Rosalind Williams: Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination, new ed. (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · anthropology, history, literature, technology, underground
The underground has always played a prominent role in human imaginings, both as a place of refuge and as a source of fear. The late nineteenth century saw a new fascination with the underground as Western societies tried to cope with the pervasive changes of a new social and technological order. In Notes on the Underground, Rosalind Williams takes us inside that critical historical moment, giving equal coverage to actual and imaginary undergrounds. She looks at the real-life invasions of the underground that occurred as modern urban infrastructures of sewers and subways were laid, and at the simultaneous archaeological excavations that were unearthing both human history and the planet’s deep past. She also examines the subterranean stories of Verne, Wells, Forster, Hugo, Bulwer-Lytton, and other writers who proposed alternative visions of the coming technological civilization.
Williams argues that these imagined and real underground environments provide models of human life in a world dominated by human presence and offer a prophetic look at today’s technology-dominated society. In a new afterword written for this edition, Williams points out that her book traces the emergence in the nineteenth century of what we would now call an environmental consciousness—an awareness that there will be consequences when humans live in a sealed, finite environment. Today we are more aware than ever of our limited biosphere and how vulnerable it is. Notes on the Underground, now even more than when it first appeared, offers a guide to the human, cultural, and technical consequences of what Williams calls “the human empire on earth.”
New Edition
With a new afterword by the author
Publisher The MIT Press, 2008
ISBN 0262731908, 9780262731904
283 pages
PDF (updated on 2014-9-5)
Comment (0)Audio Arts (1973-2006)
Filed under magazine, sound recording | Tags: · art, art history, interview, sound art
“The audio cassette-magazine Audio Arts was established by Bill Furlong in 1973. Edited and produced by Furlong, it comprises an integral element of his art practice.
The idea of Audio Arts arose out of conversations between two young artists, William Furlong and Barry Barker, in the early 1970s. Its publication was a part of the conceptual experimentation taking place within the contemporary art of the time.
Since its inception in 1972, Audio Arts has grown to become a comprehensive and coherently focused sound archive of artists’ voices as well as sound art. The cassette-magazine has been in continuous and regular publication for thirty-five years, with over twenty-five volumes of four issues each.
A small part of the Audio Arts archive is shown for the first time. Four hours of recorded clips can be accessed online, or in Tate gallery via headphones.”
Exhibition (Tate, 2007)
Article about Furlong (Randy Kennedy)
Speaking of Art book (contains 50 selected interviews)
Wikipedia
Listen (on Tate website)
Comment (0)Manuel Castells: Communication Power (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · business, communication, global warming, internet, mass media, network society, neuroscience, politics, technology, youtube
We live in the midst of a revolution in communication technologies that affects the way in which people feel, think, and behave. The mass media (including web-based media), Manuel Castells argues, has become the space where political and business power strategies are played out; power now lies in the hands of those who understand or control communication.
Over the last thirty years, Castells has emerged as one of the world’s leading communications theorists. In this, his most far-reaching book for a decade, he explores the nature of power itself, in the new communications environment. His vision encompasses business, media, neuroscience, technology, and, above all, politics. His case histories include global media deregulation, the misinformation that surrounded the invasion of Iraq, environmental movements, the role of the internet in the Obama presidential campaign, and media control in Russia and China. In the new network society of instant messaging, social networking, and blogging–“mass self-communication”–politics is fundamentally media politics. This fact is behind a worldwide crisis of political legitimacy that challenges the meaning of democracy in much of the world.
Publisher Oxford University Press, 2009
ISBN 0199567042, 9780199567041
Length 571 pages