100 Notes – 100 Thoughts. New publications: notebooks nos. 34 to 55

For further information on the series:

www.documenta.de and www.hatjecantz.de/documenta13

It is the starting point. One writes a note.To write a note evokes a particular situation: where does the writing happen? On what occasion is the note written? Which form is the note taking? Is it a set of words? A line? A drawing? To write a note is to situate oneself. Situating does not only have to do with where one is, but with the very question of where one wishes to go, with wanting to map traces of ideas through language, their routes, the experiences that inhabit them.A note is an expression that talks about writing and, at the same time, about a subject who is prepared to include the insecure, the unsure, all that is not yet there, within a cared-for present. To write a note is to absorb. As in eating an apple, a person cannot train the internal linings of her bowels to master which sugars, minerals, or vitamins are absorbed, and which others are not. The same thing happens in one’s relationship with the events we are involved in, or read about, or hear of from others; or in the experiences we have of the many million degrees of empathy we feel when even writing a note about them; or when we read texts, or even when we just see. In this form of absorption our agency is distributed and its boundaries are neither firm nor fixed. A note is something that does not keep its “enemies” at a distance, but eagerly searches for ways of inclusion. A note hopes. License your roving hands, and let them go. And so, too, your eyes and mind.

As a prelude to the 2012 exhibition, dOCUMENTA (13) and Hatje Cantz are publishing a series of notebooks, 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, that is comprised of facsimiles of existing notebooks, commissioned essays, collaborations, and conversations. The notebooks appear in three different formats (A6, A5, B5) and range from 16 to 48 pages in length. Contributors hail from diverse fields – art, science, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, political theory, literature, and poetry. The third round of notebook authors include Ida Applebroog, Walter Benjamin and Nikola Doll, Jill Bennett, George Chan and Fernando García-Dory, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Salvador Dalí and Ignacio Vidal-Folch, Dietmar Dath, Jimmie Durham, Nawal El Saadawi, Matias Faldbakken, Édouard Glissant and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Avery F. Gordon, Boris Groys, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Sonallah Ibrahim, David Link and Geoff Cox, Ada Lovelace and Joasia Krysa, Stephen Muecke, Ingo Niermann and Chus Martínez, Ana Prvacki and Irina Aristarkhova, Andrew Ross, and Enrique Vila-Matas on Thomas Mann and Theodor W. Adorno.

Commissioned by dOCUMENTA (13) Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev together with Head of Department, Member of Core Agent Group, Chus Martínez, this series is edited by Head of Publications, Bettina Funcke. The 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts series is being launched at various places and in various moments, each accompanied by a discussion on the nature and the aim of this publishing project. You can acquire individual notebooks or subscribe to the entire series of 100 notebooks in both printed and e-book editions at www.hatjecantz.de/documenta13

 

034: Ingo Niermann
Choose Drill
Introduction: Chus Martínez

Berlin-based author Ingo Niermann deals with the subject matter called “drill.” In this notebook, he proclaims the self-determined drill as a new societal doctrine and gives practical instructions. After an era of opening and transgressing borders, drill could be the next step: the freedom to coerce oneself. For this purpose, the reader can participate in actions proposed by the author, such as “Join the U.S. Army,” where non-Americans can offer their services to the U.S. Army; or could decide to live a year as if it were the last. The culmination is the Drill Palace, modeled on Cedric Price’s unrealized Fun Palace, where you participate in drills, develop drills, or witness them as a spectator.

Ingo Niermann (*1969) is a writer living in Berlin.

Chus Martínez (*1972) is Member of the Core Agent Group and Head of Department for dOCUMENTA (13).

English/German
44 pp., 5 ill.,
10.5 x 14.8 cm, paperback
€ 4.– [D], CHF 6.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2883-6
December 2011

E-Book
Ca. € 3.99 [D], CHF 6.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3063-1
January 2012

035: Matias Faldbakken
SEARCH

For SEARCH, novelist and artist Matias Faldbakken went into the log of his different hard drives and extracted parts of his Google search histories. The search phrases are printed chronologically according to when they were typed into the search box. The texts are largely based on image searches. In many respects they show the verbal semi-absurd foundation for the artist’s image production: they are partly his notes, partly his research. These search-word texts are almost like automatic writing: unconscious (or accidental) text production. They allow the reader to witness part of his working process and could be seen as a cross section of his thinking. The texts occupy a space in between the artist’s visual and textual production, ending up here as a form of (concrete) poetry.

