The word 'digital' refers to both digital data, as used in computers, and also the digits, fingers, of the hand, and thus by extension touch, which has long been a trope for connectivity, community, a
From our bank accounts to supermarket checkouts to the movies we watch, strings of ones and zeroes suffuse our world. Digital technology has defined modern society in numerous ways, and the vibrant di
A memoir and cultural history the World’s End, a West London area once home to bohemian artists and punk rock and now an outpost of neoliberalism.Charlie Gere’s account of growing up in the World’s End area of West London during the Cold War combines local history, cultural history, memoir, and a strong sense of the apocalyptic. Once a rundown part of Chelsea at the wrong end of the King’s Road, the World’s End has long been a place for bohemian writers and artists, including Turner, Whistler, Beckett, Bacon, and Bacon’s muse Henrietta Moraes, all of whom evinced an appropriate apocalyptic sensibility. After World War II, in which the area suffered severe bombing, it became a center of the counterculture that emerged from what Jeff Nuttall called “Bomb Culture,” formed by the threat of nuclear annihilation. The famous boutique Granny Takes a Trip opened there in 1966, joined later on by Hung On You, Puss Weber’s Flying Dragon Tea Room, and the commune Gandalf’s Garden. The area also
This book explores how the practice of art, in particular of avant-garde art, keeps our relation to time, history and even our own humanity open. Examining key moments in the history of both technolog
The failure of secular modernity to deliver on its promise of progress and enlightenment leaves a void that religion is rushing to fill. Yet what kind of religious thinking and doing can be adequate t
Much as art history is in the process of being transformed by new information communication technologies, often in ways that are either disavowed or resisted, art practice is also being changed by tho
Technological optimism, even utopianism, was widespread at midcentury; in Britain,Harold Wilson in 1963 promised a new nation "forged from the white heat of the technologicalrevolution." In this heady
The failure of secular modernity to deliver on its promise of progress and enlightenment leaves a void that religion is rushing to fill. Yet what kind of religious thinking and doing can be adequate t
