We're pleased to announce that the pre-orders are now open for Ken Hollings' Inferno: A Geneaology of 1960s Trash Culture!
Inferno is a heady exploration of the chaos and phantasmagoria of the 1960s trash experience. Hollings guides readers through a Dantean descent into the shadowy corners of exploitation cinema and the underground scenes, visiting the creations of Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, Ray Dennis Steckler, Hershel Gordon Lewis, Russ Meyer, and more. With expert eyes, discarded phenomena of 60's teenage culture are excavated such as surfers, bikers and their parties, hidden desires and identities, and Rat Fink, the ghoulish anti-Mickey Mouse. Inferno examines and celebrates some of our most abject and vulgar cultural shrapnel, and with it, our longstanding devotion to trash.
Trash has always served me well—over the years it has become the outer form and material expression of my dreams: of tomorrow, of life in space, of the blissful alienation from this world that I have always craved.—from Inferno
Paperback
$19.95 T | £15.99
ISBN: 9781907222795196
pp. | 5.75 in x 8 in24
b&w illus.
April 2020
"Reading Ken Hollings is the intellectual equivalent of being fired from the space-module for a non-stop EVA’." – Tom McCarthy, author of Men in Space and Satin Island
“Ken Hollings is a master at connecting the dots between avant-garde art history, outré culture and weird science.” —David Pescovitz, Boing Boing
Ken Hollings is a writer, broadcaster, and cultural theorist based in London. He has lectured and presented at the Royal Institution, the Berlin Akademie der Künste, the Venice Biennale, Tate Britain and the Royal College of Art, where he currently teaches.
His previous books, The Space Oracle, The Bright Labyrinth and Welcome to Mars are published by Strange Attractor Press.
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The Space Oracle: A Guide to Your Stars
‘The Space Oracle shows what happens when astronomy escapes into the wider human world, and finds purposes beyond the scientific. As Ken Hollings points out, ‘‘the further into space we go, the more we learn about ourselves’’’ - Marek Kukula, Public Astronomer, Royal Observatory Greenwich
‘Takes the reader on some delightfully unexpected cosmic journeys… [a] playful and evocative meditation on the celestial’ - PD Smith, The Guardian
The Space Oracle reinvents the history of astronomy as a new form of astrological calendar. This radical retelling of our relationship with the cosmos reaches back to places and times when astronomers were treated as artists or priests, to when popes took part in astral rites and the common people feared eclipses and comets as portents of disaster.
Available to order from MIT Press HERE
Paperback
$17.95 T | £14.99
ISBN: 9781907222535176
pp. | 4.33 in x 7 in17
b&w illus.
January 2019
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The Bright Labyrinth: Sex, Death and Design in the Digital Regime
"In this deftly weaved dreamwork, Ken Hollings shows that the 21st century has yet to really begin. Our contemporary malls and emporia are but pale shadows of the palaces of desire dreamt up in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the best guides to what Hollings calls the ‘digital regime’ turn out to be old prophets and provocateurs. Yet The Bright Labyrinth makes us hear these old voices with new ears… " MARK FISHER
The Bright Labyrinth is a subtle and sometimes disturbing account of how technology has impacted upon human culture. Offering a theoretical map for the future development of communication design, The Bright Labyrinth draws upon architecture and film, avant-garde art and critical theory, military strategy and machine intelligence to guide the reader through the Digital Regime that has shaped a century of human creativity and thought.
Available to order through Strange Attractor Press HERE
Paperback
$20.95 T | £16.99
ISBN: 9781907222184352
pp. | 6 in x 8.5 in10
b&w illus.
November 2016
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Welcome to Mars
"A remarkable book… quite simply, essential reading."
Fortean Times"…an exemplary exercise in cross-specialism history… a rollercoaster ride through the dreamtime of post-war American esoteric, technological and mass culture with a wealth of often amazing and sometimes shocking information on every page."
Furtherfield
Welcome to Mars is an iconoclastic, penetrating and darkly humorous history of America from 1947-1959, the decade in which the nation defined its image and created the blueprint for the world we live in today.
Available to order through Strange Attractor Press HERE
Paperback
$13.95 T | £11.99
ISBN: 9780954805487314
pp. | 6 in x 8.25 in10
b&w illus.
October 2008