Books published by No Place Press

A history of design teaching from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s told through essays, interviews, remembrances, and primary materials.With contributions by more than forty of the most influential voices in art, architecture, and design, After the Bauhaus, Before the Internet traces a history of design teaching from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s through essays, interviews, and primary materials. Geoff Kaplan has gathered a multigenerational group of theorists and practitioners to explore how the evolution of graphic design pedagogy can be placed within a conceptual and historical context. At a time when all choices and behaviors are putatively curated, and when “design thinking” is recruited to solve problems from climate change to social media optimization, the volume’s contributors examine how design’s self-understandings as a discipline have changed and how such changes affect the ways in which graphic design is being historicized and theorized today.

How Silicon Valley, the dark net, and digital culture have affected our relationship to knowledge, history, language, aesthetics, reading, and truth.In October 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Ross William Ulbricht was arrested at the Glen Park Public Branch Library in San Francisco, accused of being the "Dread Pirate Roberts” and mastermind of a dark net drug marketplace known as Silk Road. Ulbricht was an ardent libertarian who believed Silk Road—described by the New York Times as "the largest, most sophisticated criminal enterprise the internet has ever seen”—was battling the forces of big government. He was convicted two years later of money laundering, computer hacking, and conspiracy to traffic narcotics and sentenced to life in prison.Art historian Pamela Lee reads this event as a fairy tale of disruption rather than an isolated episode in the history of the dark net, Silicon Valley, and the relationship between public libraries and digital culture. Lee argues that the notion of "disruptive” technology in contemporary culture has radically affected our relationship to knowledge, history, language, aesthetics, reading, and truth. Against the backdrop of her account of Ulbricht and his exploits, Lee provides original readings of five women artists—Gretchen Bender, Cecile B. Evans, Josephine Pryde, Carissa Rodriguez, and Martine Syms—who weigh in, either explicitly or inadvertently, on the nature of contemporary media and technology. Written as a work of experimental art criticism, The Glen Park Library is both a homage to the Bay Area and an excoriation of the ethos of Silicon Valley. As with all fairy tales, the book's ultimate subjects are much greater, however, and Lee casts a critical eye on collisions between privacy and publicity, knowledge and information, and the past and future that are enabled by the technocratic worldview.