Narrowcast explores how mid-century American poets associated with the New Left mobilized tape recording as a new form of sonic field research even as they themselves were being subjected to tape-based surveillance. Media theorists tend to understand audio recording as a technique for separating bodies from sounds, but this book listens closely to tape's embedded information, offering a counterintuitive site-specific account of 1960s poetic recordings. Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Larry Eigner, and Amiri Baraka all used recording to contest models of time being put forward by dominant media and the state, exploring non-monumental time and subverting media schedules of work, consumption, leisure, and national crises. Surprisingly, their methods at once dovetailed with those of the state collecting evidence against them and ran up against the same technological limits. Arguing that CIA and FBI "researchers" shared unexpected terrain not only with poets but with famous theorists such as Fredric Jameson and Hayden White, Lytle Shaw reframes the status of tape recordings in postwar poetics and challenges notions of how tape might be understood as a mode of evidence.

Narrowcast explores how mid-century American poets associated with the New Left mobilized tape recording as a new form of sonic field research even as they themselves were being subjected to tape-based surveillance. Media theorists tend to understand audio recording as a technique for separating bodies from sounds, but this book listens closely to tape's embedded information, offering a counterintuitive site-specific account of 1960s poetic recordings. Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Larry Eigner, and Amiri Baraka all used recording to contest models of time being put forward by dominant media and the state, exploring non-monumental time and subverting media schedules of work, consumption, leisure, and national crises. Surprisingly, their methods at once dovetailed with those of the state collecting evidence against them and ran up against the same technological limits. Arguing that CIA and FBI "researchers" shared unexpected terrain not only with poets but with famous theorists such as Fredric Jameson and Hayden White, Lytle Shaw reframes the status of tape recordings in postwar poetics and challenges notions of how tape might be understood as a mode of evidence.

Renowned for his films installations which re-enact conversations from specific historic moments, Irish artist Gerard Byrne's (b. 1969) work explores the way we understand the present through revisiting the past. Drawing from a diverse range of sources including plays, magazine interviews and art journals, his film installations and photographs engage with the structuring of time, with looking and interpretation and the idea of the object throughout the twentieth century. His work has received great critical acclaim from within the art world, but also from other fields that his work engages with, such as cinema and the performing arts. Byrne has exhibited widely in Europe and America and his work is held in important international collections such as Tate, London; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and the Arts Council of Ireland. He currently lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. This publication offers a comprehensive overview of his work from 1998-2012 and includes an in-depth interview with Kirsty Ogg, Curator, Whitechapel Gallery, and essays by poet/critic and Professor of English at New York University Lytle Shaw and Helena Reckitt, curator/critic and Lecturer in Curating at Goldsmiths.