CrimethInc: Recipes for Disaster: An Anarchist Cookbook (2004)

Recipes for Disaster: An Anarchist Cookbook is an anarchist book released by the CrimethInc. collective in December 2004. It provides information on and strategies for direct action useful to activists and dissenters. There are sections on forming affinity groups, organizing demonstrations, stenciling, black blocs, sabotage, squatting, and more personal topics like mental health and “Supporting Survivors of Domestic Violence”. It was written over a span of three years by dozens of radical collectives from all over the world working together.

The title alludes to The Anarchist Cookbook, a controversial book from 1971. CrimethInc. denounces the earlier book, saying it was “not composed or released by anarchists, not derived from anarchist practice, not intended to promote freedom and autonomy or challenge repressive power–and was barely a cookbook, as the recipes in it are notoriously unreliable. At best, it was a fraud, a spoof; at worst, an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of anarchist practice, and cause readers to injure themselves. The recent movie by the same name is equally embarrassing, not so much to anarchists as to the industry that produced it.”

Publisher CrimethInc. (December 2004)
ISBN 0-9709101-4-2
624 pages

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Patricia Pisters (ed.): Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari (2001)

This book focuses on the micro-political implications of the work of Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari). General philosophical articles are coupled to more specific analyses of films (such as Fight Club and Schindler’s List) and other expressions of contemporary culture. The choice of giving specific attention to the analyses of images and sounds is not only related to the fact that audiovisual products are increasingly dominant in contemporary life, but also to the fact that film culture in itself is changing (‘in transition’) in capitalist culture. From a marginal place at the periphery of economy and culture at large, audiovisual products (ranging from art to ads) seem to have moved to the centre of the network society, as Manuel Castells calls contemporary society. Typical Deleuzian concepts such as micro-politics, the Body without Organs, becoming-minoritarian, pragmatics and immanence are explored in their philosophical implications and political force, whether utopian or dystopian. What can we do with Deleuze in contemporary media culture? A recurring issue throughout the book is the relationship between theory and practice, to which several solutions and problems are given.

Publisher Amsterdam University Press, 2001
ISBN 9053564721, 9789053564721
302 pages

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Nick Montfort, Ian Bogost: Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (2009)

The Atari Video Computer System dominated the home videogame market so completely that “Atari” became the generic term for a videogame console. The Atari VCS was affordable and offered the flexibility of changeable cartridges. Nearly a thousand of these were created, the most significant of which established new techniques, mechanics, and even entire genres. This book offers a detailed and accessible study of this influential videogame console from both computational and cultural perspectives.

Studies of digital media have rarely investigated platforms—the systems underlying computing. This book (the first in a series of Platform Studies) does so, developing a critical approach that examines the relationship between platforms and creative expression. Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost discuss the Atari VCS itself and examine in detail six game cartridges: Combat, Adventure, Pac-Man, Yars’ Revenge, Pitfall!, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. They describe the technical constraints and affordances of the system and track developments in programming, gameplay, interface, and aesthetics. Adventure, for example, was the first game to represent a virtual space larger than the screen (anticipating the boundless virtual spaces of such later games as World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto), by allowing the player to walk off one side into another space; and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back was an early instance of interaction between media properties and video games.

Montfort and Bogost show that the Atari VCS—often considered merely a retro fetish object—is an essential part of the history of video games.

Publisher MIT Press, 2009
ISBN 026201257X, 9780262012577
Length 184 pages

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