Link Editions
Link Editions is a publishing initiative of the LINK Center for the Arts of the Information Age. LINK Editions uses the print on demand approach to create an accessible, dynamic series of essays, pamphlets, catalogues and artist books. A keen advocate of the idea that information wants to be free, Link Editions releases its contents free of charge in .pdf format, and on paper at a price accessible to all. Link Editions is a not-for-profit initiative and all its contents are circulated under a Creative Commons license.
Series Titles
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REFRESH is an exhibition series where each episode is titled with a specific #HASHTAG reflecting the key concept that the works and artists in the show gravitate around. REFRESH02 is #LAYERS_BRUSSELS. REFRESH01 #LAYERS moves to Bruxelles, at La Raffinerie (Charleroi-Danses), in collaboration with iMAL Center for Digital Cultures & Technology, and in doing so the show changes to include new artists and artworks. #LAYERS_BRUSSELS takes place exactly ten years after Holy Fire. Art of the Digital Age (2008), the exhibition curated by Yves Bernard and Domenico Quaranta at l’iMAL, as well part of the off programme of Art Brussels: an event that played an ... -
#LAYERS: the ways in which the complexity of the digital environment manifests itself. Code and interface, public and private, material and immaterial, visible and invisible; the layers in a digital image; the strata of time in the archives of digital memory. This booklet is the archive/catalogue of the exhibition REFRESH01 – #LAYERS, curated by Fabio Paris and produced by the Link Art Center, that took place at Spazio Contemporanea, Brescia, from October 22 to November 19, 2016. -
The issue #12 of the “In My Computer” series, FDIC Insured was selected out of a call for proposals issued in 2015 by the Link Art Center and Abandon Normal Devices (AND) in the framework of Masters & Servers, and will be followed soon by the publication of the online archive of the 500+ failed banks logos collected and restored by the artist since 2008. Starting in 2008, Michael Mandiberg methodically downloaded the logos of the many banks that failed during the Great Recession, and were taken over by the United States Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). During this process, these ... -
Digital technology has interfered in all the spheres, private, public and professional, of our society and shaped them. Artists have always used the techniques or technologies of their time to express themselves. To each appropriated innovation thus corresponds a range of works. Yet, it takes time for the art world to integrate new practices and new media. Impatient, the most fervent advocates of digital art have structured themselves into international communities by organizing dedicated events. Their practices have now matured and the public is culturally ready to welcome their creations as it already does in festivals. At the same time, ... -
Artificial Fear Intelligence of Death: In Conversation with Monica Anderson, Erik Davis, R.U. Sirius and Dag Spicer Link EditionsThe public discourse around AI is oscillating between salvation and the apocalyptic, often referring to images from Science Fiction. Meanwhile, in our smartphones, in search engines or in automatic translation, forms of artificial intelligence are already part of our everyday life. An ongoing artistic research on the topic brought Geneva-based artist Lauren Huret to California, where she conducted interviews with four protagonists of the discourse: Computer scientist and entrepreneur Monica Anderson (Artificial Intuition), computer historian Dag Spicer (Computer History Museum), writer and editor R.U. Sirius (MONDO 2000) and writer Erik Davis (TechGnosis. Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of ... -
Cloning Aura: Art in the Age of Copycats is an essay that explores the close relation between practices of appropriation and the questioning of authorship, from the avant-gardes to Post-Internet, going through Postmodernism, 70s-80s subcultural movements, net.art and the Surfing Club generation. Written in Italian, the essay is made of thousands of text quotations mined from hundreds of papers, glued together in a sort of “crazy quilt” that nonetheless holds a linear narrative. The writing technique employed is usually referred to as patch-writing, here used to speak about appropriation through an act of appropriation, and to make a statement about the ... -
Photodump is the 11th issue of the ongoing book series “In My Computer.” Designed by Kasper Hauser, the book features three distinct contributions, all based on image collections, and made by young Italian authors who work within a very specific field but like to cross borders. Suddenly in the Digital, by Davide Giorgetta and Valerio Nicoletti, is a systematic research on interface incidents and their ability to break the digital medium supposed transparency and immediacy, by bringing the medium itself to the fore. A Collection of Trophy Images, by Valeria Mancinelli, Chiara Nuzzi and Stefania Rispoli, is an a-systematic research ... -
