Jasper Bernes: The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (2017)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, avant-garde, capitalism, cybernetics, information, labour, literary criticism, marxism, poetry, postindustrial, productivity, taylorism, technology, work

“A novel account of the relationship between postindustrial capitalism and postmodern culture, this book looks at American poetry and art of the last fifty years in light of the massive changes in people’s working lives. Over the last few decades, we have seen the shift from an economy based on the production of goods to one based on the provision of services, the entry of large numbers of women into the workforce, and the emergence of new digital technologies that have transformed the way people work. The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization argues that art and literature not only reflected the transformation of the workplace but anticipated and may have contributed to it as well, providing some of the terms through which resistance to labor was expressed. As firms continue to tout creativity and to reorganize in response to this resistance, they increasingly rely on models of labor that derive from values and ideas found in the experimental poetry and conceptual art of decades past.”
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2017
Post ’45 series
ISBN 9780804796415, 0804796416
viii+231 pages
Reviews: Stevphen Shukaitis (Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, 2017), Julian Murphet (Affirmations, 2017), Vince Carducci (Public Seminar, 2017).
Comment (0)Media-N, 12(3): Uncovering News: Reporting and Forms of New Media Art (2017)
Filed under journal | Tags: · aesthetics, art, art criticism, fake news, journalism, media activism, media art, new media art, propaganda, reality, tactical media, truth

“As the highly contested term “fake news” has become omnipresent in our media sphere and as the hacking of private networks for political gain have dominated the global news cycle, Media-N’s new issue is well positioned to uncover the complex relationship between media art and the multifarious forms of news reportage. We find in this wide-ranging journal issue, new media artists, writers, and theoreticians attempting to reveal, expose, and protest the production, rhetoric, and dissemination of news. Exploiting or subverting the existing network or creating alternative technologies, codes, or platforms, new media artists has probed the hegemonic grip of tradition forms of media production. Employing the raw material of journalism or intervening in the distribution and transmission of news information, artists have effectively critiqued or reimagined the unstable and fluid spaces of the contemporary news sphere. The nature of news information and its relationship to concepts of reality, truth, aesthetics, and the public and private are all at play in this issue.” (from Introduction)
With contributions by Erica Levin, Randall Packer, Kris Paulsen, Erin McElroy, Lisa Moren, Brandon Bauer, Rick Valentin, Francesca Franco, Yasuhito Abe, Vincent Cellucci, Jesse Allison, Derick Ostrenko, and Mina Cheon.
Guest editors: Abigail Susik and Grant Taylor
Publisher New Media Caucus, 2017
Open Access
ISSN 1942-017X
Caren Kaplan: Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (2018)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, air, cartography, colonialism, geography, history of photography, infrastructure, knowledge, landscape, mapping, military, nature, panorama, photography, power, space, technology, war

“From the first vistas provided by flight in balloons in the eighteenth century to the most recent sensing operations performed by military drones, the history of aerial imagery has marked the transformation of how people perceived their world, better understood their past, and imagined their future. In Aerial Aftermaths Caren Kaplan traces this cultural history, showing how aerial views operate as a form of world-making tied to the times and places of war. Kaplan’s investigation of the aerial arts of war—painting, photography, and digital imaging—range from England’s surveys of Scotland following the defeat of the 1746 Jacobite rebellion and early twentieth-century photographic mapping of Iraq to images taken in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Throughout, Kaplan foregrounds aerial imagery’s importance to modern visual culture and its ability to enforce colonial power, demonstrating both the destructive force and the potential for political connection that come with viewing from above.”
Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, 2018
Next Wave: New Directions in Women’s Studies series
ISBN 9780822370086, 0822370085
xiv+298 pages
via André