New books in the library during December and January include:

Obrist, Hans Ulrich. Formulas for now. Thames & Hudson, 2008. ART M 8 OBR
Ross, Alex. The rest is noise: listening to the twentieth century. Fourth Estate, 2008. ART PX 20 ROS
Frieling, Rudolf. The art of participation: 1950 to now. Thames & Hudson, 2008. ART M 8 FRI
Dell, Simon. On location: siting Robert Smithson and his contemporaries. ART M 25 DEL
Spieker, Sven. The big archive: art from bureaucracy. MIT, 2008. ART M 8 SPI

The full list is available at LibraryThing or you can download a pdf here: Library acquisitions December January 2009.

Parsing the Languages of the New Media is a blog about Lev Manovich’s book The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2001), which took an academic approach to discussing new media, computer-mediated art, and new media art practices within the framework of historical visual and media cultures. The book addressed the aesthetic features of new media, and, as a practitioner himself, as well as a lecturer at the University of California, Manovich was one of the first academics to offer a systematic and rigorous theory of new media. The blog (by postgraduate film student David Witzling) offers page-by-page commentaries on the book, with cross-linking, and links embedded in the text to other websites.

There are 4 copies of the book in the UCL Main Library at ART TA MAN.

The Getting the Picture website provides a selection of artists’ illustrated letters from the collection of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. The collection encompasses “exuberant thank you notes, winsome love letters, lively reports of current events, graphic instructions and other personalized communiqués from the early nineteenth century through the 1980s.” Artists include: Alexander Calder; Marcel Duchamp; Winslow Homer; George Grosz, Philip Guston, Ray Johnson, Roy Lichtenstein; Man Ray; William Wegman; and Andy Warhol. It is also possible to browse by date (from 1890 to 1989).

Left field cinema provides an alternative perspective on mainstream films and analysis of masterpieces of world cinema, independent film and the works of some of the most influential filmmakers in the form of articles, reviews and podcasts. Describing itself as ‘film recommendation and analysis’ as opposed to film criticism, each episode belongs to a subseries, such as ‘Misunderstood modern cinema’, ‘British masterpiece’, or ‘Asian avant-garde’. It is also possible to browse the site by film genre or a-z list of film titles.

This is a reminder that the library has access to Film & Sound Online, a database of film, video and sound material. Collections include:

• Royal Mail Film Classics: founded in 1933 the GPO Film Unit produced one of the finest British collections of documentary, public information, animation and industrial film ever to come from a single UK source.
• The Imperial War Museum: the IWM film and video collection is recognised as one of the most important moving image resources for the study of all aspects of the major conflicts in which Britain was involved in the 20th Century.
• The Amber Film Collective, which documented working class communities in the north-east of England from the 1960s onwards. Amber Films was one of the first independent, regional film co-operatives.
• Educational and Television Films Ltd: documentaries and feature films relating to the former Soviet Union, Communist China, the European Eastern block, Chile and Cuba.
• Films of Scotland: one of the most coherent local and national film collections in the UK, Films of Scotland charts the changing face of Scotland from the 1930s to 1982.

All films can be downloaded for research use.