The 10th issue of the “In My Computer” series, Profile Page presents a selection of 100 images out of a much wider project documenting the living rooms in a huge brutalist housing unit with more than 600 standardized student flats, and confronting the pictures with a screenshot of their inhabitants’ Facebook profile page. The result is a study on the “relationship between frameworks and content, uniform design and customization, conformism and originality, social control and freedom, and how it develops within the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’ world,” as Domenico Quaranta writes in his intro text. -
Everyday we stare at computer screens as we type out emails, write code, upload photos, watch videos, and push around pixels. Billions of pages of information splashed with text and images are accessed daily, composed of colored dots emanating from a screen connected to a computer connected to the Internet. Together, these clusters of colors visually display information that we consume and that we create, colors that make up the viewers’ virtual worlds. What Color Is My Internet? is a self-portrait of the artist as an internet surfer. The book tells, in visual form, the story of 90 days of Greg ... -
Spirit Surfing is an attempt to preserve and share a body of texts and visual essays written by artist, actor and musician Kevin Bewersdorf between 2002 and 2010, collected and edited by Domenico Quaranta without the explicit consent of the author, but according to his philosophy of sharing. Bewersdorf has been very active online between 2007 and 2009, as one of the leading figures of the so-called “pro-surfers” generation. With his works and texts, he had a long-standing influence on the practice and theory of art, not only net-based. When, around 2010, he decided to stop actively promoting himself as an artist, ... -
In Vanishing Acts, Eileen Isagon Skyers looks at the role of network-based art practices as an aesthetic critique of our engagement with interface technologies that are increasingly seamless and, largely, undetectable. There’s a direct correlation between the imperceptible interface and the distracted nature of human cognition. There are certain urgencies assailing our nervous systems now that were simply never there before. And despite our endless customization of web content, we’re unable to observe the computational processes that make the information manifest. In this situation, net art has the ability to reveal something quite crucial about the changing nature of subjectivity in ... -
Everything I Shoot Is Art is a collection of essays and interviews written by Swedish art critic and researcher Mathias Jansson along the last few years, and first published on various online magazines and journals. Their main, though not unique, concern are the various possible connection lines that can be drawn between what we usually call “games” and what we usually call “art”, in the constant effort to help finding a broader, more comprehensive definition for the latter. Included are interviews with artists and indie game designers, from Rafael Rozendaal to Pippin Barr. -
The 8th issue of the series “In My Computer,” Command-Shift-4: Screenshots 2001–2014 presents a selection of about 350 images out of the 40,000 screenshots taken by the Austrian duo along its existence. Curated by German designer Diane Hillebrand, the book is born as an e-book translated into paper form. Although both versions of the book can be experienced linearly, as a usual book, they are actually hypertexts that should be primarily navigated hypertextually, clicking on links (in the e-book version) or following notes (in the paper version). In the e-book version, hyperlinks are visualized using icons in 14 different kinds ... -
Produced as a catalogue for the exhibition Holy Fire: Art of the Digital Age (2008), this book is more than a simple catalogue. Along with the works of the 27 artists in the exhibition it features the editors’ essays along with a collective interview involving some of the most important representatives of the new media art world. Holy Fire is not a book on new media art, but an exploration of the contemporary art of the digital age, and a pamphlet against the new media art paradigm and the self-isolation in which these practices evolved in the last sixty years. In ... -
6PM YOUR LOCAL TIME (#6pmylt) is a networked, distributed, one night contemporary art event taking place simultaneously in different locations, coordinated from one central venue and documented online via a web application. The project, conceived by Fabio Paris for the Link Art Center and developed in collaboration with Abandon Normal Devices (AND) and Gummy Industries, is an OPEN FORMAT and can be used by other organizations and individual curators to set up other #6pmylt events. The Link Art Center itself organized the first two events: 6PM Your Local Time UK, curated in collaboration with AND and coordinated from Furtherfield Commons, London, involving ... -
