Bøger udgivet af Sternberg Press

If discourse is the foundation of democracy, how can the design of our cities empower and enable discourse? "Never have the potential political consequences of architecture been greater, and never has the political sensibility of architecture been less." This was the state of the discipline that social theorist and urban thinker Richard Sennett declared when he addressed an audience at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 1981. Over a series of six lectures, Sennett presented discourse as the foundation of democracy, and posited that our cities are uniquely positioned to either empower or constrict this discourse--and that the difference could lie in architecture and urban design. Now, over 40 years later, as political polarization persists and its consequences arise in both new and familiar ways, Democracy and Urban Form revisits questions that remain relevant: If discourse is the foundation of democracy, how can the design of our cities empower and enable discourse?

How machine and computer vision produces contemporary images. Although often considered to be a fault or a glitch in the system, the event of hallucination is central to the models of image production generated by artificial intelligence (AI). Through mining the latent space of computer vision, Trevor Paglen's series Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations (2017-ongoing) reveals this phantasmal and hallucinatory domain. In the conversation included in this volume, he discusses how we can think from within these opaque structures and, in turn, questions the frequently inflated claims made on behalf of automated image-production systems. In an accompanying essay, Anthony Downey explores the uncanny realm of algorithmically induced images and proposes that AI, through its generative modeling of the world, invariably estranges us from the present and the future.

"Swedish culture is still marked by an age-old taboo against complaining and voicing discontent, at least in public. To the very end Andrée and Strindberg must have considered their notebooks semi-public. How could we otherwise explain their complacency in the face of contingencies that were certainly 'linked in a fatal chain'? We have no choice but to remain true to the arrogance and naivety of our own psychological world view. We must substitute our own anxieties for theirs and give voice to their fear of death, retroactively." Anders Kreuger, in Joachim Koester, Message from Andrée Five artists' books and one general catalogue document the works of Eva Koch, Joachim Koester, Peter Land, Ann Lislegaard, and Gitte Villesen. Conceived in close collaboration with each artist, the books focus on this younger generation of Danish artists who were a part of the international breakthrough for Danish visual art during the 1990s. The books trace how in their various artistic practices the artists are all preoccupied with the representation of reality within or beyond the real. ContributorsPeter Adolphsen, Bill Arning, Anders Kreuger, Sanne Kofod Olsen, Anette Østerby, Mai Misfeldt and Marianne Torp, Vibeke Viboldt Knudsen, Lars Erik Frank, Daniel Pies, et al.

The pilot episode of a TV series that perversely aims to make Kafka's tales palpable for toddlers. Roee Rosen's film Kafka for Kids is set as the pilot episode for a TV series that perversely aims to make Kafka's tale "The Metamorphosis" palpable for toddlers. In its title, the film Kafka for Kids implies that the intellectual great of modern literature will finally be presented in a way that is generally understandable. Roee Rosen wants to present Franz Kafka, of all people, with his contorted thought constructions, in a way that is even accessible to kids! But unfortunately, that's not how things turn out: the star writer of the educated middle class is not simplified, but his story becomes much more complex, corresponding to reality, for reality is more complicated than we like to represent using biaxial graphs. Featuring the original script of the movie, readers are invited to dive into a magical story, followed by essays that give a deeper insight in the literary aspects of Roee Rosen's oeuvre. A stowaway on the journey, Rosen playfully and with wonderful self-irony does not negate the complexity of the present, but takes it to the next level by exploring how all things are interlinked. Rosen neither doubts the complexity of our reality, nor does he oversimplify to a fault. Published by Sternberg Press and Kunstmuseum Luzern.

