While sparsely occupied ultra-thin “pencil towers” develop in our cities, functioning as speculative wealth storage for the superrich and cavernous “iceberg” homes extend architectural assets many stories below street level, communities around the globe are blighted by zombie and ghost urbanism, marked by unoccupied neighbourhoods and abandoned housing developments
Category Archive: book reviews
Artists and writers examine the bombardment of information, misinformation, emotion, deception and secrecy in online and offline life in the post-digital age
The authors explore emerging forms of algorithmic governance and AI-augmented apps that collect data about individuals and keep wages and worker representation under control. They also provide case studies of new and exciting form of resistance across the globe
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A book that unpacks the notion of the mass image through the lens of affective, representational, political, logistical and material economies
Inspired by medieval bestiaries and observations of our damaged planet, A Bestiary of the Anthropocene is a compilation of hybrid creatures of our time
A practical guide for working with data in more ethical, creative and responsible ways
social
In previous centuries, Europeans believed that human interventions could tame heavy storms, dry landscapes and unseasonably dark Summers and modify the climate as they wished
Building on a long-shared history in the region, the projects covered in this volume use design and architecture to address social, political and ecological concerns along the shared border between Mexico and the USA
In this manifesto, climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tyres and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse
The artists who opened their own bank, printed their own money and then bought £1 million worth of predatory debts, which were then blown up in the shadow of London’s financial district
A tarot deck that features inspirational women of science on the minor arcana cards, plus a guidebook with scientist biographies and other information
The book looks at the many dark facets of the corporation, including automation, surveillance, tech work, workers’ struggles, algorithmic challenges, the disruption of local democracy and much more
Examining the potential benefits and risks of using artificial intelligence to advance global sustainability
Each life forms explains a key aspect about life on Earth. From the sponge that seems to be a plant but is really an animal to the almost extinct soft-shelled turtle deemed extremely unique and therefore extremely precious, these examples reveal how life itself is arranged across time and space, and how humanity increasingly dominates that vision
A fun book that targets an audience of art viewers without the usual arty mumbo jumbo. There’s humour throughout the pages and there’s inventiveness in the categories Cotton chose to classify contemporary photography art
A rigorously researched overview of right-wing domestic terrorism. The author analyses its historical roots, characteristics, tactics, rhetoric, and organisation, assessing the current and future trajectory of the use of violence by the far right
The book considers how artists have used cultural practices to rethink concepts of violence and non-violence
A social and political history of industrial pollution, from the toxic wastes of early tanneries to the fossil fuel energy regime of the twentieth century
Of all the radioactive elements discovered at the end of the 19th century, it was radium that became the focus of both public fascination and entrepreneurial zeal
How contemporary photographers of African origin are interrogating ideas of ‘Africanness’
This guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture
How hackers and hacking moved from being a target of the state to a key resource for the expression and deployment of state power
Artists offer new insights about genetic engineering by bringing it out of the lab and into public places to challenge viewers’ understandings about the human condition, the material of our bodies and the consequences of biotechnology
What worlds are revealed when we listen to alpacas, make photographs with yeast or use biosignals to generate autonomous virtual organisms?
Artists, theorists, activists, and scholars propose concrete forms of non-fascist living as the rise of contemporary fascisms threatens the foundations of common life
A growing movement of soft cultural activism spearheaded by artists, curators and art critics who believe that art has a responsibility to engage directly with Chinese social reality
Free to download, the proceedings of the conference contain essays and visual documentation that explore the nature of the forbidden and the aesthetics of liminality in art that engages with technology and science…
Setting himself on fire, walking in front of an icebreaker while the frozen water cracks behind him, going on a 1600 km triathlon from Warsaw to Paris, standing on the North Pole for 24 hours… Guido van der Werve knows how to catch viewers’ attention
Investigating everything from historical mugshots to Instagram posts, Helfand examines how the face has been perceived and represented over time; how it has been instrumentalized by others; and how we have reclaimed it for our own purposes
A duo of books explores how a technology born in a purely military context has found its place in every single aspect of our life
The cutting-edge research is given a human face and even if we don’t fully understand the processes at work, the pictures allow us to perceive how in this world of the tiniest particles the biggest connections are searched for
The work of designers, artists, cartographers, geographers, researchers and activists who create diagrams to tell inconvenient stories that upset and resist the status quo
Black holes, dark matter, gravity, time, motion—these phenomena fascinate physicists and artists alike. Both strive to discover how they shape our world
Lynn Hershman Leeson‘s work exposes why we need to have a better understanding of the potentials of gene editing and how they are being exploited by companies motivated mostly by profit
I never thought i’d ever read a dictionary from A to Z but this one is witty, original and wonderfully opinionated. Plus it’s the abridged version
A book (which you can download for free) explores how maps are created as a part of political struggle, for critical research or in art and education
Photographer Salvatore Vitale explores Switzerland’s security measures by focusing on “matter-of-fact” types of instructions, protocols, bureaucracies and clear-cut solutions which he visualizes in photographs, diagrams, and graphical illustrations
The untold story of digital cash and its creators—from experiments in the 1970s to the mania over Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
Paul Lowe managed to cram into one book some 200 years of history, technology, art, society without ever making it look laborious nor indigestible
Amanda Boetzkes links the increasing visualization of waste in contemporary art to the rise of the global oil economy and the emergence of ecological thinking