The first studio for electronic music in the Netherlands was not a radio studio -- as in so many other countries -- it was located at the research laboratory of Philips (also known at NatLab). Since 1930 it had been part of the electro-acoustic research program which combined technical, economic, sociologic and musical aspects. The first compositions realized in the Philips studio were thus test-cases. Parallel to this research, other departments of Philips, purely focused at marketing, developed plans for the Philips Pavilion at the World Expo of 1958 at Brussels. Philips planned a demonstration for the general public of the possibilities of sound and light, but through the engagement of Le Corbusier, Iannis Xenakis and Edgar Varèse this project took a strong turn towards the avant-garde. The result, now considered a milestone in the history of electronic music, was in many ways more experimental than the music produced at the Philips research laboratory.

The story of electronic music at the Philips research laboratory and the Philips Pavilion are the first two main strands of the book On the Threshold of Beauty, in which Kees Tazelaar for the first time unravels the course of events, and debunks some of the myths around the Philips Pavilion. A third historical strand in the book concerns the needs of composers, who desired to learn how to compose in the new medium. In 1957 Walter Maas and the CEM set up an electronic studio at the Technical University of Delft for this purpose, which fused with the Philips studio in 1960, and afterwards moved to the University of Utrecht. Tazelaar writes about the works realized at this studio (STEM), as well as about the activities of the ground-breaking German composer Gottfried Michael Koenig who comes to the Netherlands in 1961 and in 1964 takes over the direction of STEM.

With: Thierry Bardini, Caroline van Eck, Gustav Fechner, Mark Frost, George Gessert, Tim Ingold, Arjen Mulder, John Ruskin, Lars Spuybroek, Wendy Steiner, Daniel N. Stern.

Edited by Joke Brouwer, Arjen Mulder and Lars Spuybroek.

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How can the age-old notion of beauty regain an importance appropriate to the 21st century? Our need for beauty has not diminished, as hard as modernism tried to erase it from art and life and supplant it with the sublime. It was a sublime that increasingly associated itself with negation and deconstruction. In contrast, vital beauty, as defined by John Ruskin more than 150 years ago, is a beauty of sympathies and affinities with life forms. Yet vital beauty must be reinvented, since life forms today can be technological as well as natural. The concept of vital beauty raises the question of how we should design our environments, our objects and our lives, and of how we might one day invent a politics of beauty.

The publication was released during the Vital Beauty Symposium at May 16, 2012 in de Balie, Amsterdam.

Download the introduction of Vital Beauty (PDF).

Author: Various Issued: 2010 Type: Paperback, illustrated, full color   Pages: 356 Language: English	Dimensions: 23 x 16 cm ISBN: 978-90-5662-748-5 Price: € 22.50 Design: Joke Brouwer

With: Arjun Appadurai, Tord Boontje, Wim Delvoye, Driessens & Verstappen, Gunnar Heinsohn, Lino Hellings, Knowbotic Research, Lynn Margulis, Arjen Mulder, Raj Patel, Casey Reas, Ken Rinaldo & Amy Youngs, Lars Spuybroek, Isabelle Stengers, Bruce Sterling, Alberto Toscano, Christian Unverzagt and Herwig Weiser.

Edited by Joke Brouwer, Arjen Mulder and Lars Spuybroek.

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Modernist belief was informed by the vision of technology as a tool of reduction, purifying nature from a state of randomness into one of cleansed controllability and perfection. It was not just the art of modernism that was all about purity and the search for abstraction, the same logic and politics of purity were also at work in rationalized agriculture, refined food, urban planning, population control, and the experience of the Other, both as the goal and the legitimization of the means to reach that goal. With amazing, world changing consequences – but also with devastating effects for the environment, climate, cultural diversity, biopolitics, and city and country life.

This book investigates this urge for the pure, but also advocates a much deeper need for the impure, not to reinstate a new organicism or back-to-nature movement, but to trace progression to a point where all modernist values reverse, where technology becomes an agent for the impure and the imperfect. Technology, long an agent for homogeneity and purity, is now turning into one for heterogeneity and global contingency.