Milk as a biocultural substance. In the context of INLAND's Academy at documenta fifteen, Microbiopolitics of Milk presents the grounding basis for a research project around Milk as a biocultural substance, through its implications in the regimes of contemporary biopolitics, economics, and representation. Featuring texts by Heather Paxson, Esther Leslie & Melanie Jackson, Harry G. West, Vinciane Despret, Chris Fite-Wassilak and Richie Nimmo, reflecting the different dimensions of milk in a variety of research fields. ContributorsVinciane Despret, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Fernando García-Dory, Melanie Jackson, Esther Leslie, Richie Nimmo, Heather Paxson, Harry G. West Copublished by INLAND-Campo Adentro and documenta fifteen

On the themes found in the work of Lorraine O'Grady: Black female subjectivity, intersectional feminism, institutional critique, music, and translation. Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? is the fourth book in the annual series A Series of Open Questions published by CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Sternberg Press. This fourth issue is informed by themes found in the work of Lorraine O'Grady, including diaspora, Black female subjectivity, racial hybridity, translation, intersectional feminism, institutional critique, Black representation in the art world, archives, music, Conceptualism, and performance art. ContributorsSelam Bekele, Martin Bernal, Camille Chedda, Gabrielle Civil, Kathleen Collins, Erica Deeman, Jeanne Finley, Jacqueline Francis, Édouard Glissant, Rujeko Hockley, Bec Imrich, E. Jane, Charles Lee, Darrell M. Mcneill, Denise Murrell, John Muse, Sawako Nakayasu, Lorraine O'Grady, Yétúndé Olagbaju, Hsu Peng, Lara Putnam, Trina Michelle Robinson, Legacy Russell, David Scott, Peter Simensky, Maud Sulter, Carrie Mae Weems, Judith Wilson, Alisha B. Wormsley, Allison Yasukawa Published by CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Sternberg Press

The first book-length inquiry into the twisted romantic ballad, giving a sense of both its history and contemporary currency. Titled after Soft Cell's version of the original 1965 Gloria Jones track, Tainted Love is the first book-length inquiry into the subject of the twisted romantic ballad, giving a sense of both its history and contemporary currency. Sometimes extreme, this twist to the conventional romantic ballad spans across gender and generational boundaries to subvert our understanding of both the genre's function and its behavior. Each chapter of Tainted Love takes a deep dive into a single twisted ballad, examining both its inner workings--lyrics, melody, and vocal approach--and its broader cultural resonance. Featuring an analysis of songs by Kendrick Lamar, Nina Simone, Roxy Music, Joni Mitchell, The Velvet Underground, Frank Sinatra, Soft Cell, Paul McCartney, Charlotte & Serge Gainsbourg, PJ Harvey & Nick Cave, and Little Simz, this book turns on the question: What compels songwriters to compose--and us to listen to--these warped songs?

The adventures of a French art student as she visits New York to work as an assistant for an established artist. While studying at the Fine Arts School in Paris in 2013 and having to complete an internship abroad, Mathilde Supe, a 24-year-old student, contacted Keren Cytter to be her assistant. The latter, who had just left Berlin for New York, accepted the offer. Supe embarked on a journey to New York City, where she had never set foot, barely speaking English, without a work permit, and without contacts. From this incredible adventure, she transcribed every detail of hardship and learning in a book that took the form of a logbook and followed the evolution of one young artist's view of another established artist. Through experimental modes of storytelling and perception, Keren Cytter's work deals with social alienation, the representation of language, and the function of individuals in cultural systems. She is primarily a filmmaker, yet her work includes performances, plays, sculptures, drawings, novels, zines, children's books, and interdisciplinary festivals. Keren Cytter Does Not Like To Share is published on the occasion of Cytter's solo presentation "Bad Words" at the Ludwig Forum Aachen (June 25-September 25, 2022). Copublished with Ludwig Forum für International Kunst Aachen

A collection of Dan Graham's interviews and conversations with a wide array of individuals from various backgrounds and disciplines. Dan Graham: Some Rockin' is a compilation of fifteen interviews (two of them previously unpublished) between Dan Graham and artist friends, architects, musicians, art critics, and curators from various parts of our world. In these interviews Graham's intense interest in and observation of cultural phenomena such as rock music, urbanism, architecture, corporate culture, and art world politics and their historical development overlaps and interferes with the articulated interest of the interviewers in Graham's art, sense of humor, attitude, and point of view in regard of a huge variety of topics. Two essays, besides the "Introduction," are added to this compilation: the essay "The Museum in Evolution" by Dan Graham, and an essay by the editor, Gregor Stemmrich, on the development and far reaching implications of Graham's art.

