Designing for the Far Right

A new book from Steven Heller examines the history of the symbols used by the far right. Here, he talks to Daniel Cookney about why these designs have proved so enduring, and also advocates for why they should be banned

Vimeo killed the video star : Burial and the user-generated music video

This chapter looks at how user generated content on sites such as Vimeo and Youtube has responded to and further facilitated the practice of ‘facelessness’ employed by, electronic music producer, Burial. For a notoriously media-shy producer who is synonymous with the genre of dubstep, these outputs have taken the place of an authorised promotional video while obviously eschewing the iconography/pop music standard of depicting the author. Three separate unofficial videos for Burial tracks are examined that, while differing aesthetically, can similarly be argued as appropriate visual interpretations of Burial’s music

The architecture of underground dance music : the work of Shaun Bloodworth

Presenting a posthumous consideration of the work of photographer Shaun Bloodworth with a focus on his use of the urban landscape, this photo essay argues that there is a connection between figure and ground that defies conventional portraiture. Furthermore, in Bloodworth’s work, the use of oft-ignored backdrops involves the same reterritorialization that occurred in the late 1980s as dance music promoters illegally occupied dilapidated unused spaces for parties in cities such as Sheffield, London and Manchester. The catalogue of work that he left on his death in 2016 is then a dystopian series of images where the celebration of architects and musicians as celebrities seemingly hasn’t occurred and the metropolis’s less celebrated environs are seemingly reclaimed by the equally anonymous

Extremity and excess : proceedings of the 2011 University of Salford College of Arts and Social Sciences postgraduate research conference

The essays gathered in this volume explore the difficulties of classifying and conceptualizing the extreme and the excessive. Uniting a broad selection of new research (initially presented as part of the University of Salford’s annual College of Arts and Social Sciences Conference 2011), the collection queries some of the premises surrounding these topics: ideas that are most often presented as a counterpoint to a perceived ‘normality’. Both terrorism/responses to terrorist threat and the grotesque within horror cinema are represented whilst perhaps reflecting that which is deemed outside of the general parameters of acceptability and decency. Yet there is also a focus on subjects that may, at first, be seen as less radical. From alternative representations of authorship to new technology’s attempts at ‘realness’, prose as hysteria through to melodramatic depictions of war and, finally, approaches that aim to challenge the more commonplace critical strategies employed in the assessment of both fine art and fine artists, this collection will be of particular interest to students and scholars prepared to look beyond a concept that may hint at the merely shocking and engage with a more widely interpreted and nuanced critique of extremity and excess