Originally published in 2008, this book documents the life and work of Gazira Babeli, the avatar artist active in Second Life between 2006 and 2010. In about 4 years, Gazira Babeli has created a vast body of works which address the world she lives in, and which have lent her such a solid, recognizable image that she has become a household name in Second Life. She acts like a virus, unleashing earthquakes, tornados and storms of images, deforming the bodies of other residents and constructing metaphorical machines; a capricious deity, she herself is a work of art, a “constructed identity” ... -
The last decade has seen an incredible growth in the production and distribution of images and other cultural artefacts. The internet is the place where all these cultural products are stored, classified, voted, collected and trashed. What is the impact of this process on art making and on the artist? Which kind of dialogue is going on between amateur practices and codified languages? How does art respond to the society of information? This is a book about endless archives, image collections, bees plundering from flower to flower and hunters crawling through the online wilderness. -
How did the internet go from the utopian free-for-all, open source heaven, libertarian last frontier to the current state of permanent surveillance, exhibitionism and paranoia? This duplicity is the underlying thread that links the artists, activists, and researchers in The Black Chamber, an exhibition, a symposium, an urban intervention and a publication. The Black Chamber aims at discussing the delicate and often awkward role of art and imagination in the age of mass surveillance, stressing the multiple connections between post-studio art and independent research, grassroots reverse engineering, and new forms of political activism in the age of networks. Not just an exhibition ... -
Originally published in 2009, this book collects the work made between 1999 and 2009 by Austrian duo UBERMORGEN (lizvlx and Hans Bernhard). Along that decade, UBERMORGEN developed a consistent oeuvre, focused on the ability of media to infiltrate reality to the point of completely altering the perception of it ([V]ote Auction, [F]original Media Hacks, Generator Tetralogy) or even its social, biological or human infrastructure (Psych|OS, Chinese Gold, Art Fid); and on the potential of art to engage a dialogue with economic, bureaucratic and informational systems (EKMRZ Trilogy, Superenhanced and all of the above). All these works are presented extensively through ... -
Astronaut Luggage is a collection of short texts written along the last years and circulated online, rearranged around five main topics: the Apocalypse, commodities, drones, history and politics. Adopting the forms of the essay and the short story, Rothstein sets himself in an “atemporality” that allows him to tell stories in which the distinction between reality and fiction is not important. As he writes in the introduction: “None of these stories are true, but none of them are false, either. These distinctions are not the point, at least not immediately. The difference between fact and fantasy are important, just not ... -
If Art Were to Disappear Tomorrow What Stories Would We Tell Our Kids? is a project that aims to create an archive of tweet-structured texts capable of describing contemporary artworks. This project came about with the idea of ordering a huge amount of works that share the common feature of being very simple yet very meaningful. Italian artist Roberto Fassone and curator Giovanna Manzotti have tried to condense the shapeless mass of images and information of contemporary artworks present in their computers and on the web, into a simple, functional and structured system, in which the complexity of the art ... -
Peer Pressure is a collection of essays previously published online between 2010 and 2011. In the author’s words, “each essay is an impassioned description or prescription to understand the digital space we inhabit differently.” Most of these writings have been highly influential for the (relatively) small community the author addresses, eliciting many heated debates. The texts idealistically address creative platforms, image aggregators, relational practices, internet memes and much more. -
Post Internet was a blog developed between December 2009 and September 2010 by the New York based art critic Gene McHugh, thanks to a grant of the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program. For almost a year, Gene McHugh kept filling this folder with his personal notes. Writing and posting became a daily, regular activity, that sometimes produced many posts a day, sometimes longer texts posted at a slower pace. However, Post Internet is not just a piece of beautiful criticism—it’s also, in itself, a piece of Post Internet art in the shape of an art criticism blog—“criticism as ... -
