Sonic Wilderness Wild Vinyl Records

Sonic Wilderness accesses the critical value of unusual vinyl records that concern our relationship with nature. These wild records reveal unconventional perspectives on the entanglements of human life with animals, gardens and plants. They form a lyrical unconscious exposing the conventions and ideologies of popular music, their warped perspectives and acoustic radioactivity comprising a resistance to enduring social, psychological and political conditions.

Diagrams: Tropes, Tools and Abstract Machines examines the pervasive roles of diagrams as analytical, generative, narrative and critical devices manifest in design practices by architects and non-architects that draw on thick cultural milieus and that operate at personal, architectural and urban scales. What are potentials of diagrams beyond representation, as situated cultural practices, corporeal engagement and choreographic script, as instruments of speculation and invention, as manifestation of ideas and incrimination of ideology, as abstract machines in scenarios of allopoïesis, autopoïesis and cosmopoïesis?

What futures are we designing by default? What collaborations are we complicit in? How can we incorporate an active civic engagement into our professional and creative practice – into our everyday lives? Esther Anatolitis presents a dynamic snapshot of her own practice from a distinctly Australian context but with a global perspective, offering tools and techniques for integrating civic engagement into daily practice. Taking leaps across spatial, creative, professional and political work, this is an unsettling text.

Dirty theory follows the dirt of material and conceptual relations from the midst of complex milieus. It messes with mixed disciplines, showing up in ethnography, in geography, in philosophy, and discovering a suitable habitat in architecture, design and the creative arts. Dirty theory disrupts a comfortable status quo, including our everyday modes of inhabitation and our habits of thinking. This small book argues that we must work with the dirt to develop an ethics of care and mainte- nance for our precarious environment-worlds.

If architecture is a design-centred discipline which proceeds by suggesting propositional constructions then, Zambelli argues, archaeology also designs, but in the form of reconstructions. He proposes that whilst practitioners of architecture and archaeology generally purport to practice in future-facing and past-facing-modes respectively, elements of these disciplines also resemble one another. Zambelli speculates that whilst some of these resemblances have remained explicit and revealed, others have become occluded with time, but that all such resemblances share homological similarities of interconnected disciplinary origin making available in the scandalous space between them a logically underpinned, visually analogical form of practice.

Set amidst the experimental ecology of practices that supports feminist thinking and doing in architecture, this small book outlines an instruction guide that presents six provocative steps toward the invention of productive concept-tools. It invites readers to explore creative and messy methodologies that combine an aesthetics with a practical ethics. Frichot encourages us to think and do architecture in ways that challenge a dogmatic status quo that celebrates major figures, while overlooking the care and labour of minor figures and practices.

This book explores the new performativity in art theory and practice, examining ways of rethinking interpretive processes in visual culture. Since the 1960s, visual art practices - from body art to minimalism - have taken contemporary art outside the museum and gallery; by embracing theatricality and performance and exploding the boundaries set by traditional art criticism. The contributors argue that interpretation needs to be recognised as much more dynamic and contingent. Offering its own performance script, and embracing both canonical fine artists such as Manet, De Kooning and Jasper Johns, and performance artists such as Vito Acconci and Gunter Brus, this book offers radical re-readings of art works and points confidently towards new models for understanding art.

***Information is forthcoming from the Hayward Gallery

Literary Criticism. African American and Caribbean Studies. Kamau Brathwiate's CONVERSATIONS WITH NATHANIEL MACKEY is based on the transcript of his discussion with Nathaniel Mackey at Poet's House in New York City. Brathwaite expansively elaborates on Mackey's (and audience member's) knowledgeable inquiries; his answers are layered with subsequent ruminations arising from his lifelong engagement with world literature and expressive cultures. A multiphasic drift, CONVERSATIONS WITH NATHANIEL MACKEY combines elements of biography and autobiography with poetic discourse on Caribbean literary history and negative effects of colonial domination. Brathwaite splices dialog with poetry, criticism, and instrictive imaginary voices in his now distinct and characteristic Sycorax 'video style' format. Both Brathwaite and Mackey have several titles carried by SPD. Mackey's ERODING WITNESS is newly available, along with WHATSAID SERIF (City Lights) and DJOBOT BAGHOSTUS'S RUN (Sun & Moon) Brathwaite's BLAC