Matias Faldbakken (*1973) lives and works as an artist and writer in Oslo.

English/German
32 pp., 2 ill.,
10.5 x 14.8 cm, paperback
€ 4.– [D], CHF 6.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2884-3
December 2011

E-Book
Ca. € 3.99 [D], CHF 6.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3064-8
January 2012

036: Dietmar Dath
Girls’ Calligraphy Exercise

In his notebook, the author and journalist Dietmar Dath captures ten personal moments of art and moments of life. They are about relationships between people, their ways of dealing with one another, communication, friendship, love, art, and criticism. In the end, the thoughts of a weasel, who is living in the author’s fridge, crystallize into a true recognition: “Not finishing flourishes in art. It is a kind of succeeding. Failure does not come into it. That is because art is there to invent goals, but not to reach them. An exhibition opening is celebrated and talked about. But its end is passed over in silence.”

Author and translator Dietmar Dath (*1970) is Editor at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; he lives in Frankfurt/Main, Freiburg, and Leipzig.

English/German
24 pp., 6 ill.,
14.8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6.– [D], CHF 9.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2885-0
December 2011

E-Book
Ca. € 5.99 [D], CHF 9.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3065-5
January 2012

037: David Link
Machine Heart
Introduction: Geoff Cox

In his work David Link generates (apparently) interactive projects, at the interface between art, science, and technology. For LoveLetters_1.0, Link reconstructed a functional replica of one of the earliest programmable computers, the Ferranti Mark I, and an equally early program, invented in 1952 by Christopher Strachey at the University of Manchester, to produce computer-generated love letters, written using a built-in random generator. Anonymously addressed to “Darling Love” or “Jewel Duck,” the letters talk to the reader in a surprisingly human and tender way. In his introduction, Geoff Cox highlights the question, already suggested by the apparently contradictory title of this notebook, Machine Heart, of whether the human capacity for thinking and feeling has been captured by machines.

David Link (*1971) is an artist and media archaeologist; he lives and works in Cologne.

Geoff Cox is currently a Researcher at the Digital Urban Living Research Center, Aarhus University, Denmark.

English/German
28 pp., 13 ill.,
17.6 x 25 cm, paperback
€ 8.– [D], CHF 12.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2886-7
December 2011

E-Book
Ca. € 7.99 [D], CHF 12.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3066-2
January 2012

038: Édouard Glissant & Hans Ulrich Obrist

This notebook is a homage of the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist to the French author, poet, and philosopher Édouard Glissant (1928–2011), who passed away last year. Glissant, one of the most influential figures of the French-speaking Caribbean and a pioneer of postcolonial thinking, called “attention to means of global exchange which do not homogenize culture but produce a difference from which new things can emerge”. Obrist encountered Glissant at the beginning of his curatorial path, following a recommendation by Alighiero Boetti, then through his books, and later in person. In the introduction, Obrist creates a multilayered portrait of the intellectual, laying out some of his key concepts: the creolization of the world, “archipelic thought,” and the museum as archipelago, as well as utopia. These ideas are expressed in a personal tone by Glissant in a selection of title pages of his books with drawings, notations and poetic dedications that are reproduced here in facsimile.

Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) was a French writer, poet, and philosopher.

Curator and critic Hans Ulrich Obrist (*1968) is Co-Director, Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London.

