MaHKUzine: Journal of Artistic Research, 1-10 (2006-2011)

MaHKUzine is an international publication in both hard copy and website form. The journal embarks on a topical discourse in artistic research implying visual art, editorial design, fashion design, interior design, and public space design. The magazine offers symposia reports, articles by guest lecturers, staff and research reports.

Editorial board: Henk Slager (General Editor), Annette W. Balkema, Arjen Mulder
Publisher: Utrecht School of the Arts, Faculty of Visual Arts and Design

Publisher

MaHKUzine#1 Is the medium still the message?, summer 2006, PDF
MaHKUzine#2 Critical Methodologies, winter 2007, PDF
MaHKUzine#3 Design Solutions, summer 2007, Issuu
MaHKUzine#4 The Politics of Design, winter 2008, Issuu
MaHKUzine#5 A Certain MA-ness, summer 2008, Issuu
MaHKUzine#6 Spatial Practices, winter 2009, Issuu
MaHKUzine#7 Nameless Science, summer 2009, PDF
MaHKUzine#8 Epistemic Encounters, winter 2010, PDF
MaHKUzine#9 Doing Dissemination, summer 2010, PDF
MaHKUzine#10, winter 2011, Issuu

Andrew Benjamin: Writing Art and Architecture (2010)

“In his new book, the philosopher Andrew Benjamin turns his attention to architecture, design, sculpture, painting and writing. Drawing predominantly on a European tradition of modern philosophical criticism running from the German Romantics through Walter Benjamin and beyond, he offers a sequence of meditations on a diverse ensemble of works and themes: on the library and the house, on architectural theory, on Rachel Whiteread, Peter Eisenman, Anselm Kiefer, Peter Nielson, David Hawley, Terri Bird, Elizabeth Presa and others.

In Benjamin’s hands, criticism is bound up with judgment. Objects of criticism always become more than mere documents. These essays dissolve the prejudices that have determined our relation to aesthetic objects and to thought, releasing in their very care and attentiveness to the ‘objects themselves’ the unexpected potentialities such objects harbour. In his sensitivity to what he calls ‘the particularity of material events’, Benjamin’s writing comes to exemplify new possibilities for the contemporary practice of criticism itself.”

Publisher: Re.press, Melbourne, 1 October 2010
Transmission series
ISBN: 9780980668360 (pbk. with colour images)
ISBN-ebook: 9780980668377
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license
170 pages

Publisher

PDF

Anthony Dunne: Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design (1999/2005)

“As our everyday social and cultural experiences are increasingly mediated by electronic products—from ‘intelligent’ toasters to iPods—it is the design of these products that shapes our experience of the ‘electrosphere’ in which we live. Designers of electronic products, writes Anthony Dunne in Hertzian Tales, must begin to think more broadly about the aesthetic role of electronic products in everyday life. Industrial design has the potential to enrich our daily lives—to improve the quality of our relationship to the artificial environment of technology, and even, argues Dunne, to be subverted for socially beneficial ends.

The cultural speculations and conceptual design proposals in Hertzian Tales are not utopian visions or blueprints; instead, they embody a critique of present-day practices, ‘mixing criticism with optimism.’ Six essays explore design approaches for developing the aesthetic potential of electronic products outside a commercial context—considering such topics as the post-optimal object and the aesthetics of user-unfriendliness—and five proposals offer commentary in the form of objects, videos, and images. These include ‘Electroclimates,’ animations on an LCD screen that register changes in radio frequency; ‘When Objects Dream…,’ consumer products that “dream” in electromagnetic waves; ‘Thief of Affection,’ which steals radio signals from cardiac pacemakers; ‘Tuneable Cities,’ which uses the car as it drives through overlapping radio environments as an interface of hertzian and physical space; and the ‘Faraday Chair: Negative Radio,’ enclosed in a transparent but radio-opaque shield.

Very little has changed in the world of design since Hertzian Tales was first published by the Royal College of Art in 1999, writes Dunne in his preface to this MIT Press edition: ‘Design is not engaging with the social, cultural, and ethical implications of the technologies it makes so sexy and consumable.’ His project and proposals challenge it to do so.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2005
ISBN 0262042320, 9780262042321
174 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-11-19)