Category: Book review

2015

Mike Leggett

Ulrike Gehring & Peter Weibel (eds) 
ZKM / Hirmer Publishers, Munich
504 pp., b/w, col. illus.

ISBN 978-3-7774-2230-5 (hc)

The two editors of this substantial volume, an off-shoot of what must have been a spectacular exhibition at ZKM (the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe), provide the excellent introductory and closing essays to contributions by thirty-seven authors, mainly from German and Dutch academic institutions. ZKM is known mainly for its work with media artists, transdisciplinary research and collaboration internationally, the exhibition and publication bringing into the light artefacts and reflections from a previous age of exploration at the beginnings of the Enlightenment. The space of the title is the application of intellect to describing and representing the dynamics of distance, and thought.

2014

Mike Leggett

Sérgio B. Martins
MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England (2013). 232 pp., col. b/w illus. 
ISBN 978-0-262-01926-2 (hc)

To anyone unfamiliar with the interventions made by avant-garde artists into the art world and occasionally wider society during the middle of the 20th Century, this volume delivers a very readable account. The artists, the objects they made and the discussions they generated are selected here in relation to the particular practices and contexts emergent in Brazil post 1945. (Leonardo Digital Reviews)

2016

Mike Leggett

Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta (the
collective), with Philip Monk, curator and writer. Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2014)

Raqs – the term comes from the whirling dances of Asia – regard other artists, researchers and writers as part of the complex interchange of their ideas and practice. Selecting strands from the international army of practitioners, the Collective have curated artists into specific institutions, festivals and biennales. (Leonardo Digital Reviews 2016)

2017

Mike Leggett

by Larissa Hjorth, Sarah Pink, Kristen Sharp, and Linda Williams
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2016
Leonardo Book Series, Roger E. Malina, Editor
224 pp., illus. 61 b/w. Trade, $37
ISBN: 978-0-262-034562.

The introduction is a topography to this very complex field of study, where artists, enthusiasts, inventors, activists, technologists, hackers, ecologists, and scientists are all simultaneously responding to the climate changes of the technology industries and the environmental market place of human interactions. For some, this section will be sufficient. The complexities hinted are unraveled in eight chapters, taking cuts through the data and enabling the reader to experience from the inside the magnitude of our mediated effect on each other and the planet we call home.

2016

Mike Leggett

 Giovana Fossati and Annie van den Oever, Editors. Leonardo Digital Reviews (2016) and Leonardo, Vol. 50, No. 2, April 2017: 224-224. 

Audience studies is a recent field of study related to the work of film archives drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data but does not form part of this collection other than by inference. The emphasis is on the projector and other tools for darkened rooms, like printers; in the showman days of fairground entertainment these were one and the same with the camera. It is these three tools of practice where attention is focussed, strung between the vastly different worlds of Hollywood and the amateur filmmaker. 

2016

Mike Leggett

Camouflage Cultures: beyond the art of disappearance Ann Elias, Ross Harley, Nicholas Tsoutas (eds) Sydney University Press, Australia. sydney.edu.au/sup 215 pp., b/w col. illus. $US40 ISBN 9781743324257 (pb) reviewed for Leonardo Journal of Art Science and Technology Digital Reviews (LDR)

Contributors of this volume first presented at an international conference and exhibition of contemporary art held at the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney in 2013. A keynote by Roy R Behrens, artist and pioneer researcher in the field, (whose books were previously reviewed in LDR; June 2010 and Jan 2012), introduced the ubiquity of camouflage, leading the discussion developed over the past decade away from the kind of military applications with which the term is more commonly linked towards other researches. As a milieu for the sciences, arts and humanities, assiduously riffing on terms like mimesis, deception, falsification, disguise, even delusion, enable this collection of stimulating essays derived from the conference to encounter a wide range of practical applications for the term camouflage.