Jeffrey Skoller: Shadows, Specters, Shards. Making History in Avant-Garde Film (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, avant-garde film, cinema, experimental film, film, film theory, history of cinema
Demonstrates how avant-garde films better reflect the complexity of history than conventional film.
Avant-garde films are often dismissed as obscure or disconnected from the realities of social and political history. Jeffrey Skoller challenges this myth, arguing that avant-garde films more accurately display the complex interplay between past events and our experience of the present than conventional documentaries and historical films.
Shadows, Specters, Shards examines a group of experimental films, including work by Eleanor Antin, Ernie Gehr, and Jean-Luc Godard, that take up historical events such as the Holocaust, Latin American independence struggles, and urban politics. Identifying a cinema of evocation rather than representation, these films call attention to the unrepresentable aspects of history that profoundly impact the experience of everyday life. Making use of the critical theories of Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, among others, Skoller analyzes various narrative strategies—allegory, sideshadowing, testimony, and multiple temporalities—that uncover competing perspectives and gaps in historical knowledge often ignored in conventional film. In his discussion of avant-garde film of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Skoller reveals how a nuanced understanding of the past is inextricably linked to the artistry of image making and storytelling.
Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2005
ISBN 081664232X, 9780816642328
Length 233 pages
Michael A. Hiltzik: Dealers of Lightning: Xerox Parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age (2000)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1970s, 1980s, computing, engineering, history of computing, history of technology, technology
In the bestselling tradition of The Soul of a New Machine, Dealers of Lightning is a fascinating journey of intellectual creation. In the 1970s and ’80s, Xerox Corporation brought together a brain-trust of engineering geniuses, a group of computer eccentrics dubbed PARC. This brilliant group created several monumental innovations that triggered a technological revolution, including the first personal computer, the laser printer, and the graphical interface (one of the main precursors of the Internet), only to see these breakthroughs rejected by the corporation. Yet, instead of giving up, these determined inventors turned their ideas into empires that radically altered contemporary life and changed the world.
Based on extensive interviews with the scientists, engineers, administrators, and executives who lived the story, this riveting chronicle details PARC’s humble beginnings through its triumph as a hothouse for ideas, and shows why Xerox was never able to grasp, and ultimately exploit, the cutting-edge innovations PARC delivered. Dealers of Lightning offers an unprecedented look at the ideas, the inventions, and the individuals that propelled Xerox PARC to the frontier of technohistoiy–and the corporate machinations that almost prevented it from achieving greatness.
Publisher HarperBusiness, 2000
ISBN 0887309895, 9780887309892
Length 480 pages
More info (publisher)
More info (google books)
Download (DJVU)
Comment (0)Steve Wozniak: The Woz Wonderbook (1977)
Filed under brochure | Tags: · 1970s, computing, history of computing, history of technology, technology
The “Woz Wonderbook” was a compilation of notes from Steve Wozniak’s filing cabinet that served as the first documentation and technical support manual for the Apple II computer (before the more famous “red book” of January 1978).
A copy donated to DigiBarn Computer Museum by Bill Goldberg, longtime Apple employee.
Scanned by David Craig.
Available in Creative Commons License permitting noncommercial use with share-alike.
Deirdre Boyle: Subject to Change. Guerrilla Television Revisited (1997)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1970s, art, collective art, critique, television, video, video art, video guerrilla
In Subject to Change, Deirdre Boyle interweaves the narratives of three very different video collectives from the 1970s – TVTV, Broadside TV, and University Community Video – to tell a fascinating story of video “guerrillas” and their efforts to remake television to include voices and visions absent from the broadcast media mix.
Keywords and phrases
Michael Shamberg, Megan Williams, guerrilla television, Freex, Paul Goldsmith, portapak, WNET, Abbie Hoffman, Allen Rucker, KTCA, TVTV Show, Greg Pratt, TVTV’s, Ira Schneider, Cajun, David Loxton, cable television, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Appalachia
Publisher Oxford University Press US, 1997
ISBN 0195110544, 9780195110548
Length 286 pages
More info (publisher)
More info (google books)
Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970’s
Filed under book | Tags: · 1970s, art history, body, performance art
Having yourself shot. Putting out fires with your bare hands and feet. Biting your own body and photographing the marks. Sewing your own mouth shut. These seemingly aberrant acts were committed by performance artists during the 1970s. Why would anyone do these things? What do these kinds of masochistic performances tell us about the social and historical context in which they occurred? Fascinating and accessibly written, Contract with the Skin addresses such questions through a reconsideration of these acts in relation to psychoanalytic and legal concepts of masochism.
O’Dell argues that the growth of masochistic performance during the 1970s must be seen in the context of society’s response to the Vietnam War and contemporaneous changes in theories of contract. She contends that the dynamic that exists between audience and performer during these masochistic acts relates to tensions resulting from ruptures in the social contract. Indeed, as the war in Vietnam waned, so did masochistic performance, only to reemerge in the 1980s in relation to the “war on AIDS” and the censorious “culture wars”.
Focusing on 1970s performance artists Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Gina Pane, and collaborators Marina Abramovic/Ulay as well as those with similar sensibilities from the late 1980s onward — Bob Flanagan, David Wojnarowicz, Simon Leung, Catherine Opie, Ron Athey, Lutz Bacher, and Robby Garfinkel — O’Dell provides photographic documentation of performances and quotations from interviews with many of the artists. Throughout, O’Dell asks what we can do about the institutionalized forms of masochism for which these performances are metaphors.
Contract with the Skin is a provocative guide to thislittle-studied area, and offers new ways of thinking about performance art and artistic production.
Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970’s
By Kathy O’Dell
Edition: illustrated
Published by U of Minnesota Press, 1998
ISBN 0816628874, 9780816628872
128 pages
preview
