Lined & Unlined Library

Karl Holmqvist: ‘K Swedish artist and poet Karl...

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 14:14:03 -0400

Karl Holmqvist: ‘K

Swedish artist and poet Karl Holmqvist (born 1960) makes text works that explore pattern and permutation, while also overtly alluding to twentieth-century culture (Arakawa, Cadere, Fischli, Xenakis). These works are designed for reproduction both on the page and on the gallery wall. This volume compiles several of his text sequences, and includes a fold-out poster with exhibition installation shots.

The Rings of Saturn W.G. Sebald Shortlisted for the...

Sat, 18 May 2013 18:23:05 -0400

The Rings of Saturn

W.G. Sebald

Shortlisted for the 1998 Los Angeles Times Book Award in Fiction: “Stunning and strange … Sebald has done what every writer dreams of doing… . The book is like a dream you want to last forever… . It glows with the radiance and resilience of the human spirit.”—Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review“Ostensibly a record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia,” as Robert McCrum in the

London Observer noted, The Rings of Saturn “is also a brilliantly allusive study of England’s imperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay… . The Rings of Saturn is exhilaratingly, you might say hypnotically, readable… . It is hard to imagine a stranger or more compelling work.” The Rings of Saturn - with its curious archive of photographs - chronicles a tour across epochs as well as countryside. On his way, the narrator meets lonely eccentrics inhabiting tumble-down mansions and links them to Rembrandt’s “Anatomy Lesson,” the natural history of the herring, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, the travels of Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, and the massive bombings of WWII. Cataloging change, oblivion, and memories, he connects sugar fortunes, Joseph Conrad, and the horrors of colonizing the Belgian Congo. The narrator finds threads which run from an abandoned bridge over the River Blyth to the terrible dowager Empress Tzu Hsi and the silk industry in Norwich. “Sebald,” as The New Yorker stated, “weaves his tale together with a complexity and historical sweep that easily encompasses both truth and fiction.” The Emigrants (hailed by Susan Sontag as an “astonishing masterpiece-perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read”) was “one of the great books of the last few years,” as Michael Ondaatje noted: “and now The Rings of Saturn is a similar and as strange a triumph.”

The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self Mihaly...

Sat, 18 May 2013 18:22:57 -0400

The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The meaning of things is a study of the significance of material possessions in contemporary urban life, and of the ways people carve meaning out of their domestic environment. Drawing on a survey of eighty families in Chicago who were interviewed on the subject of their feelings about common household objects, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton provide a unique perspective on materialism, American culture, and the self. They begin by reviewing what social scientists and philosophers have said about the transactions between people and things. In the model of ‘personhood’ that the authors develop, goal-directed action and the cultivation of meaning through signs assume central importance. They then relate theoretical issues to the results of their survey. An important finding is the distinction between objects valued for action and those valued for contemplation. The authors compare families who have warm emotional attachments to their homes with those in which a common set of positive meanings is lacking, and interpret the different patterns of involvement. They then trace the cultivation of meaning in case studies of four families. Finally, the authors address what they describe as the current crisis of environmental and material exploitation, and suggest that human capacities for the creation and redirection of meaning offer the only hope for survival. A wide range of scholars - urban and family sociologists, clinical, developmental and environmental psychologists, cultural anthropologists and philosophers, and many general readers - will find this book stimulating and compelling.

Designing Interactions Bill Moggridge Digital technology has...