English/German
24 pp., 13 ill.,
14.8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6.– [D], CHF 9.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2887-4
December 2011

E-Book
Ca. € 5.99 [D], CHF 9.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3067-9
January 2012

039: Salvador Dalí
Introduction: Ignacio Vidal-Folch

Fear of death and the wish for immortality were central notions in Dalí’s lifetime: his older brother, who was also named Salvador, died just nine months before the artist was born. This particular sensibility became even more prevalent after the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Dalí’s initial plan to have his body frozen after death was replaced by a deep fascination with the sciences, in particular the discovery of the structure of DNA, which he believed to be the central component in our understanding of life. The previously unpublished notes by Dalí reproduced here contain anecdotes about author Stefan Zweig, who helped introduce the artist to Sigmund Freud. Additionally reprinted is an article from Scientific American, a magazine regularly read and commented on with handwritten notes by Dalí. In his introduction, Ignacio Vidal-Folch writes about Dalí’s search for immortality, and different views on the topic from scientists and authors such as Ray Kurzweil, Elias Canetti, and Eugène Ionesco.

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) was a Spanish artist.

Ignacio Vidal-Folch (*1956) is a journalist and author living in Barcelona.

English/German
24 pp., 13 ill.,
17.6 x 25 cm, paperback
€ 6.– [D], CHF 9.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2888-1
December 2011

E-Book
Ca. € 5.99 [D], CHF 9.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3068-6
January 2012

040: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
On the Destruction of Art—Or Conflict and Art, or Trauma and the Art of Healing

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev reflects on the historical as well as personal notion of destruction and art, as well as on the potential healing power that art can have. Guiding us through a web of etymological, historical, philosophical, personal, and art historical references, she takes the reader from Melanie Klein’s thinking about the dyadic relationship between mother and child and Walter Benjamin’s reflection on Klee’s Angelus Novus, to object studies starting with Man Ray’s metronomes, his Objects of Destruction, and Lee Miller’s photographs from the end of World War II, to Gustav Metzger’s “Manifesto of Auto-Destruction,” to melted objects from the Beirut National Museum and the blown-up Bamiyan Buddhas, which are accompanied by Michael Petzet’s report of ICOMOS’s response to the destroyed monuments, followed by artworks by Michael Rakowitz and drawings with poems by Anna Boghiguian, in addition to a postscript by art historian Dario Gamboni on the destruction of art and the legislation around it. For Christov-Bakargiev, “the sphere of art is poised on the edge of the private and of history, and becomes the location where one can experiment the possibilities of being on the edge of the anthropocentric, where the rubble lies.”

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (*1957) is Artistic Director of dOCUMENTA (13).

English/German
Ca. 40 pp., ca. 24 ill.,
Ca. 14.8 x 21 cm, paperback
Ca. € 6.– [D], CHF 9.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2889-8
December 2011

E-Book
Ca. € 5.99 [D], CHF 9.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3069-3
January 2012

041: Avery F. Gordon
Notes for the Breitenau Room of The Workhouse—a Project by Ines Schaber and Avery Gordon

Avery F. Gordon was invited by the artist Ines Schaber to, collaborate on her project, titled The Workhouse. In this notebook, Gordon is engaged in a portrait of Breitenau, the twelfth-century Benedictine monastery, located twenty kilometers south of Kassel, that has been used throughout its history for various purposes, and since the nineteenth century has been a site of confinement and “correction.” Turned into a workhouse in 1874, it subsequently became a concentration camp in Nazi years, then a girls’ reformatory until the 1970s, and is now an open psychiatric residential treatment facility and a rehabilitation center, as well as a Gedenkstätte memorial and research center. During a site visit with Schaber, Gordon, with the help of the memorial’s cofounder and director Gunnar Richter, immerses herself in Breitenau’s history and recalls its function as a place for the enclosure of disobedient social subjects and their ideas, developing “a kind of encyclopedia of the prisoner.”

Avery F. Gordon is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Visiting Faculty at the Center for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College, University of London.

English/German
28 pp., 2 ill.,
14.8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 4.– [D], CHF 6.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2890-4
December 2011

E-Book
Ca. € 3.99 [D], CHF 6.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3070-9
January 2012

042: Ida Applebroog
Scripts

Artist Ida Applebroog uses a wide variety of media to express themes of struggles within gender and political roles, as well as sexual-identity issues. The publication Scripts is a facsimile of excerpts from one of her personal notebooks containing a compilation of handwritten notes, storyboards, mise-en-scène drawings, and musical notations. Underlining, as well as annotations in different colors, shows that the artist has intensively worked through her notes several times. Some of the fragments on these pages read: “Silences are the undercurrent of all dramatic events.” “Each performance should be more of silence than words.” “Any silence must be punctuated by sound eventually.” For Applebroog, the staged scenes function as “a mode of narration,” and “the narratives are not meant to be truths; the characters simply are.” With only a few words and brief instructions, Applebroog develops stage plays of great dramatic density that she simultaneously comments on, questions, and interprets, thus delivering an insight into her working method.