In My Computer, by Miltos Manetas, is a collection of essays, interviews, short tales, parables, e-mails and drafts by its author. Written between 1997 and 2011, some of these texts are widely known, many others are unpublished, and just came out of his computer. All of them contribute to portray a personality who had a strong influence on younger generations of artists, thanks to his impressive body of work—including paintings, videos, installations, prints, performances and, last but not least, websites—but also to his writings. Manetas’ book is the first of a series of artists’ writings: “notebooks” sharing the same title ... -
Artist and game designer, Eddo Stern explores the uneasy and otherwise unconscious connections between physical existence and electronic simulation, surrounding the subject matters of violence, memory and identification. A game manual, a catalogue, a making of and an archive, How to Play Eddo Stern revolves around a selected body of works developed with different media that can be understood as “games.” Featuring an essay by Matteo Bittanti, the book is a deep dive into the massive amount of small bits and pieces that make up the folders of Stern’s game projects: 3D models, texture maps and atlases, backdrops, animation frame sequences, ... -
This book came unexpected. It appeared suddenly, just like necessities do. Like all unexpected things, it has an uneven form, and its contents are far from linear. More than a book, it’s a record, an historical document. It brings together a series of heterogeneous texts written during ten years of study, research and dissemination. Along the last ten years, Random Magazine established itself as the main editorial platform for net art and new media art in Italy. A small percentage of the material you can find on the website is represented in this book. But why put ink on paper all ... -
The first art movement to use collage to collapse together images and ideas, Dada also pioneered concepts, ideas, approaches and modi operandi that were later transfused into contemporary digital tools, becoming commonplace in the digital environment. To celebrate DADA 100, from 5 February 2016 to 5 February 201 7 the online platform and collaborative project Dadaclub.online shared high quality digital copies of original Dada artworks and magazine covers, inviting artists from all over the world to use them in their work. This book documents the project, presenting 148 remixes produced and shared by participants. Dada is nothing, enjoy Dada! -
In Your Computer, by Domenico Quaranta, is a collection of texts written by Domenico Quaranta between 2005 and 2010 for exhibition catalogues, printed magazines and online reviews: a pocket version of what the author would save from the universal flood, in a world without computers. It documents most of the fields of research he has focused on critically: from Net Art to Software Art and videogames, from biotechnologies to the debate around curating and the positioning of New Media Art in the contemporary landscape, and back to Net Art again. This itinerary is traced through a selection of essays, monographic ... -
In October 2012, a one-day online symposium created a platform for discussing the practice of cyberformance—live performance that uses internet technologies to connect remote participants. The 12-hour event featured 10 presentations and attracted an audience of over 100 from around the world who engaged in a lively, vibrant conversation. CyPosium: The Book presents a selection of artefacts from the CyPosium—presentation texts, chat log excerpts, discussion transcripts, edited email conversations, creative chat excerpt essays and illustrations—along with invited articles that respond to the event. The contributors hail from a wide range of artistic practice both online and offline, and their writing ... -
U+29DC aka Documento Continuo is an artist book and a research into that contemporary zeitgeist that has been labeled “post internet.” Originally conceived as a MA thesis, Documento Continuo is a textual and visual collage strongly relying on appropriation as the only possible way to draw your own path through the information overload. Written in Italian but mostly in “International Art English,” it focuses on issues like awareness, creolization, the crisis of the European Union, dematerialization and materiality, globalization, performance, identity, FOMO, and how to be an artist in the age of “always on.” -
Recently, there has been a revived interest in the medium of radio, which can be attributed to the extended range of network-based services. Most important in this context is the world-wide availability of high-quality streaming, the abolishing of monopolies, or at least the unproblematic and easy access to technologies and infrastructures as well as concessions and licences. After all its years of existence, and despite momentous technological chances, radio still displays its characteristic directness, a characteristic already pointed out by Rudolf Arnheim and Bertolt Brecht and later by Marshall McLuhan. Currently, there is an abundance of art radio projects, practically all ... -