Sat, 18 May 2013 18:22:47 -0400

Designing Interactions

Bill Moggridge

Digital technology has changed the way we interact with everything from the games we play to the tools we use at work. Designers of digital technology products no longer regard their job as designing a physical object—beautiful or utilitarian—but as designing our interactions with it. In Designing Interactions, award-winning designer Bill Moggridge introduces us to forty influential designers who have shaped our interaction with technology. Moggridge, designer of the first laptop computer (the GRiD Compass, 1981) and a founder of the design firm IDEO, tells us these stories from an industry insider’s viewpoint, tracing the evolution of ideas from inspiration to outcome. The innovators he interviews—including Will Wright, creator of The Sims, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, and Doug Engelbart, Bill Atkinson, and others involved in the invention and development of the mouse and the desktop—have been instrumental in making a difference in the design of interactions. Their stories chart the history of entrepreneurial design development for technology.Moggridge and his interviewees discuss such questions as why a personal computer has a window in a desktop, what made Palm’s handheld organizers so successful, what turns a game into a hobby, why Google is the search engine of choice, and why 30 million people in Japan choose the i-mode service for their cell phones. And Moggridge tells the story of his own design process and explains the focus on people and prototypes that has been successful at IDEO—how the needs and desires of people can inspire innovative designs and how prototyping methods are evolving for the design of digital technology.Designing Interactions is illustrated with more than 700 images, with color throughout. Accompanying the book is a DVD that contains segments from all the interviews intercut with examples of the interactions under discussion.Interviews with:Bill Atkinson • Durrell Bishop • Brendan Boyle • Dennis Boyle • Paul Bradley • Duane Bray • Sergey Brin • Stu Card • Gillian Crampton Smith • Chris Downs• Tony Dunne • John Ellenby • Doug Englebart • Jane Fulton Suri • Bill Gaver • Bing Gordon • Rob Haitani • Jeff Hawkins • Matt Hunter • Hiroshi Ishii • Bert Keely • David Kelley • Rikako Kojima • Brenda Laurel • David Liddle • Lavrans Løvlie • John Maeda • Paul Mercer • Tim Mott • Joy Mountford • Takeshi Natsuno • Larry Page • Mark Podlaseck • Fiona Raby • Cordell Ratzlaff • Ben Reason • Jun Rekimoto • Steve Rogers • Fran Samalionis • Larry Tesler • Bill Verplank • Terry Winograd • Will Wright

Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History Mildred...

Sat, 18 May 2013 18:22:37 -0400

Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History

Mildred Friedman

Graphic design has had a profound impact upon American life in the 19th and 20th centuries. Essays by specialists in the field examine areas that include graphic design’s role as a social force as well as the effect of technological developments and political change.

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot Robert Macfarlane From the...

Sat, 18 May 2013 18:22:27 -0400

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Robert Macfarlane

From the acclaimed author of The Wild Places, an exploration of walking and thinking

In this exquisitely written book, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge, England, home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads, and sea paths that crisscross both the British landscape and its waters and territories beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt old paths, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, and of pilgrimage and ritual.

Told in Macfarlane’s distinctive voice, The Old Ways folds together natural history, cartography, geology, archaeology and literature. His walks take him from the chalk downs of England to the bird islands of the Scottish northwest, from Palestine to the sacred landscapes of Spain and the Himalayas. Along the way he crosses paths with walkers of many kinds—wanderers, pilgrims, guides, and artists. Above all this is a book about walking as a journey inward and the subtle ways we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move. Macfarlane discovers that paths offer not just a means of traversing space, but of feeling, knowing, and thinking.

ECM: A Cultural Archaeology As stunning and complex as the...

Sat, 18 May 2013 18:22:14 -0400

ECM: A Cultural Archaeology

As stunning and complex as the music it celebrates, this book presents essays, photographs, archival material, and artworks that pay tribute to one of the world’s most daring and innovative record labels. Founded by the legendary producer Manfred Eicher in 1969, a moment when contemporary music was being redefined across all genres, ECM (Edition of Contemporary Music) aimed to bring jazz, improvised, and written music out of the studio and into living rooms around the world. Acoustically rich and expansive, ECM’s productions set new standards in sonic complexity. ECM recorded some of the world’s most extraordinary music, and its stable features some of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, including Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, Steve Reich, Carla Bley, Meredith Monk, Marion Brown, Codona, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Arvo Pärt. Renowned for its high standards of quality, clarity, and freshness, ECM remains a cornerstone in the industry today. This comprehensive volume showcases ECM’s cultural breadth, not just in the music world but also within the broader artistic universe. It highlights aspects of African American music of the 1960s in Europe, during the height of the American Civil Rights era, as well as the changing relationships between musicians, music, and listeners. In exploring the work of ECM, this catalog brings together a range of visual arts—installation pieces, photography, and film—alongside essays and an anthology of liner notes.

Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo Nicholas de de Monchaux How the...

Sat, 18 May 2013 18:21:55 -0400

Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo

Nicholas de de Monchaux

How the twenty-one-layer Apollo spacesuit, made by Playtex, was a triumph of intimacy over engineering.

The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades...

