Adrien Lucca: Light Transformer Prototype, 1–2 (2010–2012) [French, English]

“Le présent travail est le fruit d’une recherche qui s’étendit sur plus d’un an, et que cette première publication n’épuise pas. [..] J’ai voulu offrir à son lecteur ou à sa lectrice une véritable expérience de lecture – au sens peut-être le plus conservateur du terme – doublée d’une expérience visuelle et tactile de première main. Je prétends ainsi leur communiquer une synthèse d’observations et de pensées privées, personnelles. Cet essai pourra par conséquent contenir des erreurs ou des naïvetés qui m’auront échappées. Avant tout, j’espère y avoir trouvé un point d’équilibre entre contenus vusuels, textuels et stylistiques.” (extrait de l’avant-propos)

Interview with the author, with a Foreword by Haseeb Ahmed (in English/French)
Author

Prototype de transformateur de lumière: Essai & documents, version 1 (in French, 32 pp, 2010, PDF)
Light Transformer Prototype (picture documentation, blog post, in English, 2012)

Bernadette Corporation: Reena Spaulings (2005)

“Set in post-9/11 New York City, Reena Spaulings was written by a large collective of writers and artists that bills itself as The Bernadette Corporation. Like most contemporary fiction, Reena Spaulings is about a female twenty-something. Reena is discovered while working as a museum guard and becomes a rich international supermodel. Meanwhile, a bout of terrible weather seizes New York, leaving in its wake a strange form of civil disobedience that stirs its citizens to mount a musical song-and-dance riot called “Battle on Broadway.” Fashioned in the old Hollywood manner by a legion of professional and amateur writers striving to achieve the ultimate blockbuster, the musical ends up being about a nobody who could be anybody becoming a somebody for everybody. The result is generic and perfect—not unlike Reena Spaulings itself, whose many authors create a story in which New York itself strives to become the ultimate collective experiment in which the only thing shared is the lack of uniqueness.”

Publisher Semiotext(e), 2005
Native Agents series
ISBN 158435030X, 9781584350309
216 pages

Reviews: McKenzie Wark (Nettime), Christopher Bollen (Artforum)
Commentary: Emily Pethick (Frieze), Janet Sarbanes (Afterall), Bennett Simpson (Artforum)

Authors
Publisher

PDF (52 MB, updated on 2016-12-23)

Alain Badiou: Cinema (2010–)

“For Alain Badiou, films think, and it is the task of the philosopher to transcribe that thinking. What is the subject to which the film gives expressive form? This is the question that lies at the heart of Badiou’s account of cinema.

He contends that cinema is an art form that bears witness to the Other and renders human presence visible, thus testifying to the universal value of human existence and human freedom. Through the experience of viewing, the movement of thought that constitutes the film is passed on to the viewer, who thereby encounters an aspect of the world and its exaltation and vitality as well as its difficulty and complexity. Cinema is an impure art cannibalizing its times, the other arts, and people – a major art precisely because it is the locus of the indiscernibility between art and non-art. It is this, argues Badiou, that makes cinema the social and political art par excellence, the best indicator of our civilization, in the way that Greek tragedy, the coming-of-age novel and the operetta were in their respective eras.”

First published in French as Cinéma, Nova Editions, 2010

Texts selected and introduced by Antoine de Baecque
Translated by Susan Spitzer
Publisher Polity, 2013
ISBN 10074565567X, 9780745655673
269 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2020-7-5)