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In the first half of the 20th century, when architecture and literature dreamed of transparency, glass was the material these dreams were made of. However, the historiography of both fields usually focuses on a few canonical works by male authors to tell the story of this shared fascination. Departing from this imbalance, this essay takes the opportunity to explore the glass culture of modernity through the lens of female projects whose stories often take place simultaneously on different continents. While the former silent film actor Evelyn Word Leigh builds a glass house for herself in Nyack, New York, artists and writers based in Europe – like Claude Cahun, Anaïs Nin, and Hilda 'H.D.' Doolittle – flesh out imaginary glass domes as construction sites of artistic subjectivities. Whether homes or domes, these creative women used glass environments to question and renegotiate their assigned places in Western societies, challenging the boundaries of female agency.
Siegfried Kracauer’s texts are a widely investigated field of sociology and media studies. It is less well known that Kracauer was a graduate architect, practised during World War I and was awarded his PhD after writing a thesis in 1915 in the field of architectural history. After the war, Kracauer published numerous critiques with a special focus on the architectural developments of the time. They document an interest in architectural phenomena ranging from a reflection on his own experiences to a general perspective on the subjectivity of the modern architect, as well as more universal social phenomena.
In essence, this essay claims that the lack of ornamentation in modern architecture can be grasped as an ornamental concept of the new social order of capitalism.
Creativity is astir: reborn, re-conjured, re-branded, resurgent. The old myths of creation and creators – the hallowed labors and privileged agencies of demiurges and prime movers, of Biblical worldmakers and self-fashioning artist-geniuses – are back underway, producing effects, circulating appeals. Much as the Catholic Church dresses the old creationism in the new gowns of 'intelligent design' , the Creative Industries sound the clarion call to the Cultural Entrepreneurs. In the hype of the ‘creative class’ and the high flights of the digital bohemians, the renaissance of ‘the creatives’ is visibly enacted. The essays collected in this book analyze this complex resurgence of creation myths and formulate a contemporary critique of creativity.
The Video Vortex Reader is the first collection of critical texts to deal with the rapidly emerging world of online video – from its explosive rise in 2005 with YouTube, to its future as a significant form of personal media. After years of talk about digital convergence and crossmedia platforms we now witness the merger of the Internet and television at a pace no-one predicted. These contributions from scholars, artists and curators evolved from the first two Video Vortex conferences in Brussels and Amsterdam in 2007 which focused on responses to YouTube, and address key issues around independent production and distribution of online video content. What does this new distribution platform mean for artists and activists? What are the alternatives?
By most Western Europeans Cyprus is probably perceived as a tourist resort rather than a technologically highly developed country. Interested German visitors are informed by the travel brochure published by the Republic of Cyprus' tourist office that "in the villages old customs and traditions still exist" (Zypern. 9000 Jahre Geschichte und Kultur 1997, 11). Pictures of places of antiquity, churches, monasteries, fortresses, archaic villages and of people engaged in agricultural work and crafts convey the image of a traditional Mediterranean society. However, the Republic of Cyprus is a rapidly modernising country. It has developed recently "from a poor agrarian into a high-income service economy" (Christodoulou 1995, 11) and "radical transformation processes" are observed (cf. ibid., 18). The forthcoming accession to the European Union additionally accelerates the pace of these transformation processes. Due to its position on the extreme rim of Europe in the Eastern Mediterranean region at the crossroads of three continents, the island is perceived both as marginal (cf. Pace 1999) and as a link between Europe and the Asian and African continents (cf. Kasoulides 1999). Cyprus is conceptualised for the future as a centre and intersection: as regional hub of the modern capital market, as communications and trade centre in the Eastern Mediterranean, as "telecommunications hub for the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East region", as "international services centre". The Republic of Cyprus has a highly developed telecommunications infrastructure, which is the basic prerequisite for the conversion into such a centre and is one of the most important factors for the economic competitiveness of Cyprus. The global nature of communication platforms today, especially the Internet, is regarded as the key to the integration of Cyprus into the world economy. By implementing information technologies and promoting necessary expertise, economic progress and modernisation of the country as well as its global competitiveness is assumed to be guaranteed. Investments in the information technology infrastructure are regarded as essential for the development of Cyprus, fostering the implementation of the information society. This aim and the necessary implementation measures feature increasingly on the agendas of scientific and economic conferences and symposia in Cyprus.