In the heady and hallucinogenic days of the 1960s and rsquo;70s; a diverse range of artists and creative individuals based in the American Westmdash;from the Pacific coast to the Rocky Mountains and the Southwestmdash;broke the barriers between art and lifestyle and embraced the new; hybrid sensibilities of the countercultural movement. Often created through radically collaborative artistic practices; such works as Paolo Solerirsquo;s earth homes; the hand-built architecture of the Drop City and Libre communes; Yolanda Loacute;pezrsquo;s political posters; the multisensory movement workshops of Anna and Lawrence Halprin; and the immersive light shows and video-based work by the Ant Farm and Optic Nerve collectives were intended to generate new life patterns that pointed toward social and political emancipation. In West of Center; Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner bring together a prominent group of scholars to elaborate the historical and artistic significance of these counterculture projects within the broader narrative of postwar American art; which skews heavily toward New Yorkrsquo;s avant-garde art scene. This west of center countercultural movement has typically been associated with psychedelic art; but the contributors to this book understand this as only one dimension of the larger; artistically oriented; socially based phenomenon. At the same time; they reveal the disciplinary; geographic; and theoretical biases and assumptions that have led to the dismissal of countercultural practices in the history of art and visual culture; and they detail how this form of cultural and political activity found its place in the West.A companion to an exhibition originating at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver; this book illuminates how; in the western United States; the counterculturersquo;s unique integration of art practices; political action; and collaborative life activities serves as a linchpin connecting postwar and contemporary artistic endeavors.
#1081176 in eBooks 2013-08-15 2013-08-15File Name: B00ECWBKJC
Review
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful. Fascinating analysis of digital art and our algorithmic societyBy Jill Walker RettbergThis richly illustrated book is a wonderful survey of the ways in which colour has become generated and algorithmic in the last decades. Kane uses media archeology as a methodology; building on theorists like Kittler and Stiegler; and closely examines the use of colour in a range of artworks; from early video art where colour had to be generated and was not yet standardised to net art and dirt style and their contrasts to the bright and bold web 2.0 aesthetic. Kane explores how colour has become what she calls "post-optic"; meaning that colour is no longer simply something we see; but something functional: chromakey is one example; making blue or green nothing but the negation of colour; a space where something else is to be pasted in. Her analysis of colours we cannot see in nature; such as infrared; and the ways in which we conceptualise and represent infrared are fascinating and would be of interest to any surveillance scholar as well as to art or film historians. She also discusses synthetic colours such as the fluorescence of Day-Glo and psychedelic art; or the synthetic fluorescent proteins used in bio-art and in brain scanning.I was asked to review this book for New Media and Society (where you will find a longer review soon); and had expected to find the discussion of colour in digital art interesting; but I was surprised and excited to see how Kane makes colour an entry point to our algorithmic culture in general. Although some of the arguments in the last chapter fail to convince me; I found her discussions of the post-optical society and of the relationship between colour technologies and surveillance to be quite fascinating. Some of the discussions of video art; where Kane argues against Rosalind Krausss 1976 essay that argues that video art is essentially narcissistic; would be of interest to selfie researchers as well.This is a book that will be of interest to scholars interested in digital art and video art; but parts of it; especially chapters 5 and 6 should also be of interest to a broader group of digital culture scholars. An excellent first book from Carolyn L. Kane.