Timothy Druckrey (ed.): Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation (1996)

“A rich compilation of essays by some of today’s leading theorists and media critics, this book gathers a series of explorations into diverse forms of visualizations in a cultural environment wired into the global network. With its emphasis on the impact of the digital revolution in the late 20th century and the historical context in which it arose, Electronic Culture could not be more timely or relevant.”

Texts by Vannevar Bush, Martin Heidegger, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Jean-Louis Comolli, Kathy Rae Huffman, Lev Manovich, Vilém Flusser, N. Katherine Hayles, Siegfried Zielinski, Slavoj Žižek, Friedrich Kittler, Sherry Turkle, Pierre Levy, Hakim Bey, Adilkno/Geert Lovink, Critical Art Ensemble, a.o.

Preface by Allucquère Rosanne Stone
Illustrations by Critical Art Ensemble
Publisher Aperture, New York, 1996
ISBN 0893816787, 9780893816780
447 pages

Review: Andreas Broeckmann (Leonardo, 2000).

WorldCat

PDF (155 MB)

Proud to be Flesh: A Mute Magazine Anthology of Cultural Politics after the Net (2009)

“In late 1994, back in the days of dial-up modems and Netscape Navigator 1.0, Mute magazine announced its timely arrival. Dedicated to an analysis of culture and politics ‘after the net’, Mute has consistently challenged the grandiose claims of the communications revolution, debunking its utopian rhetoric and offering more critical perspectives.

Fifteen years on, this anthology selects representative articles from the magazine’s hugely diverse content to reprise some of its recurring themes. This expansive collection charts the perilous journey from Web 1.0 to 2.0, contesting the democratisation this transition implied and laying bare our incorporeal expectations; it exposes the ways in which the logic of technology intersects with that of art and music and, in turn and inevitably, with the logic of business; it heralds the rise of neoliberalism and condemns the human cost; it amplifies the murmurs of dissent and revels in the first signs of collapse. The result situates key – but often little understood – concepts associated with the digital (e.g. the knowledge commons, immaterial labour and open source) in their proper context, producing an impressive overview of contemporary, networked culture in its broadest sense.

Proud to be Flesh features a mix of essays, interviews, satirical fiction, email polemics and reportage from an array of international contributors working in art, philosophy, technology, politics, cultural theory, radical geography and more.”

Edited by Josephine Berry Slater and Pauline van Mourik Broekman, with Michael Corris, Anthony Iles, Benedict Seymour and Simon Worthington
Publisher Mute Publishing, London, with Autonomedia, New York, 2009
ISBN 9781906496289, 1906496285
572+48 pages

Reviews: Nicholas Thoburn (New Formations), Charlotte Frost (Rhizome), Julian Stallabrass (New Left Review).

Magazine
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (15 MB, updated on 2019-6-12)

Chuck Welch (ed.): Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology (1995)

“This book is the first university press publication in academia to explore the historical roots, aesthetics and new directions in mail art. The essays of Eternal Network were written and assembled during the early 1990s by mail artist, writer, and curator, Chuck Welch. The edition contains forty illustrated chapters surveying an international community whose mailboxes and computers were a proto internet bridging the analog and digital world of art and communication. Eternal Network includes numerous photographs of mailed artifacts, performance events, congresses, stampsheets, posters, collages, artists’ books, visual poetry, computer art, mail art projects, zines, copy art and rubber-stamped images.

The book is divided into six parts: Networking Origins, Open Aesthetics, New Directions, Interconnection of Worlds, Communication Issues and Ethereal Realms. Appendixes include mailing addresses from the 1990s, mail art exhibitions, a listing and location of over 350 underground mail art magazines and a comprehensive record of public and private international mail art archives. The late Judith Hoffberg, founder of Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS) and editor of Umbrella Magazine, wrote an astute and prophetic review of Eternal Network in March 1995. “Some might think that this is the last gasp of a paper-orientated group of artists, but it is more a testament to the future of alternative art and the role of artists as networker”.”

With a Foreword by Ken Friedman
Publisher University of Calgary Press, Calgary, 1995
ISBN 1895176271, 9781895176278
xxiii+304 pages
via Chuck Welch, (2)

WorldCat

PDF (147 MB)