Software For Artists Book Untethering The Web

A compendium of creative texts examining our complex and slippery relationships with new technologies What will the internet of the future make possible? Untethering the Webexplores the technologies, strategies and anxieties that are coalescing in 2022 to shape a new digital paradigm. As naturalized citizens of today's always-online world and as survivors of a multiyear pandemic, the need to reform our digital tools and approaches is more pressing than ever before. Evolved models for virtual convening, collective organizing and digital ownership are making this possible, and a reckoning for the platformed web and its monolithic tech giants is beginning to feel imminent--but how will it all unfold, and what new pitfalls will emerge? In conjunction with Pioneer Works' seventh Software for Artists Day, in October 2022, creators, technologists and members of our community share their visions for a flourishing digital multiverse, and how they imagine it manifesting over time.

Perhaps best known for the iconic desert monolith "Cadillac Ranch" and stunts like "Media Burn," the radical architecture and media art group Ant Farm created an abundance of works across disciplines--including video, publications, built environments and performances. Throughout their career (1968-79), Ant Farm conceived a series of time capsules that focused not on the eternal but rather on the fleeting aspects of postwar American culture: consumer goods, media archives and tchotchkes. For various reasons, all of Ant Farm's time capsules failed to function, that is, to be opened at the allotted future time and the intact contents examined. Ant Farm's successor group, LST, has taken up the project with their contemporary work "Ant Farm Media Van v.08 [Time Capsule]" (2008). This work not only functions but updates the original's line of questioning, exploring notions of the time capsule in the digital age. The Present Is the Form of All Life represents the first comprehensive documentation of these overlooked ephemeral works. Including many previously unpublished images, this publication also boasts essays by Constance M. Lewallen, Steve Seid and Gabriella Giannachi, and a discussion between curator Rudolf Frieling and LST.

Offers an inside look into the process of successfully developing thoughtful, innovative digital media. Using websites as case studies, each chapter introduces a different style of web project--from formalist play to social activisim to data visualization--and then includes the artists or entrepreneurs' reflections on the particular challenges and outcomes of developing that web project. Combining practical skills for web authoring with critical perspectives on the web, this book is ideal for courses in new media design, art, communication, critical studies, media and technology, or popular digital/internet culture.

Artists and organizers explore experimental learning initiatives fostering solidarity and dialogue With a focus on labor organizing within the arts and tech industries, Software for Artists Book 3 explores the potential of creating alternative networks of education and challenging the material conditions that prevent us from enacting new realities with dignity and security. When we defy existing models for institution-building, what possibilities for gathering can materialize and what kinds of learning and unlearning can we practice together? Released alongside Pioneer Works' eighth Software for Artists Day and the School for Poetic Computation's 10th anniversary in November 2023, the book convenes educators, labor organizers and artists exploring experimental learning initiatives to be in solidarity and conversation with each other. Contributors include: Kandis Williams, manuel arturo abreu, Rahel Aima, Kameela Janan Rasheed, American Artist, Shani Peters, Neema Githere, Ayana Cotton, Lynn Yunn, Yatu Espinosa, Norm O'Hagan, Sam Lavigne, Or Zublasky and Dana Kopel.

The debut poetry collection from Arab-American poet Kareem Rahma-formerly of VICE and The New York Times-shows us the future in haiku. What awaits us is not the future we had hoped for or what we were promised, but the terrible consequences of we've done to ourselves. Managing to be both a hopeful prayer for change and direct warning to the reader, New York-based author Kareem Rahma makes masterful work of the haiku form to build a very possible future world dominated by corporations, an earth depleted of natural resources and humans turned into zombies, glued to their screens. Elegant but caustically humorous, even in the darkness, Rahma remains hopeful that we can still keep the promises we made in the past. Paired with Jean-Marc Côté's 19th-century illustrations of an imagined year 2000, We Were Promised Flying Cars is not just for poetry and science fiction fans, but anyone interested in what tomorrow might look like.

"A text for teachers who want to reconsider hierarchy in their classrooms and for those curious about education as a context for creativity and collaboration. Drawn from Ball’s experiences teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Notes on my Dunce Cap includes advisory material regarding the role of the teacher, the creation of syllabi, and the manner in which groups may evaluate the work of an individual without harm. Alongside these notes that reflect on his teaching practice, sample SAIC syllabi create contexts in which students develop habits that become the basis for a writing practice. Reading lists cover topics such as child protagonists, the dérive, and fairytales, and classroom procedures encourage students to lucid dream, take long walks without cellphones, and participate in the Franz Kafka Fancier Society of Chicago. Ball describes dynamic ways to ask questions, facilitate discussion, organize exhibitions, and incorporate theatrical elements to draw the most out of students and teachers alike. Ball shakes up classroom habits and breathes new life into reading, questioning, teaching, and learning."--

The Anhoek School is a nomadic pedagogical experiment that analyzes educational structures and investigates alternatives to traditional North American methods for learning. Under the auspices of the school, the Anhoek Record Examination-an obscene form of the Graduate Record Examination-aims to gum the data production and collection of standardized testing as well as question the ideological underpinnings behind it. Compiled by Beatriz E. Balanta and Mary Walling Blackburn, Quaestiones Perversas gathers together unruly record examinations (Beautiful Economy; The Reproductive; F|Slash|F), a traumatizing listening lab (Doggy... Doggy), and a physical fitness test that maims more than it measures. The answer keys are an intervention/irruption of poesis in the field of systematicity or the lust for order: the position of the father and the controlling language of the state. The book undoes the benign voice of the test, awakens the reader to the history of violence embedded in the form, and activates it as a site for aesthetic expression.

Simultaneous Soloists is a compilation emerging from British installation artist Anthony McCall's (born 1946) Solid Light Works exhibition at Pioneer Works (2018), based on the accompanying performance series Four Simultaneous Soloists organized by composer David Grubbs. Referring to four soloist performers witnessed individually or as an ensemble alongside McCall's sculptural volumes of light, the editors recount these events through a dialogue discussing a decade of working together in intersecting practices. Also included in the book are writings by art historians Branden W. Joseph and Swagato Chakravorty, reproductions from McCall's archival materials and drawings paired with photo documentation of the exhibition, and interviews with the 16 participating musicians. As told to Grubbs, these interviews invite an expanded audience to consider the in-situ performances by Susan Alcorn, MV Carbon, Maria Chávez, Che Chen, Jules Gimbrone, Sarah Hennies, Eli Keszler, Okkyung Lee, Miya Masaoka, Christopher McIntyre, Tomeka Reid, Ben Vida, Yoshi Wada, Nate Wooley and C. Spencer Yeh.