The Lebanese video artists, documentarians and photographers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige have been a duo since the 1990s, making works that address the turbulent history of their homeland. This monograph surveys the duo's projects, including their most recent series of installations and research on the now defunct Lebanese space exploration program.

Beirut had been a renowned resort and a center of culture and style for hundreds of years, when, in the late twentieth century, it became the site of terrible violence and trauma. More than 15 years after the official end of Lebanon's civil war in 1990, political instability, bombings and assassinations still dominate the international headlines, obscuring years of swift change. In that time, Beirut became fertile ground for radical and innovative art-making and critical thought. "Out of Beirut" introduces new and recent work by artists who have been at the forefront of that activity, and who, in this new time of turmoil and change, will be watching Beirut's fate closely, chronicling it, and perhaps by their responses, changing it. With work by Fadi Abdallah, Gilbert Hage, Heartland, Bernard Khoury, Rabib Mroue, Walid Raad, Walid Sadek, Jalal Toufic, Paola Yacoub and Michel Lasserre and Akram Zaatari, among others.

We are transitioning towards a new and different culture, a digital one in which the medium of photography becomes dangerously diluted in an image world produced moment by moment and consumed at a rapid pace. Photographic images and their reception inevitably converge with the symbolic, cultural, social, and political implications of the act of looking. Here, 40 contributors share their perspectives on photography in Lebanon, evoking its numerous forms of existence. Examining techniques, practices, uses, objects, images, histories, and artistic approaches, the book presents a fascinating collection of 380 photographs produced between the end of the 19th century and today.

The ecological crisis the world is currently experiencing calls for an urgent rethinking of our relationship to nature, natural resources, and the entirety of life on Earth, as well as that of humans to each other. The time has come for repurposing coexistence, aided by post-human thought and technological advancement, and for realizing that humans are merely part of, rather than the center of, our world. Potential Worlds: Planetary Memories and Eco-Fictions, published in conjunction with group shows at Zurich's Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and Baku's YARAT Contemporary Art Space, questions forms of knowledge developed in the course of annexation of the environment and asks what ideas of nature might emerge from the current crisis and how we might perceive nature in the future. Thirty-six artists from around the world featured in this book examine the ecological and social consequences of the past and ongoing conquests of land for purposes of accumulating power and resources. Essays by Benjamin H. Bratton, T. J. Demos, Reza Negarestani, and Jussi Parikka shed light on multiple different perspectives, such as colonialism, post-humanism, ecology, and artistic adaption of new technologies, and investigate the potential future of mankind living in alliance with nature and the role of art in this undertaking as a technological, scientific, and social experiment. Concise texts on the work of the participating artists and an introduction by curators Suad Garayeva-Maleki and Heike Munder round out this illustrated volume.

"Net Pioneers 1.0 discusses media art history with a new, interdisciplinary look at the historical, social, and economic dynamics of our contemporary, networked society.The hype around Net-based art began in the early 1990s, before the Internet had become a commodity. It developed in skeptical parallel to the rise and decline of the new economy. But why does this chapter of art history appear to end so suddenly? Is it that the idea of Net-based art involving itself in a revolutionary spirit in a networked society failed? One might equally well argue that it was far too successful simply to become another media-art genre. Looking today at the social, aesthetic, and conceptual approaches of the early 1990s presented in this book, it is clear that most of them have in fact come true, if in ways other than intended.The contributions cover a wide variety of topics, ranging from art-scholarly methodological debate (Bentkowska-Kafel, Kuni), source-critical analysis (Reisinger), archiving, exhibition, and analytical practice (Ernst, London, Paul, Sakrowski) to media-philosophical aspects (Ries) and technical and artistic innovations (Daniels)."--Résumé de l'éditeur

Join an oneiric odyssey through a slacker second life.

Artists, scholars, filmmakers, and writers revisit the films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. Jean-Marie Straub (b. 1933) and Danièle Huillet (1936–2006) met in Paris in 1954. Straub wanted to make a film about Johann Sebastian Bach, to which Huillet thought: “He's planning to do far too much; he won't manage it alone.” It was the beginning of a fifty-year collaboration, which brought about one of the most unconventional and controversial bodies of work in modern cinema. Tell it to the Stones presents variations from a prolonged re-encounter with Huillet and Straub's work that was sparked by a three-month exhibition, complete cinema retrospective, workshops, and music performances in Berlin in the fall of 2017. Contributing artists, scholars, filmmakers, and writers have revisited this collective experience in new texts, revised transcripts, conceptual essays, and visual montages. What happens during an encounter happens in-between: between language and image, gestures and words, looks and everything unsaid. “To help us build the in-between,” is how Danièle Huillet once imagined a task for those who come to see their films. The present compendium revives these encounters and reveals the urgencies of how Straub and Huillet's oeuvre matters today, perhaps more than ever.

A look at how the internet and post-millenial technologies have transformed our ways of seeing and birthed a new form of culture. The way we see the world has changed drastically since NASA released the “blue marble” image of the earth taken by Apollo 17 in 1972. No longer a placid slow-moving orb, the world is now perceived as a hothouse of activity and hyper-connectivity that cannot keep up with its inhabitants. The internet has collectively bound human society, replacing the world as the network of all networks. In Goodbye, World! Looking at Art in the Digital Age, writer and curator Omar Kholeif traces the birth of a culture propagated but also consumed by this digitized network. Has the internet transformed the way we see and relate to images? How has the field of perception been altered by evolving technologies, pervasive distribution, and our interaction with screens? How have artists working in diverse contexts, from eBay auctions to augmented reality, created new ways of emoting that are determined by these technologies? Focusing on a cultural and artistic landscape that has taken shape since the year 2000, Kholeif aims to put into context a new language for seeing, feeling, and being that has emerged through post-millennial technologies, and argues for a nuanced understanding of the post-digital condition. Taking cues from John Berger's Ways of Seeing and Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, this book—part memoir, part critical analysis—should prove essential for anyone interested in the changing world of the internet.

A collection of texts, historical and contemporary, on radical pedagogy in the arts. How do people learn, what do they know, and how does it influence their personality, their behavior, and their position in society? These questions were the focus of the research project and exhibition series entitled "Creativity Exercises" between 2014 and 2016, which displayed historical and contemporary art projects experimenting with alternative forms of learning, spanning three exhibition stations: Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, tranzit.hu in Budapest, and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. The book contextualizes the Creativity Exercises--an amateur art course led by neo-avant-garde artists Miklós Erdély and Dóra Maurer in Budapest from 1975 to 1977--within the postwar intellectual networks that connected artists, architects, educators, sociologists, and other socially engaged professionals, fostering the exchange of ideas and concepts and making connections between different fields of knowledge. The first part of the publication consists of historical texts translated into English for the first time, including the exercise descriptions that functioned as the curriculum for the Creativity Exercises, studies written on the methods employed in the Creativity Exercises course, and parallel models for progressive pedagogies and art education. In the second part of the book, newly commissioned essays offer historical and transnational context for the "case study" of the Creativity Exercises course. The impact that such "creativity exercises" had on aesthetic, educational and institutional concepts, and the impulses for participation, co-creation, knowledge production and exchange that they continue to give--even beyond the realm of art--are the central themes of the book. Contributors László Beke, Ildikó Enyedi, Miklós Erdély, Dóra Maurer, Ferenc Mérei and Tamás St. Auby, Éva Forgács, Janna Graham, Dóra Hegyi, Sándor Hornyik, Zsolt K. Horváth, Emese Kürti, Zsuzsa László, Marion von Osten, Axel Wieder