Books by Stephen Barber

The iconoclastic work of the Vienna Action Group is now more contemporary than ever before, and THE ART OF DESTRUCTION provides a comprehensive introduction to that work in both film and performance. Fully illustrated and annotated, and including an extensive filmography, this is a book of compelling interest to all students of film, art and performance, and for all readers engaged with questioning social and corporate cultures.

Eadweard Muybridge is among the seminal originators of the contemporary world's visual form, with its concentrated image-sequences of bodies in movement and its ocular obsessions. This book examines an almost unknown dimension of Muybridge's work, as a moving-image projectionist, who toured Europe's cities to enthral beyond-capacity audiences with unprecedented projections and who built a moving-image auditorium - long before cinemas were created - in which to project his work at the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. That final invention of Muybridge's was both an all-engulfing catastrophe and the vital precursor for the following century's worldwide manias for projection. Based on entirely new research into Muybridge's travels, audiences, auditoria and projectors, this book explores his initiating role in moving-image projection and also maps Muybridge's driving inspiration for subsequent artists and filmmakers preoccupied with the volatile entity of projection, from 1890s Berlin to contemporary Japan, via further spectacular World's Exposition events and cinemas' overheated projection-boxes.The book looks closely at the enigmatic figure of the moving-image projectionist, from its origins in Muybridge's experiments, across glass, celluloid and digital projections, to the contemporary moment. Moving-image projection formed a crucial determinant in the imagining of new corporealities and new urban spaces, through its irrepressible capacity to envision future bodies and cities. The cinema projectionist - a solitary figure of compulsion and restlessness, inhabiting a profession touched with the multiple addictions and deaths of the moving image - was once a pivotal presence for global cinema audiences but is now consigned to near-obsolescence.The book investigates contemporary urban projections as aberrant manifestations derived from Muybridge's first conjurations of projection's power for its spectators. Throughout, the book interrogates the strange figure of the projectionist, embodied first of all by Muybridge himself. The Projectionists will attract and fascinate all lovers of cinemas, photography and moving-image cultures.

This book shows how political inaction has shaped the politics, economy and society we recognize today, despite the fact that policymakers are incentivised to act and to be seen to act decisively.

From the narrow alleyways of the Golden Gai to the flashing ads and jumbotrons of Shibuya street crossings to the skyscrapers of Shinjuku and the cartoon billboards of the Akiba, Tokyo is an intensely visual and mesmerizing city. This work gives an account of Tokyo's urban sensations.

Berlin's unique history of conflict, violence, and transformation has created an arena of extraordinary urban surfaces, from which the this day city and its layered, wounded past are projected simultaneously. This title explores the intimate connections between those surfaces and the works of art and film.

An illuminating, often provocative examination of urban images in cinema.