Massive anthology of essays and illustrations published in NOT BORED! between 1983 and 2010.

Many remember the 1980s as the era of Ronald Reagan, a conservative decade populated by preppies and yuppies dancing to a soundtrack of electronic synth pop music. In some ways, it was the "MTV generation." However, the decade also produced some of the most creative works of punk culture, from the music of bands like the Minutemen and the Dead Kennedys to avant-garde visual arts, literature, poetry, and film. In We're Not Here to Entertain, Kevin Mattson documents what Kurt Cobain once called a "punk rock world" --the all-encompassing hardcore-indie culture that incubated his own talent. Mattson shows just how widespread the movement became--ranging across the nation, from D.C. through Ohio and Minnesota to LA--and how democratic it was due to its commitment to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tactics. Throughout, Mattson puts the movement into a wider context, locating it in a culture war that pitted a blossoming punk scene against the new president. Reagan's talk about end days and nuclear warfare generated panic; his tax cuts for the rich and simultaneous slashing of school lunch program funding made punks, who saw themselves as underdogs, seethe at his meanness. The anger went deep, since punks saw Reagan as the country's entertainer-in-chief; his career, from radio to Hollywood and television, synched to the very world punks rejected. Through deep archival research, Mattson reignites the heated debates that punk's opposition generated in that era-about everything from "straight edge" ethics to anarchism to the art of dissent. By reconstructing the world of punk, Mattson demonstrates that it was more than just a style of purple hair and torn jeans. In so doing, he reminds readers of punk's importance and its challenge to simplistic assumptions about the 1980s as a one-dimensional, conservative epoch.

Since the early 2000s there has been an increase in artists who are walking as an essential part of their artistic practice. This book identifies the unique attributes of walking to develop a definition for walking as an artistic medium. Drawing on historical sources, such as the walks of the Romantic poets, Dadaists and Letterist/Situationist Internationals, it presents a practice based approach to walking focused on the radical memory of the medium. The book covers three contemporary organisations working to develop the artistic medium of walking—London’s Walking Artists Network, Scotland’s Walking Institute and New York City’s Walk Exchange—and looks at how these different organisation’s strategies contribute to the development of the artistic medium of walking. The book is framed by five walking exercises, and invites the reader to create a memory palace for the medium of walking as a practical exploration of artistic walking practices.

