Olia Lialina, Dragan Espenschied (eds.): Digital Folklore: To Computer Users, with Love and Respect (2009)

“Technical innovations shape only a small part of computer and network culture. It doesn’t matter much who invented the microprocessor, the mouse, TCP/IP or the World Wide Web and what ideas were behind these inventions. What matters is who uses them. Only when users start to express themselves with these technical innovations do they truly become relevant to culture at large.

Users’ endeavors, like glittering star backgrounds, photos of cute kittens and rainbow gradients, are mostly derided as kitsch or in the most extreme cases, postulated as the end of culture itself. In fact this evolving vernacular, created by users for users, is the most important, beautiful and misunderstood language of new media.

As the first book of its kind, this reader contains essays and projects investigating many different facets of Digital Folklore: online amateur culture, DIY electronics, dirtstyle, typo-nihilism, memes, teapots, penis enlargement, …” (from the back cover)

Contributors: Cory Arcangel, Julia Böger, Manuel Buerger, Helene Dams, Dragan Espenschied, Jörg Frohnmayer, Mark Grimm, Christopher Heller, Yunchul Kim, Dennis Knopf, Stefan Krappitz, Florian Kröner, Tobias Leingruber, Olia Lialina, Leo Merz, Bernadette Neuroth, o+ro, johannes p osterhoff, Isabel Pettinato, Michael Ruß, Alexander Schlegel, Bert Schutzbach, Siegfried Zielinski.

Publisher Merz & Solitude (Merz Akademie & Akademie Schloss Solitude), Stuttgart, 2009
Reihe Projektiv series
Designer Manuel Buerger
ISBN 9783937982250, 3937982256
287 pages

Reviews: Pau Waelder (Furtherfield, 2010), Kevin McGarry (Rhizome, 2010), Regine Debatty (We Make Money Not Art, 2010), Alessandro Ludovico (Neural, 2010), Richard Schwarz (The Gap, 2010, DE), Marie Lechner (Libération, 2010, FR), Stefania Bercu (Masters of Media, 2010).

Book website
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (27 MB)

Leslie Kanes Weisman: Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment (1992)

“Discrimination by Design is a fascinating account of the complex social processes and power struggles involved in building and controlling space. Leslie Kanes Weisman offers a new framework for understanding the spatial dimensions of gender and race as well as class. She traces the social and architectural histories of the skyscraper, maternity hospital, department store, shopping mall, nuclear family dream house, and public housing high rise. Her vivid prose is based on exhaustive research and documents how each setting, along with public parks and streets, embodies and transmits the privileges and penalties of social caste.

In presenting feminist themes from a spatial perspective, Weisman raises many new and important questions. When do women feel unsafe in cities, and why? Why do so many homeless people prefer to sleep on the streets rather than in city-run shelters? Why does the current housing crisis pose a greater threat to women than to men? How would dwellings, communities, and public buildings look if they were designed to foster relationships of equality and environmental wholeness? And how can we begin to imagine such a radically different landscape?

In exploring the answers, the author introduces us to the people, policies, architectural innovations, and ideologies working today to shape a future in which all people matter. Richly illustrated with photographs and drawings, Discrimination by Design is an invaluable and pioneering contribution to our understanding of the issues of our time–health care for the elderly and people with AIDS, homelessness, racial justice, changing conditions of work and family life, affordable housing, militarism, energy conservation, and thepreservation of the environment. This thoroughly readable book provides practical guidance to policymakers, architects, planners, and housing activists. It should be read by all who are interested in understanding how the built environment shapes the experiences of their daily lives and the cultural assumptions in which they are immersed.” (from the back cover)

Publisher University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1992
ISBN 0252063996, 9780252063992
x+190 pages

Reviews: Gail Lee Dubrow (Journal of Planning Education and Research, 1993), Esther da Costa Meyer (NWSA Journal, 1993), Diane Favro (Journal of American History, 1994), Joanne K. Guilfoil (Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 1994), Irene Nierhaus (L’Homme, 1994, DE), Nancy M. Somerick (Public Relations Review, 1995).
Commentary: Spatial Agency (n.d.).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (29 MB)

Siegfried Ebeling: Der Raum als Membran (1926–) [German]

“Time and again Der Raum als Membran [Space as Membrane], published by Siegfried Ebeling as a kind of pamphlet in 1926 in Dessau — the artistic and technological laboratory of modernism—, caught the attention of his contemporaries. We find a copy on the desk of Walter Gropius at the Dessau Bauhaus, another one with notes from the hand of the architect at the library of Mies van der Rohe. And again and again whenever the utopian Bauhaus is mentioned, the title page of Der Raum als Membran reappears. The author, however, along with his other attempts to develop a theory of biological architecture, has disappeared from common memory. Siegfried Ebeling died 1963 in Hamburg, impoverished and isolated from post-war architecture.”

Full title: Der Raum als Membran: ist ein analytisch-kritischer Beitrag zu Fragen zukünftiger Architektur, die über das nackte Bedürfnis hinausgeht und hiermit sich legen möchte in die gestaltende Hand aller Wissenschaft.

First published by C. Dünnhaupt, Dessau, 1926.

New edition
Afterword by Walter Scheiffele
Publisher Spector Books, Leipzig, 2016
Edition Bauhaus, 43
ISBN 9783944669465, 3944669460
47 pages
via Thebaus

Commentary: Walter Scheiffele (2010), Volker Frank (n.d., DE), Luis Palcorbo & Ines Martin-Robles (RA, 2014, ES), James Lowder (2015), Matina Kousidi (Architectural Review, 2015), Matina Kousidi (MD Journal, 2016), Georg Vrachliotis (Arch+, 2016, DE).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (Afterword missing, 5 MB)