January 2011

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop, still, Keiichi Matsuda, 2009 by Greg J. Smith Keiichi Matsuda is a multidisciplinary designer based in London and Tokyo who garnered widespread attention last year for Augmented (hyper)Reality, a speculative video series that explored near-future media environments. His short films Domestic Robocop and Augmented City 3D...

David Graham Philips From The New York Times: It’s easy to imagine how a novelist might use a real person as a basis for a fictional character. It’s equally easy to imagine how such a person could notice the similarities and perhaps become offended. After all, the fiction writer...

In Rembrandt's painting The Jewish Bride, the huge, thickly embroidered sleeve of the man is the most extraordinary assemblage of paint, whereas other areas are quite smoothly painted to convey basic information...

by Barry Eichengreen The dollar’s key role in international markets is once again in the spotlight. This column introduces a new book by Barry Eichengreen: Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System. As the author puts it, “If you...

School of Athens, Raphael, 1510-1511        Posted by kind permission of James Clifford, this is the text of a talk he delivered at “The University We Are For,” a conference  organized by David Theo Goldberg and Wendy Brown at UC Berkeley (11/5/10). The Berkeley forum is webcast here and...

Bonnie Parker, circa 1933 by  Kathleen Cairns Wanted Women: An American Obsession in the Reign of J. Edgar Hoover, by Mary Elizabeth Strunk, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 304 pp. Female “outlaws” have been a staple of American popular culture at least since the 1830s, when New York Herald publisher...

Brown Skin, Blue Masks | by Nadja Millner-Larsen, Wazhmah Osman, and Danyel Ferrari

Triple Canopy

Perhaps what we have here, in the wake of the failure of the Abu Ghraib images—and countless similar images from Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, and so on—is the nightmare...