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
Category Archive: book reviews
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
advertising
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’
social
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
The book challenges the normal understanding of modern architecture by proposing that it was shaped by the dominant medical obsession of its time: tuberculosis and its primary diagnostic tool, the X-ray
Emphasizing art by artists who were present at these nuclear events—the “global Hibakusha”—rather than those reacting at a distance, Decamous puts Eastern and Western art in dialogue, analyzing the aesthetics and the ethics of nuclear representation
Over the years, SUPERFLEX have realized bold works that confront some of modern society’s most unsavoury aspects with free goods, free beers, resistance to social control, calls for solidarity and of course tools!
What will happen to our sensory apparatus in 50 years, when the mechanisms for how we communicate and sense our surroundings become obsolete, prompted by the advancement of sensors that will enable brain-to-brain communication?
Presenting work from the earliest through to the most contemporary of photographers, Making It Up: Photographic Fictions challenges the idea that ‘the camera never lies’
The book offers critical reflections on some of the most challenging environmental problems of our time, including land take, groundwater pollution, desertification, and biodiversity loss
The history of energy is neither linear nor Darwinian. It is full of forgotten fantastic innovations…
How live art has developed in the 21st century as a visual medium, a global language and a political force
What do outer space capsules, submarines, and office buildings have in common? Each is conceived as a closed system: a self-sustaining physical environment demarcated from its surroundings by a boundary that does not allow for the transfer of matter or energy
A global overview of how contemporary artists incorporate text and the written word into work that speaks to some of the most pressing issues of the 21st century
The essays focus on future fictions in art and design from different perspectives: future fictions and imagination in creative practices, future literacy and future ethics
Media historian and artist Kristen Gallerneaux weaves a literary mix tape that explores the entwined boundaries between sound, material culture, landscape and esoteric belief
The book documents creative strategies by artists, fashion designers and other media users to become virtually faceless for aesthetic, fetishist or resistance purposes
In a world dominated by the visual, could contemporary resistances be auditory?