A techno-fiction novel on the uneasy desire for anti-rationalist ideas on the internet. Taking off along the grotesque evolutionary curve of the internet, this novel by Mochu brings together Japanese otaku subcultures, Hindu mythology, darknet highways, ultraviolent cyberpunk forums, and renegade university departments to forge a transnational narrative that trips through the incompatible fantasies of rationality and civilization, with wormholes through ancient tales, recent cinema, plain-wrong art histories, and pirated philosophical reflections. The novel opens with a case of abduction in India. The operations of a far-right publishing house are interrupted by extraterrestrial influences with political intent. The attack on a science-fiction writer at a beach in Goa seems connected to a bot-propelled puzzle revolving around the defacement of Medieval temple relics elsewhere. A detective specialized in interstellar sociology finds clues that point to a transgalactic anarchist group with ties to online Posadist forums, while Eurasian political theory circulates as noise-objects in Goa's beachside clubs. Meanwhile, occultist explorers in the sci-fi writer's story find that the legendary homeland for Hinduism in the Arctic has become infested by "Gradients of Hegelian Unhappiness" by way of an invasive subzero entity buried in deep snow. The detective's investigations eventually turn metaphysical, settling on impossible solutions spanning the far reaches of outer space. Reactionary behavior on the internet, having spawned numerous retroactive origin stories for itself, takes on a tentacular presence across diverse political spectrums, time periods, and cultural contexts, giving the impression of a vast and tangled entity with distributed intelligence. Fatally fused by a common hatred for the legacies of the Enlightenment, popular manifestations go by terms like "alt-right" and "neo-reaction," powered by nerdy forums and blog posts across the web. Stationing conspiracy theory itself as the central form of thinking, acting, and concept-making in the twenty-first century, Bezoar Delinqxenz is a mixtape simulation of these entanglements at the borderlands of fiction, insanity, and political emancipation.

First global exploration of contemporary forms of filmmaking from political and cultural self-determination movements of Autochthonous communities and peoples. Film X Autochthonous Struggles Today brings together for the first time filmmakers, activists, film curators, and scholars who share a common interest in filmmaking practices that emerge from and participate in the various situations of struggle that the Autochthonous/Indigenous/Native/Aboriginal/First Nations peoples and communities are involved in worldwide. Starting with the Edison Studio's 1894 short films Buffalo Dance and Sioux Ghost Dance, representations of Autochthonous peoples have been part of cinema right from its inception. The vast majority of these representations, however, have not been produced by nor for Autochthonous peoples. In the wake of political and cultural self-determination movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and with the gradual democratization and accessibility of the tools of moving-image making, Autochthonous communities have displaced and renewed cinema's forms and means of production, increasingly reclaiming their right for self-representation by way of film and video. Along with the vibrant forms of moving images arising from within the communities, close to their existential concerns, filmmaking has also become a potent tool in Autochthonous struggles. This book answers the need to take a global look at the diverse ways of filmmaking that fight for land rights and against environmental injustice (Brazil, Morocco, Taiwan, USA), that resist neocolonial domination, economic and political exploitation (Japan, Philippines), that offer a counterpoint during low intensity or drawn-out armed conflicts (Colombia, Mexico), that invent strategies of counter information and representation (Australia, Canada, Russia, Samoa), and that strive for visibility.

