Global Book Launch New Tendencies - Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961 – 1978), Leonardo Book Series, MIT Press (June 2016)
Book presentation, Wednesday June 15th at 21er Haus, Blickle Kino, 7 pm to 9 pm , Arsenalstraße 1, 1030 Vienna. Lecture and discussion with Armin Medosch, hosted by Harald Krejci, chief curator of 21er Haus The book presentation happens in the context of the exhibition Rückblick Kinetika 1967. MIT Press Information https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/new-tendencies New Tendencies - Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961 – 1978), Leonardo Book Series, MIT Press (Juni 2016) by Armin Medosch New Tendencies, a nonaligned modernist art movement, emerged in the early 1960s in the former Yugoslavia, a nonaligned country. It represented a new sensibility, rejecting both Abstract Expressionism and socialist realism in an attempt to formulate an art adequate to the age of advanced mass production. In this book, Armin Medosch examines the development of New Tendencies as a major international art movement in the context of social, political, and technological history. Doing so, he traces concurrent paradigm shifts: the change from Fordism (the political economy of mass production and consumption) to the information society, and the change from postwar modernism to dematerialized postmodern art practices. Medosch explains that New Tendencies, rather than opposing the forces of technology as most artists and intellectuals of the time did, imagined the rapid advance of technology to be a springboard into a future beyond alienation and oppression. Works by New Tendencies cast the viewer as coproducer, abolishing the idea of artist as creative genius and replacing it with the notion of the visual researcher. In 1968 and 1969, the group actively turned to the computer as a medium of visual research, anticipating new media and digital art. Medosch discusses modernization in then-Yugoslavia and other nations on the periphery; looks in detail at New Tendencies’ five major exhibitions in Zagreb (the capital of Croatia); and considers such topics as the group’s relation to science, the changing relationship of manual and intellectual labor, New Tendencies in the international art market, their engagement with computer art, and the group’s eventual eclipse by other “new art practices” including conceptualism, land art, and arte povera. Numerous illustrations document New Tendencies’ works and exhibitions. Cover Texts “This book brings much-needed attention to the importance of New Tendencies, the groundbreaking art movement that emerged in the former Yugoslavia in the 1960s. Carefully researched and deeply insightful,Medosch’s overview illustrates that New Tendencies was much more than a highly relevant exhibition series: a playing field for exploring key ideas of the information revolution, from cybernetic control systems and networked communication to information aesthetics and digital art as visual research. A must-read for anyone interested in the evolution of contemporary digital art and its complex technological and socio-political histories.” Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts, Whitney Museum, Associate Professor, School of Media Studies, The New School „[the book] developed an ”deep archeology” of the technological and new media revolution in the Croatian, Yugoslavian and International neo-avant-garde in the 1960s and 1970s. This book is an analytical guide to the media, conceptual and political transformation of the late modernist epistemology of art. The author comparatively discusses relations between the socialist and western techno-utopian and, at the same time, critical artistic projects. His epistemology of art offers a mapping of scientific, electronic, proto-cybernetic, computer oriented and conceptually developed artistic research between techno-positivism and techno-criticism, between neoconstructivism and conceptual art.“ Miško Šuvaković, professor of art theory and dean of Faculty for media and communications, Belgrade; co-editor of Impossible History. Historic Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes, and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918-1991 About the Author Armin Medosch, PhD, is a Vienna based artist, curator and scholar working in art and media theory; in 2014, he curated the international exhibition Fields (Riga European Culture Capital 2014); he is initiator of the Technopolitics working group in Vienna. His new book under the title “New Tendencies – Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution” comes out at MIT Press in June 2016. Book Blog: http://www.newtendencies.eu/ Personal Website: www.arminmedosch.at Research Platform: www.thenextlayer.org contact: [email protected] ______________________________________________ SPECTRE list for media culture in Deep Europe Info, archive and help: http://post.in-mind.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre