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 10:29:00 -0400

The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

Susan Buck-Morss

Walter Benjamin’s magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form.Working with Benjamin’s vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth.The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose “materialist metaphysics” he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century “ur-form” of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin’s dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time - from air balloons to women’s fashions, from Baudelaire’s poetry to Grandville’s cartoons - as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique.Buck-Morss plots Benjamin’s intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south - Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples - and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of “dialectics at a standstill.” She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin’s insights but then allows a set of “afterimages” to have the last word.Susan Buck-Morss is Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory at Cornell University. The Dialectics of Seeing is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media Geert...

Fri, 25 May 2012 14:45:34 -0400

Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media

Geert Lovink

With the vast majority of Facebook users caught in a frenzy of ‘friending’, ‘liking’ and ‘commenting’, at what point do we pause to grasp the consequences of our info-saturated lives? What compels us to engage so diligently with social networking systems? *Networks Without a Cause *examines our collective obsession with identity and self-management coupled with the fragmentation and information overload endemic to contemporary online culture.

With a dearth of theory on the social and cultural ramifications of hugely popular online services, Lovink provides a path-breaking critical analysis of our over-hyped, networked world with case studies on search engines, online video, blogging, digital radio, media activism and the Wikileaks saga. This book offers a powerful message to media practitioners and theorists: let us collectively unleash our critical capacities to influence technology design and workspaces, otherwise we will disappear into the cloud. Probing but never pessimistic, Lovink draws from his long history in media research to offer a critique of the political structures and conceptual powers embedded in the technologies that shape our daily lives.

Schwitters Arp Gottfried Boehm

Sun, 06 May 2012 20:35:53 -0400

Schwitters Arp

Gottfried Boehm

Every Thing Design Glenn Adamson The great Dutch book designer...

Sun, 06 May 2012 20:35:37 -0400

Every Thing Design

Glenn Adamson

The great Dutch book designer Irma Boom designed this handsome, hefty gem, which features 700 prints, posters and other objects from the collection of Zurich’s Gestaltung Museum. It is a collection renowned worldwide for its unsurpassed holdings of design masterpieces: Ettore Sottsass’s iconic red “Valentine” typewriter from 1969, Paul Rand’s 1950 poster for the film No Way Out, as well as graphic works by Toulouse-Lautrec and El Lissitzky, and a range of works by Richard Paul Lohse, Harry Bertoia, Willy Guhl, Makoto Saito, FHK Henrion and many other great designers. Founded in 1875, the museum’s collection focuses on twentieth-century mass-manufactured products, comprising over 10,000 objects and 20,000 examples of packaging, from famous designs to anonymous everyday objects; a graphics collection containing over 100,000 items from around the world, dating from the fifteenth century to the present; a collection of 300,000 posters and an applied arts collection, showcasing work from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that covers the overlap between industrial manufacturing, design and art. With beautiful, full-page spreads, Every Thing Design, like the Gestaltung Museum itself, expands our conceptions of what design is, unpacking how a designed object is perceived and how this perception changes over time. It examines the criteria museums use for acquisition, and how the objects’ significance and value are established. The result is a surprising reconsideration of trends, production techniques and public reception.

Design Research Unit: 1942-72 Michelle Cotton In the same way...

Sun, 06 May 2012 20:35:21 -0400

Design Research Unit: 1942-72

Michelle Cotton

In the same way that the Helvetica font graphically defined the New York City subway system, the Design Research Unit visually branded the London we know today in everything from its street signs to such corporate identities as British Rail. Design Research Unit: 1942-72 details the history of the Unit and includes contemporary perspectives by artists, designers and critics.

Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts William H...

Fri, 04 May 2012 16:10:08 -0400

Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts

William H Gass

A dazzling new collection of essays—on reading, writing, form, and thought—from one of America’s master writers. It begins with the personal, both past and present. It emphasizes Gass’s lifelong attachment to books and moves on to the more analytical, as he ponders the work of some of his favorite writers (among them Kafka, Nietzsche, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Proust). He writes about a few topics equally burning but less loved (the Nobel Prize–winner and Nazi sympathizer Knut Hamsun; the Holocaust). Finally, Gass ponders theoretical matters connected with literature: form and metaphor, and specifically, one of its genetic parts—the sentence.

Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader Charles Esche The...

