Hito Steyerl: Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (2017)

“What is the function of art in the era of digital globalization?

How can one think of art institutions in an age defined by planetary civil war, growing inequality, and proprietary digital technology? The boundaries of such institutions have grown fuzzy. They extend from a region where the audience is pumped for tweets to a future of “neurocurating,” in which paintings surveil their audience via facial recognition and eye tracking to assess their popularity and to scan for suspicious activity.

In Duty Free Art, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl wonders how we can appreciate, or even make art, in the present age.

What can we do when arms manufacturers sponsor museums, and some of the world’s most valuable artworks are used as currency in a global futures market detached from productive work? Can we distinguish between information, fake news, and the digital white noise that bombards our everyday lives? Exploring subjects as diverse as video games, WikiLeaks files, the proliferation of freeports, and political actions, she exposes the paradoxes within globalization, political economies, visual culture, and the status of art production.”

Publisher Verso, London, 2017
Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 License
ISBN 9781786632432, 1786632438
244 pages

Reviews: J.J. Charlesworth (ArtReview, 2017), Fisun Güner (Elephant, 2017), El Putnam (Visual Resources, 2018), Carol Breen (Media Theory Journal, 2018).
Exh. review: Gabi Scardi (Domus, 2016).

Publisher
WorldCat

HTML (added on 2019-12-13)
EPUB

Suzanne Lacy (ed.): Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (1995)

“Departing from the traditional definition of public art as sculpture in parks and plazas, new genre public art brings artists into direct engagement with audiences to deal with the compelling issues of our time. This is the first definitive collection of writings on the subject by critics, artists, and curators who are pioneers in the field. Includes essays by Judith Baca, Estella Conwill Májozo, Suzi Gablik, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Mary Jane Jacob, Allen Kaprow, Jeff Kelley, Lucy Lippard, Patricia C. Phillips, and Arlene Raven.”

Publisher Bay Press, Seattle, 1995
ISBN 0941920305, 9780941920308
296 pages

Reviews: Kirkus Rev (1994), Gaye Green (Art J, 1999), Carole Gold Calo (Public Art Dialogue, 2012).
Commentary: Stephanie Smith (Afterall, 2011, PDF).

Editor
WorldCat

PDF (49 MB, updated on 2018-6-22)

Interventions in Digital Cultures: Technology, the Political, Methods (2017)

“How to intervene? Interventions are in vogue in digital cultures as forms of critique or political actions into public spheres. By engaging in social, political, and economic contexts, interventions attempt to interrupt and change situations—often with artistic means. This volume maps methods of interventions under the specific conditions of the digital. How are interventions shaped by these conditions? And how can they contribute to altering them? In essays and interviews, this book interrogates modes of intervening in and through art, infrastructures, techno-ecological environments, bio-technology, and political protests to highlight their potentials as well as their ambivalences.”

With contributions by Martina Leeker, Fred Turner, Howard Caygill, Alexander R. Galloway, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Ulrike Bergermann, Steve Kurtz, Kat Jungnickel, and Tobias Schulze.

Edited by Howard Caygill, Martina Leeker, and Tobias Schulze
Publisher meson press, Lüneburg, 2017
Digital Cultures series
Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 License
ISBN 9783957961105, 3957961106
148 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (3 MB)