Torque brings together a diverse collection of essays and artworks, many newly commissioned for the project, that reflect upon the plasticity of the brain, the adaptability of technology and the malleability of language, and their twisting together through past, present and future cultures. The contributors and their work each offer unique models of navigating this territory, making their own artefacts, writing their own scripts, forging critical space and examining the blind spots. Torque#1: Mind, Language and Technology is the result of a wide range of cross-disciplinary conversations, taking place across symposia, online forums, live events and workshops, produced by the book’s editors: ... -
Beyond New Media Art is the revised, updated version of a book first published in Italian with the title Media, New Media, Postmedia (Postmedia Books, Milan 2010). Through the circulation of excerpts, reviews and interviews, the book produced some debate outside of Italy, which persuaded the author to release, three years later, this English translation. Beyond New Media Art is an attempt to analyze the current positioning of so-called “New Media Art” in the wider field of contemporary arts, and to explore the historical, sociological and conceptual reasons for its marginal position and under-recognition in recent art history. On the other ... -
Curated by Valentina Tanni, Eternal September: The Rise of Amateur Culture is a group exhibition that explores the relationship between professional art making and the rising of amateur cultural movements through the web, an historical event that is triggering a big and fascinating shift in every field of culture, especially visual culture. The show includes the works of 15 authors (professionals and amateurs) and a series of special projects and collateral events taking place both offline and online. -
From 2000 to 2009, artist Addie Wagenknecht used her livejournal account as a “private space” where to share her relationships failures to her “online only” friends. This group of people knew more about her life then even the person she was dating. In hindsight, these hundreds to thousands of private group based entries were an archive of her mistakes, permanently cached in servers for the rest of history. Technological Selection of Fate is a fragile, glitchy archive of part of this diary; a fragmentary, repetitive, arbitrary but surprisingly touching and emotional personal memory; a stream of consciousness delivering bits and ... -
One Per Year is a collection of fifteen essays written between 2000 and 2014. The topics range from media theory to philosophy related to media theory to music reviews to art reviews to thoughts on design. Like a time capsule, the book archives 15 years of media history from the point of view of the same person, an artist and theorist who went himself through an evolution, from his early interest in hacking and web design to his encounter with internet art and continental philosophy, to his participation in recent debates around glitch art and the New Aesthetic. -
Born Digital is a benefit auction and an online exhibition made to support the activities of the Link Art Center on the online auction platform Paddle8. The event—the first with this focus taking place in Europe on this scale—includes more than 50 works kindly provided by 33 artists. For two weeks long, from April 15 to April 30, 2014, people and collectors are invited to visit the works and eventually to bid to support the artists and the organizers. The Link Art Center is the first Italian organization to collaborate with Paddle8, an online auction house that partners with non-profit organizations ... -
Since You Were Born—originally exhibited as part of Memory at Niklas Beleinus Gallery—is a book composed of the chronological history of every website visited on the artist’s computer over a three month period beginning with the birth of his daughter Octavia (July 19, 2013). It thus belongs to the genre that once someone with a sheer fantasy and a bad taste for names called “autobotography”: it shows a portion of the artist’s life as it is preserved by bots—in this case, the “Chronology” function of the browser. A family album, a record of personal memories, and a picture of the ... -
In the summer 2007 three artists from Slovenia legally changed their names to “Janez Janša.” This life event introduced a break into their artistic practice, which evolved into one of the most radical explorations of life in the age of biopolitics. Featuring a text by Domenico Quaranta, this book documents and discusses their recent work, a continuum that is sometimes produced by companies and institutions as a reaction to their life, sometimes by isolating and documenting specific moments in their life. ID cards, passports and bank cards become the means of a research that undermines the very concepts of “art” ... -
Just what is it that leads many contemporary artists to restage historic events great and small, performances of the past, and sometimes even imaginary events? Are they possessed by the post-modern demon? (albeit belatedly…) Does this practice spring from a cynical awareness of the decline of values, the surrender—be it dismal or joyful, it makes little difference—to the logic of the society of spectacle? Is it yet another variation of Francis Fukuyama’s bitter prophecy of “the end of history”? Or is it simply the end of the modern myth of the “originality” of the work of art, a further confirmation of the ... -
