The Off-Modern

Svetlana Boym writes a new genealogy of modernity, moving beyond older debates between modernism and postmodernism to focus on the intersection of art, architecture, technology, and philosophy in the early twenty-first century. Drawing on theories of Georg Simmel, Henri Bergson, Aby Warburg, and Jacques Derrida, Boym presents the off-modern as an eccentric, self-questioning, anti-authoritarian perspective with roots in the Russian avant-garde, now developed in surprising ways by contemporary artists, architects, and curators around the world. She illustrates the off-modern in discussions of (and with) figures as diverse as architect Rem Koolhaas, Albanian artist-turned-mayor Edi Rama, an art collective in Delhi, and the creator of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. Both a manifesto and a memoir, The Off-Modern often returns to themes of travel and immigration, exploring issues of diasporic intimacy and productive estrangement amid nostalgic landscapes of urban ruins.

Svetlana Boym was a literary critic, visual artist, writer of fiction, and Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, USA. Her books include Death in Quotation Marks, Common Places, The Future of Nostalgia, Another Freedom and The Off-Modern. Her artworks were exhibited in New York, Berlin, Ljubljana, Glasgow, Copenhagen, Kaunas, and Cambridge. She lectured and performed in Freud's Museum in Vienna, in the New York Artists' Space, at the MoMA, Vienna Kunsthalle, The Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, La Maison de Sciences de l'Homme, Paris, and Moscow ICA.

Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface David Damrosch (Harvard University, USA)
I: Perspectives
1: History Out-of-Sync
2: Cultural Exaptation
3: Human Error
4: Nostalgic Technologies
5: Digital Resident Aliens
6. Edgy Geography
7. Archive of Pentimenti
8. Perspectivism
9: Prospective Nostalgia
10: Ruinophilia
11: Off-Modern Urbanism
12: Embarrassing Monumentality
13: Tact and Touch
14: Diasporic Intimacy
15: Immigrant Arts
16: Alternative Solidarities, Feminine Friendships
17: Estrangement for the World
18: Defamiliarized Human
19: Squiggles, Spirals and Serpentine Dances
20: The Off-Modern Museum
21: Hypertextual Design and Essayistic Drift
22: On Off
II: Practices
23: Unforeseen Homecoming
24: Phantasmagorias of History
25: Turning the page on the Avant-Garde
26: Hybrid Utopias
27: Global Transits and Portable Homes
28: Postindustrial Art Nouveau: Tirana Arabesque 2010
29: Multitasking with Clouds
30: Airport Ruins
31: Hydrant Immigrants
32: Not Working
33: Black Mirrors
Notes
Bibliography