Curious Rituals: Gestural Interaction in the Digital Everyday (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · everyday, gesture, ritual, technology
“Curious Rituals is a research project conducted at Art Center College of Design (Pasadena) in July-August 2012 at the media design program.
It looks at gestures, postures and digital rituals that typically emerged with the use of digital technologies (computers, mobile phones, sensors, robots, etc.): gestures such as recalibrating your smartphone doing an horizontal 8 sign with your hand, the swiping of wallet with RFID cards in public transports, etc. These practices can be seen as the results of a co-construction between technical/physical constraints, contextual variables, designers intents and people’s understanding. We can see them as an intriguing focus of interest to envision the future of material culture.” (source)
The book features an essay by Dan Hill, followed by a design fiction by Julian Bleecker and script of a short film.
Authors Nicolas Nova, Katherine Miyake, Walton Chiu, Nancy Kwon
Published in September 2012
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License
72 pages
via Roelof Roscam Abbing
authors
A Digital Tomorrow (short film, 10 min)
Internationale situationniste n°1-12 (1958-1969) [French]
Filed under journal | Tags: · capitalism, consumerism, everyday, life, mass media, situationists, spectacle
L’Internationale situationniste produit ses travaux théoriques dans sa revue Internationale situationniste. La revue fut également rédigée par Guy Debord, Mohamed Dahou, Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Maurice Wyckaert, Constant, Asger Jorn, Helmut Sturm, Attila Kotanyi, Jørgen Nash, Uwe Lausen, Raoul Vaneigem, Michèle Bernstein, Jeppesen Victor Martin, Jan Stijbosch, Alexander Trocchi, Théo Frey, Mustapha Khayati, Donald Nicholson-Smith, René Riesel, René Viénet, etc. 12 numéros furent publiés entre 1958 et 1969. Cette revue était un terrain d’expérimentation discursif et également un moyen de propagande.
Bulletin central édité par les sections de l’international situationniste
Director: G.-E. Debord
Rédaction: Paris
via La Bibliotheque Fantastique
Numéro 1, Juin 1958, 32 pp.
Numéro 2, Décembre 1958, 36 pp.
Numéro 3, Décembre 1959, 40 pp.
Numéro 4, Juin 1960, 40 pp.
Numéro 5, Décembre 1960, 52 pp.
Numéro 6, Août 1961, 44 pp.
Numéro 7, Avril 1962, 56 pp.
Numéro 8, Janvier 1963, 68 pp.
Numéro 9, Août 1964, 48 pp.
Numéro 10, Mars 1966, 84 pp.
Numéro 11, Octobre 1967, 72 pp.
Numéro 12, Septembre 1969, 116 pp.
View online (museumjorn.dk)
Siegfried Kracauer: The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (1963/1995)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1920s, 1930s, cinema, cultural criticism, cultural politics, dance, everyday, film theory, literature, photography, weimar
Siegfried Kracauer was one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant cultural critics, a daring and prolific scholar, and an incisive theorist of film. In this volume his finest writings on modern society make their long-awaited appearance in English.
This book is a celebration of the masses–their tastes, amusements, and everyday lives. Taking up themes of modernity, such as isolation and alienation, urban culture, and the relation between the group and the individual, Kracauer explores a kaleidoscope of topics: shopping arcades, the cinema, bestsellers and their readers, photography, dance, hotel lobbies, Kafka, the Bible, and boredom. For Kracauer, the most revelatory facets of modern life in the West lie on the surface, in the ephemeral and the marginal. Of special fascination to him is the United States, where he eventually settled after fleeing Germany and whose culture he sees as defined almost exclusively by “the ostentatious display of surface.”
With these essays, written in the 1920s and early 1930s and edited by the author in 1963, Kracauer was the first to demonstrate that studying the everyday world of the masses can bring great rewards. The Mass Ornament today remains a refreshing tribute to popular culture, and its impressively interdisciplinary essays continue to shed light not only on Kracauer’s later work but also on the ideas of the Frankfurt School, the genealogy of film theory and cultural studies, Weimar cultural politics, and, not least, the exigencies of intellectual exile.
In his introduction, Thomas Levin situates Kracauer in a turbulent age, illuminates the forces that influenced him–including his friendships with Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and other Weimar intellectuals–and provides the context necessary for understanding his ideas. Until now, Kracauer has been known primarily for his writings on the cinema. This volume brings us the full scope of his gifts as one of the most wide-ranging and penetrating interpreters of modern life.