Download the Introduction The Politics of the Impure (PDF) 

Lars Spuybroek on The Politics of the Impure (2010) from V2_ on Vimeo.

Lars Spuybroek on Ornaments (2010) from V2_ on Vimeo.

Author: Various Issued: 2012 Type: Animated ePub,  Illustrated with video fragments	ISBN: 978-94-6208-032-4 Price: € 7.99 Design: M-A-D / Erik Adigard, Patricia McShane & Htet Win Language: English
Available via NAi Booksellers

With: Andrew Pickering, Timothy Lenoir, Tagny Duff, Sundar Sarukkai, Dmitry Gelfand, Evelina Domnitch, Arjen Mulder, Sally Jane Norman, Peter Cariani, Mariam Fraser, Maurizio Martinucci, Joel Ryan, Tomasz Jaskiewicz, Harry Smoak and Chris Salter.

Edited by Harry Smoak, Chris Salter and Michel van Dartel.

As techno-science increasingly reaches into every aspect of life, formerly fast held distinctions between the inert and the active, the human and non-human and life and matter are cracking. From biotechnical engineering to the cataclysmic imminence of climate change, our very notions of what and how we consider life are under fire. What are the ethical, aesthetic and political stakes in understanding a world view in which humans are no longer at the centre? 

The Vibrancy Effect originates from a closed expert meeting organized by V2_ and Chris Salter that brought together artists, social scientists, natural scientists and humanities experts to explore the question of what matter does, to us and the world, and to bridge the gap between different disciplines conceptualizing and working with new notions of ‘vibrant materiality’ (Jane Bennett) and ‘material agency’ (Andrew Pickering).

Book Launch

Vibrancy Effect is presented during the DEAF2012 festival,
Gouvernestraat 133 Hotspot, on May 18, 12:00-13:00.

Author: Lars Spuybroek Issued: 2011 Type: Paperback, illustrated, full color    Pages: 400 Language: English	Dimensions: 16 x 23 cm ISBN: 978-90-5662-827-7 Price: € 29.50 Design: Joke Brouwer

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"We have to find our way back to beauty," writes Lars Spuybroek in the introduction to The Sympathy of Things. In this book Spuybroek argues that we must "undo" the twentieth century – the age in which the sublime turned from an art category into a technical reality. This leads him to the aesthetical insights of the nineteenth-century English art critic John Ruskin, from which he distils pointers for our time.

In The Sympathy of Things, the old romantic notion of sympathy, a core concept in Ruskin’s aesthetics, is re-evaluated as the driving force of the aesthetic experience. For Ruskin, beauty always comprises variation, imperfection and fragility, three concepts that wholly disappeared from our mindsets during the twentieth century.

Spuybroek addresses the five central dual themes of Ruskin in turn: the Gothic and work, ornament and matter, sympathy and abstraction, the picturesque and time, ecology and design. He wrests each of these themes from the Victorian era and compares them with the related ideas of later aestheticians and philosophers like William James and Bruno Latour.

Lars Spuybroek is Professor of Architectural Design at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He is the author of NOX: Machining Architecture (2004), The Architecture of Continuity (2008), Research & Design: The Architecture of Variation (2009) and Research & Design: Textile Tectonics (2011).

"We are living through a change in paradigm, in the age of the flexible machine, where the concepts of matter, spirituality and design are under re-negotiation and we need such fearless thought to jolt complacency. If Spuybroek, like Ruskin, does not shake your design and aesthetic concepts, you haven’t understood him."

Charles Jencks on The Sympathy of Things

"The Sympathy of Things is a stirring call to action; an amazing reconstruction of the ideas of the Victorian sage 
John Ruskin; and, above all, a visionary look at the inner life of things. Lars Spuybroek makes the case that aesthetics is first philosophy, and proposes a radical new aesthetics for the digital age."

Steven Shaviro on The Sympathy of Things

The Sympathy of Things has been made possible with the aid of The Netherlands Architecture Fund. 