Ida Applebroog (*1929) is an artist living in New York.

English
28 pp., 26 ill.,
17.6 x 25 cm, paperback
€ 6.– [D], CHF 9.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2891-1
December 2011

E-Book
Ca. € 5.99 [D], CHF 9.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3071-6
January 2012

043: Ana Prvacki & Irina Aristarkhova
The Greeting Committee Reports …

In this notebook, artist Ana Prvacki and scholar Irina Aristarkhova discuss the social idea of the greeting and the gestures and ethics of hospitality. As an artist of Romanian heritage, Prvacki recalls stories of her grandmother’s generous nature even in dark times, and her childhood mistake of putting snow in the boots of guests she didn’t like. Prvacki’s personal approach to etiquette allows a certain history of artistic and political hospitality methods to be portrayed: from the faux pas of Borat, and the Singapore Kindness Movement, to Daniel Bozhkov’s People Greeter project. Aristarkhova’s voice adds a theoretical lineage of the history and ethics of hospitality, from Immanuel Kant and his concept of “civility” to luminaries such as Gandhi, Mother Theresa, and Martin Luther King. Due to different approaches to hospitality protocols, awkward tensions will happen, but as Aristarkhova says, “dealing with difference is better than pretending we are all exactly alike.”

Ana Prvacki (*1976) is an artist based in Los Angeles and Singapore.

Irina Aristarkhova (*1969) holds a joint appointment in Women’s Studies and Visual Art at Pennsylvania State University.

English/German
24 pp., 20 ill.,
17.6 x 25 cm, paperback
€ 8.– [D], CHF 12.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2892-8
December 2011

E-Book
Ca. € 7.99 [D], CHF 12.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3072-3
January 2012

044: Andrew Ross
The Exorcist and the Machines

Cultural critic Andrew Ross, who is a supporter of an alternative globalization approach, focuses in his texts on topics such as precarious cognitive labor, the organization of work, and urban society. In this notebook he questions the price we have to pay for the never-ending increase in efficiency and productivity and analyzes the correlation between self-exploitation in the Western economic system and the exploitation of the human workforce in Asia. Many freelance and creative producers spend all their waking hours on their laptops—their electronic notebooks—which allow them to work anytime and anywhere, leading to mistaken ideas about flexibility and independent work hours. Ross provides an example of the harsh labor conditions of the manufacturers of these machines in an investigation into the largest private employer in China, the Taiwanese company Foxconn, where a series of suicides occurred among the mostly adolescent workers. The most important medium of the only supposedly free, individually defined labor in Western neoliberalism owes its existence to degrading work conditions in other parts of the world.

Andrew Ross (*1956) is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.

English/German
36 pp., 2 ill.,
10.5 x 14.8 cm, paperback
€ 4.– [D], CHF 6.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2893-5
December 2011

E-Book
Ca. € 3,99 [D], CHF 6,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3073-0
January 2012

045: Walter Benjamin
Paris Arcades
Introduction: Nikola Doll

In 1927, on the occasion of a several-months-long visit to Paris, Walter Benjamin began taking notes on the Parisian Arcades for his most ambitious book project, which remained unfinished because of the repeatedly interrupted work process and, ultimately, his suicide in Portbou in 1940 when fleeing the German occupation. It was published posthumously as The Arcades Project. The fragments included, among others, the essay “The Artwork in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935–39). With her introduction to a selection of these handwritten notes, Nikola Doll describes how the author attempted “to integrate the principle of the montage as an epistemological technique.” Color charts, schemata, and diagrams act as guiding principles to navigate the thicket of excerpts and quotations. Benjamin’s personal color-coding shows an attempt to make order within the vast constellation of his own notes—a tension between an impulse toward structure and the potential of the open field of his interests.

