes curator and scholar Hannah Star Rogers. “Materials, too, have the potential to impact conversations in new ways”
It seems that design is locked in a system of exploitation and profit, a cycle that fosters inequality and the depletion of natural resources. CAPS LOCK uses clear language and striking visual examples to show how graphic design and capitalism are inextricably linked
From the politics of proxies to space extractivism and the commodification of the commons, including citizenship by investment and the art market, everything indicates that “offshore governance” has become the norm…
But what are the wider effects of whistleblowing as an act of dissent on politics, society, and the arts? How does it contribute to new courses of action, digital tools, and contents?
There are great ways to adapt to the climate crisis that confronts us, but there are disastrous ways too. In this book, Morgan Phillips takes us from the air-conditioned pavements of Doha and the ‘cool rooms’ of Paris, to the fog catchers of Morocco and the agro-foresters of Nepal
The exhibition in a box features artists, thinkers and researchers whose works unravel the many complex technological, social and ecological systems, both visible and invisible, that surround us