The ACTLab Reading List

Art/Architecture

Marina Abramovic
Artist Body
Christopher Alexander
A Pattern Language
The Timeless Way of Building
Hugo Ball
Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary
J. G. Ballard
The Atrocity Exhibition
Michael Benedikt
For an Architecture of Reality
John Berger
About Looking
Ways of Seeing
Joseph Beuys
Energy Plan for the Western Man
Yves-Alain Bois
Painting as Model
Jacques Derrida
The Truth in Painting
Elizabeth Diller
Bodybuildings: Architectural Facts and Fictions
(and Ricardo Scofidio) Flesh
Ernst Gombrich
Art and Illusion
Nelson Goodman
Languages of Art
Jane Jacobs
The Life and Death of Great American Cities
Allan Kaprow
Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life
Michael Kirby
The Art of Time
Rem Koolhaas
Delirious New York
S,M,L,XL
Lucy Lippard
Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object
E. Manzini
The Material of Invention: Materials and Design
WJT Mitchell
Picture Theory
Donald Norman
Design of Everyday Things
Yoko Ono
Instruction Paintings
Alberto Perez-Gomez
Polyphilo, or the Dark Forest Revisited
Tom Phillips
A Humument
Jim Burns Praeger
Arthropods
Hani Rashid and Lise Ann Couture
Asymptote
Situationist International
Situationist International Anthology
Bernard Tschumi
Architecture and Disjunction
Jeffrey Vallance
Blinky
The World of Jeffrey Vallance: Collected Writings 1978-1994
Robert Venturi
Learning from Las Vegas
Paul Virilio
Bunker Archaeology
Lost Dimension
Steven Watson
Strange Bedfellows, the first American Avant-garde
Mark Wigley
The Architecture of Deconstruction
T. Williams
The History of Invention: From Stone Axes to Silicon Chips
James Wines
De-Architecture
Peter Zellner
Hybrid Space: New Forms in Digital Architecture

CD-ROM/Interactive

 

Kveta Pacovska
Mitternachtspeil (also in book form)
Comics/Graphic Literature
Nick Bantock
Griffin and Sabine Trilogy
Istvan Banyai
Zoom
Daniel Clowes
Caricature
Robert Crumb
Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart
How To Read Donald Duck: Imperialist ideology in the Disney comic
Will Eisner
Comics and Sequential Art
Graphic Storytelling
The Essential Silver Surfer
Neil Gaiman
Mr. Punch
Sandman series
Chris Garratt and Mike Kidd
The Essential Biff: Situationist comix
George Herriman
Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman
Paul Maar
Onkel Florians Fliegender Flohmarkt (Uncle Florian's Flying Circus)
Scott McCloud
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
Winsor McKay
The Best of Little Nemo in Slumberland
Frank Miller
The Dark Knight Returns
Alan Moore
Watchmen
Richard Osborne
Philosophy for Beginners (and other comic style books in Writers and Readers "For Beginners" series)
Spectacular Times
Buffo! Amazing tales of political pranks and anarchic buffoonery
Art Spiegelman
Maus I and II
 
Cultural Studies/Philosophy/History/Anthropology
Reinhold Aman (ed.)
