Published: 04/23/2020
We are living through the wrack of the White Male. As the compact between social hierarchy, inherited privilege, and race (reinforced by gender and other normative categories) shows signs of buckling, his rage and resentment threaten us all. For he is a thing possessed: possessed by his own love of possession, and born to a[…]
Published: 10/02/2019
How to reckon with the staggering volume of television materials, past and present? And how to comprehend all the potential, complex scales at which to grapple with television, from its tiniest units of audiovisual content to its most massive industrial coordinates and beyond? In Television Scales, Nick Salvato demonstrates how the problem of scale in[…]
Published: 07/20/2019
Moonbit is a hybrid work comprised of experimental poetry and a critical theory of the poetics and politics of computer code. It offers an extended intellectual and creative engagement with the affordances of computer software through multiple readings and re-writings of a singular text, the source code of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer or the[…]
Published: 05/07/2020
Overlooking Lago di Orta in the foothills of the Northern Italian Alps, the Renaissance-era Sacro Monte di Orta (a UNESCO World Heritage site) is spectacle and hagiography, theme park and treatise. Sacro Monte di Orta is a sacred mountain complex that extolls the life of St. Francis of Assisi through fresco, statuary, and built environment.[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 06/27/2019
The term “interest” lacks a precise antonym. In English, we have “disinterested” and “uninteresting,” but we want for a term that denotes robust opposition to interest. The same appears to hold true in every other language (as far as we know). Interest’s missing antonym reflects not merely a widespread lexical oversight, but a misrecognition of[…]
Published: 12/30/2019
We are all, no matter how little we like it, the bearers of unwanted and often shunned memory, of a history whose infiltrations are at times so stealthy we can pretend otherwise, and at times so loud we can’t hear much of anything else. We’re still here — there differently than those before us, but[…]
Published: 05/31/2019
What kinds of knowledge and understandings of the world can be generated – and shared – when we use para-academic techniques and sensibilities to decode or respond to relatively orthodox intellectual objects? And what worlds might be possible if we practiced scholarly work from a place of collaboration and pleasure, as joyful fellow explorers? In[…]
Published: 07/05/2019
Drawing on the vast archival resources of its Architecture and Design Collection, the UCSB Art, Design & Architecture Museum (University of California, Santa Barbara) presents an assessment of 50 years of design by Barton Myers (b. 1934), beginning with his work in the Toronto firm A.J. Diamond and Barton Myers (1967–1975) to his own offices[…]