This book, which accompanies a major exhibition at the Center for New Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, invokes three disparate realms in which images have assumed the role of cultural weapons. Monotheistic religions, scientific theories, and contemporary arts have struggled with the contradictory urge to produce and also destroy images and emblems. Moving beyond the image wars, ICONOCLASH shows that image destruction has always coexisted with a cascade of image production, visible in traditional Christian images as well as in scientific laboratories and the various experiments of contemporary art, music, cinema, and architecture.
While iconoclasts have struggled against icon worshippers, another history of iconophily has always been at work. Investigating this alternative to the Western obsession with image worship and destruction allows useful comparisons with other cultures, in which images play a very different role. ICONOCLASH offers a variety of experiments on how to suspend the iconoclastic gesture and to renew the movement of images against any freeze-framing.
The book includes major works by Art & Language, Willi Baumeister, Christian Boltanski, Daniel Buren, Lucas Cranach, Max Dean, Marcel Duchamp, Albrecht Dürer, Lucio Fontana, Francisco Goya, Hans Haacke, Richard Hamilton, Young Hay, Arata Isozaki, Asger Jorn, Martin Kippenberger, Imi Knoebel, Komar & Melamid, Joseph Kosuth, Gordon Matta-Clark, Tracey Moffat, Nam June Paik, Sigmar Polke, Stephen Prina, Man Ray, Sophie Ristelhueber, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and many others.

Summary
Artists and writers portray the disorientation of a world facing climate change.
This monumental volume, drawn from a 2020 exhibition at the ZKM Center for Art and Media, portrays the disorientation of life in a world facing climate change. It traces this disorientation to the disconnection between two different definitions of the land on which modern humans live: the sovereign nation from which they derive their rights, and another one, hidden, from which they gain their wealth—the land they live on, and the land they live from. Charting the land they will inhabit, they find not a globe, not the iconic “blue marble,” but a series of critical zones—patchy, heterogenous, discontinuous.
With short texts, longer essays, and more than 500 illustrations, the contributors explore the new landscape on which it may be possible for humans to land—what it means to be “on Earth,” whether the critical zone, the Gaia, or the terrestrial. They consider geopolitical conflicts and tools redesigned for the new “geopolitics of life forms.” The “thought exhibition” described in this book opens a fictional space to explore the new climate regime; the rest of the story is unknown.
Copublished with ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe

This book investigates the state of panoptic art at a time when issues of security and civil liberties are on many people's minds. Traditional imaging and tracking systems have given way to infinitely more powerful "dataveillance" technologies, as an evolving arsenal of surrogate eyes and ears in our society shifts its focus from military to domestic space. Taking as its point of departure an architectural drawing by Jeremy Bentham that became the model for an entire social regime, CTRL [SPACE] looks at the shifting relationships between design and power, imaging and oppression, from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries.

From the photographs taken with hidden cameras by Walker Evans and Paul Strand in the early twentieth century to the appropriation of military satellite technology by Marko Peljhan a hundred years later, the works of a wide range of artists have explored the dynamics of watching and being watched. The artists whose panoptical preoccupations are featured include, among others, Sophie Calle, Diller + Scofidio, Dan Graham, Pierre Huyghe, Michael Klier, Rem Koolhaas, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Thomas Ruff, Julia Scher, Andy Warhol, and Peter Weibel. This book, along with the exhibition it accompanies, is the first state-of-the-art survey of panopticism—in digital culture, architecture, television, video, cinema, painting, photography, conceptual art, installation work, robotics, and satellite imaging.

Jean Baudrillard is one of France's leading modern-day philosophers and greatly influenced contemporary art, especially in the eighties and early nineties. Around 12 years ago he started taking photographs on his travels; for the past 6 years or so he has concentrated intensively on photography. But there is no direct link between his artistic work and his philosophy. On the contrary, he takes photos of things he doesn't want to comment on, and leaves the things he photographs out of his written work. For the first time, this book presents Baudrillard's photos together with his collected texts on the theory of photography. In his pictures he strolls through the world of objects, looking for insignificant and arbitrary things. According to Peter Weibel, the laconic nature of things is the reason for their beauty, and Baudrillard photographs this beauty in a laconic way - without the pathos of history, without the constructed objectivity or staging of art photography. His photographic glance literally rests on the surface of the objects and celebrates their appearance for the eye.

The religious movements of today no longer depend on the handselling of literature such as bibles, pamphlets etc, but instead operate predominantly with electronic picture media such as video and television that can be disseminated much more widely, and which are capable of enormous rhetorical impact. "Medium Religion" approaches religion as a media phenomenon, whose expressions are subject to the same laws of reproduction as any other consumer entity, and focuses particularly on geopolitical religious hotspots like the Middle East, Asia, Russia, North America and South America. It contains commentary by (among others) such notable thinkers as Boris Groys, Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Zizek; contributing artists include Adel Abdessemed, Oreet Ashery, Maja Bajevic, Paul Chan, Omer Fast, Barbad Golshiri, Kajri Jain, Vitali Komar, Alexander Kosolapov, Nira Pereg, Dorna Safaian, Anri Sala, Michael Schuster, Wael Shawky, Joshua Simon and Jalal Toufic.

A history of media art from photography to the interconnected and collaborative art practices of the last two decades on the basis of 100 "masterpieces," edited by Peter Weibel and Siegfried Zielinski.
From photography to cinematography, sound art, machine and projection theatre, radio and television art, artistic video, mediabased action and Fluxus art to the networked practices of the last years: This media anthology not only puts the history of media art into an operative canon on the basis of more than 100 "masterpieces." It also contains a rhizomatic structure of global references in order to reveal the reciprocal networks of media experiments. An extensive introductory essay written by Siegfried Zielinski and Peter Weibel completes this indispensable reference work.