The Best of Maledicta -- The International Journal of Verbal Aggression
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
Gaston Bachelard
The Poetics of Space
The Poetics of Reverie
The Psychoanalysis of Fire
M.M. Bakhtin
The Dialogic Imagination
Roland Barthes
Image-Music-Text
Mythologies
The Pleasure of the Text
S/Z
Jean Baudrillard
Seduction
Simulacra and Simulation
Simulations (and others in Autonomedia¹s semiotext(e) series)
Walter Benjamin
Illuminations
Henri Bergson
Matter and Memory
Pierre Bourdieu
Die feinen Unterschiede
Harold Bloom
The Anxiety of Influence
Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star
Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences
Michel de Certeau
The Practice of Everyday Life
Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave, ed
Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context
Noam Chomsky
Necessary Illusions: Thought control in democratic societies
James Clifford
The Predicament of Culture
Arthur Danto
Narration and Knowledge
The Transfiguration of the Commonplace
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
Anti-Oedipus
A Thousand Plateaus
Paul DeMan
Allegories of Reading
Jacqes Derrida
Archive Fever
Dissemination
Umberto Eco
Misreadings
The Open Work
A Theory of Semiotics
Mircea Eliade
The Sacred and the Profane
Yriö Engeström, Reijo Miettinen, and Raija-Leena Punamäki-Gitai
Perspectives on Activity Theory, Learning in doing
P. Feyerabend
Against Method
William H. Gass
Finding a Form
On Being Blue
Clifford Geertz
The Interpretation of Cultures
Rene Girard
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
Violence and the Sacred
Nelson Goodman
Fact, Fiction and Forcast
Problems and Projects
Ways of Worldmaking
Jürgen Habermas
Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit
Martin Heidegger
Poetry, Language, Thought
Herodotus
The History
Stewart Home
Neoismo, Plagiarism & Praxis
Johann Huizinga
Homo Ludens: A study of the play element in culture
Julie Thompson Klein
Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
Metaphors We Live By
Henri Lefebvre
The Production of Space
Niklas Luhmann
Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft
Roland Marchand
Advertising the American Dream: Making way for modernity, 1920- 1940
Brian Massumi
A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Sense and Non-Sense
The Visible and the Invisible
Marvin Minsky
The Society of Mind
William Paulson
The Noise of Culture
Mark Poster
The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context.
Plato
Meno
The Republic
Timaeus and Critias
Alain Robbe-Grillet
For a New Novel
Sakolsky and Koehline, Eds.
Gone to Croatan: Origins of North American Dropout Culture
Peter Sloterdijk
Spheres I+II
Michael Taussig
Mimesis and Alterity
Peter Lamborn Wilson
Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegades
Games
Final Fantasy VII, SquareSoft
Infocom Masterpieces, Infocom ( currently available from http://store.activision.com )
Myst (Rand and Robyn Miller)
David Sheff
Game Over, Press Start to Continue
Gender/Identity/Sexuality
Alison Adam
Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine.
Didier Anzieu
The Skin Ego
Kirsten Bakis
Lives of the Monster Dogs
Marleen Barr
Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction
Georges Bataille
Erotism
Simone de Beauvoir
The Second Sex
Kate Bornstein
My Gender Workbook
S.E. Braude
First Person Plural
Judith Butler
Gender Trouble
Beatriz Colomina, ed.
Sexuality and Space
Mary Daly
Gyn/Ecology
Gilles Deleuze
Masochism
Michel Foucault
The Care of the Self
The History of Sexuality
Madness and Civilization
Sigmund Freud
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Totem and Taboo
Joanna Frueh
Erotic Faculties
Sander Gilman
Difference and Pathology
Disease and Representation
Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, eds.
The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul
Jacques Lacan
Écrits
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
George Lakoff
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind
Steven Levy
Artificial Life
Gary A. Olsen and Elizabeth Hirsh, eds.
Women Writing Culture
John O¹Neill
Five Bodies: The Human Shape of Modern Society
Adrienne Rich
Of Woman Born
C.A. Ross
Dissociative Identity Disorder
Mary Shelley
Frankenstein
L.K. Suryani and G.D. Jensen
Trance and Possession in Bali: a Window on Western Multiple Personality,
Possession Disorder and Suicide
When Rabbit Howls- The Troops for Truddi Chase
Etienne Wenger
Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity
David Wills
Prosthesis
Media/Technology/Cybertheory
Espen Aarseth
Cybertext
Phil Agre
Computation and Human Experience
(with Douglas Schuler) Reinventing Technology, Rediscovering Community
Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape
Edward Barrett, ed
Sociomedia: Multimedia, Hypermedia, and the Social Constuction of Knowledge.
S. Paige Baty
E-mail trouble: Love & Addition @ The Matrix
Michael Benedikt, ed.
Cyberspace
David Bennahum
Extra Life
Hakim Bey
T.A.Z.
Brook and Boal, eds.
