Tzara - who himself coined the term "Dada," inspired by an obscure connection of his birthday to an Orthodox saint - was at the Cabaret Voltaire that night, along with fellow Romanians Marcel, Jules, and Georges Janco and Arthur Segal. It's not a coincidence, Sandqvist argues, that so many of the first dadaist group was Romanians. Sandqvist traces the artistic and personal transformations that took place in the "little Paris of the Balkans" before they took center stage elsewhere, finding sources as varied as symbolism, futurism, and folklore. He points to a connection between Romanian modernists and the Eastern European Yiddish tradition; Tzara, the Janco brothers, and Segal all grew up within Jewish culture and traditions.".

In Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media, Claudia Costa Pederson analyzes modernist avant-garde and contemporary video games to challenge the idea that gaming is an exclusively white, heterosexual, male, corporatized leisure activity and reenvisions it as a catalyst for social change. By looking at over fifty projects that together span a century and the world, Pederson explores the capacity for sociopolitical commentary in virtual and digital realms and highlights contributions to the history of gaming by women, queer, and transnational artists. The result is a critical tool for understanding video games as imaginative forms of living that offer alternatives to our current reality. With an interdisciplinary approach, Gaming Utopia emphasizes how game design, creation, and play can become political forms of social protest and examines the ways that games as art open doors to a more just and peaceful world.

The Dada movement, revered as perhaps the purest form of cultural subversion and provocation in 20th-century Europe, has been a victim of the readiness with which cultural historians have swallowed its own propaganda. Based on extensive close analysis of French-language Dada work in its original form, and offering English translations throughout, this major reappraisal looks at a broad range of media and topics - including poetry, film, philosophy, and quantum physics - in order to get beyond Dada's typecasting as avant-garde anti-hero. Work by women writers and other marginalized figures combines with that of canonical Dadaists to present Dada in a radically new set of guises: poetic and textually subtle; intellectually and philosophically meaningful; peaceable and quasi-Buddhist; and, perhaps most uncomfortably of all, conformist and reactionary.

This excellent overview of new research on Dada and Surrealism blends expert synthesis of the latest scholarship with completely new research, offering historical coverage as well as in-depth discussion of thematic areas ranging from criminality to gender. This book provides an excellent overview of new research on Dada and Surrealism from some of the finest established and up-and-coming scholars in the field Offers historical coverage as well as in–depth discussion of thematic areas ranging from criminality to gender One of the first studies to produce global coverage of the two movements, it also includes a section dealing with the critical and cultural aftermath of Dada and Surrealism in the later twentieth century Dada and Surrealism are arguably the most popular areas of modern art, both in the academic and public spheres

This volume focuses on the unstudied geographic margins of Dada, delving into the roots of Dada in Israel, Romania, Poland, and North America. Contributors consider some of the practices and experiments that were conceived a century ago, surfaced in art throughout the twentieth century, and are still relevant today. Unearthing its Israeli origins, examining Dadaist expressions in Poland, and shedding light on overlooked facets of Dadaist art in Romania and North America, the authors cast a spotlight on the less-explored geographical peripheries of Dada. The book is organized around four thematic trajectories—space, language, materiality, and reception—which are dissected through the lens of micro-histories. Recognizing the continuing validity of questions raised by Dadaist artists, this volume argues that Dada persists as an ongoing endeavor—a continual reexamination of the fundamental tenets of art and its ever-evolving potential manifestations. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, modernism, and history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Dada magazines made Dada what it was: diverse, non-hierarchical, transnational, and defiant of the most fundamental artistic conventions. This first volume entirely devoted to Dada periodicals retells the story of Dada by demonstrating the centrality of these graphically inventive, provocative periodicals: Dada, New York Dada, Dada Jok, and dozens more that began crossing enemy lines during World War I. The book includes magazines from well-known Dada cities like New York and Paris as well as Zagreb and Bucharest, and reveals that Dada continued to inspire art journals into the 1920s. Anchored in close material analysis within a historical and theoretical framework, Dada Magazines models a novel, multifaceted methodology for assessing many kinds of periodicals. The book traces how the Dadaists-Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Dragan Aleksic, Hannah Höch, and many others-compiled, printed, distributed, and exchanged these publications. At the same time, it recognizes the journals as active agents that engendered the Dada network, and its thematic, chronological structure captures the constant exchanges that took place in this network. With in-depth scrutiny of these magazines-and 1970s “Dadazines” inspired by them-Dada Magazines is a vital source in the histories of art and design, periodical studies, and modernist studies.