Third Text, 120: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (2013)

“This special issue of Third Text investigates the intersection of art criticism, politico-ecological theory, environmental activism and postcolonial globalization. The focus is on practices and discourses of eco-aesthetics that have emerged in recent years in geopolitical areas as diverse as the Arctic, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Europe and Mexico. The numerous contributors address new aesthetic strategies through which current ecological emergencies – including but not limited to the multifaceted crisis of climate change – have found resonance and creative response in artistic practice and more broadly in visual culture.” (from the Introduction)

With contributions by Christoph Brunner, Roberto Nigro, Gerald Raunig, Jessica L Horton, Janet Catherine Berlo, Jimmie Durham, Subhankar Banerjee, Nabil Ahmed, Berin Golonu, Basil Sunday Nnamdi, Obari Gomba, Frank Ugiomoh, Ursula Biemann, Peter Mörtenböck, Helge Mooshammer, Patrick D Flores, Raqs Media Collective, Luke Skrebowski, Emily Apter, Steven Lam, Gabi Ngcobo, Jack Persekian, Nato Thompson, Anne Sophie Witzke, Liberate Tate, TJ Demos, Eduardo Abaroa and Minerva Cuevas.

Guest editor: TJ Demos
Publisher Third Text, London, January 2013
175 pages

Publisher

PDF (10 MB)
Online supplement (contains another 6 articles + introduction)

Fionnghuala Sweeney, Kate Marsh (eds.): Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem, Haiti and the Avant-garde (2013)

“This collection of ten essays makes a persuasive case for a black Atlantic literary renaissance and its impact on modernist studies. The chapters stretch and challenge current canonical configurations of modernism in two ways: by considering the centrality of black artists, writers and intellectuals as key actors and core presences in the development of a modernist avant-garde; and by interrogating ‘blackness’ as an aesthetic and political category at critical moments during the twentieth century. This is the first book-length publication to explore the term ‘Afromodernisms’ and the first study to address together the cognate fields of modernism and the black Atlantic.”

Publisher Edinburgh University Press, 2013
ISBN 074864640X, 9780748646401
264 pages

Review: Dominic Thomas (French Studies, 2013).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (updated on 2020-6-9)

Olga Goriunova (ed.): Fun and Software: Exploring Pleasure, Paradox and Pain in Computing (2014)

“Fun and Software offers the untold story of fun as constitutive of the culture and aesthetics of computing. Fun in computing is a mode of thinking, making and experiencing. It invokes and convolutes the question of rationalism and logical reason, addresses the sensibilities and experience of computation and attests to its creative drives. By exploring topics as diverse as the pleasure and pain of the programmer, geek wit, affects of play and coding as a bodily pursuit of the unique in recursive structures, Fun and Software helps construct a different point of entry to the understanding of software as culture. Fun is a form of production that touches on the foundations of formal logic and precise notation as well as rhetoric, exhibiting connections between computing and paradox, politics and aesthetics. From the formation of the discipline of programming as an outgrowth of pure mathematics to its manifestation in contemporary and contradictory forms such as gaming, data analysis and art, fun is a powerful force that continues to shape our life with software as it becomes the key mechanism of contemporary society.”

Texts by Andrew Goffey, Simon Yuill, Matthew Fuller, Luciana Parisi and M. Beatrice Fazi, Adrian Mackenzie, Michael Murtaugh, Geoff Cox and Alex McLean, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Andrew Lison, Christian Ulrik Andersen, Brigitte Kaltenbacher, Annet Dekker, and Olga Goriunova.

Publisher Bloomsbury, New York and London, 2014
New Media and Technology series
ISBN 1623560942, 9781623560942
285 pages

Software studies page on Monoskop

Publisher

PDF, ARG