Resisting the Virtual Life
Jay David Bolter
(and Richard Grusin) Remediation: Understanding New Media
Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing
Scott Bukatman
Terminal Identity
G. Spencer Brown
Laws of Form
Manuel Castells
The Network Society
John Casti
Complexification
William J. Clancey
Situated Cognition: On Human Knowledge and Computer Representations
Andy Clark
Being There
Joseph J. Corn (ed.)
Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology, and the American Future
Richard Coyne
Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age
Critical Art Ensemble
The Electronic Disturbance
Bruce Damer
Avatars!
Kristin Dawkins
Gene Wars: The Politics of Biotechnology (Open Media Pamphlet #3)
Guy Debord
Society of the Spectacle
Mark Dery
Flame Wars
Dhris DiBona, Sam Ockman, and Mark Stone, eds
Open Sources: Voices of the Open Source Revolution
Stephen Doherty-Farina
The Wired Neighborhood
Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay, eds.
Technology & the Politics of Knowledge
Stephanie Flecher
E-mail: A Love Story
George Gerbner
The Future of Media: Digital Democracy or More Corporate Control? (Open Media Pamphlet # 11)
Chris Hables Gray
The Cyborg Handbook
Barry N. Hague and Brian D. Loader, eds.
Digital Democracy: Discourse and Descision Making in the Information Age
David Hakken
Cyborgs@Cyberspace: An Ethnographer Looks to the Future
Donna Haraway
Modest Witness@Second Millenium: FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse
Simians, Cyborgs and Women
Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe, eds.
Global Literacies and the World-Wide Web
N. Katherine Hayles
How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics.
Robert Held
Inquisition: A bilingual guide to the exhibition of torture instruments from the middle ages to the industrial era
Larry Hickman
John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology
Michael Hiltzik
Dealers of Lightning
Birger Hjørland and Birger Hjrland
Information Seeking and Subject Representation
Douglas Hofstadter
Gödel, Escher, Bach
Steven Holtzman
Digital Mantras
Lynette Hunter
Critiques of Knowing: Situated Textualities in Science, Computing and the Arts
Edwin Hutchinson
Cognition in the Wild
Robert Jacobson, ed.
Information Design
Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Johndan
Nostalgic Angels: Rearticulating Hypertext Writing
Michael Joyce
Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics
Sara Kiesler, ed.
Culture of the Internet
Kroker/Kroker
Digital Delirium
Ray Kurzweil
The Age of Spiritual Machines
Manuel de Landa
War in the Age of Intelligent Machines
George Landow
Hyper / Text / Theory
Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of ContemporaryCritical Theory and Technology
Bruno Latour
Aramis, Or the Love of Technology
Science in Action
We Have Never Been Modern
Brenda Laurel
Computers as Theatre
Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin
Net Slaves: True Tales of Working the Web. New York
Pierre Lévy
Becoming Virtual
Malcolme McCullough
Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand
Richard McKeon
Rhetoric: Essays in Invention & Discovery
Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media
Laws of Media: The New Science
Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore
War and Peace in the Global Village
William Mitchell
City of Bits
E-topia
Alan J. Munro, Kristina Hook, and David Benyon, eds.
Social Navigation of Information Space
Janet Murray
Hamlet on the Holodeck
Bonnie A. Nardi
Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction
(and Vicki O'Day) Information Ecologies : Using Technology with Heart
Nicholas Negroponte
Being Digital
Jakob Nielsen
Designing Web Usability
David F. Noble
The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention
Donald Norman
Things That Make Us Smart
William R. Paulson
The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information
Marjorie Perloff
Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media
Mark Poster
The Second Media Age
H. Rheingold
Virtual Reality
Avital Ronell
The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electronic Speech
William Rowe
Machinery and Mechanical Devices
Socrates in the Labyrinth: Hypertext, Argument, Philosophy (Hypertext.)
Ziauddin Sardar and Jerome R. Ravetz, eds.
Cyberfutures: Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway
Dan Schiller
Digital Captitalism: Networking the Global Market System
Douglas Schuler
New Community Networks
Marc A. Smith and Peter Kollock, eds.