A journey through sound, memory, and landscapes, questioning the origins, perception, and cultural implications of music. A lifelong relation to sound and music underlies Latifa Echakhch's work. On the occasion of her representation of the Swiss Pavilion for the 59th Venice Biennale, she has edited a volume on sound, memory, and perception. In the book, images of her installation in the Swiss Pavilion, The Concert, accompany her own writings along with this by Alexandre Babel and Francesco Stocchi, the co-curators of the pavilion. The volume also includes interviews with and collected texts by François J. Bonnet, Emanuele Quinz, Maxime Guitton, Alvin Curran, Salomé Voegelin, Antoine Chessex, Jonathan Sterne, Juliette Volcler, and Raphaël Brunner. Confronting knowledge, reflection, and intuition, their combined concert of thoughts confirms how sound and music--and their absence--play a crucial role in our physical and cultural perception of the world, and how they allow us to expand our bodily and cognitive experience. This book is one of the three parts of the Swiss Pavilion; the other two are the installation and a vinyl edition of the piece composed by Alexandre Babel.

The most significant critical, theoretical, and art historical texts by the artist, writer, and filmmaker Aria Dean. Compiled here for the first time, the selected writings of Aria Dean (b. 1993, Los Angeles) mount a trenchant critique of representational systems. A visual artist and filmmaker, Dean has also emerged as one of the leading critical voices of her generation through a body of writing that maps the forces of aesthetic theory, image regimes, and visibility onto questions of race and power. Dean's work across media has long been defined by what she calls a "fixation on the subject and its borders," and the texts collected here filter that inquiry through digital networks, art history, and Black radical thought. Equally at home discussing artists who embrace difficulty--from Robert Morris to David Hammons, Lorna Simpson, and Ulysses Jenkins--and conceptual frameworks such as Afropessimism, Dean often contends with how theoretical positions brush against the grain of lived reality: how the Structuralism handed down from the academy, for instance, can be commingled with critiques of structural racism, or how Georges Bataille's notion of base matter transforms through an encounter with Blackness. Dean's thinking embraces a definition of "Black art that luxuriates in its outside-the-world-ness," as she writes in this volume, which works to elucidate "Blackness's proclivity for making and unmaking its own rules as it produces objects" of cultural necessity. Originally published in November--of which Dean is a founding editor--as well as in Texte zur Kunst, e-flux journal, and in exhibition contexts, the essays compiled in Bad Infinity were written over a six-year span that charts our rapidly evolving forms of subjectivity and sociality.

Textual and visual ephemera along with performative documents stemming from a reading of Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man. Sibyl's Mouths is the most recent in a series of publications by Pure Fiction, a writing and performance group with shifting members active since 2011. From February 12 to March 6, 2022, Pure Fiction presented an exhibition and performance program at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne titled "Shifting Theater: Sibyl's Mouths." The starting point was a collective reading of Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man, in which the narrator discovers a collection of scribbled oak leaves scattered in a cave outside Naples. Alleged prophecies of the Cumean Sibyl, the textual fragments inscribed on the leaves foretell the story of an epidemic that ravages the globe in the 2100s--a period where solitude, intimacy, and the perception of time is radically renegotiated. Through a multiplicity of textual genres and writerly approaches, contributors will examine the questions and forms that emerge from prophecy: the role of the voice in text, writing, and performance; fragmentary heterogeneous narratives. The mouth is consulted, not only as a mouthpiece or as a cavernous instrument for vocalization but as an essential part of the digestive tract. Processes in the gut, such as assimilation, excretion, and regurgitation involve multiple temporal directionalities, and may function as metaphorical gateways to intuitive truths. ContributorsRosa Aiello, Gerry Bibby, Coleman Collins, Ayanna Dozier, Annie Ernaux, Amelia Groom, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, Ellen Yeon Kim, Bitsy Knox, Dan Kwon, Erika Landström, Enad Marouf, Katrin Mayer, Aislinn Mcnamara, Kamila & Jasmina Metwaly, Luzie Meyer, Vera Palme, Theresa Patzschke, Georgia Sagri, Mahsa Saloor, Elif Saydam, Mark Von Schlegell, Simon Speiser, Elaine Tam, C.S. Tolan, Mikhail Wassmer, Anna Zacharoff

