Jack Smith: Wait For Me at the Bottom of The Pool: The Writings of Jack Smith (1997)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, film, film criticism, performance
“During thirty years of activity as a filmmaker, photographer and performer, Jack Smith produced a body of creative, antic writing that intersects and transcends the genres of hothouse fantasy, criticism and social comment. Bringing together long unavailable essays, performance scripts, interviews and other material, Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool reveals the ideas and personality of an artist whose distinctive vision has influenced generations of filmmakers and performance artists. With caustic wit, Smith praises the performances of Maria Montez as well as the sculpture of Walter de Maria, examines the cult success of Reefer Madness and the uses of pornography, and discusses the perils of democracy, the evils of property and the police state, art history and architecture.”
Edited by J. Hoberman and Edward Leffingwell
Publisher High Risk Books, with Institute of Contemporary Art/P.S. 1 Museum, New York, 1997
ISBN 1852424281, 9781852424282
177 pages
PDF (16 MB)
Comment (0)Dennis Tenen: Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (2017)
Filed under book | Tags: · book, computation, human-computer interaction, language, literary theory, literature, media, media theory, poetics, software, text, theory, translation
“This book challenges the ways we read, write, store, and retrieve information in the digital age. Computers—from electronic books to smart phones—play an active role in our social lives. Our technological choices thus entail theoretical and political commitments. Dennis Tenen takes up today’s strange enmeshing of humans, texts, and machines to argue that our most ingrained intuitions about texts are profoundly alienated from the physical contexts of their intellectual production. Drawing on a range of primary sources from both literary theory and software engineering, he makes a case for a more transparent practice of human–computer interaction. Plain Text is thus a rallying call, a frame of mind as much as a file format. It reminds us, ultimately, that our devices also encode specific modes of governance and control that must remain available to interpretation.”
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2017
ISBN 9781503601802, 1503601803
x+268 pages
Reviews: N. Katherine Hayles (Critical Inquiry, 2017), Jan Baetens (Leonardo, 2017), James Edward Draney (LARB, 2017), Maisie Ridgway (Textual Practice, 2018).
Comments (2)Angela Nagle: Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-right (2017)
Filed under book | Tags: · 4chan, alt-right, internet, libertarianism, memes, tumblr, web
“Recent years have seen a revival of the heated culture wars of the 1990s, but this time its battle ground is the internet. On one side the “alt right” ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements, to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-supporting gay libertarian Milo Yiannopolous. On the other side, a culture of struggle sessions and virtue signalling lurks behind a therapeutic language of trigger warnings and safe spaces. The feminist side of the online culture wars has its equally geeky subcultures right through to its mainstream expression. Kill All Normies explores some of the cultural genealogies and past parallels of these styles and subcultures, drawing from transgressive styles of 60s libertinism and conservative movements, to make the case for a rejection of the perpetual cultural turn.”
Publisher Zero Books, Winchester, UK, 2017
ISBN 9781785355431, 1785355430
120 pages
Reviews: Leif Weatherby (Jacobin, 2017), Olivier Jutel (Overland, 2017), Cameron L Fantastic (2017), Gareth Watkins (Queens Mobs, 2017), Catherine Liu (LA Rev of Books, 2017), Jen Isakson and Ross Speer (Radical Philosophy, 2018).
Comment (1)