Lectures

Lars Spuybroek on The Sympathy of Things at the Architectural Association, London, 2011 http://www.aaschool.ac.uk  

Video: Lars Spuybroek on The Sympathy of Things at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Innsbruck, 2012.

Contents

Preface

The Digital Nature of Gothic

     Ruskin: The Nature of Gothic

     Craft and Code

     I believe in Things

The Matter of Ornament

     Ruskin: The Wall Veil and Earth Veil

     An Abstract Materialism

     Tesselation Ornament and Ribbon Ornament

     Some Hints on Pattern-designing

Abstraction and Sympathy

     The Mosaic of Experience

     The Fabric of Sympathy

     Lipps’ Sympathy, Worringer’s Empathy

     The Veil is the Anti-Eidos

The Radical Picturesque

     Forms and Forces

     Ruskin: The Parasitical Sublime

     Sublime Things

     The Technological Wild

The Ecology of Design

     Ruskin: Beauty is the End

     A Veil of Strange Intermediate Being

Editors: Arjen Mulder, Joke Brouwer Issued: 2007 Type: Paperback, illustrated, full color   Pages: 220 Language: English	Dimensions: 23 x 16 cm ISBN: 978-90-5662-577-1 Price: € 22.50 Design: Joke Brouwer

With: Sean B. Carroll, Alberto Toscano, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Michael Hensel, Eva Jablonka, Noortje Marres, Brian Massumi, Detlef Mertins, Arjen Mulder, Lars Spuybroek, Gilbert Simondon.

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Interaction is a defining characteristic of every living being. Bodies and objects build connections, form networks, and then, through interaction, achieve organization, structure, memory and heredity. The only selection criterion for interaction is whether it works, that is, whether it is operational. Interactivity is on the one hand a method of bringing something into being - a form, a structure, an organization, a body, an institute, a work of art - and on the other hand a way of dealing with it.

Interact or Die! takes an interdisciplinary approach to its theme. It contains a series of interviews with leading biologists in the field of evolutionary developmental biology (“evo-devo”) and with architects and art historians in the field of bioconstructivism. It also features a series of outstanding essays on interactive art, interactive politics and interactive philosophy.

Interact or Die! received the 2008 Media.Art.Research.Award from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute and Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria.

“There is no information in the genes or in the environment unless it is interpreted by the organism.”

Essays and Interviews

• Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder: Interact or Die!
• Sean B. Carroll: The Genes and Switches for Animal Forms
• Eva Jablonka: Information Is Everything That Can Be Interpreted
• Arjen Mulder: The Excercise of Interactive Art
• Brian Massumi: The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens
• Jeanne van Heeswijk: Empathy as a Radical Act: An Argument for Re-Scripting the City
• Detlef Mertins: Where Architecture Meets Biology
• Lars Spuybroek: The Aesthetics of Variation
• Michael Hensel: Absolute Convolut-o-rama
• Noortje Marres: There Is Drama in Networks
• Alberto Toscano: Technical Culture and the Limits of Interaction: A Note on Simondon
• Gilbert Simondon: Technical Individualization

Artist Projects

• Thomas McIntosh: Ondulation
• Donna Conlon: Coexistence
• Garnet Hertz: Experiments in Galvanism
• Herwig Weiser: Death before Disko
• Exenemo: Object B
• Code 31: SE/30
• Roman Kirschner: Roots
• Workspace Unlimited: Common Grounds
• Valentina Vuksic: Harddisko
• Edwin van der Heide: Pneumatic Sound Field
• Übermorgen: Amazon Noir
• Marnix de Nijs: EI4
• Zhang Peili: Lowest Resolution
• 5Voltcore: knife.hand.chop.bot
• Zhou Hongxiang: Chinese Portaiture
• Yang Zhenzhong: Surrounded
• Hu Jie Ming: Go Up! Go Up!
• Antoine Schmitt: World Wide Ensamble
• Graham Smith: MOBI and Morphing Machinery
• Zachary Liebermanz: drawn

Editors:  Joke Brouwer and Carla Hoekendijk Issued: 1997 Type: Paperback, illustrated, full color   Pages: 368 Language: Dutch and English	Dimensions: 23 x 16 cm ISBN: 90-6617-186-3 Price: € 19.50 Design: Joke Brouwer

With: Louis Bec, Kerstin Dautenhahn, Stefaan Decostere, Manuel DeLanda, Mark Dery, Jozef Keulartz, Knowbotic Research, Detlef Linke, Humberto Maturana, Wim Nijenhuis, Lars Spuybroek, Stelarc, Gerburg Treusch-Dieter, Paul Virilio.

