Martin Duberman: Black Mountain College: An Exploration in Community (1972)

“With faculty and alumni that included John Cage, Robert Creeley, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Olson, Josef and Anni Albers, Paul Goodman, and Robert Rauschenberg, Black Mountain College ranked among the most important artistic and intellectual communities of the twentieth century. In his groundbreaking history, Martin Duberman uses interviews, anecdotes, and research to depict the relationships that made Black Mountain College what it was. Black Mountain documents the college’s twenty-three-year tenure, from its most brilliant moments of self-reinvention to its lowest moments of petty infighting. It records the financial difficulties that beleaguered the community throughout its existence and the determination it took to keep the college in operation. Duberman creates a nuanced portrait of this community so essential to the development of American arts and counterculture.”

Publisher Dutton, New York, 1972; Anchor Books, Garden City, NY, 1973
ISBN 0385070594. 9780385070591
xix+578+[16] pages

Reviews: Herbert Leibowitz (New York Times, 1972), Kirkus Reviews (1972), George B. Tindall (North Carolina Historical Review, 1973).

Publisher (2009 reprint)
WorldCat

PDF (94 MB)

Teresa de Lauretis, Stephen Heath (eds.): The Cinematic Apparatus (1980)

Papers and discussions from a conference organised by the Center for Twentieth Century Studies of University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in February 1978.

Publisher St. Martin’s Press, New York, and Macmillan, London, 1980
ISBN 0312139071, 9780312139070
x+213 pages

Reviews: William C. Wees (Cinema Journal, 1982), Nigel Floyd (Framework, 1981).
Commentary: Thomas Elsaesser (Recherches sémiotiques, 2011).

Conference
Editor
WorldCat

PDF

Eric Kluitenberg (ed.): Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium (2006)

“Where people fail our machines will succeed – it seems to be one of the most stubborn myths in Western society. We are incessantly being bombarded with films, books, street advertising and commercials about new gadgets, new media and new futures that seem suspiciously similar to all that precedes. Imagine the power … of the umpteenth gadget. Imagine … that technology can go where no human has ever gone before, that technology can succeed where no human has succeeded – not only in space or in nature, but also in the interpersonal, specifically in communication with the other.

This book investigates those technological myths and the dream of the ultimate communication medium from multiple perspectives. Building on insights provided by media archeology, Siegfried Zielinski, Bruce Sterling, Erkki Huhtamo and Timothy Druckrey spin a web of connections between the wonderful fantasy machines of Athanasius Kircher, the mania of stereoscopy, ‘dead’ media and archeological media art. Edwin Carels and Zoe Beloff descend into the cinematographic caverns of spiritualism and the iconography of death, while Eric Kluitenberg and John Akomfrah lift the lid on the imaginary connection machines and the ‘mothership connection’.”

Publisher NAi, Rotterdam, with De Balie, Amsterdam, 2006
ISBN 9789056625399, 905662539X
296 pages
via Media Archaeology Reconfigured

Reviews: Arjen Mulder (Open!, 2007), Erik van Bemmelen (Masters of Media, 2010).

Event
Publisher (archived)
WorldCat

PDF (16 MB)