Skip to main content
rile*books

Search books

Search books by title, author, publisher, keywords...

Cover of Media Burn—Ant Farm and the Making of an Image

Inventory Press

Media Burn—Ant Farm and the Making of an Image

Steve Seid

€35.00

Ant Farm, the conceptual architectural practice turned art collaborative, is known for such distinctive works as House of the Century (1971–73), Cadillac Ranch (1974), and The Eternal Frame (1975).

Of equal notoriety is Media Burn, Ant Farm’s legendary 1975 performance, in which a radically customized Cadillac was driven through a wall of burning television sets. Media Burn: Ant Farm and the Making of an Image is a vibrant assessment of the complex set of cultural references and art-making strategies informing this collision of twentieth-century icons.

Author Steve Seid (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive) probes the little-known critical backstory of this bold performance (and resulting video work) and its irreverent effort to mount a subversive critique of media hegemony while reimagining the core meaning of performance itself.

Media Burn: Ant Farm and the Making of an Image examines car culture, image proliferation, and radical architectural practice, and offers a close read of Media Burn’s numerous texts, speeches, ephemera, and artifacts.

128 pages ┊ Language: English

recommendations

Cover of Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art

Inventory Press

Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art

C. Ondine Chavoya, David Evans Frantz

Published to accompany the artist’s first retrospective exhibition, Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art examines the work of the inventive yet overlooked Teddy Sandoval, a central figure in Los Angeles’s queer and Chicanx artistic circles. Sandoval was known for producing subversive and playful artworks in a range of media that explored the codes of gender and sexuality, particularly conceptions of masculinity.

This publication surveys Sandoval’s work alongside other queer, Latinx, and Latin American artists whose practices profoundly resonate. This expansive catalogue features essays by C. Ondine Chavoya, David Evans Frantz, Raquel Gutiérrez, and Mari Rodríguez Binnie, as well as biographical entries on other artists featured in the exhibition, including Félix Ángel, Myrna Báez, Álvaro Barrios, Ester Hernández, Hudinilson Jr., Antonio Lopez, María Martínez-Cañas, Marisol, and Joey Terrill.

Design by Content Object
Co-published by Inventory Press, Williams College Museum of Art, Vincent Price Art Museum, and Independent Curators International

Cover of Clara Istlerová: a Life Among Letters

Inventory Press

Clara Istlerová: a Life Among Letters

Anežka Minaříková, Clara Istlerová

Clara Istlerová: A Life Among Letters is the first publication in the United States to delve into the design landscape of the former Czechoslovakia through the lens of Czech designer Clara Istlerová (born 1944). A trailblazer in her field, Istlerová was one of the few women in the male-dominated field of Czech typography. This publication introduces readers to Istlerová’s renowned book designs, particularly highlighting the analog processes she utilized to create one of the most influential books on Czech architecture, Švácha, Rostislav. From Modernity to Functionalism (Odeon, 1985).

The publication features an intimate interview with Istlerová conducted by editor Anežka Minaříková, accompanied by work from Istlerová’s personal archive alongside discussions detailing her creative process. Offering a vivid portrayal of an era where design was a tangible, labor-intensive endeavor carried out in close collaboration with typesetters and printers, the publication unveils the Czech design narrative of the twentieth century to English-speaking readers, highlighting Istlerová’s lasting impact and central role.

Design by Anežka Minaříková and Marek Nedelka

Cover of A New Program for Graphic Design

Inventory Press

A New Program for Graphic Design

David Reinfurt

A New Program for Graphic Design is the first communication-design textbook expressly of and for the 21st century. Three courses—Typography, Gestalt and Interface—provide the foundation of this book.

Through a series of in-depth historical case studies (from Benjamin Franklin to the Macintosh computer) and assignments that progressively build in complexity, A New Program for Graphic Design serves as a practical guide both for designers and for undergraduate students coming from a range of other disciplines.

