NETWORKS
LARSEN, BANG
Networks is one of a series documenting major themes and ideas in contemporary art.
'...an essential read and a potential series classic.'
Morgan Quaintance,Art Monthly
Lars Bang Larsen has assembled a vital selection of texts that map the various conceptual genealogies of the network from the perspective of our digital present. The collection features a wide range of artistic and theoretical positions, ranging from the well-established to the still emergent. As such, Networks enables the reader to traverse a dynamic intellectual landscape, connecting diverse fields of thought.
Luke Skrebowski, University Lecturer in History of Art, University of Cambridge
The dawn of the electronic media age in the 1960s initiated a cultural shift from the modernist grids determination of projection and representation to the fluid structures and circuits of the network, presenting art with new challenges and possibilities. Artists have used the space of flows as a basis for creating utopian scenarios, absurd yet functional propositions or holistic planetary visions. Others have explored the economies of reciprocity and the ethics of generosity, in works that address changed conditions of co-dependence and new sites of social negotiation. The infra-power of the network has been a departure point for self-organized counter-culture and the creation of new types of agency. And a poetics of connectivity runs through a diverse range of work that addresses the social and material complexity of networks via physical structures and ambient installation, the mapping of the internet, or the development of robots and software that take on the functions of artist or curator.
Artists surveyed include Joseph Beuys, Ursula Biemann, Roberto Chavet, Colectivo Situaciones, Critical Art Ensemble, Marcel Duchamp, Peter Fend, Gego, Hans Haacke, Koncernº, Pia Lindman, Mark Lombardi, Marta Minujín, Aleksandra Mir, Tanja Ostojic, Lea Porsager, Arturas Raila, Pit Schultz, Hito Steyerl, Suzanne Treister, Wolf Vostell and Stephen Willats.
Writers include Pamela Allara, Lawrence Alloway, Roy Ascott, Jane Bennett, Hakim Bey, Luc Boltanski, Manuel Castells, Ève Chiapello, Jodi Dean, Gilles Deleuze, Umberto Eco, Okwui Enwezor, Alexander Galloway, Natasha Ginwala, Félix Guattari, Michael Hardt, Joasia Krysa, Bruno Latour, Geert Lovink, Noortje Marres, Marshall McLuhan, Marcel Mauss, Reza Negarestani, Antonio Negri, Sadie Plant, Lane Relyea, Ned Rossiter, Craig Saper, Saskia Sassen, Steven Shaviro, Tiziana Terranova, Paolo Virno and Vivian Ziherl.
Lars Bang Larsen is an art historian and international curator. His books include The Model: Palle Nielsens A Model for a Qualitative Society (1968) (2010) and, with Søren Andreasen, The Critical Mass of Mediation (2012).
