[spectre] Global Book Launch New Tendencies June 15th

[Armin Medosch]

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:
arminmedosch at gmail.com