Bøger udgivet af Spector Books

Often there are only seconds between the ignition of a blasting charge and the collapse of a building, but the planning for such a demolition can take weeks. Blasting is a profession that relies on experience, and that is conveyed through the medium of the image. The blaster, before he destroys the building, makes a complex technical drawing of the progression. The detonation itself is then recorded by several cameras from different view points. Afterwards the drawings are superposed over the photographs in order to control the blast. A permanent calibration, an optimization between the idea and the reality by the means of drawing and photography. In her artistic work, Alina Schmuch also mostly uses the medium of photography. For the project Script of Demolition she worked with the extensive image archive of the blaster family Fink. The publication includes different imaging media--from 8mm film to digital photography. The book presents movement sequences of collapsing chimneys, TV towers and buildings that have been recorded following explicitly nonaesthetic criteria.

The manifold entanglements of African and Western culture are a central motif in the oeuvre of the Algerian-French artist Kader Attia. The influence of traditional African architecture on European modernism forms the background for his voluminous spatial installations, videos and photographs, as much as the reappropriation of North and South American black music within African Jazz and Pop of the 1960s up to the 1980s. His work manifests the productivity of dissonance; where African masks, stuffed animals, scientific instruments, and historical artifacts seemingly have nothing in common, the artist unearths connections between Europe's handling of its own colonial history, current migration politics, and the urbanistic realities of its metropolises of today. Based on Kader Attia's solo show Repair: 5 Acts at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, this publication focuses on works from the years 2008-2013 and places them in a broader art historical concept.

Edition Bauhaus 38 In 1921, Walter Gropius founded a theater workshop at the Bauhaus. It conducted new research and experiments on the relationship between humans and technology. The central protagonists Lothar Schreyer, Oskar Schlemmer, and László Moholoy-Nagy investigated the issues of mechanization, machine industrialization, and rationalization. They sought a new, meaningful relationship with the dynamized, increasingly technically animated environment. In their stage laboratory, they developed abstract motion studies, designed atmosphere machines, and built theater apparatus. They also organized the famous Bauhaus celebrations, where they staged themselves as a collective of new humans. For the first time, an exhibition and a catalog with sketches, drawings, photographs as well as films, figurines, costumes, models, and apparatus are now devoted to the experiments and concepts of the legendary Bauhaus stage.

What could it mean to live the life of an artist, and how can it be done? Is it a form of sleepwalking or a sullen selfassertion?How is it possible to unite literary, scientific or philosophical deliberations with art? The artist duo Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond uses film as a tool to visually discuss the present with all its contradictions, following the realization that to record images always correlates with a form of modeling reality. In their book, Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond combine a comprehensive collection of their collaborative filmic work (1999 - 2013) with texts by authors who have accompanied them along the way.

Shortly before his death, Beuys created his sculpture "The End of the 20th Century"-- four years before the fall of the Berlin wall. This existential interest in the future that survived all disappointments and aberrances of the 20th century forms the starting point for the new exhibition at the National Gallery, part of the State Museums of Berlin. Works from the Collection Marx and more recent positions are presented in ten chapters that take on the wording of Beuys's eponymous sculpture "The End of the 20th Century" in an associative way, while simultaneously widening the scope of the title and calling it into question. The catalogue is based on the principle of the collage developed by the Berlin graphic design office cyan in collaboration with the editors specifically for the art works shown in the book and the selected texts. The different texts and text formats -- from philosophy to poetry, reflecting the 20th century as a mental space -- enter into a dialogue with the images. The exhibition is on view from September 13 to March 31, 2014, at the Hamburger Bahnhof.

The extraordinary story of an artist's effort to reclaim an unauthorized photograph from the Stasi archivesA nude image of photographer Tina Bara (born 1962) from the archives of the Stasi was reproduced, many years later, on the cover of a book by Spanish artist Dora García. Here, Bara reclaims her own image.

Frank Berger has developed a photographic method which can be described as a gesture of insistence. He produces extensive series of photos of certain settings, in particular street scenes, that depict variations of similar, mundane constellations in almost identical framings, and which are yet significant to the photographer. Shot in high-resolution on reversal film, the pictures do not capture a unique moment, but rather insist on the workings of the optical unconscious of photography. This artist book brings together the series Traffic Assistants (Shanghai, 2008) and Theseus & Kentaur (Vienna, 2007). Human figures are shown in what appear to be opposing contexts: as the heroic subjects of artistic representation and touristic contemplation at the Vienna Museum of Fine Arts, and then again in a Chaplinesque choreography of assistant policemen in Shanghai trying to control the local traffic.

