Revamping the concepts of Universal Design and Design for All for a more participatory, community-based design practice

Can design cater to a diverse society? How does it respond to the disparate demands of the people using it? Since the 1980s, debates about inclusion and participation have been an important part of the design discourse. Today's design approaches expand on the concepts of Universal Design and Design for All, reinterpreting them in a community-based, participatory design practice. Design for All? Inclusive Design Today gathers together a variety of recent projects, initiatives and concepts drawn from different design disciplines, and sets up a dialogue with an international cohort of teachers and researchers. Dealing with a range of different voices in inclusive design strategies, from feminism to postcolonialism, this book is part of a paradigm shift that radically questions society's normative values.

Jonas Mekas' diaries have an aching honesty, puckish humor and quiet nobility of character. Many readers curious about the early years of this seminal avant-garde filmmaker will discover here a much more universal story: that of the emigrant who can never go back, and whose solitariness in the New World is emblematic of the human condition. -Phillip Lopate

I was enormously moved by it. -Allen Ginsberg

Legendary filmmaker Jonas Mekas actually came to filmmaking relatively late in life, and his path to New York was a difficult one. In 1944, Mekas and his younger brother Adolfas had to flee Lithuania. They were interned for eight months in a labor camp in Elmshorn. Even after the war ended, Mekas was prevented from returning to his native Lithuania by the Soviet occupation. Classed as a displaced person, he lived in DP camps in Wiesbaden and Kassel for years. It was only at the end of 1949 that Jonas and Aldolfas Mekas finally found their way to New York City.

A new edition of Mekas' acclaimed memoir, first published by Black Thistle Press in 1991, I Had Nowhere to Go tells the story of the artist's survival in the camps and his first years as a young Lithuanian immigrant in New York City. Mekas' memoir--the inspiration for a 2016 biopic by Douglas Gordon--tells the story of how an individual life can move through the larger 20th-century narratives of war and exile and tentatively put down new roots. In the words of Phillip Lopate, This is a lyrical, essential spiritual anthropology.

Jonas Mekas (born 1922) lives and works in New York. Filmmaker, writer and poet, he is a cofounder of Anthology Film Archives, one of the world's largest and most important repositories of avant-garde film. An influential figure in New American Cinema and New York underground culture, he worked with Andy Warhol, George Maciunas, John Lennon and many others. Mekas' work has been exhibited in museums and festivals worldwide.

The subconscious as catalyst for Surrealist and avant-garde practices across decades and continents

Marking the 100th anniversary of the First Manifesto of Surrealism and the founding of the Bureau of Surrealist Research in Paris in 1924, Archive of Dreams is dedicated to the surrealist movement as well as the networks it engendered and the artistic stimuli it provided in the 20th century. The idea was for the Bureau to collect dream testimonies in whatever form, not only to preserve and analyse them but also to give active expression to them in artistic processes. The publication shows how the practices of the avant-gardes blurred the boundaries between dream and reality, between the traditional, passive notion of the archive and the idea of active, innovative artistic experiment--and thus ultimately also between the past, the present and possible futures. Works and documents made before, during and after World War II shed light on the methods of international artists and the global network they were involved in. They are complemented by diverse reflections on global protest movements and the traumas of war, thus connecting to everyday experiences in a Europe beset by warfare.

The figurehead of New German Cinema meditates on the next leap forward in visual aesthetics

In The Dragonfly's Eye, author and filmmaker Alexander Kluge (born 1932) tests out the cooperative capacities of the Stable Diffusion model, which uses AI to process images. As a filmmaker, he has years of experience dealing with the camera and its ways of seeing. As a result, he is particularly curious about the different images that AI can generate. Here, Kluge reflects on the idiosyncrasies of these new types of images, in which chance factors and errors create subjective forms, resulting in open images that are hard to place. He establishes rules for using the virtual camera and thus contributes to a debate on how AI should be handled. In a series of stories combining images and text--ranging from cases of phantom pregnancy in East Germany to the mercenary Yevgeny Prigozhin--he examines how the virtual camera uncovers a new lens within which stories can be framed.

How disrupted global infrastructures bring the interdependence of our world into harsh relief

From the war in Ukraine disrupting wheat exports to Covid and wood shortages affecting construction sites worldwide, this volume questions the cultural, political and spatial nature of infrastructure, investigating its tangible components alongside the faults that appear when those systems fail.