Communities in Cyberspace
Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert L. Breyfus
Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepeneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity
Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler
Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization
Susan Leigh Star, ed. 1995.
Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and Politics in Science and Technology
Allucquère Rosanne Stone
The War Between Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age
Lucy Suchman
Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication
Patricia Sullivan and James E. Porter
Opening Spaces: Writing Technologies and Critical Research Practices
Margaret A. Syverson
The Wealth of Reality: Ecologies of Composition
Mark C. Taylor
Hiding
(and Esa Saarinen) Imagologies: Media Philosophy
Roza Tsagarousianou, Damian Tambini, and Cathy Brian, eds.
Cyberdemocracy: Technology, Cities, and Civic Networks
Edward Tufte
Envisioning Information
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Visual Explanations
Gregory Ulmer
Teletheory
Tyler Volk
Metapatterns
Alan Weisman
Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World
Kathleen E. Welch,
Electronic Rhetoric
Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores
Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design
Shoshana Zuboff
In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power
Music
Jacob Aranza
Backward Masking Unmasked: Backward satanic messages of rock and roll exposed
Jacques Attali
Noise: The political economy of music
John Cage
Notations
Silence
P. Panhuysen, ed.
Echo: The Images of Sound
Gilbert Rouget
Music and Trance: A theory of the relations between music and possession
B. Truax
"Musical Creativity and Complexity at the Threshold of the 21st Century"
Journal of New Music Research
Performance/Theatre/Dance
Antonin Artaud
The Theatre and Its Double
Augusto Boal
Theatre of the Oppressed
Bertolt Brecht
On Theatre
Stefan Brecht
Queer Theatre
Joseph Chaikin
The Presence of the Actor
Robert K. Gilmore
Ozark Baptizings, Hangings, and Other Diversions: Theatrical folkways of rural Missouri, 1885-1910
Jerszy Grotowski
Towards a Poor Theatre
John Law and John Hassard
Actor Network Theory and After
Susan Leigh Foster, ed.
Corporealities
Friedrich Neitzsche
The Birth of Tragedy
Peggy Phelan
Unmarked: The Politics of Performance
Rebecca Schneider
The Explicit Body in Performance
Re/Search #s 6, 7 (Industrial Culture Handbook), #11 (Pranks)
Survival Research Laboratories
The Will To Provoke: An account of fantastic schemes for initiating social improvement
Photography
Roland Barthes
Camera Lucida
Rosalind Krauss, et al
L'Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism
Susan Sontag
On Photography
Poetry and Literature
Diane Ackerman
Jaguar of Sweet Laughter
Antonin Artaud
Selected Writings
Margaret Atwood
Collected Poems
J.G. Ballard
Crash
Jorge Luis Borges
The Garden of Forking Paths
Labyrinths
William Burroughs
Naked Lunch
Italo Calvino
Invisible Cities
Six Memos for the Next Millenium
Lewis Carroll
Alice¹s Adventures in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from Underground
Isidore Ducasse
La Poesis
Les Chantes de Maldorador
James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg, eds.
Word Virus; The William Burroughs Reader
Robert Graves
The White Goddess
Robert Hass
Human Wishes
Herman Hesse
Steppenwolf
Barbara Hodgson
The Sensualist
Victor Hugo
Notre Dame de Paris
Michel Houllebecq
Particules Elementaires
Whatever
James Joyce
Finnegan¹s Wake
Ulysses
Milan Kundera
Identity
Slowness
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
David Lee
The Porcine Canticles
Alan Lightman
Einstein¹s Dreams
Federico Garcia Lorca
Poet in New York
Klaus Maeck (ed.)
