Arthur Conan Doyle is best known as the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. However, his works are far more extensive than these familiar works. They include historical novels, political pamphlets, historical studies, science fiction novels and, last but not least, numerous publications on spiritualism. Photography plays a central role in his work and gives rise to a highly peculiar world of imagination. The photographs allow us to take a look at the world in around 1900 with all its oddities. For Conan Doyle's contemporaries, Sherlock Holmes was a real figure. To Conan Doyle, photographs of elves, the dead and ghosts testified to their existence. This book collects these images, along with the imaginarium that surrounds them.

With The Assembled Human the Museum Folkwang inquires into the ambivalent relationship between humans and machines. It's a conflicted relationship, fluctuating between utopia and nightmare, and it still influences our present time. From the conveyor belt to cybernetics and today's digital revolution, from Cubism, Futurism, and Constructivism into the recent present with Ed Atkins, Jon Rafman, Avery Singer, or Anna Uddenberg, the show traces the transformation of technology, presenting a wide panorama of artistic visual worlds: human beings as hybrid creatures, blended with their own self-made machines. Featuring 200 works by 100 artists as well as prolific essays, this extensive catalogue goes in-depth into this highly current issue. Artists: Walter Heinz Allner, Bettina von Arnim, Gerd Arntz, Ed Atkins, Giacomo Balla, Joachim Bandau, Lenora de Barros, Willi Baumeister, Thomas Bayrle, Rudolf Belling, Ella Bergmann-Michel, Renato Bertelli, Umberto Boccioni, Wilhelm Braune, John Cage, Helen Chadwick, Computer Technique Group (CTG), Charles A. Csuri, Mariechen Danz, Fortunato Depero, Walter Dexel, Otto Dix, Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Charles & Ray Eames, Max Ernst, Alexandra Exter, OEyvind Fahlstroem, Harun Farocki, William Allan Fetter, Otto Fischer, Herbert W. Franke, Carl Grossberg, George Grosz, Richard Hamilton, Barbara Hammer, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Eva Hesse, Lewis Wickes Hine, Heinrich Hoerle, Rebecca Horn, Vilmos Huszar, Boris Ignatowitsch, Fritz Kahn, Wassily Kandinsky, Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven, Friedrich Kiesler, Konrad Klapheck, Jurgen Klauke, Paul Klee, Heinrich Kley, Josh Kline, Iwan Kljun, Gustavs Klucis, Alexander Kluge, Kiki Kogelnik, Germaine Krull, Boris Kudojarow, Helmuth Kurth, Jurgen van Kranenbrock, Maria Lassnig, Fernand Leger, Alice Lex-Nerlinger, Roy Lichtenstein, El Lissitzky, Hilary Lloyd, Goshka Macuga, Rene Magritte, Kasimir Malewitsch, Man Ray, Etienne-Jules Marey, Remy Markowitsch, Caroline Mesquita, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Johannes Molzahn, Alexei Morgunow, Martin Munkacsi, Eadweard Muybridge, Otto Neurath, Katja Novitskova, ORLAN, Tony Oursler, Trevor Paglen, Nam June Paik, Eduardo Paolozzi, Georgi Petrusow, Antoine Pevsner, Walter Pichler, Jon Rafman, Robert Rauschenberg, Timm Rautert, Alexander Rodtschenko, Thomas Ruff, Walter Ruttmann, James Shaffer, Arkadi Schaichet, Xanti Schawinsky, Helmut Schenk, Oskar Schlemmer, Nicolas Schoeffer, Franz Wilhelm Seiwert, Avery Singer, Stelarc, Friedemann von Stockhausen, Thayaht, Paul Thek, Jean Tinguely, Patrick Tresset, Anna Uddenberg, Andor Weininger, Erwin Wendt, Hugo von Werden, George Widener. Text in English and German.

Armchair travel may seem like an oxymoron. Doesn't travel require us to leave the house? And yet, anyone who has lost herself for hours in the descriptive pages of a novel or the absorbing images of a film knows the very real feeling of having explored and experienced a different place or time without ever standing up from the couch. No passport, no currency, no security screening required-the luxury of armchair travel is accessible to us all. In Traveling in Place, Bernd Stiegler celebrates this convenient, magical means of transport in all its many forms. Organized into twenty-one "legs" - or short chapters - Traveling in Place begins with a consideration of Xavier de Maistre's 1794 Voyage autour de ma chambre, an account of the forty-two-day "journey around his room" Maistre undertook as a way to entertain himself while under house arrest. Stiegler is fascinated by the notion of exploring the familiar as though it were completely new and strange. He engages writers as diverse as Roussel, Beckett, Perec, Robbe-Grillet, Cortazar, Kierkegaard, and Borges, all of whom show how the everyday can be brilliantly transformed. Like the best guidebooks, Traveling in Place is more interested in the idea of travel as a state of mind than as a physical activity, and Stiegler reflects on the different ways that traveling at home have manifested themselves in the modern era, from literature and film to the virtual possibilities of the Internet, blogs, and contemporary art. Reminiscent of the pictorial meditations of Sebald, but possessed of the intellectual playfulness of Calvino, Traveling in Place offers an entertaining and creative Baedeker to journeying at home.