Halloween: A Fantasy in Three Acts by Ken Werner
9 1/4” x 11 1/8”
65 pages
Hardcover
B&W
Published by Anthology Editions
ISBN: 9781944860639
Werner / Halloween Article via KQED
Description via Anthology Editions:
Originally published in limited quantities in 1981, Halloween: A Fantasy in Three Acts collects photographs taken by Ken Werner at San Francisco’s adult Halloween celebrations from 1976 to 1980, assembling a visual narrative of American consciousness and popular culture as seen through lenses of queerness, black humor, and the macabre. Once touted as the “Mardi Gras of the West,” the raunchy, mostly open-air nighttime costume parties documented by Werner were hugely popular events organized primarily by LGBT and sex worker advocates, attracting tens of thousands of curious attendees as well as conservative ire from around the nation. Reissued for the first time in decades, this underground classic explores a bacchanalia worthy of the pagan and occult roots of the Halloween ritual—a magical dream/nightmare-land of terror and joy, with uninhibited celebrants reveling in stunning self-made guises that combine cartoon logic, sexual extravagance, and a highly irreverent take on American mythologies.
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Amaya Productions
Buried in Noise (Paul DeMarinis) edited by I. Beirer
6 1/2” x 9 3/4”
208 pages
Hardcover
B&W w/ Full Color
Published by Kehrer Verlag
ISBN: 9783868281415
1st Printing (2010)
DeMarinis Webpage
DeMarinis Vimeo
Description via Kehrer Verlag:
This artist's book is the first comprehensive monograph on sound and media artist Paul DeMarinis, born in 1948 in Cleveland, Ohio. DeMarinis has avidly followed the development of communication media, interested in discoveries being made in the realm of physical phenomena and the corresponding objects and devices that have been invented as well as in their cultural and social aspects. His works embody an aesthetic culture of invention permeated by a critical, yet humorous and poetic spirit. Buried in Noise is being published on the occasion of DeMarinis's artist fellowshipat the DAAD artists' program in Berlin. The publication compiles ocumentation on Paul DeMarinis's complete oeuvre since 1973 and the first published compendium of texts by the artist.
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The Neuron Mirror by Graeme Revell
11.5" x 15"
160 pages
Hardcover
Full Color Offset
Edition of 100
'By far one of the most visually striking and thought provoking books I've encountered in quite some time. Incredibly beautiful and orginal. 'The Future' has arrived and its everything we hoped for... right?' - Ross
Artist's Statement:
The Neuron Mirror is a human/AI collaborative partnership; an intensive process of inspiration, iteration, curation, finesse and judgement; a collection of images conserved while thousands of others were discarded. Yet the question continues to be asked: who or what is the artist?
Salvatore Chiarella has written that it is not technology alone that makes an artwork, but rather the totality of artistic theory, approach, and realisation. Al image generation is a Copernican revolution in the artistic field, but the technology does not replace human creativity. The spread of photography at the end of the 19th century with the advent of technology able to reproduce reality (at least as it was defined at the time), led to similar debates about its status as an art form and the possibility that it might supplant painting. The outcome, however, was photography's gradual acceptance and simultaneously the flowering of historical avant-gardes such as Impressionism, Futurism, Surrealism and Expressionism. There is every reason to anticipate similar developments in the context of art in this century.
There are other relevant implications for philosophical aesthetics, especially the discussions about the nature of creativity and authorship. The generation of art by Als calls into question the uniqueness of individual creativity and artistic imagination in an unprecedented way, questions we will elaborate on in later chapters. Al technology can be considered as an extension of human potentialities through the externalization of mental processes in the form of a distributed non-corporeal mind. Mark Coeckelbergh, however, argues that existing notions such as tool, extension, and (quasi) Other are insufficient to conceptualize the use of this technology, and proposes instead to investigate what happens as processes and performances out of which artistic subjects, objects, and roles emerge. The old categories leave in place the human/machine separation and opposition. The discussion has been about how humans and Al relate in this context, yet the focus was on the ontological and artistic status of the Al which implicitly or explicitly was compared to that of the human. He suggests turning this around, no longer taking the relationship as fixed and given, but rather bringing the relation and the process itself to the forefront of the analysis?
The process can perhaps be better viewed as 'poietic performances' involving humans and non-humans potentially leading to the emergence of new artistic (quasi)subjects and roles in the process. For example: Al image generators often introduce exquisite detail in a quite unexpected way. They also currently confuse ground and subject if the human prompter does not take extraordinary measures to avoid the ambiguity. Yet the results, which are evident in many images herein, are often stunning. This is only an 'error when conceived in terms of mirroring animal visual perception - a survival mechanism, not an artistic one. It is likely that developers will attempt to 'correct' such artefacts in subsequent versions, thereby betraying an anthropic bias towards representation within the larger project of artificial general intelligence.
The Neuron Mirror is a 3-way performance of human/Al/audience all embedded in a dynamic process which includes the role of the artist, the technology, and the viewers, philosophers and critics who ascribe meaning and value to the work, entangling the human prompter/curator and the Al into the 'Artist'. In Karen Barad's terms, what happens can be understood as dialogue, intra-action and dance between the performances of humans and the performances of Al. These are in turn embedded in extensive material and narrative contexts in which they are immanent, by which they are shaped, and to what meaning they contribute.
The final creative output may go beyond the boundaries of expectation and fulfil the requirement of and originality. These are new starting points for an artistic re-evaluation of what we mean by intelligence and creativity.
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Hands and Feet and Their Supports by Matt Borruso
8.5" x 11"
184 pages
Softcover (Two color screenprinted with flaps)
Digital Press (B&W / Full Color on construction paper)
Hand sewn
Edition of 175
"Hands and Feet and Their Supports rearranges dispositions and raises expectations. Tastefully rich and beautifully presented; Borruso's critical eye and thoughtful attention reaches yet another new height. This ones a keeper. Bravo!' - Ross
Some fully formed, others in a state of becoming, hands and feet and their supports. Cast and recast, copied and recopied, rubber gloves, ur-feet, the feet of apes. Fragments that represent a whole, these outermost extremities can stand in for humans. The hands and feet of ancient ancestors, present selves, future monuments.
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