Chris Newbold, Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Hilde van den Bulck (eds.): The Media Book (2002)

The Media Book provides today’s students with a comprehensive foundation for the study of the modern media. It has been systematically compiled to map the field in a way which corresponds to the curricular organization of the field around the globe, providing a complete resource for students in their third year to graduate level courses in the U.S.

Publisher A Hodder Arnold Publication, 2002
ISBN: 0340740485, 978-0340740484
464 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-9-3)

Doron Swade: The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer (2001)

In 1821 an inventor and mathematician named Charles Babbage was reviewing a set of mathematical tables. After finding an excess of errors in the results, he exclaimed, “I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam.” Thus began Babbage’s lifelong enterprise to design and build a mechanical calculating engine-the world’s first computer. Drawing on Babbage’s original notes and designs, Doron Swade recounts both Babbage’s nineteenth-century quest to build a calculating machine-the Difference Engine-and Swade’s own successful attempt to build a replica for the bicentennial of Babbage’s birth. Set against the tantalizing background of Victorian science and politics with a colorful cast of characters, The Difference Engineis a saga of ingenuity and will-and the dawning of a new age.

Publisher Penguin Books, 2001
ISBN 0670910201
342 pages

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PDF (DJVU; updated on 2012-7-25)

Miwon Kwon: One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (2002)

“Site-specific art emerged in the late 1960s in reaction to the growing commodification of art and the prevailing ideals of art’s autonomy and universality. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as site-specific art intersected with land art, process art, performance art, conceptual art, installation art, institutional critique, community-based art, and public art, its creators insisted on the inseparability of the work and its context. In recent years, however, the presumption of unrepeatability and immobility encapsulated in Richard Serra’s famous dictum “to remove the work is to destroy the work” is being challenged by new models of site specificity and changes in institutional and market forces.

One Place after Another offers a critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s and a theoretical framework for examining the rhetoric of aesthetic vanguardism and political progressivism associated with its many permutations. Informed by urban theory, postmodernist criticism in art and architecture, and debates concerning identity politics and the public sphere, the book addresses the siting of art as more than an artistic problem. It examines site specificity as a complex cipher of the unstable relationship between location and identity in the era of late capitalism. The book addresses the work of, among others, John Ahearn, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Donald Judd, Renee Green, Suzanne Lacy, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Serra, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2002
ISBN 0262112655, 9780262112659
230 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)