7 minute read
The Latest Publications
1Digital Suffragists MARIE TESSIER
Marie Tessier has been moderating comments at the New York Times since 2007, the year the first iPhone went on the market. Today, the number of smartphone users is estimated at over six billion. With so many people connected to the internet, the public sphere should, in theory, be more democratic than ever. So why is there an absence of women’s voices online? Why are they outnumbered by men? What does this mean for democracy? “The fact is,” Tessier states, “that women are routinely criticised, demeaned, threatened, interrupted and characterised as wrong, unruly, disgusting and out of place when they exercise their rights as citizens or do their jobs as elected officials.” One such example is US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was confronted in this way on the Capitol steps in 2020. Tessier traces these patterns of behaviour – what she calls “the fossils of male white supremacy” – as far back as The Iliad.
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“The fossils of historic gender segregation and the official exclusion of women from the public square have functioned as the new bones of digital technology and the public conversations they support,” Tessier argues. “It has been digitally reframed and cast out into the world as if it were something new. But it is very, very old.”
Digital Suffragists outlines the manifold reasons why many women’s voices continue to go unheard – presenting in-depth analyses of news comments and online trolling. It also takes a deep dive into implicit gender bias in technology and web design. Finally, the text paves a way forward, imagining a democratic media space where gender and racial representation are at the forefront. “It’s not enough to simply call on women to speak up,” Tessier says. “It is fundamentally a design problem.” Words Eleanor Sutherland
MIT Press mitpress.mit.edu
2Black Paper TEJU COLE
Photographer and writer Teju Cole (b. 1976) draws a series of lucid connections on the connotations of colour, shadow and gradient. Here, we are transported from the world of photography and abstract art – via theories of racial difference and the social hierarchies they uphold – to the domain of morality, in which “light” and “dark” signify good and evil. Above all, this text explores the conceptual and metaphorical dimensions of “blackness.” The book hinges on an introductory portrait of Caravaggio (1571-1961), Renaissance master of chiaroscuro (the use of shading to suggest the substance and volume of objects) and violent paranoiac, whose biography is saturated with tales of depravation and excess. “He was a murderer, a slaveholder, a terror and a pest,” Cole notes. “But I don’t go to Caravaggio to be reminded of how good people are, and certainly not because of how good he was. I seek him out for a certain kind of otherwise unbearable knowledge.” Cole is too subtle a narrator to spell out what this knowledge might be, but we suspect that an overly “black-and-white” worldview is being held to account for many of the evils in our present moment: not least the appalling treatment of migrants, whose deaths en route to western cities are amongst those referenced here. For Caravaggio, by contrast, truth lies in shading.
The main body of the collection comes from a set of essays, which have been expanded from lectures delivered in 2019. Here, Cole asserts that we should make more expansive and subtle use of all our senses in taking in the world. Indeed, read as a whole, these stories “collectively argue for using our senses – interpreted as capaciously as possible – to respond to experience, embrace epiphany, and intensify our ethical commitments.” Words Greg Thomas
The University of Chicago Press press.uchicago.edu
3The New Urban Aesthetic MONICA MONTSERRAT DEGEN & GILLIAN ROSE
The past 15 years have seen a huge amount of work on infrastructure. Fast forward to 2022 and the overwhelming presence of advanced digital technology provides a fascinating point of departure to examine design and development as a whole, both in the present and in future. This new title exemplifies how the colonisation of data is defining the early 21st century urban experience, as a radical reconfiguration of 20th century inhabitation.
For Gillian Rose, Head of the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, and coauthor, Mónica Montserrat Degen, Reader in Cultural Sociology at Brunel University London, the dynamics of the contemporary world are fundamentally shifting as digital data is extracted, processed and returned in different formats, devices and situations. And, these changes are happening most intensely in cities. Today, a bewildering amount of sensors generate data, which is gathered and analysed by human as well as algorithmic agents, and is used for things as diverse as the allocation of housing to policing and healthcare. Whilst the average citizen is aware of how smartphones, cameras and apps influence their everyday experiences, from travel to socialising, the deeper entanglements and interactions are less obvious.
The authors focus on three key examples of change in three very different cities: a large redevelopment in Doha, Qatar; the renovation of Milton Keynes to become a smart city; and the cultural regeneration of London's Smithfield Market into the Culture Mile. They examine how social media, and other technologies like CGI, have been critical factors in civic participation and gentrification. The conclusion leads, as promised, to the definition of a new aesthetic: glamorous, flowing and dramatic. Words Christopher Kanal
Bloomsbury bloomsbury.com
ERIC WILES
California-based Eric Wiles’ fine art and landscape photography reveals dynamic images of natural beauty. His goal is to bring awareness to the variety of wondrous places in the world, in the hope that we will be inspired to contribute to global conservation and protection efforts. He notes: “In showing the magnificence of our home, we can recognise that every day is Earth day.” Wiles’ work has been propelled to international awards, exhibitions and fairs including the Musée du Louvre and Red Dot Miami.
ew-photo.com I eric-wiles.pixels.com I @eric.wiles.photo
THOMAS WITZKE
Thomas Witzke is a painter, photographer and digital artist based in Stuttgart and Ulm. He focuses on the narrative aspect of colour; this is perhaps best expressed in the L’art pour L’art series, in which the viewer is invited to explore rooms in museums and artists’ studios. The depicted spaces are in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Museum Berggruen, Berlin and the Neue Pinakothek, Munich, and the studios of Paula Modersohn-Becker, Lyonel Feininger and Gabriele Münter. This award-winning series has been shown in numerous exhibitions.
kunstmedia.com | Instagram: @thomaswitzke9
DEBORAH MOSS
Deborah Moss is an award-winning artist who works from her studio, which is nestled in a native forest in North Auckland, New Zealand. Drawing upon the power and dynamism of nature, she translates the local environment to her artworks, creating poetic expressions, energetic gestures and colourful stories that reveal a powerful alchemy of forces between the natural world and her interior vision.
Painting is experimental and process-driven for Moss; she encourages each composition to develop on its own accord through rich layers of paint and response to surface discoveries.
Once each original artwork is sold, a native-species tree such as the puriri is planted on her rural property as part of her Planting Hope conservation initiative.
Moss holds an MA (Hons) from the University of Auckland. She exhibits work regularly throughout New Zealand and Australia and her works are held in numerous international private collections.
