Matthew Fuller: How to Sleep: The Art, Biology and Culture of Unconsciousness (2018)

“Sleep is quite a popular activity, indeed most humans spend around a third of their lives asleep. However, cultural, political, or aesthetic thought tends to remain concerned with the interpretation and actions of those who are awake. How to Sleep argues instead that sleep is a complex vital phenomena with a dynamic aesthetic and biological consistency.

Arguing through examples drawn from contemporary, modern and renaissance art; from literature; film and computational media, and bringing these into relation with the history and findings of sleep science, this book argues for a new interplay between biology and culture. Meditations on sex, exhaustion, drugs, hormones and scientific instruments all play their part in this wide-ranging exposition of sleep as an ecology of interacting processes.

How to Sleep builds on the interlocking of theory, experience and experiment so that the text itself is a lively articulation of bodies, organs and the aesthetic systems that interact with them. This book won’t enhance your sleeping skills, but will give you something surprising to think about whilst being ostensibly awake.”

Publisher Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2018
Lines series
ISBN 1474288707, 9781474288705
192 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

HTML
PDF

Brian Holmes: Driving the Golden Spike: The Aesthetics of Anthropocene Public Space (2016)

“The idea came to me, ironically, while driving around Chicago. It was high summer; I was on the city’s shattered West Side. The urban grid slid by outside the window, residential vernacular on its third or fourth recycle, parched and decayed, with a kind of lost and disjointed vibrancy. Eyes on the traffic, my mind rolled back over the city’s history: its canals and granaries and skyscrapers, its formidable industrial century since the arrival of the railroads in the 1850s, its suburban sprawl after the Great Fire of 1873, its postmodern decline made irreversible by the 1960s revolts and the capital flight that followed. Through it all, the university and financial sectors continued their endless rise. There is a profound violence to this place, but also a deep sense of regularity. Chicago is the race-riot city that turns civil strife into social norms, and splits atoms while abstracting material production into mathematical derivatives. Can you still experiment in a place that has successively been the transport hub, the stockyard, the workshop, the vitrine, the boxing-ring, and quite literally the laboratory of modernism? And what could this ideal of experimentation mean for our future, when its Promethean pasts have reappeared before our eyes as the new geological layer of the Anthropocene?” (opening paragraph)

Publisher Deep Time Chicago, September 2016
Creative Commons BY-ND 4.0 International License
19 pages

Video lecture (April 2016, 47 min)
Publisher

PDF, PDF
HTML (e-flux, Oct 2017)

Marc James Léger (ed.): The Idea of the Avant Garde: And What It Means Today (2014)

“This book is premised on the view that the idea of the avant garde has an increased importance in these times of global political crisis. Much cultural production today is shaped by a biopolitics that construes all creative and knowledge production in terms of capital accumulation. A different kind of culture is possible. This collection of writings, essays, interviews and artworks by many of today’s most radical cultural practitioners and astute commentators on matters avant garde mediates the different strategies and temporalities of avant-garde art and politics. Tracing diverse genealogies and trajectories, the book offers an inter-generational forum of ideas that covers different arts fields, from visual art, art activism, photography, film and architecture, to literature, theatre, performance, intermedia and music.”

Texts by Marc James Léger, Adrian Piper, Andrea Fraser, David Tomas, Catherine Lescarbeau, Hal Foster, Laura Mulvey, Bruce LaBruce, Santiago Sierra, Derek Horton, Christine Wertheim, Lyn Hejinian, Marjorie Perloff, Wu Ming 2, Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Rabih Mroué, Judith Malina, Moe Angelos, Bill Brown, The Errorist International, Jonas Mekas, Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, Travis Wilkerson, Evan Mauro, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Gene Ray, John Roberts, Zanny Begg and Dmitry Vilensky, Owen Hatherley, Michael Webb, Mitchell Joachim, Beatriz Colomina, Boris Groys, Vitaly Komar, Victor Tupitsyn, Gregory Sholette and Krzysztof Wodiczko, Critical Art Ensemble, BAVO, Alexei Monroe, Jean-Hervé Péron, Chris Cutler, Charles Gaines, Jason Robinson, Sara Marcus, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Thanos Chrysakis, Kim Cascone, Marc Couroux, Thérèse Mastroiacovo, Chrysi Papaioannou, and Bill Dane.

Publisher Manchester University Press, Manchester, with Left Curve, Oakland, CA, 2014
ISBN 9780719096914, 071909691X
285 pages

Editor
Exhibition (2018)
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (16 MB)