Books in the Semiotext(e) / Active Agents series

A multigenre investigation of the personal and cultural annals of memory, identity, and spectatorship, both on and off the screen.In exchange for studying what each fraudulent cell looks like under a merciless commercial and commodified lens, viewers enable late-capitalism to run more smoothly by calling in with their votes, as is the case with Reality TV. From the inside, secrecy appears eradicated, as though secrets or coded transparencies comprise the totality of injustice, rather than just one part. Justice is reduced to a vantage point. We see and we see and we see ad infinitum.—from Picture CycleWith her debut collection Beauty Talk & Monsters (2007), Masha Tupitsyn established a new genre of hybrid writing that melded film criticism, philosophy, and autobiography. Picture Cycle continues Tupitsyn's multigenre investigation of the personal and cultural annals of memory, identity, and spectatorship, both on and off the screen. Composed over a ten-year period, Picture Cycle is a pioneering collection whose sharp and knowing vignette-like essays form a critical autobiography of the daily images in our lives. Deftly covering a range of theoretical and cinematic frameworks, Tupitsyn traces here the quickly vanishing line between onscreen and offscreen, predigital and postdigital. The result is a unique intellectual study of the uncanny formation of our life's biographies through images.

Exit strategies from the current financial crisis that may lead us toward a new horizon of constructing the common.

A poet and post-punk heroine writes on subjects ranging from Björk to Robert Smithson, from traveling in Iceland to walking in Thoreau's footsteps on Cape CodPoet and post-punk heroine Eileen Myles has always operated in the art, writing, and queer performance scenes as a kind of observant flaneur. Like Baudelaire's gentleman stroller, Myles travels the city—wandering on garbage-strewn New York streets in the heat of summer, drifting though the antiseptic malls of La Jolla, and riding in the van with Sister Spit—seeing it with a poet's eye for detail and with the consciousness that writing about art and culture has always been a social gesture. Culled by the poet from twenty years of art writing, the essays in The Importance of Being Iceland make a lush document of her—and our—lives in these contemporary crowds. Framed by Myles's account of her travels in Iceland, these essays posit inbetweenness as the most vital position from which to perceive culture as a whole, and a fluidity in national identity as the best model for writing and thinking about art and culture. The essays include fresh takes on Thoreau's Cape Cod walk, working class speech, James Schulyer and Björk, queer Russia and Robert Smithson; how-tos on writing an avant-garde poem and driving a battered Japanese car that resembles a menopausal body; and opinions on such widely ranging subjects as filmmaker Sadie Benning, actor Daniel Day-Lewis, Ted Berrigan's Sonnets, and flossing.

Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art driven by high-profile graduate programs.Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art driven by high-profile graduate programs. Probing the surface of art-critical buzzwords, Chris Kraus brilliantly chronicles how the City of Angels has suddenly become the epicenter of the international art world and a microcosm of the larger culture. Why is Los Angeles so completely divorced from other realities of the city? Shrewd, analytic and witty, Video Green is to the Los Angeles art world what Roland Barthes' Mythologies were to the society of the spectacle: the live autopsy of a ghost city.

The first book-length monograph on Elaine Sturtevant, who has focused her career on the artistic copy.