The first book on the artist collective known for their raucous multimedia installations. Founded by artist Eli Sudbrack, assume vivid astro focus has been dazzling the art world since 1994 with its exuberant, visually spectacular room-size installations. Created out of recycled and appropriated imagery from a wide range of sources--such as unicorn tapestries, children's stickers, pages from gay porn magazines, album covers, Buddhist thangka paintings, and street graffiti, to name a few--the finished works can feel like a cross between a '70s disco, Brazilian Carnival, and a psychedelic version of Andy Warhol's Factory. This volume, their first, will include many of the elements featured in their installations, which are known for the many "give-aways" the artists provide the visitors: a blow-in poster, postcard and sticker pages, and a pop-up, all designed by avaf.

This first monograph on the oeuvre of Kon Trubkovich (born 1979) surveys the Russian artist's career in color reproductions and in-depth critical discussion, traversing the period from his first museum exhibition in 2006 to the present day. His works delve into themes of rebellion, memory, imprisonment and perception through a wide variety of media, including painting, drawing, photography and sculpture. Trubkovich's multimedia creations are generally based upon film stills, sourced from videos that range from prison footage to found movie clips and home videos. Extended across a series, these isolated fragments, generally distorted or grainy, evoke human processes of memorialization and psychological narrative. The artist's solo exhibitions, all of which are touched upon here, include "No Country for Old Men" MoMA (PS1), "Almost Nowhere," "Signali" (both Marianne Boesky) and "Leap Second" (OHWOW).

Volume 79 of the influential international art journal "Parkett" features Jon Kessler, Marilyn Minter and Albert Oehlen. In the tinkered gadgetry of Kessler's retro sci-fi installations, we peek through surveillance cameras to see our own image among his analog programs crammed with detritus of all kinds. Kessler's vista of (d)evolved cyberstuff is in a manic state of accumulation, as this data-diving artist masters the ecology of pure information. Within Marilyn Minter's fetishistic, flawless pictures, we find a painter obsessed with the clear articulation of magnified sweat beads and pore-smeared glitter. In each successive lip-smacking painting, Minter sets out to perfect beauty's disguise, affirming both her pleasure in fashion imagery, and an appreciation of its vulgar mishaps--say, a drag queen's eyelashes clumped together with too much mascara. According to essayist John Kelsey, Albert Oehlen's collage-paintings "seem almost bored of their own shock-value." And yet this artist, one of the most significant German painters of the past 20 years, can make boredom look like a rigorous, if not delirious experiment. Also featured: Spencer Finch, Gelitin and Mark Wallinger, as well as essayists Paul Bonaventura, Mark Godfrey, Glenn O'Brien, Katy Siegel, Andrea Scott and Pamela Lee, to name a few.

Ivan Navarro is known internationally for his sociopolitically charged sculptures of neon and fluorescent light. The sculptures and installations of Ivan Navarro grow out of the legacy of minimalism and modern design, but they subvert the cool detachment of their forms with pointed sociopolitical critique. Born in Santiago, Chile, in 1972, Navarro grew up under Pinochet's brutal military dictatorship. In order to better understand this dark history, Navarro uses light-a symbol of hope and truth-as his medium, constructing chairs, ladders, doors, and even shopping carts out of neon and fluorescent lights. With their ambient glow and live current, the works are equally seductive and unnerving. In this first monograph on the artist, Cay Sophie Rabinowitz considers the personal stories underlying Navarro's sleek, industrially produced works. In conversation with Hilarie M. Sheets, Navarro discusses his relationship to modernism, minimalism, and language.

After cofounding "Fantom" in 2009 in Milan and New York, Cay Sophie Rabinowitz is continuing the endeavor by launching her magazine with the new name of "Osmos." "Osmos" magazine focuses its editorial practice on texts and image series by practitioners and professionals investigating the uses and abuses of photography. Alongside more conventional genres, such as Essay, Interview, and Portfolio, "Osmos" frames some of its content in sectors, such as "Collections," about curatorial and archival practice; "Means to an End," about the side effects of non-artistic image production; and "Picture Perfect," where photography is implicit in the production of the featured work, but is not always the resulting final medium. One outstanding feature is the critical approach to the cover, which acknowledges the delayed effect of image capture or so-called "after image," by featuring an artist or work to be discussed in the following issue. With a radical blend of arresting images, print quality, and distinctive design, "Osmos" magazine is the most recognized publication in the market fostering contemporary perspectives in photography as the medium crossing all creative industries and practices--art, design, fashion and propaganda, aiming at the core of our imagination.

After cofounding "Fantom" in 2009 in Milan and New York, Cay Sophie Rabinowitz is continuing the endeavor by launching her magazine with the new name of "Osmos." "Osmos" magazine focuses its editorial practice on texts and image series by practitioners and professionals investigating the uses and abuses of photography. Alongside more conventional genres, such as Essay, Interview, and Portfolio, "Osmos" frames some of its content in sectors, such as "Collections," about curatorial and archival practice; "Means to an End," about the side effects of non-artistic image production; and "Picture Perfect," where photography is implicit in the production of the featured work, but is not always the resulting final medium. One outstanding feature is the critical approach to the cover, which acknowledges the delayed effect of image capture or so-called "after image," by featuring an artist or work to be discussed in the following issue. With a radical blend of arresting images, print quality, and distinctive design, "Osmos" magazine is the most recognized publication in the market fostering contemporary perspectives in photography as the medium crossing all creative industries and practices--art, design, fashion and propaganda, aiming at the core of our imagination.