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Seeing new media art as an entry point for better understanding of technology and worldmaking futures

In this challenging work, a leading authority on new media art examines that curatorial and aesthetic landscape to explore how art resists and rewires the political and economic structures that govern technology. How do inventive combinations of artistic and theoretical improvisation counter the extent to which media art remains at risk, not just from the quarantines of a global pandemic but also from the very viral and material conditions of technology?  How does global media art speak back to the corporate closures of digital euphoria as clothed in strategies of digital surveillance, ecological deprivation, and planned obsolescence? In Technics Improvised, Timothy Murray asks these questions and more. 

At the intersection of global media art, curatorial practice, tactical media, and philosophy, Murray reads a wide range of creative performances and critical texts that envelop artistic and digital materials in unstable, political relations of touch, body, archive, exhibition, and technology. From video to net art and interactive performance, he considers both canonical and unheralded examples of activist technics that disturb the hegemony of biopolitical/digital networks by staging the very touch of the unsettling discourse erupting from within. In the process, critical dialogues emerge between a wide range of artists and theorists, from Hito Steyerl, Ricardo Dominguez, Joan Jonas, Isaac Julien, Ryoji Ikeda, and Shadi Nazarian to Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Elizabeth Povinelli, Jean-François Lyotard, Erin Manning, Achille Mbembe, and Samuel Weber.

Brilliantly conceived and argued and eloquently written, Technics Improvised points the way to how artistic and theoretical practice can seize on the improvisational accidents of technics to activate creativity, thought, and politics anew.

French symbolist artist Odilon Redon (1840–1916) seemed to thrive at the intersection of literature and art. Known as “the painter-writer,” he drew on the works of Poe, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Mallarmé for his subject matter. And yet he concluded that visual art has nothing to do with literature. Examining this apparent contradiction, The Brush and the Pen transforms the way we understand Redon’s career and brings to life the interaction between writers and artists in fin-de-siècle Paris.

Created in 1934, the Coit Tower murals were sponsored by the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the first of the New Deal art programs. Twenty-five master artists and their assistants worked there, most of them in buon fresco, Nearly all of them drew upon the palette and style of Diego Rivera. The project boosted the careers of Victor Arnautoff, Lucien Labaudt, Bernard Zakheim, and others, but Communist symbols in a few murals sparked the first of many national controversies over New Deal art.

Sixty full-color photographs illustrate Robert Cherny’s history of the murals from their conception and completion through their evolution into a beloved San Francisco landmark. Cherny traces and critiques the treatment of the murals by art critics and historians. He also probes the legacies of Coit Tower and the PWAP before surveying San Francisco’s recent controversies over New Deal murals.

An engaging account of an artistic landmark, The Coit Tower Murals tells the full story behind a public art masterpiece.

A new conceptual tool for understanding the history of art

From ancient cave paintings to contemporary sculpture, forms of indexical trace are vital to the human practice of artmaking. Through this wide-ranging exploration, Johanna Malt shows how casts, molds, and imprints (“contact images”) offer a paradigm for thinking about our relationship to objects and their surfaces as sites of meaning. Engaging and complicating philosophical dualities of absence and presence, art and non-art, original and copy, Malt introduces the contact image as an important new concept for the study of Western art.

Close reading examples from 30,000 years of art history, Malt cuts across eras and media to unite diverse forms of artistic production created through instances of contact with “the objects of the world.” From holy relics to Napoleon’s death mask to life casts of the human body by artists such as Duane Hanson and Janine Antoni, as well as conceptual and performance work by Jasper Johns and Yves Klein, The Contact Image traces themes of selfhood, time, negation, and vestige in these tactile encounters.

Revisiting fundamental questions about representation, perception, and aesthetics, The Contact Image is a sophisticated provocation for a theory of art built on the tension and oscillations that emerge when we explore how artworks embody opposites.

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How lens-based art from Southeast Asia offers alternative visions for ecological sustainability

A new paradigm of ecologically minded artistic practices is taking shape in Southeast Asia—one that at once tracks ecological destruction and works specifically to cultivate deeper feelings of empathy toward the environment. Examining a range of photography and video work, The Empathic Lens explores how these lens-based projects respond to increasingly urgent concerns related to climate disaster and capitalist acceleration.

In this analysis of work produced across Cambodia, Vietnam, and Singapore, Brianne Cohen highlights artists for whom rampant urban development, resource extraction, and environmental toxicity are close at hand. As each artist takes their lens to these realities, Cohen shows, they draw on Indigenous knowledge and local traditions that have long recognized the kinship of humans and nonhumans. Engaging often-censored discourses of Indigenous land relations and environmental justice in a region with a long history of colonial and neocolonial development, Cohen traces genealogies of empathy and animism to demonstrate how these works develop sustainable visions for the future coexistence of planetary life.

The first critical account of marginalized artworks that depict the centrality of the more-than-human in Southeast Asian Indigenous worldviews, The Empathic Lens makes a powerful case for the relevance of Southeast Asian lens-based art in contemporary media practice and the art of the Anthropocene.

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Art and technology have been converging rapidly in the past few years; an important example of this convergence is the alliance of neuroscience with aesthetics, which has produced the new field of neuroaesthetics.

Irving Massey examines this alliance, in large part to allay the fears of artists and audiences alike that brain science may "explain away" the arts. The first part of the book shows how neuroscience can enhance our understanding of certain features of art. The second part of the book illustrates a humanistic approach to the arts; it is written entirely without recourse to neuroscience, in order to show the differences in methodology between the two approaches. The humanistic style is marked particularly by immersion in the individual work and by evaluation, rather than by detachment in the search for generalizations. In the final section Massey argues that, despite these differences, once the reality of imagination is accepted neuroscience can be seen as the collaborator, not the inquisitor, of the arts.

An examination of surrealism’s unofficial ethnography of marginalized subjectivities


In interwar Paris, the encounter between surrealism and the nascent discipline of ethnology led to an intellectual project now known as “ethnographic surrealism.” In The Persistence of Masks, Joyce Suechun Cheng considers the ethnographic dimension of the surrealist movement in its formative years through a close look at the reviews Documents (1929–30) and Minotaure (1933–39) as well as the surrealist writer-turned-ethnographer Michel Leiris’s ethnography of possession. Analyzing surrealist aesthetic criticism, art, poetry, and field research in terms of a common interest in marginalized modes of subjectivity, Cheng argues that the surrealists used the figures of the mask, the veil, the hand, and the hat to radically reconceive the subject as nonhegemonic, nonanthropocentric, and feminine-identified.

Though ethnographic surrealism usually refers to the collaboration between professional ethnologists at the Institut de l’Ethnologie in Paris and Georges Bataille’s so-called dissident circle of surrealists, Cheng demonstrates that surrealism’s unofficial ethnography began long before the founding of the movement. Starting with André Breton’s wartime text “Subject” (1916), written when he was still a young psychiatric intern treating traumatized soldiers, she shows how the future surrealist poet shifted from a clinical to a para-ethnographic approach to subjectivity when adopting his patient’s first-person voice as a textual mask.

Revealing surrealism to be always implicitly ethnographic, Cheng uncovers deep affinities between archrivals Breton and Bataille, highlights psychiatry’s underacknowledged role in surrealism’s lay ethnography, and theorizes the surrealists’ feminine identification as a means of critiquing power. By broadening the scope of ethnographic surrealism, The Persistence of Masks offers new insights that challenge longstanding beliefs about this multifaceted movement in poetry, the arts, and culture.