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Will technomorphization – the reorganization of the organic based on the intelligent machine model – become the dominant process of our age? Has evolution entered a technological scientific phase in which humans no longer develop in natural ways, in which the human body instead adapts itself to the parameters of a technological era?

In this book, fourteen internationally acclaimed authors give their views on this blurring of borders and the fusion of the biological with the technological. It offers ideas on angels and robots, viruses and mad cows, a world where machines are anthromorphized and humans technomorphized. If the glare of our monitors is all that illuminates us, is it time to build a museum for the sun?

“A body capable of incorporating movement that from moment to moment would be a pure machinic motion performed with neither memory nor desire ...”

Essays

• Stelarc: Parasite Visions
• Manuel Delanda: The Machinic Phylum
• Knowbotic Research: The Urban as Field of Action
• Gerburg Treusch-Dieter: Caught in the Net; from Limb-Machine to Cyborg
• Wim Nijenhuis: Assault and Absence
• Mark Dery: An extremely Complicated Phenomenon of a Very Brief Duration Ending in Destruction: The 20th Century as Slow-Motion Car Crash
  
• Kertin Dautenhahn: Life, Intelligence and other Dangerous Constructions of Mind and Matter
• Detlef Linke: Theoids, Androids and Clonoids
• Stefaan Decostere: Angels in Hell - Benjamin in Cyber
• Louis Bec: Squids, Elements of Technozoosemiotics
• Jozef Keulartz: Primitive Imagination in Mechanical Metaphors
• Paul Virilio: The Museum of the Sun
• Lars Spuybroek: Motor Geometry
• Humberto Maturana: Metadesign
  

Author: Lars Spuybroek Issued: 2008 Type: Paperback, illustrated, b-w   Pages: 292 Language: English	Dimensions: 20 x 14 cm ISBN: 90-5662-637-2 Price: € 18.50 Design: Joke Brouwer

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"That buildings are made of elements doesn't mean that architecture should be based on elementarism; on the contrary, we should strive for an architecture of continuity that fuses tectonics with textile, abstraction with empathy, and matter with expressivity."

This is the crux of the argument Lars Spuybroek makes in this book, the first fully theoretical account of his innovative work. The state of contemporary architecture is the product of a 150-year battle between the Polytechnique and Beaux-Arts schools of design, which has forced us into a stalemate between the radically opposed positions of high-tech and sculpturism. Spuybroek aims to do no less than mend this rift through rethinking technology as an extension of our feeling senses, materiality as the realm of activity and agency, and structure as the result of genesis.

Building on Gottfried Semper's materialist theory of architecture, he takes us from a philosophy of technology to a surprisingly historical argumentation that constantly revives the words of John Ruskin, William Hogarth and Wilhelm Worringer. Alongside a number of essays, the book contains extensive conversations in which we witness him refining and sharpening his arguments ("We will see a merging of Art Nouveau and Bauhaus, where empathy has been liberated from manual labor and machines have been liberated from uniform repetition"). In a period of theoretical tranquility in architecture, this book takes a refreshing turn back to the basics, one in which tools, methodology and architectural aesthetics are recalibrated.

Lars Spuybroek is Professor and Thomas W. Ventulett III Distinguished Chair in Architectural Design at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He is also the principal of NOX, an architecture and art studio in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His previous books are The Weight of the Image (NAi Publishers, 2000) and NOX: Machining Architecture (Thames & Hudson, 2004).

