A personal and expert account of the artists and events that defined the medium's first 50 years, written a true expert in the field 'London's book excites because it brings new artists into a lineage worthy of greater stuff. Her passion for lesser-known figures ... is contagious.' - ARTnews, The Best Art Books of 2020 Since the introduction of portable consumer electronics nearly a half century ago, artists throughout the world have adapted their latest technologies to art-making. This first-hand account by the curator who has been following video art from its beginnings in the late 1960s, when artists first adapted portable consumer technology to art-making, spotlights video's ongoing importance in the art world, tracing the genre's development alongside the advances in technology that have continued to open up new possibilities for artists. London has worked closely and personally with the artists she writes about, who span generations, including Joan Jonas, Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, Shirin Neshat, Pipilotti Rist, Miranda July, Ragnar Kjartansson, and Ian Cheng. The text is both art-historical and personal - weaving together background information and insightful interpretations with unique anecdotes and experiences to trace the history of video art as it transformed into the broader field of media art - from analog to digital, small TV monitors to wall-scale projections, and clunky hardware to user-friendly software. In doing this, she reveals how video evolved from fringe status to be seen as one of the foremost art forms of today.

In her authoritative new book, Maite Conde introduces readers to the crucial early years of Brazilian cinema. Focusing on silent films released during the First Republic (1889-1930), Foundational Films explores how the medium became implicated in a larger project to transform Brazil into a modern nation. Analyzing an array of cinematic forms, from depictions of contemporary life and fan magazines, to experimental avant-garde productions, Conde demonstrates the distinct ways in which Brazil's early film culture helped to project a new image of the country.

In a world increasingly dominated by the digital, the critical response to digital art generally ranges from hype to counterhype. Popular writing about specific artworks seldom goes beyond promoting a given piece and explaining how it operates, while scholars and critics remain unsure about how to interpret and evaluate them. This is where Roberto Simanowski intervenes, demonstrating how such critical work can be done.
"Digital Art and Meaning" offers close readings of varied examples from genres of digital art such as kinetic concrete poetry, computer-generated text, interactive installation, mapping art, and information sculpture. For instance, Simanowski deciphers the complex meaning of words that not only form an image on a screen but also react to the viewer's behavior; images that are progressively destroyed by the human gaze; text machines generating nonsense sentences out of a Kafka story; and a light show above Mexico City's historic square, created by Internet users all over the world.
Simanowski combines these illuminating explanations with a theoretical discussion that employs art philosophy and history to achieve a deeper understanding of each particular example of digital art and, ultimately, of the genre as a whole.

Against Immediacy is a history of early video art considered in relation to television in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. It examines how artists questioned the ways in which "the people" were ideologically figured by the commercial mass media. During this time, artists and organizations including Nam June Paik, Juan Downey, and the Women's Video News Service challenged the existing limits of the one-to-many model of televisual broadcasting while simultaneously constructing more democratic, bottom-up models in which the people mediated themselves. Operating at the intersection between art history and media studies, Against Immediacy connects early video art and the rise of the media screen in gallery-based art to discussions about participation and the activation of the spectator in art and electronic media, moving from video art as an early form of democratic media practice to its canonization as a form of high art.

This deluxe two-volume set explores seven-time Academy Award winner Rick Baker s 40-plus-year journey as a special makeup effects artist. Features a foreword by John Landis, a preface by Peter Jackson, and an introduction by Rick Baker. Rick Baker: Metamorphosis chronicles the career of the legendary special effects and makeup artist, best known for his creature effects and designs. This deluxe, two-volume set, replete with more than 1,600 four-color images and original sketches, covers the makeup artist s forty-plus-year journey, from his early days as a young monster maker, creating body parts in his parents kitchen, to his more than seventy film and television credits, which resulted in seven Academy Awards, one Emmy, and three BAFTAs, among numerous others. From the gory zombies of Michael Jackson s Thriller and the staggeringly lifelike Bigfoot in Harry and the Hendersons to the creative builds in Men in Black and the groundbreaking effects in An American Werewolf in London, Rick Baker s special effects, makeup, and prosthetics count among some of Hollywood s most enduring legacies.

Drawing on film theory, literary modernism, psychology and art history, Fields of View elucidates an expanded network of connections between avant-garde film and wider culture. In this bold and original work, A.L. Rees identifies three key terms - 'field', 'frame' and 'interval' and charts their use by filmmakers and theorists such as Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Bruce Baillie, Maya Deren, Malcolm Le Grice and Werner Nekes, from the 1920s through to the present day. A seminal voice in film culture, Rees left the incomplete manuscript for this book on his death, and Simon Payne has subsequently carefully prepared the book for publication. Fields of View is an important work that establishes a unique perspective on experimental film.