The second publication by Goldsmiths' Centre for Research Architecture explores the role of media in spatial politics and social justice movements

Since its founding in 2005, the Centre for Research Architecture (CRA) at Goldsmiths, University of London, has brought together a diverse group of architects, artists, urbanists, geographers, lawyers, scientists, journalists and activists to develop research methodologies and investigative techniques to address contemporary spatial politics. Militant Media, the second volume in CRA's series of publications, engages with the ethical and political implications of media and technology in relation to contemporary conflicts. In doing so, it also reflects upon the changing role of media in justice and human rights campaigns, examining a range of topics from the use of images in campaigning to the investigative potential of digital materials. In addition to critical and theoretical reflections, Militant Media offers a wide range of practice-based projects that have developed oppositional modes of representation and created new aesthetic strategies and tools.

Unmasking the paintings of the German theater director and prodigy of Bertolt Brecht

As a student of Bertolt Brecht, Achim Freyer (born 1934) has gained an international reputation for his theater productions. However, he has always considered himself a painter. This monograph is the first to focus on his complete artistic oeuvre, placing his abstract visual works in the context of his background in performing arts.

One timber prefab building turns into a litany of conversations, research and essays on responsible yet habitable environments

The Proto-Habitat is both a theoretical and practical (built) experiment to explore ways of dwelling that are closer to contemporary lifestyles, and to broaden collective representation to include environmentally responsible modes of existence and habitability.

Photographers from Anna Atkins to Jochen Lempert illustrate our fascination with plants in the age of technology

From scientific discoveries to animist beliefs, plants are an inexhaustible source of stories that reveal our most intimate desires and fears. Photography is the primary witness to his phenomenon. Science/Fiction questions human projections and representations of the vegetal world, bringing to light the subjectivity, intelligence and expressive abilities of plants. The publication traces a visual history of plants, linking art, technology and science from the mid-19th century to the present day through two conceptual frameworks: scientific and fictional. Bringing together more than 30 artists across different periods of time and parts of the world, it employs the logic of the science fiction novel, taking us from a stable, identifiable world and gradually plunging us into uncertain landscapes.
Artists include: Anna Atkins, Karl Blossfeldt, Elspeth Diederix, Sam Falls, Joan Fontcuberta, Stephen Gill, Jochen Lempert, Angelica Mesiti, Agnieszka Polska, Anais Tondeur.

Examining politics of cultural appropriation through an art movement born from Belgium's exploitation of the Congo

Style Congo reflected a widespread fascination with exotic art and architecture while downplaying King Leopold II's exploitation of the region. Based on historical materials and contemporary interventions, this book chronicles the representation of the Congo in Belgian expositions between 1885 and 1958.

Long out of print, Berlin on a Dog's Night now features a new layout and over 30 additional photographs

Between 1977 and 1990, Gundula Schulze Eldowy (born 1954) roamed East Berlin with her camera. Her powerful, direct images capture the long postwar period in the socialist part of the city: the deep scars left behind by conflict and the old Berlin milieu with its one-of-a-kind characters.

Daijing's haunting compositions featuring voices and electronic instruments combine opera and noise music

Chinese artist, composer and performer Pan Daijing (born 1991) devises her exhibitions as Gesamtkunstwerk, total works of art in which architectural intervention, light, sound and movement interact. Mute is the first comprehensive presentation of Pan's work in the dynamic zone straddling music and visual art.

Beyond the Bauhaus school: how international pedagogy influenced design as a career

This book explores the emergence of the artist and designer profession after the First World War and the further development of this career in close proximity to capitalist industrial production. The book features articles on teaching models pioneered by schools like the Design Laboratory, New York (the first comprehensive school of modernist design in the United States that was open to general enrollment); the School of Arts and Crafts (Skola umeleckých remesiel), Bratislava; the Ulm School of Design (Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm), Germany; and Industrial Design College (Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial), Rio de Janeiro.
These texts are accompanied by essays and conversations on design pedagogy's politics, practices and self-understanding. This book is part of the Schools of Departure series, jointly published with a digital atlas that aggregates research on the global interconnections of Bauhaus pedagogy with reform projects in art and design education in the 20th century.

Avant-garde designs from America's First Couturier

British-American designer Charles James (1906-78), America's First Couturier, is famed for the extraordinarily elegant evening gowns he created in the 1930s through the 1950s for society ladies on both sides of the Atlantic. From the beginning of his career, James also designed revolutionary unisex styles. The famous eiderdown evening jacket, designed in 1937 for women, was revived as a cult unisex design object in 1970s New York. The eiderdown jacket and James' other unisex designs share with his ball gowns a sculptural, architectural presence and a rigorously cerebral design process grounded in science and mathematics. James is regarded as a visionary thinker in the world of fashion, introducing lasting innovations in both technique and methodology.