"This Spuybroek guy is the cat's pyjamas of parametric architecture. I read his Continuity book and it was like being hit over the head with a Gothic column."

Bruce Sterling

Contents

Foreword by Detlef Mertins

Introduction: Experience, Tectonics and Continuity

Motor Geometry

Substance and Accident

The Motorization of Reality

The Primacy of Experience

The Soft Machine of Vision

Africa Comes First

The Structure of Vagueness

Sensograms at Work

The Lives That Are Hidden

Machining Architecture

The Architecture of Continuity

Textile Tectonics

The Aesthetics of Variation

Steel and Freedom

Acknowledgments
References

The Architecture of Continuity is made possible by the Netherlands Architecture Fund (Stimuleringsfonds voor Architectuur). www.archfonds.nl and the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfornds. www.prinsbernhardcultuurfornds.nl

Editors: Joke Brouwer, Arjen Mulder Issued: 2008 Type: Hardcover, illustrated, full color   Pages: 448	Dimensions: 27.5 x 22.5 cm ISBN: 978-90-5662-600-6 Price: € 59.90 Language: English

 
With essays by Elmer Schönberger, Frans Evers, Kees Tazelaar, Michael van Hoogenhuyze and Paul Slangen

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Dick Raaymakers: artist and pioneer

Dick Raaymakers (1930) is widely recognized as one of the founders of Dutch electronic music in the 1950s, and as a multimedia artist he was way ahead of his time. Dick Raaymakers' works and installations as well as his music and theater performances are so original that they are unique in the world. His influence on colleagues of his own generation but especially on younger generations of artists cannot be overestimated.

Dick Raaymakers: A Monograph is a 450 page, richly illustrated book offers insight into Raaymakers' work methods, thought processes and motivation and is a must-have reference work. This overview is complemented by a number of essays by experts from the world of music and theater, such as Elmer Schönberger, Frans Evers, Kees Tazelaar, Michael van Hoogenhuyze and Paul Slangen.

Together with V2_Institute for the Unstable Media, Dick Raaymakers has been digging through his personal archive for two years in order to track down the first sketches, correspondence, final concepts and often intense collaborations and performances of all of his works. This does not only offer an insight into the work of Dick Raaymakers, but into a major part of Dutch post-war art as well.

Dick Raaymakers: A Monograph is a book that should be in the collection of every lover of electronic music, theater, art and performance.

"By thinking outside of musical frames Raaymakers has been able to unite music, theater and visual art like no one else."

Reinbert de Leeuw

Translations: Hepzibah Kousbroek, Laura Martz and Leo Reijnen.

The photograph on the cover is an image from the NPS documentary In Search of a Lost Application (2000) by Jacqueline Oskamp.

Dick Raaymakers: A monograph has been made possible with the aid of:

The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture;

The Mondriaan Foundation;

The Nederlands Fonds voor Podiumkunsten;

VSBfonds;

Société Gavigniès;

Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds;

The City of Eindhoven;

Johan Wagenaar Foundation, The Hague;

Stroom, The Hague;

Royal Conservatoire The Hague;

Editors: Arjen Mulder, Joke Brouwer Issued: 2004 Type: Paperback, illustrated, full color   Pages: 208 Language: English	Dimensions: 23 x 16 cm ISBN: 90-5662-423-7 Price: € 22.50 Design: Joke Brouwer

With: Arjun Appadurai, Mike Davis, Alexander Galloway/Eugene Thacker, Tijs Goldsmith, Christopher Kelty, Arjen Mulder, Karim Nader, Loretta Napoleoni.

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Interactive art is organized as an open system: it is able to exchange matter, energy, and information with its environment while maintaining its coherence. Interactive art is art in a state of rest that must be disturbed: it is a system that has to become network before it becomes art at all. In order to come to grips with the phenomenon of interactive art, one must first understand the relationship between systems and networks.

“To find form or to see form arise, seek the systems in the network.”