The heightened environmental awareness that defines our contemporary urban age is both a challenge and an opportunity for urban planners and designers. In order to acquire perspective, context and leverage, city-makers must access the intangible realms of meaning to investigate the nature of social life and its relationship to space. In response to provocative spatial discourse from Lefebvre, Foucault and the Situationists International, Other Spaces, plural narratives of place in Berlin’s SO36, explores the application of theory in today’s broad and increasingly interdisciplinary planning and design practice. Deeply rooted in the philosophy of space, the concept of otherness is presented as a distinctive critical element and promising tool for contemporary urban analysis. As a source of spatial knowledge, otherness raises issues of relativity and reveals the layered, multi-dimensional reality of the urban environment. Both physical and symbolic, it complements conventional research methodologies with a qualitative, creative and proactive element. Unlocking a place-based imagination may be an instrumental tool for more responsible and creative urbanism. The SO36 case study suggests an alternative research approach that focuses on the observational, the experiential, and the intuitive as the fundamental basis for knowledge creation. An initial assessment of the built environment evolved to reveal abstract and subjective, but nevertheless complimentary dimensions of space. Alternative techniques of urban exploration and mapping were deployed, using otherness as a guiding principle to comparatively dissect urban morphologies and architectural typologies. Bridging the gap between professionals and citizens, this approach selectively explores urban themes and associations that reflect physical and symbolic otherness. The outcomes indicate a relationship between form and meaning, which is based and strongly supported by the community's distinctive personal and collective spatial imagination. Ultimately, what is revealed are conflicting social realities that exist simultaneously in symbiosis and define the neighborhood as a kaleidoscope of place. Das gesteigerte Umweltbewusstsein unseres zeitgenössischen, urbanen Zeitalters ist für Stadtplaner und Designer sowohl eine Herausforderung als auch eine Chance. Um bessere Sichtweisen, Zusammenhänge und Einfluss zu erlangen, müssen städtische Entscheidungsträger auf den vagen Bereich der Bedeutung zurück greifen, um das Wesen von Sozialleben und dessen Verhältnis zu Raum zu untersuchen. Als Antwort auf den provokativen Raumdiskurs von Lefebvre, Foucault und der Situationistischen Internationalen, untersucht Other Spaces, plural narratives of place in Berlin´s SO36 die Anwendung von Theorie in der weiten und zunehmend interdisziplinären Planungs- und Designpraxis der Gegenwart. Das Konzept der Andersheit ist tief verwurzelt in der Philosophie des Raumes. Es stellt sowohl einen charakteristischen, kritischen Faktor sowie ein vielversprechendes Mittel einer Analyse der zeitgenössischen Urbanität dar. Andersheit als eine Quelle des räumlichen Wissens wirft Themen der Relativität auf, gleichzeitig offenbart es die vielschichtige, multidimensionale Gegebenheit der städtischen Umwelt. Konventionelle Forschungsmethoden werden sowohl materiell als auch symbolisch mit einem qualitativen, kreativen und initiativen Faktor ergänzt. Das Freilegen einer ortsbezogenen Idee kann ein hilfreiches Mittel für mehr Verantwortung und kreativere Stadtplanung sein. Die Fallstudie SO36 zeigt einen alternativen Forschungsansatz auf, der sich auf die Beobachtung, die Empirie und die Intuition als die wesentlichen Bestandteile für die Generierung von Wissen konzentriert. Eine anfängliche Einschätzung der bebauten Umwelt weicht der Freilegung abstrakterer und subjektiverer, aber nichtsdestotrotz ergänzender Raumdimensionen. Alternative Techniken der Stadtforschung und Kartographie wurden eingesetzt, die Andersheit als ein Leitprinzip anwenden, um urbane Strukturen und architektonische Typologien aufzugliedern. Dieser Ansatz erforscht gezielt urbane Bezugspunkte und Gemeinschaften, die eine äußerliche und symbolische Andersheit widerspiegeln, und überbrückt so die Kluft zwischen Experten und Einwohnern. Die Resultate deuten eine Verbindung zwischen Gestalt und Bedeutung an, die auf der unverkennbaren, persönlichen wie kollektiven räumlichen Vorstellungskraft der Gemeinschaft beruht, und von dieser auch unterstützt wird. Letztlich werden widersprüchliche, soziale Realitäten frei gelegt, die in einer gleichzeitigen Symbiose existieren und Nachbarschaft als ein Kaleidoskop von Orten definieren.

Psychogeography usually refers to radical and artistic ways of walking or to a conflation of psychology with geography. In this unique work, the author makes arguments for considering psychogeography as a way to critique the contemporary world and to consider new ways of studying the interface of human beings in environments. The book begins by introducing and explaining the term psychogeography from a range of academic, activist, and artistic perspectives. Each chapter presents different approaches to doing psychogeography and there are arguments presented for why there is a need for a postpsychology. The author takes a creative and innovative approach to psychogeography by extending walking methods of research to include other forms of practice and research including playwriting and wargaming. The only book written on psychogeography from a psychological perspective, this book will appeal to researchers and students of psychology, geography, architecture, and cultural studies as well as artists, activists, and the public.

This book surveys influential readings and rewritings of the Chinese literary tradition by Western writers over the past century, from Ezra Pound and Haroldo de Campos to Pearl Buck, Robert van Gullick, Pascal Quignard, and Maxine Hong Kingston.

Boredom is a ubiquitous feature of modern life. Endured by everyone, it is both cause and effect of modernity, and of situations, spaces and surroundings. As such, this book argues, boredom shares an intimate relationship with architecture-one that has been seldom explored in architectural history and theory. Boredom, Architecture, and Spatial Experience investigates that relationship, showing how an understanding of boredom affords us a new way of looking at and understanding the modern experience. It reconstructs a series of episodes in architectural history, from the 19th century to the present, to survey how boredom became a normalized component of the everyday, how it infiltrated into the production and reception of architecture, and how it serves to diagnose moments of crisis in the continuous transformations of the built environment. Erudite and innovative, the work moves deftly from architectural theory and philosophy to literature and psychology to make its case. Combining archival material, scholarly sources, and illuminating excerpts from conversations with practitioners and thinkers-including Charles Jencks, Rem Koolhaas, Sylvia Lavin, and Jorge Silvetti-it reveals the complexity and importance of boredom in architecture.