Francis Spufford: Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1950s, 1960s, communism, cybernetics, economy, engineering, history of computing, mathematics, politics, science, soviet union
This book is about the moment in the mid-20th century when people believed that the state-owned Soviet economy might genuinely outdo the market, and produce a world of rich communists and envious capitalists. Specifically, it’s about the last and cleverest version of the idea – central planning via cybernetics – and about how and why, in the 1960s, it failed. To give the economics some human depth, Red Plenty generates a miniature Soviet Union on the page, peopled by scientists and politicians, fixers and managers, dreamers and cynics.
Publisher Faber & Faber, 2010
ISBN 0571269478, 9780571269471
356 pages
EPUB (updated on 2019-11-20)
See also:
Red Plenty Platforms, essay by Nick Dyer-Witheford, Culture Machine 14, 2013
Red Plenty: A Crooked Timber, collection of essays inspired by the book, 2012
Tatiana Bazzichelli, Geoff Cox (eds.): Disrupting Business: Art & Activism in Times of Financial Crisis (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, art, financial crisis, media activism
“Disrupting Business explores some of the interconnections between art, activism and the business concept of disruptive innovation. With a backdrop of the crisis in financial capitalism and austerity cuts in the cultural sphere, the idea is to focus on potential art strategies in relation to a broken economy. In a perverse way, we ask whether this presents new opportunities for cultural producers to achieve more autonomy over their production process. If it is indeed possible, or desirable, what alternative business models emerge? This book is concerned broadly with business as material for reinvention, including critical writing and examples of art/activist projects.”
Contributors include Saul Albert, Christian Ulrik Andersen, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Heath Bunting, Paolo Cirio, Baruch Gottlieb, Brian Holmes, Geert Lovink, Dmytri Kleiner, Georgios Papadopolous, Søren Bro Pold, Oliver Ressler, Kate Rich, René Ridgway, Guido Segni, Stevphen Shukaitis, Nathaniel Tkacz, and Marina Vishmidt.
Publisher Autonomedia, New York, October 2013
Data Browser series, 5
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 Unported License
ISBN 9781570272646
232 pages
Hans Prinzhorn: Artistry of the Mentally Ill: A Contribution to the Psychology and Psychopathology of Configuration (1922–) [DE, EN]
Filed under book | Tags: · art, outsider art, psychology, schizophrenia
“A book by psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn, known as the work that inspired the emergence of art brut. It was the first attempt to analyze the drawings of the mentally ill not merely psychologically, but also aesthetically. Prinzhorn presents the works of ten ‘schizophrenic masters’, now housed in Prinzhorn Collection at the University Hospital Heidelberg, with in-depth aesthetic analysis of each and also full-color reproductions of their work.” (Wikipedia)
Publisher Julius Springer, Berlin, 1922
361 pages
English edition
Translated by Eric von Brockdorff from the Second German Edition
With an Introduction by James L. Foy
Publisher Springer, 1972
ISBN 9783662009185
274 pages
Review: Aaron H. Esman (JAPA).
Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (German, JPGs/HTML/PDF, 1922)
Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (German, 5th ed., 1922/1997)
Artistry of the Mentally Ill (English, 18 MB, added on 2016-1-9)
See also John M. MacGregor’s The Discovery of the Art of the Insane (1989).
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