Alex Coles Books

Artists and designers are now defined not by their discipline but by the fluidity with which their practices move between the fields of architecture, art, and design. This volume delves into four pioneering transdisciplinary studios-Jorge Pardo Sculpture, Konstantin Grcic Industrial Design, Studio Olafur Eliasson, and Åbäke-by observing and interviewing the practitioners and their assistants. A further series of interviews with curators, critics, anthropologists, designers, and artists serves to contextualize the transdisciplinary model now at the fore of creative practice. Including interviews with Jorge Pardo, Konstantin Grcic, Olafur Eliasson, and Åbäke; and Vito Acconci, Gui Bonsiepe, James Clifford, Dexter Sinister, Martino Gamper, Ryan Gander, Caroline Jones, Ronald Jones, Maria Lind, Alessandro Mendini, Rick Poynor, and Andrea Zittel.

An exploration of the crooner in popular music from the 1950s to the present.

EP creates a discursive platform between lighter magazines (single play) and academic journals (long play) by introducing the notion of the extended play into publishing. Designed by Experimental Jetset, a new volume of EP will be released annually, each one containing both textual and visual essays of the highest quality. Edited by Alex Coles in collaboration with a specialist appropriate to the theme under investigation, each volume will focus on a subject that actively works across art, design, and architecture.The first volume, The Italian 1968 to 1976, emphasizes the multiple correspondences between well-known radical design groups like Arte Povera, Archizoom, and Superstudio, and figures such as Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Mendini, and previously overlooked spaces, works, and performances generated by Zoo, Gruppo 9999, and Cavart. Newly commissioned interviews and essays by historians, curators and critics shed new light on the era under scrutiny, while contemporary practitioners, discuss its complex legacy.With contributions by Paola Antonelli, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Andrea Branzi, Alice Clarke, Formafantasma, Martino Gamper, Verina Gfader, Joseph Grima, Alessandro Mendini, Antonio Negri, Paola Nicolin, Michaelangelo Pistoletto, Catharine Rossi, Libby Sellers, and Ettore Vitale.

After the first EP volume on the activities of the early Italian avant-garde, the second volume in the series identifies the current fascination with fiction across art, design, and architecture. Practitioners and theorists explore this strategy by pushing the debate into both speculative and real-fictitious terrains. Newly commissioned interviews, artist projects, and essays shed light on topics such as parafiction and algorithmic ambiguity. Included in the volume is one of the final interviews to be published with novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco; a conversation with Bruce Sterling, in which the science-fiction author responds to designers who reference his writings; and design theorist Vilém Flusser's 1966 essay “On Fiction,” in its first English translation. The EP series fluidly moves between art, design, and architecture, and introduces the notion of the “extended play” into publishing, with thematically edited pocket books as median between popular magazines (“single play”) and academic journals (“long play”). Contributors Paola Antonelli, The Atlas Group (1989–2004), Alex Coles, Anthony Dunne, James Dyer, Umberto Eco, Experimental Jetset, Vilém Flusser, Verina Gfader, Huib Haye van der Werf, Will Holder, Sophie Krier, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Lucas Maassen, Valle Medina, Philippe Morel, Rick Poynor, Fiona Raby, Benjamin Reynolds, Hiroko Shiratori, Bruce Sterling

The summary of this book is simple; it is inspiring, encouraging, up-lifting poetry. Each poem delivery a great message, that leaves you feeling good, Its call "Unheard Spoken Word" because I think some of God's Word has been miss-understood; this book is my Interpretation of years of studying, & listening to the Word. Every poem was from something that I heard or read; That inspire me to write; This Poetry will encourage you to do better; To let you know "you can do what you know you can do", meaning there are no limits to what you can do, as long as God is in it, & blessed it, you will succeed. The wind that blows on the rich, blows on the poor, the wind that blows on righteous, blows on the unrighteous, meaning; God wants us all to succeed in life, so we have to make a plan, & take ACTION! You will go through trials & troubles, but most success stories have trials, so go through it, & I will see you on the other end, God bless, Enjoy! Poems like "Our Father" that tell you to honor God everyday, "Soul Food" that tells you to eat the word, & get full. "He had a Dream" that tells us to keep Dr. King dream alive. "Poetry is my Roses" tell you to give roses to the living. And many more Great Poetry!

This reader in Whitechapel's Documents of Contemporary Art series investigates the interchange between art and design. Since the Pop and Minimalist eras--as the work of artists ranging from Andy Warhol to Dan Graham demonstrates--the traditional boundaries between art and architectural, graphic, and product design have dissolved in critically significant ways. Design and Art traces the rise of the "design-art" phenomenon through the writings of critics and practitioners active in both fields. The texts include writings by Paul Rand, Hal Foster, Miwon Kwon, and others that set the parameters of the debate; utopian visions, including those of architect Peter Cook and writer Douglas Coupland; project descriptions by artists (among them Tobias Rehberger and Jorge Pardo) juxtaposed with theoretical writings; surveys of group practices by such collectives as N55 and Superflex; and views of the artist as mediator--a role assumed in the past to be the province of the designer--as seen in work by Frederick Kiesler, Ed Ruscha, and others. Finally, a book that doesn't privilege either the art world or the design world but puts them in dialogue with each other

This biography of Walter Benjamin encompasses political, philosophical and artistic events of the 20th century. He was born into a Jewish family in Berlin, lived in Moscow and Paris while engaging with leading modernists artists, and committed suicide after fleeing the Nazis.