Originally published in German as Das Ornament der Masse: Essays, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963
Translated, Edited, and with an Introduction by Thomas Y. Levin
Publisher Harvard University Press, 1995
ISBN 0674551621
416 pages
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Erving Goffman: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956)
Filed under book | Tags: · everyday, life, social theory, sociology, theatre
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is a seminal sociology book by Erving Goffman. It uses the imagery of the theatre in order to study human behavior in social situations and the way we appear to others. Discussions of social techniques are based upon detailed research and observation of social customs in many regions.
Publisher University of Edinburgh
162 pages
Harold Garfinkel: Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967/2006) [English/Spanish]
Filed under book | Tags: · ethnomethodology, everyday, linguistics, social sciences, social theory, society, sociology
This is one of the major classics of contemporary sociology. Studies in Ethnomethodology has inspired a wide range of important theoretical and empirical work in the social sciences and linguistics. It is one of the most original and controversial works in modern social science and it remains at the centre of debate about the current trends and tasks of sociology and social theory.
Ethnomethodology – the study of the ways in which ordinary people construct a stable social world through everyday utterances and actions – is now a major component of all sociology and linguistics courses. Garfinkel’s formidable reputation as one of the worlds leading sociologists rest largely on the work contained in this book.
Publisher Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1967, 288 pages
Translated to Spanish by Hugo Antonio Perez Hernaiz, published under the title Estudios en Etnometodologia by Anthropos Editorial, Barcelona, 2006. ISBN 8476587856, 331 pages.
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Raoul Vaneigem: The Revolution Of Everyday Life (1967/1983) [French/English]
Filed under book | Tags: · alienation, bourgeoisie, consciousness, everyday, labour, life, nihilism, power, proletariat, revolution, situationists, spectacle, things, transcendence
“The book was, along with Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, one of the most significant works written by members of the Situationist International (1957–1972).
The book takes the field of ‘everyday life’ as the ground upon which communication and participation can occur, or, as is more commonly the case, be perverted and abstracted into pseudo-forms. The author considers that direct, unmediated communication between ‘qualitative subjects’ is the ‘end’ to which human history tends – a state of affairs still frustrated by the perpetuation of capitalist modes of relation and to be “called forward” through the construction of situations. Under these prevailing conditions, people are still manipulated as docile ‘objects’ and without the ‘qualititive richness’ which comes from asserting their irreducible individuality – it is toward creating life lived in the first person that situations must be ‘built’. So to speak, it is the humiliation of being but a ‘thing’ for others that is responsible for all the ills Vaneigem equates with modern city life – isolation, humiliation, mis-communication – and toward creating new roles that flout stereotyped convention that freedom comes.” (wikipedia)
Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations, published by Gallimard, 1967.
Vaneigem’s preface to the first French paperback edition was published by Gallimard in 1992.
English translation was first published in 1983 jointly by Left Bank Books and Rebel Press.
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Publisher Rebel Press, 2001
No copyright claims will be made against publishers of non-profit editions.
ISBN 0946061017, 9780946061013
279 pages
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Fredy Perlman: The Reproduction of Daily Life (1969-) [EN, CR, PT, FR]
Filed under book | Tags: · alienation, capitalism, economy, everyday, labour, life, production, reproduction, society, value
What sustains Capitalism? Our acceptance of everyday activities. The text offers a clear introduction to basic Marxist concepts like commodity fetishism, and surplus value; it also traces the transformation of human activity into capital. It opens with the observation “that everyday practical activity of tribesmen reproduces, or perpetuates, a tribe.”
Publisher: Black & Red, Detroit, 1969, 24 pages. Reprinted in Anything Can Happen, October 1992, Phoenix Press, PO Box 824 London N1 9DL.
Croatian edition: Reprodukcija svakodnevnog života. Translated by Aleksa Golijanin, 2003. Anti-copyright.
Portuguese edition: A Reprodução do Quotidiano. Translated from Treason Press edition (2004), in February 2009, Edições Versus Capitalismus. Anti-copyright.
French edition: La Reproduction de la Vie Quotidienne. Published by Ravage Éditions, Paris, September 2011. Anti-copyright.
about the author (wikipedia)
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