Hor mit Schmerzen! (Listen with Pain!): The definitive saga of Einsturzende Neubauten
Stéphane Mallarmé
Collected Poems
John McPhee
Annals of the Former World
The Control of Nature
Octavio Paz
The Bow and The Lyre
Convergences
Thomas Pynchon
Gravity¹s Rainbow
Rainer Maria Rilke
Duino Elegies
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Letters to a Young Poet
Salman Rushdie
Grimus
Midnight¹s Children
The Satanic Verses
Lawrence Sterne
Tristram Shandy
Junichiro Tanizaki
In Praise of Shadows
David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest
Lawrence Weschler
Mr. Wilson¹s Cabinet of Wonder
Radio-TV-Film
Anonymous
Radio Is My Bomb: A DIY manual for pirates
Joyce Nelson
Perfect Machines: TV in the nuclear age
Zeke Teflon
The Complete Manual of Pirate Radio
Science
Charles Bazerman
The Languages of Edison's Light
Michael Cole, Yrjo Engestrom, Olga Vasquez, eds.
Mind, Culture, and Activity: Seminal Papers from the Laboratory of Comparative Human
Cognition
R. Dawkins
Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design
Daniel C. Dennett
Consciousness Explained
Freeman Dyson
Infinite in All Directions
James Gleick
Chaos
G. Austin Gresham
Post-Mortem Procedures: An illustrated textbook
Edward T. Hall
The Hidden Dimension
Alfred Korzybski
Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics
T. Kuhn
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Stephen Hawking
A Brief History of Time
N. Katherine Hayles
Chaos Bound
Hans Moravec
Mind Children
Robot to Transcendent Mind
George Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, and
Tim Putnam, eds.
FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture
L. Schlain
Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light
Lewis Thomas
Lives of a Cell
Science Fiction
Douglas Adams
The Ultimate Hitchhiker¹s Guide
Isaac Asimov
Foundation
Foundation and Empire
Second Foundation
Octavia Butler
Dawn
Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents (or anything by her)
Philip K. Dick
The Divine Invasion
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Follow My Tears, The Policeman Said
Galactic Pot-Healer
The Game-Players of Titan
The Man in the High Castle
A Scanner Darkly
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
Ubik
Valis
Paul DiFillipi
Ribofunk
William Gibson
Burning Chrome
Count Zero
The Difference Engine (with Bruce Sterling)
Idoru
Mona Lisa Overdrive
Neuromancer
Virtual Light
Tim Powers
Anubis Gates
Dinner at Deviant¹s Palace
The Drawing of the Dark
Earthquake Weather
Expiration Date
Last Call
On Stranger Tides
Dan Simmons
Endymion
The Fall of Hyperion
Hyperion
The Rise of Endymion
Kim Stanley Robinson
Blue Mars
Green Mars
The Memory of Whiteness
Red Mars
Neal Stephenson
Cryptonomicon
Snow Crash
Bruce Sterling
Holy Fire
Schismatrix
Diamond Age
Crytonomicon
Sites
Simon Biggs
http://www.easynet.co.uk/simonbiggs/simonbiggs.htm
David Blair. "WAXweb"
http://bug.village.virginia.edu/
Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think."
http://www.isg.sfu.ca/~duchier/misc/vbush/
Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, "CTHEORY"
http://www.ctheory.com/
Michael Joyce, "Afternoon: a Story"
http://iberia.vassar.edu/~mijoyce/Afternoon.html
Origin. "Ultima OnLine"
http://www.owo.com/
Replay
http://www.eyebeam.org/replay/
Greg Ruggeiro, ed, Open Pamphlet Series, Seven Stories Press
http://www.sevenstories.com
Michael Shumate, "Hyperizons: Hypertext Fiction"
http://www.duke.edu/~mshumate/hyperfic.html
Joseph Squier et al. "The Place"
http://gertrude.art.uiuc.edu/ludgate/the/place/place2.html
Carl Steadman, "Kid A In Alphabet Land: A Trading Card Set Dealing with Jacques Lacan"
http://www.freedonia.com/~carl/kida/
Carl Steadman and Wendy Skratt. "placing"
http://www.placing.com/
Bruce Sterling, "The Dead Media Project."
http://www.islandnet.com/~ianc/dm/dm.html
Storytelling online
http://www.merl.com/projects/togi/index.html
Jason Zada and Greg S. Hipwell. "Spiff."
http://www.manipulation.com/spiff/home/home.html