Eye 13 / Space Digest Today

NY: Eye Magazine, 1985. One of 151 copies. Signed throughout by the contributors.. No binding. Near fine. Octavo. Forty-one contributions, including the box, its illustration, and the introductory interview, "Of Illusion, the Fourth Dimension, and a Collective Cabinet of Wonders Under the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." The assemblage offers a post-modern cabinet of curiosities, filled with materials fascinated with various media and their interactions with the blooming and booming audio-visual landscape of the 1980s. Mechanical reproduction no longer refers solely to the physical gadgetry of cinema or printing, but also to virtual mechanisms often only superficially understood. As the editors, Robert Bowen and Richard Edelman, explain, they had felt that photography "had sort of alienated or isolated itself from the rest of the art world," a phenomenon they found "repulsive." Certainly in the age of handheld digital cameras and the instant gratification of Polaroids, the sentiment has legitimacy, and in many ways the magazine's project echoes the anxieties articulated two years prior in David Cronenberg's Videodrome. Here Bowen and Edelman re-integrate photography as a way of seeing, inextricable from other forms of art. There are experiments in popular press, fragmented vision, objects of varying dimensions, and literary allusion (see, for example, a nod to William Carlos Williams's Paterson in an image of the Passaic River). Included too is an audio cassette with further experiments in processed text, amplified sound, concrete audio, and electronic improvisation. All materials housed in wood box with two plexiglass sheets and illustration at topmost layer. Stray rubbing, especially to top layer illustration, else near fine and quite scarce.