Susan Buck-Morss

Adam Michaels

Kevin McCaughey

Renowned philosopher Susan Buck-Morss collaborates with conceptual apparel label Boot Boyz Biz's Kevin McCaughey and Inventory Press' Adam Michaels on this experimental image-text update of McLuhan and Benjamin Showing how the montage principle allows thought to occupy the space between two seemingly unrelated things, Seeing Making Room for Thought both studies and embodies how an arrangement of images can be a form of thinking--in other words, images not as illustrations or objects of analysis but as a montage. In a close collaboration with designers Kevin McCaughey (founder of the popular conceptual clothing line Boot Boys Biz) and Adam Michaels of Inventory Press, renowned philosopher Susan Buck-Morss expands on her unique conception of montage, combining images and text--also integrating excerpts from Buck-Morss' previous work--in an innovative way that provides insight into images and how they work together. In both design and content, Seeing Making Room for Thought is directly in conversation with Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore's The Medium Is the Massage, as well as the works of Walter Benjamin. This innovative volume brings Buck-Morss' more experimental, visually engaged work to the fore in a way that has not been available in the usual contexts within which her writing has appeared. Susan Buck-Morss is the author of The Origin of Negative Dialectics (1977), The Dialectics of Seeing (1989), Dreamworld and Catastrophe (2000), Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009) and Year 1 (2021). She is Distinguished Professor of Political Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York. Kevin McCaughey is a designer and founder of Boot Boyz Biz (established in 2015), a project-based research practice based in New York. Adam Michaels is a designer, publisher and editor, the cofounder of design studio Project Projects, and the founder of Inventory Press and design studios Project Projects and IN-FO.CO. He received the 2015 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Communication Design.

Room for Thought

Seeing Making

Jeffrey Schnapp

The Electric Information Age Book explores the nine-year window of mass-market publishing in the sixties and seventies when formerly backstage players-designers, graphic artists, editors-stepped into the spotlight to produce a series of exceptional books. Aimed squarely at the young media-savvy consumers of the "Electronic Information Age," these small, inexpensive paperbacks aimed to bring the ideas of contemporary thinkers like Marshall McLuhan, R. Buckminster Fuller, Herman Kahn, and Carl Sagan to the masses. Graphic designers such as Quentin Fiore (The Medium Is the Massage, 1967) employed a variety of radical techniques-verbal visual collages and other typographic pyrotechnics-that were as important to the content as the text. The Electric Information Age Book is the first book-length history of this brief yet highly influential publishing phenomenon.

Adam Michaels

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