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a writer and philosopher.

Nikola Doll (*1970) is art historian and curator.

English/German
36 pp., 26 ill.,
17.6 x 25 cm, paperback
€ 8.– [D], CHF 12.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2894-2
December 2011

E-Book
Ca. € 7.99 [D], CHF 12.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3074-7
January 2012

046: Boris Groys
Google: Words beyond Grammar

In times when the exchange with the world largely takes place on the Internet, the search engine Google primarily regulates the parameters and formats of this conversation. For the philosopher and media theoretician Boris Groys, Google thus takes on the traditional role of philosophy and religion. Philosophical precursors for the dissolution of different kinds of discourses, the emancipation of words from grammar and accordingly their equalizing, as Google produces it, span from Plato to Saussure’s structuralism to Derrida’s deconstruction. Another analogy is the twentieth-century avant-garde’s production of word clouds that are freed from their context, in particular the Conceptual art of the 1960s and ’70s. As a result of the radical freeing of words, Groys names “the struggle for a utopian ideal of the free flow of information—the free migration of liberated words through the totality of social space.”

Philosopher, art critic, and media theorist Boris Groys (*1947) is Global Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University.

English/German
36 pp., 2 ill.,
10.5 x 14.8 cm, paperback
€ 4.– [D], CHF 6.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2895-9
December 2011

E-Book
Ca. € 3.99 [D], CHF 6.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3075-4
January 2012

047: Sonallah Ibrahim
Two Novels and Two Women

The Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim delivers in his notebook an insight into two of his novels, which are written in a rather documentary style, telling a personal story within a political system using excerpts from newspapers or speeches. The main characters, the women Dhat and Warda, have experienced great suffering and tragedy in their life related to the political situation in their countries. Ibrahim, who is known for his radical views and his open critique for which he was imprisoned in Egypt during the 1960s, asks himself how he can escape contemporary Egyptian political and social life through his constructed characters. This notebook’s point of departure confronts the post-1970s and -’80s Egyptian society with its changes in social justice and its devaluation of education and culture. In constructing a self-reflexive examination of his own work, Ibrahim explores gender roles in Arab society and suggests how the sense of hope for the future of Arab countries could be fulfilled through the actions of young women.

Sonallah Ibrahim (*1937) is a novelist living in Cairo.

English/German
20 pp., 2 ill.,
10.5 x 14.8 cm, paperback
€ 4.– [D], CHF 6.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2896-6
December 2011

E-Book
Ca. € 3.99 [D], CHF 6.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3076-1
January 2012

048: Nawal El Saadawi
The Day Mubarak was Tried
يوم محاكمة مبارك

In a self-reflexive narrative, the Egyptian author and human rights activist Nawal El Saadawi questions the meaning of homeland versus birthplace in a controversial location such as contemporary Cairo. She weaves personal childhood memories into the shifting Egyptian political climate, as well as the new social, intergenerational relations that currently exist. The recent trial of Mubarak, and her personal perceptions and feelings watching it, become the backdrop for Saadawi’s notebook contribution. In a literary twist, Saadawi fixates on the broken television set in her house, which is broadcasting Mubarak’s trial, as a metaphor and a way of marking the passing of time of the various presidential regimes, while revealing her own perceptual shifts from guilt and blame to “gleams of childish, mysterious hope.” Saadawi reveals the trial as a play that is regulated by the media and scriptwriters; while themes of heritage, time, love, and the difficulty of recording your life’s work through writing slowly emerge.

Nawal El Saadawi (*1931) is an Egyptian feminist writer, novelist, activist, physician, and psychiatrist living in Cairo.

English/German/Arabic
24 pp., 2 ill.,
14.8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6.– [D], CHF 9.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2897-3
December 2011

E-Book
Ca. € 5.99 [D], CHF 9.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3077-8
January 2012

049: Jimmie Durham
Material

“We live in a world of our own construction . . ., and I want to look at that strangeness in the framework of material,” the artist Jimmie Durham says. Taking the form of notes from a series of lectures given in Venice, Durham explores our relationship to the world through materials , whether they are concrete substance such as wood, oak, petroleum, or plastics, or abstract, theoretical matters such as math, prime numbers, or computing. His notebook breathes life into the notion that “our knowledge of the world comes from the way we are constructed. We construct the world as we are constructed”. By using wood and petroleum as his focal points, he leads us through the history of the construction of Venice, to a sculpture and its built-in mistake, and finally to how the tissue in fish is filled with so much plastic that a scientist friend no longer eats the animals.

