Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian (eds.), #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (2014)
Filed under book | Tags: · accelerationism, capitalism, critique, cyberculture, labour, neoliberalism, politics, technology, theory
“Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.
#Accelerate presents a genealogy of accelerationism, tracking the impulse through 90s UK darkside cyberculture and the theory-fictions of Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Iain Grant, and CCRU, across the cultural underground of the 80s (rave, acid house, SF cinema) and back to its sources in delirious post-68 ferment, in texts whose searing nihilistic jouissance would later be disavowed by their authors and the marxist and academic establishment alike.
On either side of this central sequence, the book includes texts by Marx that call attention to his own ‘Prometheanism’, and key works from recent years document the recent extraordinary emergence of new accelerationisms steeled against the onslaughts of neoliberal capitalist realism, and retooled for the twenty-first century.
At the forefront of the energetic contemporary debate around this disputed, problematic term, #Accelerate activates a historical conversation about futurality, technology, politics, enjoyment and capital. This is a legacy shot through with contradictions, yet urgently galvanized today by the poverty of ‘reasonable’ contemporary political alternatives.”
Publisher Urbanomic, Falmouth, with Merve, Berlin, 2014
ISBN 9780957529557
536 pages
Reviews: Malcolm Harris (New Inquiry), J.J. Charlesworth (Art Review), Simon O’Sullivan (Mute), Alex Andrews (Review31), Orlando Read (Frieze).
Commentaries: McKenzie Wark (Public Seminar), David Cunningham (Radical Philosophy).
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Jacob Wamberg (eds.): Totalitarian Art and Modernity (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · art history, avant-garde, capitalism, communism, democracy, fascism, labour, modernism, modernity, monument, mythology, nazism, politics, revolution, socialism, socialist realism, soviet union, technology, totalitarianism, war
“In spite of the steadily expanding concept of art in the Western world, art made in twentieth-century totalitarian regimes – notably Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and the communist East Bloc countries – is still to a surprising degree excluded from mainstream art history and the exhibits of art museums. In contrast to earlier art made to promote princely or ecclesiastical power, this kind of visual culture seems to somehow not fulfill the category of ‘true’ art, instead being marginalised as propaganda for politically suspect regimes.
Totalitarian Art and Modernity wants to modify this displacement, comparing totalitarian art with modernist and avant-garde movements; confronting their cultural and political embeddings; and writing forth their common generalogies. Its eleven articles include topics as varied as: the concept of totalitarianism and totalitarian art, totalitarian exhibitions, monuments and architecture, forerunners of totalitarian art in romanticism and heroic realism, and diverse receptions of totalitarian art in democratic cultures.”
With contributions by Mikkel Bolt, Sandra Esslinger, Jørn Guldberg, Paul Jaskot, Jacob Wamberg, Christina Kiaer, Anders V. Munch, Kristine Nielsen, Olaf Peters, K. Andrea Rusnock, and Marla Stone.
Publisher Aarhus University Press, Århus, 2010
Acta Jutlandica series, 9
ISBN 8779345603, 9788779345607
359 pages
via Mikkel Bolt
PDF (10 MB)
Comment (0)monochrom, 11-23 (2000-2004) [German]
Filed under magazine | Tags: · art, conspiracy, copyleft, copyright, media, media art, media culture, net culture, philosophy, politics, science fiction, software, subversion, surveillance, tactical media, technology
The mouthpiece of an international art-technology-philosophy collective founded in 1993, with its headquarters at Museumsquartier in Vienna.
“Das Fanzine monochrom ist ein im Telefonbuch-Format erscheinendes Zeitschriftenobjekt, das von der gleichnamigen Künstler_innengruppe aus Wien, Graz und Bamberg/Deutschland herausgegeben wird. monochrom ist ein Potpourri der digitalen und analogen Subversion, ein unnostalgisches Amalgam aus 125 Jahren abendländischer Gegenkultur, die Godzilla-Variante der gutbügerlichen Coffeetablebuch-Idee.”
Editor-in-chief: Johannes Grenzfurthner
Publisher monochrom, Vienna
ISSN 1024-6738
Publisher, (2)
monochrom on Wikipedia
PDF (No. 11-14: Ontologisches Sanierungsportfolio, 2000, 260 pp)
PDF (No. 15-23: Zweite Ordnung muss sein, 2004, 436 pp)