Interventions in Digital Cultures: Technology, the Political, Methods (2017)

“How to intervene? Interventions are in vogue in digital cultures as forms of critique or political actions into public spheres. By engaging in social, political, and economic contexts, interventions attempt to interrupt and change situations—often with artistic means. This volume maps methods of interventions under the specific conditions of the digital. How are interventions shaped by these conditions? And how can they contribute to altering them? In essays and interviews, this book interrogates modes of intervening in and through art, infrastructures, techno-ecological environments, bio-technology, and political protests to highlight their potentials as well as their ambivalences.”

With contributions by Martina Leeker, Fred Turner, Howard Caygill, Alexander R. Galloway, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Ulrike Bergermann, Steve Kurtz, Kat Jungnickel, and Tobias Schulze.

Edited by Howard Caygill, Martina Leeker, and Tobias Schulze
Publisher meson press, Lüneburg, 2017
Digital Cultures series
Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 License
ISBN 9783957961105, 3957961106
148 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (3 MB)

Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser (2005)

“Andrea Fraser’s work, writes Pierre Bourdieu in his foreword to Museum Highlights, is able to ‘trigger a social mechanism, a sort of machine infernale whose operation causes the hidden truth of social reality to reveal itself.’ It often does this by incorporating and inhabiting the social role it sets out to critique—as in a performance piece in which she leads a tour as a museum docent and describes the men’s room in the same elevated language that she uses to describe seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Influenced by the interdisciplinarity of postmodernism, Fraser’s interventionist art draws on four primary artistic and intellectual frameworks—institutional critique, with its site-specific examination of cultural context; performance; feminism, with its investigation of identity formation; and Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology. Fraser’s writings form an integral part of her artistic practice, and this collection of texts written between 1985 and 2003—including the performance script for the docent’s tour that gives the book its title—both documents and represents her work.

The writings in Museum Highlights are arranged to reflect different aspects of Fraser’s artistic practice. They include essays that trace the development of critical ‘artistic practice’ as cultural resistance; performance scripts that explore art institutions and the public sphere; and texts that explore the ambivalent relationship of art to the economic and political interests of its time. The final piece, ‘Isn’t This a Wonderful Place? (A Tour of a Tour of the Guggenheim Bilbao),’ reflects on the role of museums in an era of globalization. Among the book’s 30 illustrations are stills from performance pieces, some never before published.”

Edited by Alexander Alberro
Publisher MIT Press, 2005
ISBN 0262062445, 9780262062442
xxxvii+291 pages

Reviews: Kirsi Peltomaki (Afterimage, 2005), Melissa Gronlund (Frieze, 2005), Louis Byrne (Art Book, 2007), N.A. Hayes (PopMatters, 2008).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (104 MB, no OCR)

Hijokaidan: Music For Psychological Liberation (1994)

With hosts Alice Sailor and David Hopkins, from Kansai TV 1994. Supplemental media for the 2013 book Japanoise.

Posted on Jul 23, 2013 by distortculture on YouTube.

Commentary: Four Three (2018).

Download MP4 (23 MB), subtitles.

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