Jimmie Durham (*1940) is an artist, political activist, and writer living in Berlin and Rome.

English/German
24 pp., 5 ill.,
14.8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6.– [D], CHF 9.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2898-0
December 2011

E-Book
Ca. € 5.99 [D], CHF 9.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3078-5
January 2012

050: Thomas Mann & Theodor W. Adorno
An Exchange
Introduction: Enrique Vila-Matas

During their exile from Nazi Germany, an intensive exchange unfolded between the writer Thomas Mann and the forty-years-younger philosopher and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno. The two letters from Mann to Adorno, reproduced here, from 1943 and 1945, are associated with Mann’s Doctor Faustus. Adorno was his adviser for questions concerning musicology and musical theories, in particular about the twelve-tone-technique developed by Arnold Schoenberg, which Mann used in his novel—without mentioning its creator. This led Schoenberg to accuse the writer of plagiarism—the novelist Enrique Vila-Matas refers to the story in his introduction. Mann responds to the charge with a lack of understanding, as he thought his principle of montage, in the sense of appropriation without identification of its source, and which he explains in detail in the later of the two letters, was “perhaps outrageous” but finally legitimate.

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) was a novelist and Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) was a sociologist and philosopher.

Enrique Vila-Matas (*1948) is an author living in Barcelona.

English/German
44 pp., 27 ill.,
14.8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6.– [D], CHF 9.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2899-7
December 2011

E-Book
Ca. € 5.99 [D], CHF 9.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3079-2
January 2012

051: George Chan
Dream Farms
Introduction: Fernando García-Dory

In a lifetime of work with farmers around the world, George Chan, the father of integrated farming, has been searching for a formula that would transform “waste into wealth”. He brought together their ancient knowledge with new technologies and elaborated a theory based on circularity and sustainable recycling where farming can exist with zero input and zero emissions—the Integrated Farming and Waste Management System. For the so-called Dream Farms, a sustainable cycle was developed using material and energy in different stages, such as raising chickens and using their waste as extra nutrients for the plants, effecting an increase of crop and gain. Chan has been a pioneer of our modern take on non-pollution and bio-farming, but unfortunately his revolutionary model comes out of site-specific research and exchanges and thus remains for the most part unknown. This notebook brings together key ideas of this committed thinker in the form of drawings, diagrams, notes, and photographs, which are introduced by Fernando García-Dory, who has carefully compiled these papers in close exchange with Chan.

George Chan (*1923) is an environmental engineer.

Fernando García-Dory (*1978) is an artist and agro-ecologist living between Madrid, Berlin, and the northern Spanish mountains.

English/German
Ca. 32 pp., ca. 20 ill.,
Ca. 14.8 x 21 cm, paperback
Ca. € 6.– [D], CHF 9.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2900-0
December 2011

E-Book
Ca. € 5.99 [D], CHF 9.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3080-8
January 2012

052: Daniel Heller-Roazen
Secrets of Al-Jāḥiẓ

In this notebook, philosopher and writer Daniel Heller-Roazen poses the question, “Might language guard something of its own, hidden in everything that is said?” With his mastery of language and its cryptic, coded nature, he dives into the fundamental question and mystery of speech and “text” itself. Heller-Roazen refers to the ninth-century thinker Al-Jāḥiẓ and his notion of guarding a secret and holding the tongue, and his idea that we need two skills to handle a secret: how not to speak at the wrong time, and how not to lose a secret by divulging it. A secret affects the bodies’ organs and physical being, mainly the tongue and chest, and through a discussion of Al-Jāḥiẓ’s methods, the life of the secret is revealed: from how it traverses the body, seeping into every movement and gesture, every glance of the secret keeper, to how, once it escapes the tongue into a single ear, it is no longer a secret and becomes something else—public scandal, private shame—or at best passes into another discourse altogether, information.