What gets counted within the category of heritage, and who gets to do the counting? What to Let Go? offers new contributions by and international roster of thinkers, authors, anthropologists, curators, artists, and poets addressing the question: what gets counted within the category of heritage, and who gets to do the counting? Addressing the increasing debate around repatriation of looted artefacts by colonial powers to the varied and dissimilar processes of renaming and removing symbols of past eras, from India and Myanmar to Apartheid South Africa, the book will also look at how China's resurgent nationalism is placing a (still developing) version of its imperial heritage at the core of its twenty-first century self-image. As these processes appear to occupy an increasingly prominent segment of the political discourse, with history seemingly becoming the major battlefield both for the left and for the right, What to Let Go? asks: how can art reconfigure our collective foundational myths?

How our experience of presence, time, and history is articulated in contemporary artistic practices. Our present is defined by contemporaneity: the interconnection of heterogeneous times, histories, and temporalities. These many and various times do not merely exist in parallel with one another, simultaneously. Rather, they interconnect and are brought to bear on the same present, forming a sort of planetary present, and--at least in principle--a global sharing of time, although one not shared equally. In The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity, Jacob Lund explores how the conditions for politically engaged art and aesthetic practice, for questioning the present, have changed in recent decades, while considering how our historical present and its temporal quality differ significantly from previous presents.

A South Korean wellness center designed as a mock prison: on sensory deprivation, monastic life, the wellness industry, the prison-industrial complex, and the history of solitude. Solitary is a collection of texts written at a wellness center in South Korea designed as a mock prison. This facility is run by an organization called Happitory--a combination of "Happiness" and "Factory." Happitory offers retreats for teenagers, company employees, government officials, and the general public. Some sessions involve drama therapy, others are led by Buddhist monks. Most intriguing is a program called "Solitary Confinement," where one can spend twenty-four hours of technology-free time locked in an individual cell. To create Solitary, artist Tyler Coburn commissioned ten practitioners (including himself) to spend time in solitary confinement at this wellness center, where they produced texts using the materials on hand. Certain questions drove their writing. How does one square the relaxation promised by Happitory with the way solitary confinement functions in actual prisons? What types of thinking and writing become possible through its restrictions--no book, no Internet, just writing materials? How might the emphasis on writing relate to texts by Oscar Wilde, Antonio Gramsci, Kim Dae-jung, Shin Young-bok, and others produced during periods of imprisonment?Taken as a whole, Solitary is unique in being both a collection of texts and a collective artwork: an experiment in site-specific writing. Contributors Jaeyeon Chung, Tyler Coburn, Sunjin Kim, Hyunjeung Kim, Kyungmook Kim, Min Kyoung Lee, Woochang Lee, Russell Mason, InYoung Yeo, Jiwon Yu

A hybrid monograph/artist book of Nathalie Du Pasquier's work. Published on the occasion of Nathalie Du Pasquier's solo show at MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome), which will travel to the MRAC (Musée Régional d'Art Contemporain Occitanie/Pyrénées-Méditerranée), this book navigates the space between an exhibition catalogue and the artist book with juxtapositions of photographs of Nathalie Du Pasquier's works, installation views of the show at MACRO, and extracts from texts by various writers and figures fundamental for her practice. These come together to create an extension of the exhibition itself, in a form that channels the spirit of the show: the pages become exhibition spaces embracing associations and combinations allowing for a deeper understanding and exploration of Du Pasquier's work, and her imagination at large. RO-SÉ offers a glimpse into the possibilities offered by Du Pasquier's oeuvre, which can be approached, interpreted, and experienced from countless perspectives. It is the very vastness and variety of her work, and her inspirations, that make its exploration--and as a result, this publication--nonexhaustive. This publication is part of an ongoing study of her career and documents her exhibition at MACRO, "Campo di Marte," Du Pasquier's biggest show to date which brought together over one hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and cabins, from the early 1980s to present day.