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:15:50 -0500

Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader

Charles Esche

The relationship between art and social and political change is not only a highly topical area of current debate, it is also fundamental to the history of modern art. This volume gathers together for the first time the essential texts that have defined this area since the late nineteenth century. Using primary sources, case studies, and new commissions, Art and Social Change provides an overview of the historical development of art with ideas of social and political change, from utopian imaginings to active engagement. Incorporating artists’ writings and public statements, as well as critical and theoretical texts, the volume also highlights developments outside established Western art history.

Guy de Cointet Marie de Brugerolle Mentor to a generation of...

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:15:19 -0500

Guy de Cointet

Marie de Brugerolle

Mentor to a generation of Californian Conceptualists and performance artists, Guy de Cointet (1934-1983) took language as a material from which to generate drawings, plays and performances. De Cointet collected phrases, words and even single letters culled from popular culture and literary sources, and scripted them as dialogues or props for plays inspired by the writings and homonymic compositional methods of Raymond Roussel: in the 1976 play At Sunrise… A Cry Was Heard, for example, a large painting depicting letters bisected by a white sash provides the dialogue of the lead actress, who recites its jumble of letters as if it were ordinary conversation. His drawings were often generated by geometric erasures of found text, leaving behind Concrete-style abstract patterns. A formative figure for Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy during his tenure at the Otis Art institute, de Cointet is today in the process of being rediscovered; this timely monograph is the first overview of his enigmatic and influential oeuvre.

Project Japan: Metabolism Talks Rem Koolhaas Between 2005 and...

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:14:44 -0500

Project Japan: Metabolism Talks

Rem Koolhaas

Between 2005 and 2011, architect Rem Koolhaas and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed the surviving members of Metabolism—the first non-western avant-garde, launched in Tokyo in 1960, in the midst of Japan’s postwar miracle. Project Japan features hundreds of never-before-seen images—master plans from Manchuria to Tokyo, intimate snapshots of the Metabolists at work and play, architectural models, magazine excerpts, and astonishing sci-fi urban visions—telling the 20th century history of Japan through its architecture, from the tabula rasa of a colonized Manchuria in the 1930s to a devastated Japan after the war, the establishment of Metabolism at the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokoy, to the rise of Kisho Kurokawa as the first celebrity architect, to the apotheosis of Metabolism at Expo ’70 in Osaka and its expansion into the Middle East and Africa in the 1970s. The result is a vivid documentary of the last moment when architecture was a public rather than a private affair.

A Little History of Philosophy Nigel Warburton Philosophy...

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:13:16 -0500

A Little History of Philosophy

Nigel Warburton

Philosophy begins with questions about the nature of reality and how we should live. These were the concerns of Socrates, who spent his days in the ancient Athenian marketplace asking awkward questions, disconcerting the people he met by showing them how little they genuinely understood. This engaging book introduces the great thinkers in Western philosophy and explores their most compelling ideas about the world and how best to live in it.

In forty brief chapters, Nigel Warburton guides us on a chronological tour of the major ideas in the history of philosophy. He provides interesting and often quirky stories of the lives and deaths of thought-provoking philosophers from Socrates, who chose to die by hemlock poisoning rather than live on without the freedom to think for himself, to Peter Singer, who asks the disquieting philosophical and ethical questions that haunt our own times.

Warburton not only makes philosophy accessible, he offers inspiration to think, argue, reason, and ask in the tradition of Socrates. A Little History of Philosophy presents the grand sweep of humanity’s search for philosophical understanding and invites all to join in the discussion.

Experience: Challenging Visual Indifference Through New Sensory...

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:12:54 -0500

Experience: Challenging Visual Indifference Through New Sensory Experience

Sean Perkins

Experience documents dialogue between over 100 organisations, marketeers, designers and artists around the world — from the creators of Japanese fog parks to the creatives behind Nike Town — exploring the possibilities of a radically progressive approach to marketing.

A Universal History of Iniquity Jorge Luis Borges In his...

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:12:30 -0500

A Universal History of Iniquity

Jorge Luis Borges

In his writing, Borges always combined high seriousness with a wicked sense of fun. Here he reveals his delight in re-creating (or making up) colorful stories from the Orient, the Islamic world, and the Wild West, as well as his horrified fascination with knife fights, political and personal betrayal, and bloodthirsty revenge. Sparkling with the sheer exuberant pleasure of story-telling, this collection marked the emergence of an utterly distinctive literary voice.