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Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History: Erkki Kurenniemi in 2048

£39.95
Edited by by Joasia Krysa and Jussi Parikka
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Description: Over the past forty years, Finnish artist and technology pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi (b. 1941) has been a composer of electronic music, experimental filmmaker, computer animator, roboticist, inventor, and futurologist. Kurenniemi is a hybrid -- a scientist-humanist-artist. Relatively unknown outside Nordic countries until his 2012 Documenta 13 exhibition, "In 2048," Kurenniemi may at last be achieving international recognition. This book offers an excavation, a critical mapping, and an elaboration of Kurenniemi's multiplicities. The contributors describe Kurenniemi's enthusiastic, and rather obsessive, recording of everyday life and how this archiving was part of his process; his exploratory artistic practice, with productive failure an inherent part of his method; his relationship to scientific and technological developments in media culture; and his work in electronic and digital music, including his development of automated composition systems and his "video-organ," DIMI-O. A "Visual Archive," a section of interviews with the artist, and a selection of his original writings (translated and published for the first time) further document Kurenniemi's achievements. But the book is not just about one artist in his time; it is about emerging media arts, interfaces, and archival fever in creative practices, read through the lens of Kurenniemi.

Reviews: Sex, annotation, and verite totale: Kurenniemi is a missing mixing desk between so many interesting aspects of late-twentieth-century culture. No wonder he ends up offering us a new archival futurism! -- Matthew Fuller, Professor, Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London

Providing a long-overdue critical and historical introduction to the amazingly multifaceted work of media pioneer, visionary thinker, and self-archivist Erkki Kurenniemi, this book becomes both a media-archaeological excavation and engaging reflection on the challenges of writing media art history. The range of Kurenniemi's fascinating practice -- including electronic music composition, experimental filmmaking, robotics, and curation -- defies traditional classifications, and calls for new historical narratives of media art. Started as a compilation of the long-term research that went into the exhibition of Kurenniemi's work at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, the volume combines highlights of his own writings and interviews with excellent contributions by scholars, contextualizing his archives, art, music, and vision. -- Christiane Paul, Associate Professor, School of Media Studies, The New School; Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts, Whitney Museum

This book is a major contribution not only to the unprecedented scientific and artistic imagination of Erkki Kurenniemi, but also to the whole research on media and 'real time.' The text unveils and critically presents the reader with a series of complex technological and artistic systems exploring the man-machine relationship under the assumption both do have consciousness. Kurenniemi's work provides us with one of the most solid grounds to examine perception, the brain, the will to speculate and travel back and forth between several realms of knowledge. Kurenniemi is bold; this text is bold and a great contribution to new forms of studying risk taking in art and science. -- Chus Martinez, Head of the Institute of Art, FHNW Academy of Art and Design

Author Biography: Joasia Krysa is Artistic Director of Kunsthal Aarhus, Adjunct Associate Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark, and was part of the Documenta 13 curatorial team. She is coeditor of DATA browser book series and author of Curating Immateriality. Jussi Parikka is Professor of Technological Culture and Aesthetics at University of Southampton's Winchester School of Art and Docent in Digital Culture Theory at the University of Turku, Finland. He is the author of What Is Media Archaeology? and other books.

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SKU 9780262029582
Subtitle Erkki Kurenniemi in 2048
Publisher(s) MIT Press / Leonardo Book Series
Editor(s) Krysa, Joasia & Parikka, Jussi
Format Hardback
Original publication date 11 Sep 2015
Number of pages 368
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