Over the past thirty years, Jim Shaw has become one of America's most visionary artists, moving between painting, sculpture, and drawings, while building connections between his own psyche and the larger political, social, and spiritual history of America. Shaw's imagery is mined from comic books, record covers, conspiracy magazines, obscure religious pamphlets, and other cultural refuse to produce a portrait of the American subconscious out of his personal obsessions. Shaw, along with fellow Michigan native Mike Kelley, moved to California in the 1970s to attend Cal Arts and was one of a number of notable artists to emerge from the school in the early 1980s. Shaw's work is distinguished by rigorous formal and structural analyses of neglected forms of vernacular culture. Accompanying a major exhibition, this is the first major monograph devoted to the entirety of the artist's unique, multifaceted career.

In Madison Square Park in New York, and subsequently in Soho Square, the heart of London's media world, video artist Tony Oursler created a spectral audio-visual experience for an image-saturated society. Conceived as a kind of psycho-landscape, The Influence Machine delves deep into the history of media, rousing long-forgotten spirits and setting them to roam about both squares at night. The ghosts of the Fox Sisters, who made telegraphic contact with the spirit world in the mid-19th century, haunted alongside the ghost of television pioneer John Logie Baird. This book brings together Tony Oursler's most elaborate deep media projects in an illustrated time line, the Timestream, and accompanying texts elaborate on the phantasmagorias of the late 18th century, its contemporary equivalents, and the influence of spiritualism within the general development of media.