Marget Long: Flash + Cube, 1965-1975 (2012)
Filed under artist publishing | Tags: · 1960s, light, media technology, photography, vietnam war, war
“Flash + Cube (1965-1975) is an artist’s book about the Sylvania flashcube — the space-aged, flash photography device, revolutionary in 1965 and nearly obsolete by 1975. Assembled from a wide range of archival materials — a “terrorist letter,” G.I. photographs from Vietnam, Sylvania flashcube advertisements, as well as Long’s photographs and photomontages—the book explores the links between light, war, history and photography.
Apart from its circulation as a novelty item online, the flashcube is largely forgotten. The history of photographic flash is also often relegated to a footnote and is strikingly under-analyzed. Yet flash’s blinding effects and military genealogy, and the flashcube’s precise contemporaneity with the war in Vietnam make this a rich analytical object with which to reflect on the cultural, political and economic imperatives of its moment. As Long’s deft work with this archive shows, the flashcube is good to think with.”
Publisher Punctum Books, New York, 2012
Open access
ISBN 9780615624426, 0615624421
[151] pages
Review: Anna McCarthy (Social Text, 2012).
PDF, PDF (33 MB)
Scribd (2nd ed, 2013)
Timothy Druckrey (ed.): Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation (1996)
Filed under book | Tags: · cybernetics, cyberspace, interface, machine, media, media theory, networks, photography, representation, software, technology, theory, virtual reality
“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).
PDF (155 MB)
Comment (0)Photomontage Between the Wars, 1918-1939 (2012) [EN, ES]
Filed under catalogue | Tags: · art, art history, avant-garde, collage, montage, photography, photomontage
This publication offers an overview of the birth of the photomontage process specifically in Germany and the Soviet Union. The extensive range of posters, collages, maquettes, postcards, magazines, and books attests to the large influence of photomontage in politics, social protest, and advertising, while also demonstrating the popularity of the technique among avant-garde members during these two decades.
The catalogue features an essay by Adrian Sudhalter, as well as a chronology of the era, a selection of period texts—several published in translation for the first time—by some of the represented artists, and facsimile reproduction and translation of the catalogue of one of the most important exhibition devoted to this artistic technique at the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin in 1931 (with essays by Curt Glaser, César Domela-Nieuwenhuis, and Gustav Klutsis). The exhibition is drawn primarily from the Merrill C. Berman Collection in the United States.
Publisher Fundación Juan March, Madrid, 2012
ISBN 9788470755972
184 pages
Review: Paul Messaris (Advertising & Society Review, 2014).
English: PDF, PDF (23 MB), View online
Spanish: PDF, PDF (24 MB), View online