Bøger af Charlie Gere

A memoir and cultural history the World's End, a West London area once home to bohemian artists and punk rock and now an outpost of neoliberalism.Charlie Gere's account of growing up in the World's End area of West London during the Cold War combines local history, cultural history, memoir, and a strong sense of the apocalyptic. Once a rundown part of Chelsea at the wrong end of the King's Road, the World's End has long been a place for bohemian writers and artists, including Turner, Whistler, Beckett, Bacon, and Bacon's muse Henrietta Moraes, all of whom evinced an appropriate apocalyptic sensibility. After World War II, in which the area suffered severe bombing, it became a center of the counterculture that emerged from what Jeff Nuttall called "Bomb Culture," formed by the threat of nuclear annihilation. The famous boutique Granny Takes a Trip opened there in 1966, joined later on by Hung On You, Puss Weber's Flying Dragon Tea Room, and the commune Gandalf's Garden. The area also featured trepanning aristocrats and pet lions, among other eccentricities. In the 1970s, the World's End was the center of punk rock. Gere's parents arrived as part of a wave of gentrification, and Gere, born and brought up there, witnessed its social and cultural evolution. As an adolescent, he was traumatized by the prospect of nuclear war. He has lived long enough to see the World's End now bearing the marks of out-of-control neoliberalism and its grotesque accompanying inequality. But this too shall pass as worlds end.

Examines the role of art in an age of 'real time' information systems and instantaneous communication. This book explores how the practice of art keeps our relation to time, history and even our own humanity open. It also explores both the making and purpose of art, and how much further it can travel from the human body.

Community Without Community in Digital Culture presents the view that our digital culture is determined not by greater connection, but by the separation and gap that is a necessary concomitant of our fundamental technicity.

'This is an excellent book. It gives an almost complete overview of the main trends and views of what is generally called digital culture through the whole post-war period as well as a thorough exposition of the history of the computer and its predecessors and the origins of the modern division of labour.' - Journal of Visual Culture