Feelings Are Always Local analyzes the ways in which networks organize, expand, come together, and rearrange themselves from the inside out. With the help of specific examples, the authors investigate how we live in networks, how possibilities are created within them, opportunities seized, escape routes chosen – and how things sometimes go utterly wrong. The first question is scientific in nature: How do networks function? The second is political: How are networks made manageable at the concrete, everyday level?

Feelings are Always Local was published on the occasion of DEAF04, the 2004 Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, which focused on interactivity as an open system and interactivity in open systems. The book looks at projects with a social and political slant as well as those with a technological or biological character. It includes a series of essays, interviews and projects by international theorists and artists.

Essays and Interviews

• Arjen Mulder/Joke Brouwer: Introduction - Feelings Are Always Local
• Arjun Appadurai: Minorities and the Production of Daily Peace
• Mike Davis: Planet of Slums
• Alexander Galloway/Eugene Thacker: In Defiance of Existence: Notes on Networks, Control and Life Forms
• Tijs Goldschmidt: Every Species Is The Embodiment of Experience with the World
• Christopher Kelty: Opening the Brown Box: Networks, Science and Infrastructure
• Arjen Mulder: Body and Soul: Ludwig von Bertalanffy's Biological Worldview
• Karim Nader: Memories are Constructive in Nature
• Loretta Napoleoni: The New Economy of Terror

Artist Projects

• 0100101110101101.org: Perpetual Self Dis-Infecting Machine
  
• Beat Brogle and Philippe Zimmermann: Onewordmovie
  
• Jean-Michel Bruyère: Si Poteris narrare
  
• Chris Cunningham: All Is Full of Love
  
• Emanuel Danesch and David Rych: Utopia Travel
  
• Eastwood: Civilization IV
  
• Zhang Ga: Peoples' Portrait
  
• Tobias Grewenig: Bitmirror
  
• Axel Heide, OnesAndZeros, Philip Pocock, Gregor Stehle: UnMovie
  
• Luke Jerram: Tide
  
• Roman Kirschner: Ohrwurmbeschleuniger
  
• Ulf Langheinrich: Perm
  
• Seiko Mikami and Sota Ichikawa: Gravicells
  
• Mobile Cartographic Command Center
  
• Mumbai Streaming Attack: TramJam
  
• Marnix de Nijs: Run Motherfucker Run
  
• David Rokeby: n-cha(n)t
  
• Gebhard Sengmüller: Very Slow Scan Television
  
• Alexei Shulgin, Victor Laskin: WIMP
  
• Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau: Mobile Feelings
  
• Sponge: Membrane
  
• Time's Up: The Bar Bot
  
• Workspace Unlimited: DEVMAP
  
• Joachim Montessuis and Eléonore Hellio: M.U.S.H.

Author: Various Issued: 2005 Type: Paperback, illustrated, full color   Pages: 264 Language: English	Dimensions: 23.5 x 16 cm ISBN: 90-5662-389-3 Price: € 21.50 Design: Joke Brouwer

With: Andrew Benjamin, Josephine Bosma, Andy Cameron, Timothy Druckrey, Rudolf Frieling, Mark B. Hansen.

Edited by Joke Brouwer, Arjen Mulder and Anne Nigten.

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aRt&D: Research and Development in Art lays open a new investigative field of art that emerged in the last few decades as a result of media and technology influences. aRt&D introduces the diversity of this new art domain to a broader audience. It is the first book that is entirely dedicated to artistic research and development.

In the past decades a new international trend has emerged within the arts, usually referred to as "electronic," "digital," or "interactive" art. In the 1980s, artists mainly worked with radio and video, where in the last fifteen years digital media and network technologies have emerged as their instruments of choice. This new art domain is characterized by collaboration between artists, designers, engineers and scientists, who join forces in researching and experimenting with new opportunities for using technology for artistic ends.

aRt&D: Research and Development in Art not only provides a unique insight in the art practice through essays in which artists write about their personal experiences, it also develops a theoretical framework for these projects. The book contains contributions by the award-winning performance group Blast Theory, media artist Thecla Schiphorst, art critics Josephine Bosma and Rudolf Frieling, media theorist Andy Cameron, curators Mark Hansen and Inke Arns, philosopher Andrew Benjamin, and many others. Timothy Druckrey, expert in this field, evaluates the importance of artistic research and development so far. aRt&D positions itself as a pioneering work: it is the first book ever published that focuses in depth on interdisciplinary research and development from an artistic perspective.

