Thomas Patteson: Instruments for New Music: Sound, Technology, and Modernism (2015)

“Player pianos, radio-electric circuits, gramophone records, and optical sound film—these were the cutting-edge acoustic technologies of the early twentieth century, and for many musicians and artists of the time, these devices were also the implements of a musical revolution. Instruments for New Music traces a diffuse network of cultural agents who shared the belief that a truly modern music could be attained only through a radical challenge to the technological foundations of the art. Centered in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, the movement to create new instruments encompassed a broad spectrum of experiments, from the exploration of microtonal tunings and exotic tone colors to the ability to compose directly for automatic musical machines. This movement comprised composers, inventors, and visual artists, including Paul Hindemith, Ernst Toch, Jörg Mager, Friedrich Trautwein, László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Ruttmann, and Oskar Fischinger. Patteson’s fascinating study combines an artifact-oriented history of new music in the early twentieth century with an astute revisiting of still-relevant debates about the relationship between technology and the arts.”

Publisher University of California Press, Nov 2015
Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial ShareAlike 4.0 license.
ISBN 9780520963122 (EPUB), 9780520963122 (PDF)
250 pages

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Rosa B, 5: Environment and Design (2014) [French/English]

“Rosa B 5 deals with relations between the environment and design following the Aspen conference in 1970.

Around 1970, in France and on an international level, in all industrialized countries, the environment became a primordial question. Debates aiming to define principles and ways of approaching the issue gave rise to theoretical and conceptual tension. They crystallized the economic and political problems born of the connection taking shape between modernity and nature. In France in 1968 the Ministère des Affaires Culturelles founded the Institut de l’Environnement, a center for education and research proposing a new approach to teaching urban planning, architecture, design and communication, in response to new challenges intrinsic to a “sensitive environment.”

In 1970, the IDCA (the International Design Conference in Aspen) presented a program called Environment by design. In response to an invitation by the IDCA, the French delegation, led by designer Roger Tallon, took a position through a declaration written by Jean Baudrillard. The French delegation’s declaration, in association with the reactions and demonstrations of students and environmental activists at the conference, marked a turning point for the Aspen meetings.

Issue no. 5 of Rosa B takes the form of an archive, updating historical documents that put current debates on the fabrication of the environment into perspective. With texts and contributions by Peio Aguirre, Martin Beck, Gilles de Bure, Sheila Levrant de Breteville, Monique Eleb, Pierre Lascoumes, Jeanne Quéheillard, and a ‘carte blanche’ to Benjamin Tong with the calarts archives.” (from announcement)

Conceived by Peio Aguirre and Jeanne Quéheillard
Publisher Guadalupe Echevarria & Charlotte Laubard, Bordeaux, 2014

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Cabinet Magazine, 40: Hair (2011)

“As Roland Barthes observed of Abbé Pierre’s ‘zero’ haircut, even the most neutral of hairstyles offers a forest of signs. The capacity of hair to attract and radiate meaning permeates not just the history of hairstyles–from the Pharaonic beard of the Egyptians to the ironic mullet of the hipster–but also the rituals, technologies and products that define the world of hair. A sourcebook of ideas for artists and others interested in the curiosities of culture at large, Cabinet 40, with its special section devoted to “Hair,” features Jeffrey Kastner on the visual language of the barber pole, Laurel Braitman on the laboratory behavior of “barber mice,” Mats Bigert on the ritual of shaving the left leg of a prisoner before electrocution and Janet Connelly on the disappearing pubic hair of the porn star, as well as artist projects by Julia Jacquette and Susan Hiller.”

Edited by Sina Najafi
Publisher Immaterial Incorporated, New York, Winter 2010/11

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