Books by Domenico Quaranta

Eternal September. The Rise of Amateur Culture is a group exhibition that explores the relationship between professional art making and the rising of amateur cultural movements through the web, an historical event that is triggering a big and fascinating shift in every field of culture, especially visual culture. This catalogue features a curatorial text by Valentina Tanni, together with an interview with artist Matthias Fritsch, the man beyond the Teknoviking meme, an essay by artist group Smetnjak on practicing critical theory in the form of internet memes, and visual documentation of Tanni's ongoing curatorial project The Great Wall of Memes. Featured artists: Mauro Ceolin, Paolo Cirio, Electroboutique, Paul Destieu, Matthias Fritsch, Colin Guillemet, David Horvitz, Maskull Lasserre, Aled Lewis, Dennis Logan (Spatula007), Valeria Mancinelli and Roberto Fassone, Mark McEvoy, Casey Pugh, Steve Roggenbuck, Helmut Smits, Pawe¿ Sysiak & Tymek Borowski, TheGamePro, Phil Thompson, Wendy Vainity.

How did the internet go from the utopian free-for-all, open source heaven, libertarian last frontier to the current state of permanent surveillance, exhibitionism and paranoia? This duplicity is the underlying thread that links the artists, activists, and researchers in The Black Chamber, an exhibition, a symposium, an urban intervention and a publication. The Black Chamber aims at discussing the delicate and often awkward role of art and imagination in the age of mass surveillance, stressing the multiple connections between post-studio art and independent research, grassroots reverse engineering, and new forms of political activism in the age of networks.Not just an exhibition catalogue, this book is also an attempt to show the exhibited works as part of larger research processes. With works and original contributions by Jacob Appelbaum & Ai Weiwei, Laura Poitras, Metahaven, Zach Blas, James Bridle, Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion, Simon Denny, Jill Magid, !Mediengruppe Bitnik and Evan Roth.

Artist and game designer, Eddo Stern explores the uneasy and otherwise unconscious connections between physical existence and electronic simulation, surrounding the subject matters of violence, memory and identification. A game manual, a catalogue, a making of and an archive, How to Play Eddo Stern revolves around a selected body of works developed with di(erent media that can be understood as "games". Featuring an essay by Matteo Bittanti, the book is a deep dive into the massive amount of small bits and pieces that make up the folders of Stern's game projects: 3D models, texture maps and atlases, backdrops, animation frame sequences, code snippets, circuit diagrams, as well as emails, design documents, meeting notes, and installation diagrams. Co-produced with Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel.

There is this hacker slogan: "We love your computer." We also get inside people's computers. And we are honored to be in somebody's computer. You are very close to a person when you are on his desktop. Jodi, 1997 This book is a collection of texts written by Domenico Quaranta between 2005 and 2010 for exhibition catalogues, printed magazines and online reviews: a pocket version of what the author would save from the universal flood, in a world without computers. Most of the fields of research he has developed are represented: from Net Art to Software Art and videogames, from biotechnologies to the debate around curating and the positioning of New Media Art in the contemporary landscape, and back to Net Art again.

"Beyond New Media Art" is the revised, updated version of a book first published in Italian with the title "Media, New Media, Postmedia" in 2010. Through the circulation of excerpts, reviews and interviews, the book produced some debate outside of Italy, which persuaded the author to release, three years later, this English translation. "Beyond New Media Art" is an attempt to analyze the current positioning of so-called New Media Art in the wider field of contemporary arts, and to explore the historical, sociological and conceptual reasons for its marginal position and under-recognition in recent art history. On the other hand, this book is also an attempt to suggest new critical and curatorial strategies to turn this marginalization into a thing of the past, and to stress the topicality of art addressing the media and the issues of the information age. Domenico Quaranta (http://domenicoquaranta.com) is an art critic, teacher and curator. He regularly writes for Flash Art and Artpulse.