Synthesizing the pragmatic with the experimental, and drawing on the work of Max Bill, Beatrice Warde, Muriel Cooper and Stewart Brand (among many others), it builds upon mid-to-late 20th-century pedagogical models to convey contemporary design principles in an understandable form for students of all levels—treating graphic design as a liberal art that informs the dissemination of knowledge across all disciplines. For those seeking to understand and shape our increasingly networked world of information, this guide to visual literacy is an indispensable tool.

David Reinfurt (born 1971), a graphic designer, writer and educator, reestablished the Typography Studio at Princeton University and introduced the study of graphic design. Previously, he held positions at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University School of Art. As a cofounder of O-R-G inc. (2000), Dexter Sinister (2006) and the Serving Library (2012), Reinfurt has been involved in several studios that have reimagined graphic design, publishing and archiving in the 21st century. He was the lead designer for the New York City MTA Metrocard vending machine interface, still in use today. His work is included in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. He is the co-author of Muriel Cooper (MIT Press, 2017), a book about the pioneering designer.

Cover of Cyberfeminism Index

Inventory Press

Cyberfeminism Index

Mindy Seu

Hackers, scholars, artists and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology.

When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.

The creation and use of the Cyberfeminism Index is a social and political act. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it and pushes it into plain sight. Edited by designer, professor and researcher Mindy Seu (who began the project during a fellowship at the Harvard Law School's Berkman Klein Center for the Internet & Society, later presenting it at the New Museum), it includes more than 1,000 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art.

Contributors include: Skawennati, Charlotte Web, Melanie Hoff, Constanza Pina, Melissa Aguilar, Cornelia Sollfrank, Paola Ricaurte Quijano, Mary Maggic, Neema Githere, Helen Hester, Annie Goh, VNS Matrix, Klau Chinche / Klau Kinky and Irina Aristarkhova.

Cover of Toffe. édition générale : système de production d'actions graphiques

Unvisible éditions

Toffe. édition générale : système de production d'actions graphiques

Toffe (Christophe Jacquet)

toffe. édition générale
publication issue de reproduction générale,
système de production d'actions graphiques
développé en trois temps :
projection générale
dispositif multi-écran, pour la chaufferie
galerie de l'école supérieure des arts décoratifs de strasbourg
du 14 février au 23 mars 2003
présentation, édition générale
école nationale supérieure des beaux-arts d'alger
du 24 mai 2003
exposition, occurrence récente
diffusion, édition générale
galerie madé, paris
du 12 mai au 5 juin 2003

Cover of Prepositions

Montez Press

Prepositions

Aaron Lehman, Timmy Simonds

Prepositions enacts a distinction between what language says and what it does. A catalogue of exercises, interviews, essays and creative explorations, this workbook-compendium invites the reader to investigate how we practise empathy, understanding, and contact, by learning and teaching all at once. Building on the archive of Montez Press Radio show Tongue and Cheek, and featuring work from a stellar cast of previous participants in the broader project, Prepositions asks us what active and embodied participation really means, not just in teaching, but across a whole life.

This book will change your body—and your mind. Prepositions is a set of bite-sized propositions for being and thinking otherwise. Put it under your tongue and see what happens.
— Leah Pires

This compendium of witty exercises, moving personal reflections, curious propositions, and carefully selected graphics invites readers to explore what it means to inhabit a book. It is the product of many hands, a polyphonic choir, filled with immense care and a deep sense of friendship. As one feels its weight, moves around it, folds its pages, breaths with it, or reads it out aloud, one begins to wonder: what does the book need to be completed?
Prepositions—inscribed in the tradition of works as disparate as Robert Filliou’s Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts and CAConrad’s poetry rituals—is an exercise of radical pedagogy and readership. Everyone who enters this book becomes part of its contents.
— Alice Centamore

