Rasheed Araeen, Sean Cubitt, Ziauddin Sardar (eds.): Third Text Reader on Art, Culture and Theory (2002)

“Third Text has been the world’s leading journal on art in the global context. Known for challenging received notions of art practice, art history, popular media and cultural theory, it has never accepted unquestioningly the claims of anti-racism, multiculturalism or postcolonialism. Similarly, Third Text has not only championed new artists from six continents, it has raised the critical temperature and the political stakes for art and cultural practice in the age of globalization. This Reader brings together classic essays by some of the best-known critics in global art and cultural studies, together with some of the most exciting new voices to emerge over the last decades. Divided into sections that cover history, representation, identity, film, “post” theory, globalization, the Reader will be invaluable to students and teachers of art, cultural studies, media studies, postcolonialism and globalization.”

Selected contributors: Zygmunt Bauman, Rustom Bharucha, Zeynap Çelik, James Clifford, Sean Cubitt, Jimmie Durham, Clifford Geertz, Stuart Hall, Kobener Mercer, Benita Parry, George Ritzer, Edward Said, Ziauddin Sardar, Julian Stallabrass, Slavoj Zizek.

Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, 2002
ISBN 0826458513, 9780826458513
392 pages

Publisher

PDF (no OCR; some pages missing; updated on 2012-11-4)

Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid: Rhythm Science (2004)

“Once you get into the flow of things, you’re always haunted by the way that things could have turned out. This outcome, that conclusion. You get my drift. The uncertainty is what holds the story together, and that’s what I’m going to talk about.”
—Rhythm Science

The conceptual artist Paul Miller, also known as Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid, delivers a manifesto for rhythm science—the creation of art from the flow of patterns in sound and culture, “the changing same.” Taking the Dj’s mix as template, he describes how the artist, navigating the innumerable ways to arrange the mix of cultural ideas and objects that bombard us, uses technology and art to create something new and expressive and endlessly variable. Technology provides the method and model; information on the web, like the elements of a mix, doesn’t stay in one place. And technology is the medium, bridging the artist’s consciousness and the outside world.

Miller constructed his Dj Spooky persona (“spooky” from the eerie sounds of hip-hop, techno, ambient, and the other music that he plays) as a conceptual art project, but then came to see it as the opportunity for “coding a generative syntax for new languages of creativity.” For example: “Start with the inspiration of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat comic strip. Make a track invoking his absurd landscapes… What do tons and tons of air pressure moving in the atmosphere sound like? Make music that acts a metaphor for that kind of immersion or density.” Or, for an online “remix” of two works by Marcel Duchamp: “I took a lot of his material written on music and flipped it into a DJ mix of his visual material—with him rhyming!”

Tracing the genealogy of rhythm science, Miller cites sources and influences as varied as Ralph Waldo Emerson (“all minds quote”), Grandmaster Flash, W. E. B Dubois, James Joyce, and Eminem. “The story unfolds while the fragments coalesce,” he writes.

Miller’s textual provocations are designed for maximum visual and tactile seduction by the international studio COMA (Cornelia Blatter and Marcel Hermans). They sustain the book’s motifs of recontextualizing and relayering, texts and images bleed through from page to page, creating what amount to 2.5 dimensional vectors. From its remarkable velvet flesh cover, to the die cut hole through the center of the book, which reveals the colored nub holding in place the included audio CD, Rhythm Science: Excerpts and Allegories from the Sub Rosa Archives, this pamphlet truly lives up to Editorial Director Peter Lunenfeld’s claim that the Mediawork Pamphlets are “theoretical fetish objects . . . ‘zines for grown-ups.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2004
A Mediawork pamphlet
ISBN 026263287X, 9780262632874
128 pages

Hypnotext (Rhythm Science’s webtake by Peter Halley)

publisher
publisher
google books

PDF (no OCR; updated on 2013-1-23)

Charles Harrison, Paul Wood (eds.): Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (1992) [English, French]

“This volume provides comprehensive representation of the theories, which underpinned developments in the visual arts during the twentieth century. As well as writings by artists, the anthology includes texts by critics, philosophers, politicians and literary figures. The content is structured into eight broadly chronological sections, starting with the legacy of symbolism and concluding with contemporary debates about the postmodern.”

Publisher Blackwell, 1992
Reprinted 1999
ISBN 0631165754, 978-0631165750
1220 pages

Review: Patricia Railing (Art Book, 2004).

Publisher

Art in Theory 1900-1990 (English, 1992, 13 MB, updated on 2015-9-5)
Art en théorie 1900-1990 (French, 1997, 24 MB, added on 2016-6-26)