Charles James: The Couture Secrets of Shape goes beyond the evening gowns, focusing on some of James' unisex designs and his life in the artist community at the Chelsea Hotel, where he lived from 1964 until his death in 1978. He remained restlessly creative in this period, his rooms at the Chelsea serving as a studio, workshop, and archive. In 1973 he wrote The Charles James Approach to Structural Design; this allowed a glimpse into his thinking at that time and is included in this publication in facsimile. Edited by Homer Layne, James' last assistant, and Professor Dorothea Mink, with a preface by fashion designer Rick Owens, this volume reveals a new facet of James' groundbreaking body of work.

An inspiring guide to the history and legacy of Lloyd Kahn's 1970s countercultural self-build manuals

DIY architect, publisher and pioneer of the self-build movement, Lloyd Kahn (born 1935) is a legend of the American counterculture. Influenced by Buckminster Fuller, in 1968 Kahn started building geodesic domes, and was an editor for Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog. In 1970 Kahn published his first book, Domebook One, followed the next year by the bestselling Domebook 2. In 1971, he bought land in Bolinas and built a geodesic dome (later to be featured in Life magazine), but he soon pursued other ways to build, resulting in the classic 1973 book Shelter. Kahn published numerous self-build books over the ensuing decades, most recently Tiny Homes on the Move (2014).
Shelter Cookbook is an exploration of Kahn's now iconic publications by the Swiss architect Leopold Banchini (born 1981) --whose practice makes emphatic use of DIY architecture culture--and the German author and curator Lukas Feireiss (born 1977). It relates Kahn's building philosophy to contemporary practices, recording Banchini and Feireiss' personal search for unexpected relationships between historical documents and contemporary architectural projects. The large-format volume includes interviews, photospreads and archival material on self-building, and also includes a mycological investigation. Shelter Cookbook will inspire architects, designers, artists and counterculture cognoscenti alike with its positive vision of the possibilities and legacy of the self-build movement.

On the iconic filmmaker's final phase as an acclaimed creator of genre-bending installations

Agnès Varda (1928-2019) explored various mediums throughout her lifetime, moving from photography to film to multimedia installation. Despite Varda's highly revered status globally, her third creative period is not widely known. The Third Life of Agnès Varda, published in conjunction with an exhibition at Silent Green in Berlin, pays homage to this underexplored period, which began in 2003 at the Venice Biennale. After this first installation, Patatutopia, Varda dove head first into the medium, producing genre-bending installations throughout her final years that engaged her poetic, abstract realism and her sensitive observations of sociopolitical issues.
The Third Life of Agnès Varda features ample installation shots and texts by the artist, in addition to film stills, personal photographs and an interview between Varda and curator Philippe Pigue.

A massive, long-overdue retrospective on the multimedia image critique of Hito Steyerl, influential artist and author of Duty-Free Art and The Wretched of the Screen

Over the past 30 years, through video and installation, the immensely influential German artist and writer Hito Steyerl (born 1966) has been tracking the ways that images have mutated--from the analogue image and its manifold possibilities for montage to the fluidity of the split digital image--and the implications these mutations have had for the representation of wars, genocides and the flow of capital. We are no longer dealing with the virtual but with a confusing and possibly alien concreteness that we are only beginning to understand, writes Brian Kuan Wood of the digital visual worlds that the artist presents.

At nearly 500 pages, this book--the first substantial overview on Steyerl--looks at multimedia installations and film projects of the past ten years, as well as earlier works, all of which are united by the artist's unflagging interrogation of the politics of the image.

Taken across Europe and Africa, Akinbiyi's images of everyday city life muse on the sociopolitical labyrinths of urban society

Whether in Bamako, Berlin, London, Lagos or Durban, British photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi (born 1946) creates black-and-white street scenes that function as visual metaphors, ruminating on cultural change, social exclusion and colonialism's effect on urban planning.

This unique artistic manual combines a kitchen brochure with a car catalog

Cars and kitchens collide with one another in Lena Henke's (born 1982) installation P7340LH, combining a Poggenpohl Company kitchen with a Porsche car design. The catalog, presented as a manual, embeds Henke's works in the visual worlds of 1980s West Germany.