Cover of The German Library Pyongyang

Sternberg Press

The German Library Pyongyang

Sara Sejin Chang

From December 11, 2015, until April 10, 2016, the German Library in Guangzhou, China, became The German Library Pyongyang, a reimagining of an initiative of the Goethe-Institut that originally operated in North Korea between 2004 and 2009. This temporary intervention by Sara van der Heide is an imaginary transformation of the current geography of the German Library in Guangzhou. Van der Heide’s project is a contemporary version of the Goethe-Institut’s original library initiative in North Korea, devised as a vessel to discuss national cultural policy in a post-Cold War and postcolonial era that looks critically toward the parallel histories of Germany and the two Koreas. The German Library Pyongyang offers a space for critical questions, but it also functions as a context for transcending thinking that is prescribed by the lines of the nation-state, language, and geography. The several artistic, linguistic, and graphic interventions in the library merge with the continuing activities of the German learning center in Guangzhou, and all institutional printed matter in Chinese is replaced by Korean.

This publication brings together the four original exhibition booklets in German, Korean, English, and Chinese. An additional reader is included with critical reflections as well as documentation of the exhibition and the organized seminar.

Design by Dongyoung Lee
English/German/Korean/Chinese

Cover of Beau Geste Press

Bom Dia Books

Beau Geste Press

Alice Motard

The “catalogue dé-raisonné” of all the printed matter produced by the independent publishing house Beau Geste Press, that federated visual poets, neo-Dadaists and international artists affiliated with the Fluxus movement from 1971 to 1976.

The independent publishing house Beau Geste Press (BGP) was founded in 1971 by the Mexican artists' couple Martha Hellion and Felipe Ehrenberg. Together with their two children, they moved into a farmhouse in Devon, in the English countryside, where, joined by a group of friends including the artist and art historian David Mayor, the graphic designer Chris Welch and his partner Madeleine Gallard, they formed 'a community of duplicators, printers, and artisans'.

Beau Geste Press was active until 1976, printing publications by visual poets, neo-Dadaists and international artists affiliated with the Fluxus movement. Specialising in limited-edition artists' books, it published the work of its own members, but also that of many of their colleagues worldwide. In the spirit of cottage industry, Beau Geste Press adapted its methods and scale of production to its needs, keeping all stages, from design and printing to distribution, under the same—bucolic—roof.

Although it operated from the periphery of the main artistic centres of its time, Beau Geste Press was undoubtedly one of the most productive and influential publishing ventures of its generation.

Published by the CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux in collaboration with Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite, this reference book surveys the history of the independent publishing house Beau Geste Press (BGP) through the publications of its founding members Felipe Ehrenberg, Martha Hellion, David Mayor and Chris Welch, and of the numerous visitors to its rural outpost from 1971 to 1976. A “catalogue dé-raisonné” of all the printed matter produced by BGP, it is complemented by critical essays and first-hand texts that explore the working methods (economy and autonomy of production, distribution of books via post) and document the international influence of this short-lived “community of duplicators, printers, and artisans”.

Essays by Karen Di Franco, Zanna Gilbert, Polly Gregson, Carmen Juliá, Alice Motard, Mila Waldeck ; original texts by Allen Fisher, Mike Leggett, Clive Phillpot, Cecilia Vicuña.

Editions by Claudio Bertoni, Ulises Carrión, Helen Chadwick, GJ de Rook, Felipe Ehrenberg, Matthias Ehrenberg, Yaël Ehrenberg, Allen Fisher, Ken Friedman, Mick Gibbs, Klaus Groh, Kristján Guðmundsson, Mary Harding, Woody Haut, Jan Hendrix, Jarosław Kozłowski, Myra Landau, Michael Leggett, Rafael López, Raúl Marroquin, Pepe Maya, David Mayor, Anthony McCall, Victor Musgrave, Opal L. Nations, Colin Naylor, Michael Nyman, Ryo & Hiroko Koike, Takako Saito, Carolee Schneemann, Sitting Dog & Co, Endre Tót, Yukio Tsuchiya, Ben Vautier, Cecilia Vicuña, Chris Welch, Hideki Yoshida...

Each book is accompanied by five unprecedented bookmarks.