In more than five years of activity, the Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab) produced an impressive series of projects, all developed with open source software, shared online and documented in a way that allows everybody to copy, improve, abuse or simply use them. This approach situates F.A.T. Lab in a long tradition of DIY, processual, sharable artistic practices based on instructionals, and reveals a democratic idea of art where Fluxus scores meet hacker culture (and rap music). Featuring texts by Régine Debatty, Evan Roth, Domenico Quaranta, Geraldine Juárez and Randy Sarafan, The F.A.T. Manual is a selection of more ... -
AFK – an acronym for “away of keyboard” widely used online – is an anthology of texts written for catalogues and exhibition brochures along the last five years, featuring twelve texts about eleven artists and an artist duo: Rosa Menkman, Jon Rafman, Gazira Babeli, Martin Kohout, Maurizio Cattelan, Enrico Boccioletti, Constant Dullaart, Jill Magid, Aram Bartholl, Emilie Brout & Maxime Marion, Evan Roth and Addie Wagenknecht. In different ways, these artists experienced the impact of digital means of production and dissemination, they experimented with them, they thought about them, and all this is reflected in their work. As Peter Sunde, the co-founder of the ... -
Damiano Nava likes to use the camera as a diary. After moving to Berlin, in November 2009, he found it hard to spontaneously meet people of his generation who might be interested in being photographed. He didn’t speak German, and it was hard for him to establish the kind of intimate relationship required for the project. “I was like someone having problems finding a soulmate, so it seemed like a natural step to turn to the internet,” he writes in his introduction. He wrote an ad and posted it on Craigslist and Exberliner. For about two years, the ad generated ... -
Diff in June tells a day in the life of a personal computer, written by itself in its own language, as a sort of private log or intimate diary focused on every single change to the data on its hard disk. Using a small custom script, for the entire month of June 2011 Martin Howse registered each chunk of data which had changed within the file system from the previous day’s image. Excluding binary data, one day’s sedimentation has been published in this book, a novel of data archaeology in progress tracking the overt and the covert, merging the legal ... -
After Brad Troemel (ABT) is an artist book conceived for the JstChillin exhibition Read/Write at 319 Scholes in Brooklyn in 2011. The book—originally published in a limited edition of 20—took as its conceptual core the characterization of artist Brad Troemel as a genius and a mastermind analyzed through the lens of conspiracy theory and amateur internet sleuthing. According to artist and writer Artie Vierkant, who wrote the introduction to this edition, ABT is not “about Brad Troemel, nor any of the myriad names or identities that are mentioned in its pages. ABT is about the construction of identity in a mediated ... -
What is Net art? Does its name refer to the medium it uses? Is it the art of the Netizens, the inhabitants of the internet? Is it an art movement or an art form? This book aims to provide a starting point in the search for answers to these and similar questions concerning the existence of Internet art. Edited by Marie Meixnerová, a Czech curator and scholar, #mm Net Art—Internet Art in the Virtual and Physical Space of Its Presentation approaches Internet art as a developing art form, through five thematic sections that map the “chronological” stages of this development. -
Best of Rhizome 2012 is a selection of texts published on the editorial platform of Rhizome along 2012. Edited by Joanne McNeil, the book is, in the words of Rhizome’s Executive Director Heather Corcoran, “not just a best of Rhizome’s work, but a portrait of the year that we hope will gain significance over time for its contextualization and articulation of artists’ practices. Artists are predictors and barometers of change, and sensitive to their cultural surroundings. From texts on production in the digital age, to the influence of the Occupy Movement, from drones and surveillance, to online vernacular – these ... -
Released on the occasion of the presentation of the exhibition Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age at 319 Scholes, New York (October 18–November 4, 2012), this book presents Ryan Trecartin’s series of prints A Lossless Fall 2010 together with its background documentation, in order to allow the reader to better get into an iconic, seminal piece of contemporary art. In November 2010, Ryan Trecartin published in the fashion and design magazine W the portraits of four of his long time collaborators: Lizzie Fitch, Veronica Gelbaum, Telfar Clemens, and Ashland Mines. The group was titled A ...