What if time was an illusion and past, present and future would all exist simultaneously? According to a thesis by physicist Craig Callender, it only depends on which method we use to segment continuous space-time. This idea was an inspiration to conceptual artist Luis Camnitzer--born 1937 in Lübeck, raised in Uruguay, living in New York since 1964, where he works as artist, teacher, critic and art scholar. In 2011 Luis Camnitzer took a collection of essays by Umberto Eco and put them back into a new order according to an alternative method of editing. Camnitzer's Eco Book consists of 104 pages that seem hieroglyphic at first, filled with indecipherable arcane structures and signs, rendering the common mechanisms of interpretation absurd. The illegible pages are interleaved simultaneous signifiers. More than to merely look at signs, there is a need to alter them.

Natalie Czech's works meander between concrete poetry and conceptual photography. In der newest publication she directs her main focus to the writing process and its inherent possibilities. For the series Voyelles-- which refers to Rimbaud's eponymous poem -- Czech invited ten authors to describe a fictitious synesthesia-invoking photography in her name. In the publication's other series, Poems by Repetition, the stylistic device of repetition simultaneously creates echo, music, rhythm, stuttering, and beat. Natalie Czech uses newspaper articles, record covers, books, different iPad models and Kindle readers as supporting media for the poems and thus creates a dialogue between printed text and illustration, the literary form of a poem and the artistic practice of photography. The artist transforms literary into visual strategies and formally writes poems in the medium of photography.

Jean-Pascal Flavien's work involves the design and conception of houses that produce a particular situation of living. A form of thinking gives rise to a form of living and dwelling, and the use of these houses furthers this approach to thinking by experimenting with the space, by writing, films, etc. Four houses have been realised thus far: the viewer in Rio de Janeiro in 2007, the no drama house in Berlin in 2009, the two persons house in Sao Paulo in 2010, and the breathing house in Pougues-les-Eaux in France in 2012. Each house suggests a specific perspective on the world by proposing different types of interaction through language, space, gesture or mediation of the activities that take place within it. This catalogue is an arrangement of independent parts put next to one another, or side-by-side, like a parataxis, following the development of the no drama house and the breathing house.

The complete collection of the magazine which preceded Spector BooksSpector Cut + Paste was a magazine as permanent workshop; the beginnings of what would later become Leipzig-based publisher Spector Books. It was in these pages that Spector's editors discovered the themes that still emerge in their publishing program today; here that they learned to balance artistic and publicist practices; here that they began to combine texts, images and typography into their own formats and to explore the content-based aspects of visual design. Four issues were published between 2001 and 2008, and they are now available in bundled form here.

Passengers is the result of an observation Dagmar Keller and Martin Wittwer made at night at a bus station while travelling through Poland. For a moment, the passengers on an old bus, obscured behind stained, ice-covered windows, in the pale light of the bus station had the appearance of figures in a painting. Travellers, fallen out of time. Tired, lost in thought, their faces drawn by sadness or lit up with joy--so close and yet distanced behind the glass. Dagmar Keller and Martin Wittwer have preserved those quiet, fleeting moments in their series Passengers.

The old Federal Republic of Germany is history--a fact made especially poignant by these photos of the abandoned Dresdner Bank building. The tower--the most beautiful high-rise in Frankfurt on Main--was opened in 1978 as the bank's head office. The construction was planned by ABB Scheid und Partner architects office, the corporate design was developed by Otl Aicher. Following the bank's acquisition by Commerzbank in 2009 the head office of Dresdner Bank was vacated. In Silver Tower, a series of pictures taken between 2009 and 2011, photographer Matthias Hoch explores the deserted building. He looks for signs and remnants of an era, for the biography of the place. Meticulously structured surfaces, signs of wear and the interplay of light and shade are probed to reveal their traces to the camera: scratches, marks, layers.

The first comprehensive monograph exploring the multifaceted practice of a photographer known for his androgynous portraitureBerlin-based, Polish-born artist Andrzej Steinbach (born 1983) uses photography, sound, video, sculpture and installation to explore the impact of cultural symbolism, history and social practice on the formation of individual identity. This comprehensive monograph gathers works across mediums together with his primary photo practice.