Essays

• Introduction
• Andrew Benjamin: Plurality of Actions: Notes on an Ontology of Technique
• Josephine Bosma: Net Art: Building Something out of Nothing
• Andy Cameron: Dinner with Myron or: Rereading Artificial Reality 2: Reflections on Interface and Art
• Timothy Druckrey: (Ad)Venture Aesthetics?
• Rudolf Frieling: Database and Context: Artistic Strategies within a Dynamic Field of Action
• Mark B.N. Hansen: Embodyment: The Machinic and the Human
• Anne Nigten: Blurred Disciplines, Expressive Software

Artist Projects

• Archined, Stealth and V2_Lab
• Ars Electronica Futurelab and Brucknerhaus
• Blast Theory
• Sara Diamond
• Sher Doruff
• Edwin van der Heide and Lars Spuybroek
• Margarete Jahrmann and Max Moswitzer
• Knowbotic Research
• David Link
• Esther Polak
• David Rockeby
• Q.S. Serafijn and Lars Spuybroek
• Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignoneau
• Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák and Márton Fernezelyi
• Time's Up
• whisper

Author: Geert Lovink Issued: 2003                    Type: Paperback   Pages: 296 Language: English	Dimensions: 20 x 14 cm ISBN: 90-5662-353-2 Price: € 22.50 Design: Joke Brouwer

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In My First Recession, Geert Lovink maps the transition of critical Internet culture from the mid-1990s Internet craze to the dot-com crash, the subsequent meltdown of the global financial markets, and 9/11. In his discussion of the dot-com boom and bust cycle, he lays out the challenges faced by critical Internet culture today.

In a series of case studies, Loovink meticulously describes the ambivalent attitude that artists and activists take as they veer back and forth between euphoria and skepticism. As part of this process, Lovink examines the internal dynamics of virtual communities through an analysis of the use of moderation and "collaborative filtering" on mailing lists and weblogs. He also confronts the practical and theoretical problems that appear as artists join the growing number of new media educational programs. Delving into the unexplored gold mines of list archives and blogs, Lovink reveals a world that is largely unknown to both the general public and the Internet visionaries.

Geert Lovink is an Amsterdam based media theorist and Internet critic, a cofounder of numerous online projects such as Nettime and Fibreculture, and the author of Dark Fiber (2002), Uncanny Networks (2002) and Zero Comments (2008).

Contents

Introduction
Currents in Critical Internet Culture

Post-Speculative Internet Theory
Three Positions: Dreyfus, Castells, Lessig

Anatomy of Dotcom Mania
Overview of Recent Literature

Deep Europe and the Kosovo Conflict
A History of the V2_East/Syndicate Network

Principles of Streaming Sovereignty
A History of the Xchange Network

The Battle over New-Media Art Education
Experiences and Models

Oekonux and the Free-Software Model
From Linux to the GPL Society

Defining Open Publishing
Of Lists and Weblogs

Conclusion
Boundaries of Critical Internet Culture

Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments

Editors: Joke Brouwer, Arjen Mulder Issued: 2003 Type: Paperback, illustrated, full color   Pages: 101 Language: English	Dimensions: 16 x 20 cm ISBN: 90-5662-309-5 Price: € 17.50 Design: Joke Brouwer

With: Sher Doruff, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Brian Massumi, Lev Manovich, Anne Nigten, Joel Ryan.

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Today we have a wide range of precise systems that have been developed to describe and categorize spoken and written communication – phonologically, morphologically, syntactically, semantically, pragmatically, stylistically. But nothing similar exists for visual and audio communications, in spite of the fact that the importance of these media has increased dramatically. To realize such a system, the archive of documents must be transformed into a digital sound and image database.

