How to Design a Post-Fossil World with the Sun?⁠ ⁠ Polluting energy systems based on finite fossil resources are destroying our planet and threatening its inhabitants. We all know that by now. And at the same time, there is this infinite (at least in human terms) energy of the sun pouring down on us. ⁠ ⁠ This book is about what we know about solar energy, what we can already do and what we hope to be able to do in the near future. And so it is divided into exactly these three parts: the first explains how we have designed with the sun in the past, providing a visual timeline of the historical development of solar power. The second part looks at the present: Where are we now and what is solar design? It provides examples of innovative solar design in architecture, fashion, mobility and product design. Finally, the last part looks to the future and asks how we can ensure that solar energy does not become the asbestos of the 21st century.⁠ Buy

Drone Vision: Warfare, Surveillance, Protest brings the perfidious character of drones to the fore. Namely, seeing without being seen - and the associated insecurity and vulnerability, but also the usage for resistance and protest. The book presents three projects that move between art and politics - from migrant protests to colonial surveillance and the aesthetics of drone photography. The latter shows the geological scars and war remnants of five abandoned military sites in Israel - army strongholds, shooting ranges and urban warfare training facilities - and juxtaposes them with the personal and political scars engraved and marked on the private human body. Buy

It is here! The Cyberfeminism Index!⁠ ⁠ In in this book, hackers, scholars, artists, and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it, and pushes it into plain sight.⁠ ⁠ Edited by designer, professor, and researcher Mindy Seu, it includes more than 700 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, and bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art. Buy

There's been a lot of talk lately about space exploration. But Pauline Julier goes one step further. At a time when billionaires and governments are setting out to control space while our planet is still suffering the consequences of centuries of exploitation, Julier points out that efforts to find new worlds are nothing more than a new form of colonialism. Her visual exploration took her to the Atacama Desert in Chile, where the training grounds for NASA's rovers are located next to one of the largest lithium mines in the world. A place where the destructive capitalisation of our planet is most palpable, right next to the attempt to find new habitable worlds or at least some mineable resources. What ever the cost. Buy

Media artist Hito Steyerl illuminates the power structures, inequalities and obscurities of the world. From surveillance, alienated labour, militarisation, protest culture, corporate domination and the art market, she exposes the systemic structures behind them. If one were to give her a title, it would probably be that of a network thinker. No wonder her texts and essays are as groundbreaking as her artistic works.⁠ ⁠ This interdisciplinary anthology analyses how Steyerl's work and writing influence and cross-fertilise each other.⁠ Buy

In a world where addictive technology is designed to buy and sell our attention, and our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity, it can seem impossible to escape. But in this inspiring field guide to dropping out of the attention economy, artist and critic Jenny Odell shows us how we can still win back our lives. Odell sees our attention as the most precious—and overdrawn—resource we have. And we must actively and continuously choose how we use it. We might not spend it on things that capitalism has deemed important … but once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind’s role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress. Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often, How to do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, this book will change how you see your place in our world.⁠ Buy

For an Exhibition at Aloft at Hermès in Singapore, French artist Xavier Antin created a machine that validates Bitcoin transaction. A fraction of the processed transaction rewards this "work". The cryptocurrency accumulated through the machine is then used to finance automatic delivery of bouquets of flowers to the Aloft Space. This book shows these bouquets, which are beautifully Riso-printed using only orange, green, medium blue, flat gold, yellow and purple. Below each image is a reference to the validated transaction used to pay for the flowers.⁠⁠ Buy

Do you remember the time when cash was king in Berlin? When you were lost if you left the house without cash? You couldn't pay with a card practically anywhere. Well, that has changed. Like Berlin on so many other levels. Now you can pay with your watch, with your mobile phone, and of course with card, while physical money is all too often refused. And yet, right in this moment of change, ATMs are popping up all over Berlin in the strangest places. It seems like a last rebellion in urban space before cash disappears altogether. The book "Berlin Cash" features 72 colour photographs of ATMs by Peter Bünnagel.⁠ Buy

No society in human history has demanded so many people to be such active participants in producing the contemporary. No contemporary has ever been so aggressively monetised. Everything is for sale. There is more merchandise than love, more sponsored content than truth. As a coping mechanism, many amongst us have decided to check out from reality altogether; preferring to inhabit tailor-made fantasies and simulations. But only children believe that closing their eyes renders them invisible to monsters. When the monsters are real, closing our eyes rather increases the danger.⁠ ⁠ The latest issue of Real Review asks "What To Believe" and delves into the realms of all sorts of belief systems like conspiracy theories, the stock market, and technology, as well as the ways we create a representative image of ourselves through styling, the perfect lawn, and wearing work clothes when we don't have to.⁠ Buy

Once the cutting-edge technology of their time - video, floppy disk, CD and Super8 film are now virtually useless. Often, we even still have collections of these media somewhere in the basement, but we have no way to play them anymore - they have become obsolete.⁠ But there are some enthusiasts and artists who still appreciate these audio and visual carriers - mainly because of their specific aesthetics, which take you back to their era like a time capsule. And yes, there is often nostalgia involved, or a certain cultural pessimistic reflex that claims that "everything was better in the old days," but the love of obsolete media is also rebellious in nature. When recorders and cable outlets are scarce, it takes a certain amount of stubbornness to keep the technology alive.⁠ ⁠ ⁠H.o.Me. - Home for Obsolete Media introduces different analog media in a technological and culture historical context and demonstrates the potential inherent in working analog in the digital age.⁠ ⁠ Buy

MJKVDL 2021 presents the first published overview of the experimental work of architect-turned-clothing designer Mark Jan Krayenhoff van de Leur.  After a 30 year career as an architect, Mark began experimenting with clothing design after he and his husband, the artist AA Bronson, relocated from New York to Berlin in 2013. His designs emerge from labour-intensive and formally unique processes, responding to problems or provocations raised by traditional approaches to garment construction and tailoring, and subverting established norms of production. Rather than a fashion collection, Mark’s clothes exist outside of capitalist cycles of seasonal production and consumption; each garment is unique and no multiples are made or sold.⁠ Designed in the layout of a fashion lookbook, the publication, however, shows in a very intimate way the garments that are imbued with autobiographical narratives. The very personal is underlined by the photographs, most of which were taken at home in the Berlin flat Mark shares with his husband.⁠⠀ Buy

For a long time, sustainable products had the reputation of being unsexy, aesthetically somewhere between a tie-dyed T-shirt and a haystack. But these times are fortunately over. Sustainability, longevity and circularity are not only in demand as properties, but also their visibility within the material.⁠ At ECAL students of product design, established materials specialists, manufacturers and researchers came together with the aim of exploring and defining the aesthetic potential of a new generation of sustainable materials. The result of this research-through-design project is a series of fourteen case studies involving the development of materials made from textile waste, recycled paper, rubber granulate or vegetable fibers such as algae, rice husks, hemp, flax and wood. The resulting new materials can be shaped, pressed, woven or welded and offer future designers a range of practical tools and applied knowledge about the methods of analyzing and processing seminal materials, utilizing their advantageous qualities and developing functional, yet aesthetically intriguing objects.⁠ Buy