Colleen McQuillen, Julia Vaingurt (eds.): The Human Reimagined: Posthumanism in Russia (2018)
Filed under book | Tags: · art history, cosmism, enlightenment, human, humanism, literary history, posthumanism, russia, self, technology, transhumanism, utopia
“The enmeshment of the human body with various forms of technology is a phenomenon that characterizes lived and imagined experiences in Russian arts of the modernist and postmodernist eras. In contrast to the postrevolutionary fixation on mechanical engineering, industrial progress, and the body as a machine, the postmodern, postindustrial period probes the meaning of being human not only from a physical, bodily perspective, but also from the philosophical perspectives of subjectivity and consciousness. The Human Reimagined examines the ways in which literary and artistic representations of the body, selfhood, subjectivity, and consciousness illuminate late- and post-Soviet ideas about the changing relationships among the individual, the environment, technology, and society.”
Contributors include: Alex Anikina, Keti Chukhrov, Jacob Emery, Elana Gomel, Sofya Khagi, Katerina Lakhmitko, Colleen McQuillen, Jonathan Brooks Platt, Kristina Toland, Julia Vaingurt, Diana Kurkovsky West, Trevor Wilson
Publisher Academic Studies Press, Boston, 2018
Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the 20th and 21st Centuries series
ISBN 9781618117328, 1618117327
viii+268 pages
Reviews: Aaron Winslow (LA Review of Books, 2019), Maria Rubins (Slavonic and East European Review, 2019).
PDF (3 MB)
Comment (0)Sebastian Olma: In Defence of Serendipity: For a Radical Politics of Innovation (2016)
Filed under book | Tags: · infrastructure, innovation, philosophy, platform, serendipity, technology
“In Defence of Serendipity is a lively and buccaneering work of investigative philosophy, treating the origins of “serendipity, accident and sagacity”, both as riddles and philosophical concepts that can be put to a future political use.
Taking in Aristotle, LSD, Tony Blair and techno-mysticism, Olma challenges the prevailing faith in the benevolence of digital technology and the illegitimate equation of innovation and entrepreneurship, arguing instead that we must take responsibility for the care of society’s digital infrastructure, and prevent its degeneration into an apparatus of marketing and finance. For although there is nothing wrong with marketing and finance per se, if they alone lead technological development, free of any discretionary political interference, the freedom to be exploited will be as much a part of the future as our ability to intervene freely in our lives, will be a thing of the past.”
Preface by Mark Fisher
Publisher Repeater Books, London, 2016
ISBN 1910924342, 9781910924341
237 pages
via WL
Reviews: Max Dovey (Imperica, 2017), Robert Hewison (Cultural Trends, 2016), Serendipitor (2016).
Comment (0)James Benning: Two Cabins (2011)
Filed under artist publishing, video | Tags: · nature, solitude, technology
“This project based publication edited by Julie Ault documents and analyzes a body of work by the critically acclaimed filmmaker.
Benning reconstructed Henry David Thoreau’s and Ted Kaczynski’s iconic cabins, and uses these structures to reflect on utopian and dystopian versions of social isolation. Mounted on the walls of each cabin are copies of paintings by so-called outsider artists, also made by Benning. On the surface Benning’s two cabins are night and day, invoking contradictory sets of reclusive intentions and divergent paths leading back out. Deeper inquiry reveals the Thoreau / Kaczynski equation to be inspired. Benning’s engagement makes discernable a multitude of contacts between their motivations, beliefs, and experiences of seclusion. Benning’s armature artfully unfolds a complex articulation of practices of dissent, nonprescriptive ways of living, and the politics of solitude.
The book includes photography by Benning, essays by Julie Ault, Benning, and Dick Hebdige, and extracts from Thoreau’s and Kaczynski’s writings.”
Edited by Julie Ault
Publisher Art Resources Transfer, New York, 2011
ISBN 0923183485, 9780923183486
175 pages
via juleslineal, HT Auditory Scenes
Interview with author (Brian Sholis, Artforum, 2012)
Publisher
WorldCat
PDF (10 MB)
Film (2011, 31 min)