Making Art of Databases is a series of essays about attempts to develop systems for the deployment of databases in interactive, dynamic artworks in which the database plays an active role. Lev Manovich, Sher Doruff, Joel Ryan and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, together with Brian Massumi, share their ideas on the use of databases and archives and present the results of master classes they gave in various European cities in their particular areas of expertise. 

“Urban city intervention is not the best fit to reflect the reality of the city, for the simple reason that it is better suited to revise it.”

Essays

• Anne Nigten: How Do We Make Art of Databases?
• Lev Manovich: 'Metadating' the Image
• Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Brian Massumi: Urban Appointment: A Possible Rendezvous with the City
• Joel Ryan: MuViz - Visualization Notes
• Sher Doruff: Collaborative Culture and EmergentC's

Author: Arjen Mulder Issued: 2010 Type: Paperback, b/w   Pages: 260	Dimensions: 20 x 14 cm ISBN: 978-90-5662-819-2 Price: € 19.50 Design: Joke Brouwer

In this book Arjen Mulder investigates the origins of modern art from Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo to Kandinsky, Mondrian and Paul Klee, whom he regards not only as great artists but above all as great media theorists. In the process, he discovers how the models these illustrious predecessors built are still actively being used in the fields of contemporary art known as electronic art, video art, machine art, digital art, media art, and even “the art formerly known as media art.” Step by step, Mulder develops a surprising perspective on the genealogy of art from 1910 to 2010 and the role and value of visual culture and design in the present. He analyzes the feelings and experiences evoked by painting, photography, digital media and the interactive arts in a previously unseen manner. In compact, clear style, he works out a theory of art not as an expression of the worldview of its time but as a discoverer and researcher of it.

Arjen Mulder’s previous books include the acclaimed Understanding Media Theory: Language, Image, Sound, Behavior (2004), used at numerous colleges and universities, as well as essay collections in Dutch such as Het fotografisch genoegen ("Photographic Pleasure," 2000) and De vrouw voor wie Cesare Pavese zelfmoord pleegde ("The Woman Cesare Pavese Committed Suicide for," 2005), which critics have praised for its originality. He teaches media theory at the Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design (MaHKU) in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Author: Arjen Mulder Issued: 2010                    Type: Paperback   Pages: 248 Language: Dutch	Dimensions: 20 x 14 cm ISBN: 90-5662-818-5 Price: € 19.50 Design: Joke Brouwer

Arjen Mulder onderzoekt de oorsprong van de moderne kunst vanaf Leonardo da Vinci en Michelangelo tot Kandinsky, Mondriaan en Paul Klee, die hij niet alleen beschouwt als grote kunstenaars maar meer nog als grote mediatheoretici. Al doende ontdekt hij hoe de modellen die deze illustere voorgangers ontwikkelden nog altijd actief worden gebruikt in de eigentijdse kunsten die bekend staan onder namen als elektronische kunst, videokunst, machinekunst, digitale kunst, mediakunst en zelfs 'the art formerly known as media art'. Stap voor stap ontwikkelt hij in het boek een verrassend perspectief, niet alleen op de genealogie van de kunsten tussen 1910 en 2010, maar ook op de rol en waarde van de beeldcultuur en van design in onze tijd. Op niet eerder vertoonde wijze analyseert Mulder de gevoelens en ervaringen die worden opgeroepen met behulp van schilderkunst, fotografie, digitale media en de interactieve kunsten. In een compacte en heldere stijl ontwikkelt Mulder een visie op kunst, niet als uiting van het wereldbeeld van haar tijd, maar als ontdekker en onderzoeker daarvan. 

Arjen Mulder publiceerde eerder de veelgeprezen en op vele HBO's en universiteiten gebruikte uitgave Over mediatheorie: taal beeld, geluid, gedrag (2004), naast essaybundels als Het fotografisch genoegen (2000) en De vrouw voor wie Cesare Pavese zelfmoord pleegde (2005), waarvan de originaliteit door de critici geroemd werd. Hij doceert mediatheorie aan de MaHKU te Utrecht.