A verbal articulation of the authors' visionary theory of how the human body, architecture, and creativity define and sustain one another This revolutionary work by artist-architects Arakawa and Madeline Gins demonstrates the inter-connectedness of innovative architectural design, the poetic process, and philosophical inquiry. Together, they have created an experimental and widely admired body of work--museum installations, landscape and park commissions, home and office designs, avant-garde films, poetry collections--that challenges traditional notions about the built environment. This book promotes a deliberate use of architecture and design in dealing with the blight of the human condition; it recommends that people seek architectural and aesthetic solutions to the dilemma of mortality. In 1997 the Guggenheim Museum presented an Arakawa/Gins retrospective and published a comprehensive volume of their work titled Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not to Die. Architectural Body continues the philosophical definition of that project and demands a fundamental rethinking of the terms “human” and “being.” When organisms assume full responsibility for inventing themselves, where they live and how they live will merge. The artists believe that a thorough re-visioning of architecture will redefine life and its limitations and render death passe. The authors explain that “Another way to read reversible destiny . . . Is as an open challenge to our species to reinvent itself and to desist from foreclosing on any possibility.” Audacious and liberating, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of 20th-century poetry, postmodern critical theory, conceptual art and architecture, contemporary avant-garde poetics, and to serious readers interested in architecture's influence on imaginative expression.

A creative and dynamic volume by Arakawa and Gins, who have been called the most philosophical of living artists, which collects their writings and art work from a period of nearly 2 decades. They address the essential art query of our time: How does it all fit together? Art and science happens in fragments. They take fragments, and they try, by making linkages to perceiving tactics immediate, to draw these tactics, these ways of construing a demonstrably conceivable whole that are the perceiver-reader, into a unified field that they refer to as "the perceiving field." They propose to re-create and to rejoin fragments, and would-be fragments, so as to make a new whole.

Madeline Gins and Arakawa's book opens with this "Reversible Destiny Statute": "Not making an all-out effort to go on living and the act of dying are from this date on classed first-order felonies. Citizens will need to strive to define the heartiness of their existences and be responsible for astute and timely assessment of negative patterns of events and failed or failing conditions. Choosing to live within a tactically posed surround/tutelary abode will be counted as an all-out effort to go on living." "Equal parts poetry, philosophy, legislation, blueprint, remedy, and demand, this book throws down the gauntlet and calls Dying what it really is--treason against the body"--Joshua Edwards. "Arakawa and Gins' latest book is not just a utopian statement but a ground-breaking quest for new radical thinking which revives the optimistic stance of modernism."--Francoise Kral. Literary Nonfiction.

Research informs the development of a project which, rather than defusing these characteristics, attempts to integrate them within the scene of a political struggle. The proposed project dramatizes, through its architecture, a Palestinian disobedience to the colonial legislation imposed on its legal territory. In fact, the State of Israel masters the elaboration of territorial and architectural colonial apparatuses that act directly on Palestinian daily lives. In this regard, it is crucial to observe that 63% of the West Bank is under total control of the Israeli Defense Forces in regards to security, movement, planning and construction. Weaponized Architecture is thus manifested as a Palestinian shelter, with an associated agricultural platform, which expresses its illegality through its architectural vocabulary.

David Armitage - husband, father and failure - has lived the life of an unsuccessful screenwriter for eleven years. When one of his scripts is bought for television, David's life is transformed, more dramatically than he could have ever imagined. An overnight success and suddenly the toast of Tinseltown, David's upward trajectory finally gives him everything he had ever hoped for. New found success means total reinvention, and initiation into the Hollywood world of high-flyers. Life for David quickly becomes a heady rush of celebrities, parties and women - but everything comes at a price. Walking out on his wife and daughter, David climbs to dizzy new heights, brimming with luxury, opulence and scandal. But before long a dark figure casts a shadow on the horizon. When an influential film director presents David with an offer, the opportunity of a lifetime - could this temptation be one that jeopardises everything David has worked for. Enthralling, vivid and addictive, Douglas Kennedy's Temptation masterfully explores the destructive power of success,and the choices we have to make between personal gain and the people closest to our hearts.

Although the body has been the focus of much contemporary cultural theory, the models that are typically applied neglect the most salient characteristics of embodied existence—movement, affect, and sensation—in favor of concepts derived from linguistic theory. In Parables for the Virtual Brian Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical and semiotic models. Renewing and assessing William James's radical empiricism and Henri Bergson's philosophy of perception through the filter of the post-war French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. If such concepts are as fundamental as signs and significations, he argues, then a new set of theoretical issues appear, and with them potential new paths for the wedding of scientific and cultural theory. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with new distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, Parables for the Virtual tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan's acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multi-faceted argument.

Fiction. Art Theory. HELEN KELLER OR ARAKAWA gives rise to a new form of speculative fiction, conveying the potential for human experience now and here rather than depicting worlds distant in space or time. The novel tracks consciousness and identity through the intermingling paths of its three protangonists: the historical person Helen Keller; the iconoclastic artist Arakawa; and the writer herself, Madeline Gins. At the same time, this innovative work advances and upsets key tenets of contemporary critcal theory. This is a beautifully published book whose author is a participant in the recent show POETRY PLASTIQUE at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. The catalog for that show, edited by Jay Sanders and Charles Bernstein, is listed in this SPD catalog.

An Architectural Record Notable Book A fascinating, thought-provoking journey into our built environment Modern humans are an indoor species. We spend 90 percent of our time inside, shuttling between homes and offices, schools and stores, restaurants and gyms. And yet, in many ways, the indoor world remains unexplored territory. For all the time we spend inside buildings, we rarely stop to consider: How do these spaces affect our mental and physical well-being? Our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors? Our productivity, performance, and relationships? In this wide-ranging, character-driven book, science journalist Emily Anthes takes us on an adventure into the buildings in which we spend our days, exploring the profound, and sometimes unexpected, ways that they shape our lives. Drawing on cutting-edge research, she probes the pain-killing power of a well-placed window and examines how the right office layout can expand our social networks. She investigates how room temperature regulates our cognitive performance, how the microbes hiding in our homes influence our immune systems, and how cafeteria design affects what—and how much—we eat. Along the way, Anthes takes readers into an operating room designed to minimize medical errors, a school designed to boost students’ physical fitness, and a prison designed to support inmates’ psychological needs. And she previews the homes of the future, from the high-tech houses that could monitor our health to the 3D-printed structures that might allow us to live on the Moon. The Great Indoors provides a fresh perspective on our most familiar surroundings and a new understanding of the power of architecture and design. It's an argument for thoughtful interventions into the built environment and a story about how to build a better world—one room at a time.