Amerika

Noted German architect photographed American cityscapes in the 20s. New York's Times Square, Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn Bridge, Trinity Church, many other sites. Chicago's Michigan Avenue, Tribune Building, Federal Reserve Bank. Also buildings and locales in Buffalo and Detroit. Striking, dramatic views by trained observer. Newly translated introduction and captions. Reprinted from rare original edition.

The deadliest parasite in the world's history threatens to make the human race extinct.

From the beginning of the American Occupation in 1945 to the post-bubble period of the early 1990s, popular music provided Japanese listeners with a much-needed release, channeling their desires, fears, and frustrations into a pleasurable and fluid art. Pop music allowed Japanese artists and audiences to assume various identities, reflecting the country's uncomfortable position under American hegemony and its uncertainty within ever-shifting geopolitical realities. In the first English-language study of this phenomenon, Michael K. Bourdaghs considers genres as diverse as boogie-woogie, rockabilly, enka, 1960s rock and roll, 1970s new music, folk, and techno-pop. Reading these forms and their cultural import through music, literary, and cultural theory, he introduces readers to the sensual moods and meanings of modern Japan. As he unpacks the complexities of popular music production and consumption, Bourdaghs interprets Japan as it worked through (or tried to forget) its imperial past. These efforts grew even murkier as Japanese pop migrated to the nation's former colonies. In postwar Japan, pop music both accelerated and protested the commodification of everyday life, challenged and reproduced gender hierarchies, and insisted on the uniqueness of a national culture, even as it participated in an increasingly integrated global marketplace. Each chapter in Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon examines a single genre through a particular theoretical lens: the relation of music to liberation; the influence of cultural mapping on musical appreciation; the role of translation in transmitting musical genres around the globe; the place of noise in music and its relation to historical change; the tenuous connection between ideologies of authenticity and imitation; the link between commercial success and artistic integrity; and the function of melodrama. Bourdaghs concludes with a look at recent Japanese pop music culture.

A series of intellectual provocations that investigate the creative process across the human-nonhuman spectrum. Is it possible that creative artists have more in common with machines than we might think? Employing an improvisational call-and-response writing performance coauthored with an AI text generator, remix artist and scholar Mark Amerika, interrogates how his own "psychic automatism" is itself a nonhuman function strategically designed to reveal the poetic attributes of programmable worlds still unimagined. Through a series of intellectual provocations that investigate the creative process across the human-nonhuman spectrum, Amerika critically reflects on whether creativity itself is, at root, a nonhuman information behavior that emerges from an onto-operational presence experiencing an otherworldly aesthetic sensibility. Amerika engages with his cyberpunk imagination to simultaneously embrace and problematize human-machine collaborations. He draws from jazz performance, beatnik poetry, Buddhist thought, and surrealism to suggest that his own artificial creative intelligence operates as a finely tuned remix engine continuously training itself to build on the history of avant-garde art and writing. Playful and provocative, My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence flips the script on contemporary AI research that attempts to build systems that perform more like humans, instead self-reflexively making a very nontraditional argument about AI's impact on society and its relationship to the cosmos.

Detectives Canby and Underwood hunt down a serial killer in this “heady mix of history, sizzle, punch, and danger” (Steve Berry, New York Times best-selling author of The Patriot Threat). Disgraced former detective and Civil War veteran Thomas Canby partners with Atlanta’s first African American police officer, Cyrus Underwood, to track down a serial murderer who seems to be targeting the city’s wealthiest black entrepreneurs. Even after the killer is revealed, his astonishing ability to elude capture raises the question: is there such a thing as supernatural evil at loose in the world? Matthew Guinn draws readers into a vortex of tense, atmospheric storytelling, confronting the fears of both old South and new, compelling the reader through a breathless, disturbing finale. A Los Angeles Public Library Best Book of the Year and a Finalist for the Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize.

A model of contemporary remixing and a groundbreaking reflection on digital media

Reproduction of the original: Carl Scharnhorst, Abenteuer eines deutschen Knaben in Amerika by Armand

A collection of writings by a digital artist that blends personal memoir, net art theory, fictional narrative, satirical reportage, scholarly history, and network-infused language art. It tells the early history of a net art world "gone wild," while constructing a parallel poetics of net art that complements the author's own artistic practice