Mary Flanagan, Austin Booth (eds.): Re:skin (2007)

In re: skin, scholars, essayists and short story writers offer their perspectives on skin—as boundary and surface, as metaphor and physical reality. The twenty-first century and its attendant technology call for a new investigation of the intersection of body, skin, and technology. These cutting-edge writings address themes of skin and bodily transformation in an era in which we are able not only to modify our own skins—by plastic surgery, tattooing, skin graft art, and other methods—but to cross skins, merging with other bodies or colonizing multiple bodies.

The book’s agile crossings of disciplinary and genre boundaries enact the very transformations they discuss. A short story imagines a manufactured maternal interface that allows a man to become pregnant, and a scholar describes the evolution of “body criticism”; a writer uses “faux science” to explore animal prints on faux fur, and fictional lovers experience one another’s sexual sensations through the slipping on and off of skin-like bodysuits. Ubiquitous computational interfaces are considered as the “skin” of technology, and questions of race and color are shown to play out in digital art practice. The essays and narratives gathered in re: skin claim that the new technologically mutable body is neither purely liberating nor simply limiting; instead, these pieces show us models, ways of living in a technological culture.

Contributors:
Austin Booth, Rebecca Cannon, Model T and Sara D(iamond), L. Timmel Duchamp, Mary Flanagan, Jewelle Gomez, Jennifer Gonzalez, Nalo Hopkinson, Alicia Imperiale, Shelley Jackson, Christina Lammer, David J. Leonard, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Melinda Rackham, Vivian Sobchack, Elisabeth Vonarburg, Bernadette Wegenstein

Publisher MIT Press, 2007
Original from the University of Michigan
ISBN 0262062607, 9780262062602
Length 356 pages

Keywords and phrases
avatar, Lynx, carapace, NFL Street, Issy, uterus, video games, Cleve, VRML, Melinda Rackham, Lara Croft, EverQuest, wetsuit, Posthuman, Shelley Jackson, interventional radiology, phenomenology, MMORPGs, sports games, Blast Theory

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Stephanie Smith, Victor Margolin (eds.): Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art (2006)

Balancing environmental, ethical, economic, and aesthetic concerns, sustainable design has the potential to transform everyday life and has already dramatically reshaped the practice of architecture. “Beyond Green” introduces a new generation of international artists who work at the intersection of sustainable design and contemporary art.

The book explores the ways that this design strategy is being used-and sometimes intentionally misused-by an emerging group of artists who combine fresh aesthetic sensibilities with constructively critical approaches to the production, dissemination, and display of their art. Lavishly illustrated, the book also includes texts by and interviews with individual artists, along with substantial essays by exhibition curator Stephanie Smith and design historian Victor Margolin. What results is a bracing volume that will be of interest to practitioners and aficionados of design and art alike, as well as to environmentalists.

Publisher Independent Curators International, 2006
ISBN 0935573429, 9780935573428

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Allen Strange: Electronic Music: Systems, Techniques, and Controls (1973)

The bible for analogue freaks and sounddesigners. Allan Strange’s book is perhaps the definitive text on modular synthesis methods, written from a standpoint that’s musically understandable, as opposed to requiring a part-background in electronic engineering to understand. Useful both as a textbook and a reference document, the book also contains numerous illustrations and diagrams of modules by Moog, ARP, Buchla et al.

Publisher W. C. Brown Co, 1973
ISBN 069703612X, 9780697036124
Length 160 pages

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