Daniel Heller-Roazen (*1974) is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University.

English/German
24 pp., 2 ill.,
10.5 x 14.8 cm, paperback
€ 4.– [D], CHF 6.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2901-7
December 2011

E-Book
Ca. € 3.99 [D], CHF 6.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3081-5
January 2012

053: Jill Bennett
Life in the Anthropocene

The topic of this notebook by Jill Bennett is life in the anthropocene, the present eon, which is characterized by human activities. Derived from geology, the term anthropocene circumscribes an era that began with industrialization and spans a vanishingly brief time of 250 years, in which, however, a paradigm change has occurred. Its implications have generated some resistance, uttered, for example, when denying that climate change, a decisive trait of the anthropocene, is a man-made phenomenon. The comprehensive change in our understanding of the world has had effects on how we eat, shop, and move around, but it also offers the potential for inventions in the socio-ecological systems: when ecological thinking begins to influence our ways of working, it may eventually lead to a transdisciplinary revolution. Bennett names examples of transdisciplinary processes from the realm of art, such as Amy Balkin’s work Public Smog (2004–ongoing), which incorporates the earth’s atmosphere. In the end, it is the actively recognized paradigm change that opens possibilities for innovations.

Jill Bennett is a writer, researcher and cultural critic based at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, Sydney.

English / German
36 pp., 3 ill.,
10.5 x 14.8 cm, paperback
€ 4.– [D], CHF 6.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2902-4
December 2011

E-Book
Ca. € 3.99 [D], CHF 6.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3082-2
January 2012

054: Stephen Muecke
Butcher Joe

In this notebook, Stephen Muecke describes the works of the Aboriginal artist Butcher Joe from Goolarabooloo, who visualized key ideas of his culture in the drawings reproduced here. They show places where the dead visit the living, events at the threshold between waking and sleeping: legends of dreamtime that explain how everything came into existence and that constitute the rules according to which people live. We see dancing, hunting, and working people, spirits, animals, skeletons—particular scenes from history, partially translations of visual and acoustic memories, in which spirits can turn into humans and humans into animals. As a portrait of a particular Indigenous Australian aesthetic, these drawings and the descriptive essay in the notebook allow the reader a personal insight into the world and life of the people and their mythical principles, according to which all—be it animal, human, or plant—is viewed in its potential to transform.

Butcher Joe Nangan (1902–1989) was an artist from Broome, West Australia.

Stephen Muecke (*1951) is a writer living in Sydney.

English/German
Ca. 32 pp., ca. 15 ill.,
17.6 x 25 cm, paperback
€ 8.– [D], CHF 12.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2903-1
December 2011

E-Book
Ca. € 7.99 [D], CHF 12.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3083-9
January 2012

055: Ada Lovelace
Introduction: Joasia Krysa

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace and daughter of Lord Byron, was a writer who, as a young adult, developed a deep interest in mathematics, in particular in Charles Babbage’s work on the Analytical Engine. This notebook includes a full reproduction of her famous “Note G,” one of several notes that supplemented her translation of a text by Luigi Federico Menebrae about Babbage’s research. Note G contains an algorithm that functions as a software to enable Babbage’s Engine—which did not yet exist—to perform computing processes and is widely regarded as the first computer program. While Note G expresses the author’s doubt about a computer’s capability to develop what we would call “artificial intelligence,” in other places she foresees that computers could go beyond pure calculation. In her thinking, Lovelace “managed to combine scientific rationalism with subjective imagination.” Additionally to Note G, this notebook contains selected transcripts and reproductions of letters exchanged between her and Babbage, as well as her sonnet “The Rainbow.”

Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) was an English writer.

Joasia Krysa is a curator, academic and Agent for dOCUMENTA (13).

English/German
36 pp., ca. 13 ill.,
17.6 x 25 cm, paperback
€ 8.– [D], CHF 12.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2904-8
Dezember 2011

E-Book
Ca. € 7.99 [D], CHF 12.90
ISBN 978-3-7757-3084-6
January 2012