Monday, July 20, 2009

Book is Out!

My new book on Atropos Press "Gratitude for Technology" has started appearing on online booksellers today! Barnes & Noble was the first, so I am linking to them, Amazon should come online soon.

The book is the result of about two years of work trying to articulate the radical premise of my media art: in order to access more meaning in the technological surfaces all around us, we need to engage with the physical material of that surface, and trace back the historical processes of how it came into being.

If we look carefully, we will see that inside every technological surface are matrices of human relationships stretching back through history. These matrices of related activity formed the materials of the earth into the technological surface. If we can somehow find a way to model and manifest these webs of relationships, this utterly human cosmology, (we may need some quantum mathematics!) we will have something which we can use to develop a more substantial connection between our selves and the technological surface.

I access a wide variety of sources to explore my argument, philosophy, art, design, performance, science, contemplating the historical value of labour and the origin and structures of meaning. and more. I am very excited to finally put into book form many of the concerns that have been going on in, and unify my work since my feature film "Proposal for Dog Brain" was completed in 1995.

Now, as I start promoting this book, I have begun preliminary editing on the first installment of my video-performance series "A Political Economy of the Smallest Things" starring Paul Virilio and Otto Rössler and yours truly. This takes the themes from (especially the last chapter of) "Gratitude for Technology" even further into the infinitesimal production of leptons and bosons at CERN near Geneva. I will upload some short clips shortly, until then, please leave a comment and say hello!

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