An oversize artist's book of found online imagery employing women's bodies as sales toolsThis oversize artist's book from German artist Cordula Ditz (born 1972) includes over 400 images from eBay featuring women wearing or displaying items for sale, with their faces obscured or disguised. By removing these images from their original context, Ditz's project approaches a case study of female visibility online.

In the last ten years, the Dutch photographer Erik van der Weijde has been responsible for over fifty publications: these include not only slim photozines and simply produced brochures but also voluminous cloth-bound books -- many of them distributed via his own publishing house 4478ZINE. This Is Not My Book provides for the first time an overview of his work, which constitutes one of the most important artistic positions at the interface between photography and independent publishing. The book uses large-format representations to show the lines of connection between he individual publications. It also contains van der Weijde's 4478ZINE publishing manifesto and other texts as well as ve conversations with the publishers Anne König and Jan Wenzel. This Is Not My Book indicates a full stop, an act of punctuation set down by the author with his published work.

Photography is a peculiar medium, an idiosyncratic mix of strengths and weaknesses. It is extremely good at documenting our everyday reality, and yet it is only capable of capturing the mute surface of our world. It merely shows the external appearance of things, not their essence. This is a question of interpretation, a matter for the viewer's discretion. To compensate for this failing, photographs are mostly presented in an explicit context, often with explanatory captions. Tillesen's "superficial images" also document our everyday reality, in combination with titles that seem to offer an explanation of their content. But on closer examination it becomes clear that neither the photographs nor the captions are reliable.

Beyond contemporary disclosures about mass surveillance by intelligence services, the promises inherent in "big data" determine discourses about future innovations and systems of classification in government and industry, which aim to increasingly transform political and systemic questions into those of technological management. The promises of participation and "digital democracy" stand in contrast to new forms of cybernetic control and the modulation of social behaviour on an unprecedented scale. The countless sensors of our ubiquitous digital and technological infrastructures have united the state, industry, body, and technology into ever more complex "nervous systems". This nervousness is revealed in particular where relationships of power and participation come to the fore, namely in the "social question". The publication assembles a combination of contemporary art -- complemented by contributions from experts, theorists, and researchers, presenting contextualized historical documents, artefacts, and other objects. Nervous Systems appeared in conjunction with the exhibition at HKW Berlin (February to April 2016).

"On Saturday, 14 November 2015, as we were walking through the city, we saw that the people selling fruit and vegetables on the Boulevard de Rochechouart had already unloaded the crates from their cars before realizing that the state of emergency that had been imposed on Paris also affected their market. They stood around, uncertain what to do. They weren't quite ready to pack up their perishable goods again. The terrorist attacks had had an impact on them too. It was only later that I realized that I should have recorded the situation, that it revealed more about the day than the endless repeats of reports from the scene and rituals of grief." This was the entry Jan Wenzel, publisher of Spector Books, posted in his Facebook blog. The État d'urgence affected everyone who was in the capital at the time. Like so many of her colleagues, Bettina Lockemann had travelled to the city to attend Paris Photo. On 14 November 2015 she roamed through the city with her camera, recording the oppressive atmosphere in its streets and squares.

Examining the costs of running a modern household in the face of climate change and dwindling resources"How are we to live in a way that is healthy and economical?" One answer to this question was provided by Ernst Jahn's film of the same name ("Wie wohnen wir gesund und wirtschaftlich?," 1926-28), which showed the kitchen in the Gropius House complete with all the latest domestic appliances. The Dessau Masters' Houses were not only showcases of "new living" (Neues Wohnen) but also places where modern methods of housekeeping could be demonstrated. The topical relevance of this question was discussed at the 2015 Haushaltsmesse, an international trade fair on the art of housekeeping and budgeting. In Reserve: The Household!, which takes a documentary approach to this subject, now brings together these different viewpoints eyeing the question through the prism of the problems we face today. In the face of climate change and dwindling resources, the externalized costs of running a modern household are back on the (kitchen) table. The book is a compilation of essays by internationally renowned anthropologists, economists, artists, architects, historians, and cultural studies experts and also contains a wealth of historical documents and photographs.

When Saâdane Afif was awarded the prestigious Günther-Peill Prize in 2012, he ended up in Düren, a small provincial town in North Rhine-Westphalia. He used this location as an opportunity to reflect on the idea of 'Here' (Ici)' and 'There' (Là-bas). Afif transported Düren's station lights together with the loudspeakers and platform announcements into the museum setting. He invited friends to write songs on the themes of 'Here' and 'There' and designed two posters for Ici. and Là-bas. - the titles of the two-part multimedia installation. Ici. was shown in the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum & Papiermuseum Düren and Là-bas. at the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art and in the Kunsthaus Glarus in Switzerland. The two-part artist book includes views of the installation, the fifteen lyrics by different poets, and essays by Diedrich Diedrichsen, Juan A. Gaitán, and Rein Wolfs on the French conceptual artist's way of working.

Anomalies of the Early 21st Century is about society's dropouts and those in transition or on a downward slope towards social exclusion. The book contains sixty-six accounts (some fictional, some documentary, and some a hybrid of the two) telling of literal dropouts, people who have effectively turned their back on their "society" to live self-sufficiently in the woods, or those who have rejected the mainstream or have simply been forced to drop out - the unemployed and homeless. We also read of winners, the happy few in the neo-liberal programme of out-and-out capitalization. Anomalies of the Early 21st Century is told against the backdrop of the global market fundamentalism of the last twenty-five years, in which all those who depart from the faith are branded as sentimental, as naïve, or simply as failures. The portraits are dedicated to these "fallen souls" and are combined with internet images of famous and lesser-known figures.

Ten years of multimedia installations and performances from a Berlin-based duoBerlin-based artist duo Pauline Boudry (born 1972) and Renate Lorenz (born 1963) work across film, installation, sculpture and dance to create their politically charged performance pieces. This book gathers their most acclaimed exhibitions from the past decade.

On the iconic filmmaker's final phase as an acclaimed creator of genre-bending installationsAgnès Varda (1928-2019) explored various mediums throughout her lifetime, moving from photography to film to multimedia installation. Despite Varda's highly revered status globally, her third creative period is not widely known. The Third Life of Agnès Varda, published in conjunction with an exhibition at Silent Green in Berlin, pays homage to this underexplored period, which began in 2003 at the Venice Biennale. After this first installation, Patatutopia, Varda dove head first into the medium, producing genre-bending installations throughout her final years that engaged her poetic, abstract realism and her sensitive observations of sociopolitical issues. The Third Life of Agnès Varda features ample installation shots and texts by the artist, in addition to film stills, personal photographs and an interview between Varda and curator Philippe Pigue.

This inventive take on the monograph combines Sagadin's art with literary responsesThis monograph on Vienna-based artist Marusa Sagadin (born 1978) is divided into two interlocking narratives. In the first part, English author Miriam Stoney looks at the artist's drawings, sketches, collages and photos of models. In the second part, photographs of installations, sculptures and objects are accompanied by a short story by Paul Knight.

Tobias Zielony captures the life of adolescent indigenous gang members in Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba province in Canada. In keeping with the tradition of classic photo journalism, Zielony makes use of various genres of photography; including portraits of gang members posing in front of the camera and views of the urban landscape in and outside Winnipeg.

On the implications of computer-generated music for live performance In the performance of computer-generated music, a tangibly causal relationship between action and sound has been cut. Looking at Music asks: how important is live action to the future of musical performance?

The word cliché is of French origin and can refer to more than a printing plate or a preconception, for instance also to a photo negative, a print and the act of taking a picture. Inga Kerber makes use of this semantic variety with a condensed overview of her archives, organised according to classic, clichéd image categories: landscape, still life, portrait, nude. The artist choses subjects, scans the originals, prints them and arranges them into series. Shifts of colour or small flaws that appear in the process of reproduction are not retouched, but rather acknowledged as a quality in themselves. Cliché is a book that sees reproducibility as an essential mode of images: their circulation leaves traces, in our memories as well as in the images themselves.

How the playlist has colonized our listening habitsToday, the playlist structures how people listen, as well as how companies collect their data. This volume examines how the playlist has spawned new categories, aesthetic tendencies and behaviors.

Engaging in dialogue with other artists while at the same time rendering this visible in and through art has been one of the key aspects in Józef Robakowski's (born 1939, Posen) oeuvre from the 1960s. With this as its point of departure, the book covers, above all, the wealth of Robakowski's ideas and methods in his collaboration with other artists. Robakowski is shown as an avantgarde-filmmaker and as a creator of experimental work responding to the specificities of context, working outside the official museum and gallery system to present politically critical works. The book accompanied his first US solo-exhibition in Ludlow 38 New York in 2011 and his first retrospective in ZKM Karlsruhe in 2012.