An inquiry into the current ways of knowing, their ramifications, and institutional and noninstitutional artistic practices that provide channels for education from below. Artistic Ecologies: New Compasses and Tools aims to both analyze and speculate about potentials of artistic ecologies, collective learning, and engaged pedagogies to engender new institutionalities. Going beyond tensions between individuals and institutions, Artistic Ecologies examines avenues for collective learning. If learning for life is emancipation--understood not just as a matter of power but of freedom--the essential question that emerges is: What knowledge makes us free and how can institutions help produce it? In search of an answer, this publication's textual and visual contributions explore sites and practices through which new institutionalities can emerge. Artistic Ecologies comprises essays analyzing current ways of knowing and their ramifications (Marina Garcés, Yayo Herrero and Pirate Care) and portraying alternative ways of forming knowledge through institutional and non-institutional artistic practices (DAAR--Decolonizing Architecture Art Research, Yael Davids, Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, The Sensing Salon). Artistic contributions in various formats--poems, drawings, visual essays--by Luna Acosta, CAConrads, Eva Ďurovec, Teuta Gatolin, Margherita Isola, and Jammers illustrate heterodox channels for questioning the dominant forms of knowledge and educating from below.

The use of art and architecture to develop practical solutions to economic and ecological crises. What if art holds the solution to the unfolding ecological and economic crises of our time? For more than forty-five years, Peter Fend has argued that art premonitions material culture, therefore the means of production, ensuing changes in social relations. Hence, in his view, works by Marcel Duchamp, Carolee Schneemann, Mary Beth Edelson, Paul Sharits, and others, can prefigure ecological restoration and cohabitation. In the late 1970s, artists in New York initiated teams--first Colab, The Offices, and later Ocean Earth and Space Force--to move from critique into effecting real-world change. Initiatives came from Jenny Holzer, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Taro Suzuki, Joan Waltemath, and Eve Vaterlaus, among others, who linked up with scientists to produce reports and analyses with satellite imagery for news media. Africa-Arctic Flyway: Physiocratic States gathers documents of Peter Fend's efforts through Ocean Earth for a planet organized according to hydrology--water basins--rather than national and colonial borders. It lays out tools and technologies derived from art, architecture, and science to replace fossil fuels, dams, nuclear industry, and industrial farming. The ensuing proposal for governance builds on what is identified as the first school of economic thought: physiocracy. Here, via satellite-aided eco-taxation, governance pursues an increase in the numbers of fish, marine mammals, migratory birds, and insects. For instance, ideas from Earth art are applied to restoring wetlands and flyways in three swaths--the Americas, East Asia, and Eurafrica--converging on the Arctic. This book focuses on the Eur­africa flyway and surveys four decades of work. It asks, "How do we go from visual art to reality?" Fend answers: "Through architecture."

Art critical essays focusing on artworks that, in various ways, convey a sense of unheroic "trouble." The undead of contemporary painting, avant-garde populism, photography courting stupidity, fraught networking, synthetic atmospheres, displaced abstractions, and the mediation of pain: these are among the subjects treated in this collection of essays by art historian and critic Ina Blom. Written over the past twenty years and drawing on Blom's familiarity with the contemporary art scene as well as the archives of twentieth-century avant-garde art, these texts share a pull towards artistic projects that are not redemptive or exemplary but that rather convey a sense of--often unheroic--trouble. Leaning into ambivalence as a methodology of criticism, Blom takes a particular interest in the detours, doubts, and difficulties that run alongside avant-garde art's more constructively hopeful desires for transformative innovation and change.