In a world where technology, spectacle and excess seem to eclipse former concepts of nature, the individual and society, what might be the characteristics of a contemporary sublime? If there is any consensus it is in the notion that the sublime represents a taking to the limits, to the point at which fixities begin to fragment. This anthology examines how ideas of the sublime are explored in the work of contemporary artists and theorists, in relation to the unpresentable, transcendence, terror, nature, technology, the uncanny and altered states. Writers include Glenn Adamson, Elissa Auther, Reyner Banham, Jean Baudrillard, John Berger, Walter Benjamin, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Joan Key, Ulrich Lehmann, Sarat Maharaj, Karl Marx, Sadie Plant, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Roberts, Jenni Sorkin. Lucy Steeds is an editor of the Exhibition Histories series for Afterall Books and pathway leader in Exhibition Studies at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London. Writers include Giorgio Agamben, Emily Apter, Karen Archey, St Augustine, Mieke Bal, Geoffrey Batchen, Hans Belting, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Henri Bergson, Daniel Birnbaum, Yve-Alain Bois, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Gilles Deleuze, Georges Didi-Huberman, Brian Dillon, Elena Filipovic, Elizabeth Grosz, Boris Groys, Rachel Kent, Rosalind Krauss, George Kubler, Quinn Latimer, Bruno Latour, Doreen Massey, Jean-Luc Nancy, Michel Serres, Michel Siffre, Mark von Schlegell, Nancy Spector, Jan Verwoert and Dōgen Zenji.

Writers include James Agee, Ariella Azoulay, Walter Benjamin, Adam Broomberg, Judith Butler, Oliver Chanarin, Georges Didi-Huberman, John Grierson, David Levi Strauss, Elizabeth McCausland, Carl Plantinga, Jacques Rancière, Martha Rosler, Jean-Paul Sartre, Allan Sekula, Susan Sontag, Hito Steyerl and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Writers include Joseph A. Amato, Karen Barad, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Hubert Damisch, Georges Didi-Huberman, Natasha Eaton, Briony Fer, Vil èm Flusser, Jens Hauser, Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm, Tim Ingold, Wolfgang Kemp, Julia Kristeva, Esther Leslie, Jean François-Lyotard, Sadie Plant, Dietmar Rϋbel, Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, Simon Taylor, Hilke Wagner, Monika Wagner, and Gillian Whiteley. With newly commissioned texts by artist Anna Zett, artist David Steans, and writer Mark Pilkington. Documentary has undergone a marked revival in recent art, following a long period in which it was a denigrated and unfashionable practice. This has in part been led by the exhibition of photographic and video work on political issues at Documenta and numerous biennials and, since the turn of the century, issues of injustice, violence and trauma in increasing zones of conflict. Aesthetically, documentary is now one of the most prominent modes of art-making, in part assisted by the linked transformation and recuperation of photography and video by the gallery and museum world. Unsurprisingly, this development, along with the close attention paid to photojournalism and mainstream documentary-making in a time of crisis, has been accompanied by a rich strain of theoretical and historical writing on documentary.Writers include Daniel Birnbaum, Norman Bryson, Douglas Crimp, Gilles Deleuze, Sebastian Egenhofer, Hal Foster, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Isabelle Graw, David Joselit, Shirley Kaneda, Geeta Kapur, Thomas Lawson, Midori Matsui, Lane Relyea, Rene Ricard, Jerry Saltz, Mira Schor, Barry Schwabsky and Adrian Searle. For this collection, Dan Byrne-Smith brings together his acute aesthetic sense, his extensive knowledge of science fiction, and his engaged utopian hermeneutic to present this compelling array of artists and writers who break open the cage of neoliberal entrapment and engage in a revolutionary response to the dark times that immerse us all." Julian Stallabrass teaches Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. His books include Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture (1996), High Art Lite: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art (1999) Internet Art: The Online Clash Between Culture and Commerce (2003) and Art Incorporated (2004). Petra Lange-Berndt is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art at University College London and a leading researcher in the field of material studies in art history. She is co-editor of Sigmar Polke: We Petty Bourgeois! Contemporaries and Comrades, the 1970s (2011).

I welcome this new book about materiality. It explores questions of embodiment in our age of virtuality, and that is no small matter.'A definitive guide to the rising status of sound in art, through original critical writings and artists' statements. Antony Hudek is Senior Lecturer at Liverpool School of Art and Design, Liverpool John Moores University. He is a translator of works by Jean-François Lyotard, a writer on contemporary art, independent curator and co-publisher of Occasional Papers. Tanya Harrod is our leading scholarly voice on craft. [This] invaluable anthology...is an ideal introduction to the intellectual landscape of craft, and an essential tool for those already invested in the topic." Wild writing on wild thought! This is a crucial, far-ranging primer for all those who have never considered themselves modern. A thrilling bricolage text that posits magic as a radical curriculum, galvanic DIY-ism, queer spirituality, a haven for the deviant and deemed, a recipe for cosmic connectedness, a form of anti-colonial politics, a hex on self-serving theocratic and technocratic mendacities." Amelia Groom is a London-based critic and curator who writes regularly for frieze and other publications. She held a teaching fellowship at the University of Sydney while she was writing her doctoral dissertation in the Art History and Theory department.

This anthology reconsiders crucial aspects of abstraction's resurgence in contemporary art, exploring three equally significant strategies explored in current practice: formal abstraction, economic abstraction, and social abstraction. In the 1960s, movements as diverse as Latin American neo-concretism, op art and “eccentric abstraction” disrupted the homogeneity, universality, and rationality associated with abstraction. These modes of abstraction opened up new forms of engagement with the phenomenal world as well as the possibility of diverse readings of the same forms, ranging from formalist and transcendental to socio-economic and conceptual. Part of the acclaimed Documents of Contemporary Art series of anthologies which collect writing on major themes and ideas in contemporary art. The object is this thing that refuses to go away. Virtual reality, conceptual art and numerous philosophical and psychological traditions have sought to de-thingify the world, but the object, in its many forms, persists. This anthology surveys reappraisals of what constitutes the ‘objectness’ of production, with art as its focus. Among the topics it examines are the relation of the object to subjectivity; distinctions between objects and ‘things’; the significance of the object’s transition from inert mass to tool or artefact; and the meanings of the everyday in the found object, repetition in the replicated or multiple object, loss in the absent object, and abjection in the formless or degraded object. It also explores artistic positions that are anti-object; theories of the experimental, liminal or mental object; and the role of objects in performance. The object becomes a prism through which to re-read contemporary art and better understand its recent past.

Terry R. Myers is a Chicago and Los Angeles-based writer, educator and independent curator. A regular contributor since 1988 to numerous international journals, including The Brooklyn Rail, Art Review, Parkett, and Modern Painters, he is the author of Mary Heilmann: Save the Last Dance for Me (Afterall Books, 2007). He is Associate Professor of Painting & Drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Simon Morley is a British artist and art historian who has contributed to international art journals including Art Monthly, Untitled, Contemporary Visual Art, TATE Etc. and Tema Celeste. A lecturer at Winchester School of Art, England, he is the author of Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art (2003). In the past two decades, artists and writers have increasingly adopted the idea that science fiction can be understood as a lens through which to search for fragments of truth emerging from the past or the future, and the proliferation of science fiction in contemporary art practice and discourse reflects an increased understanding of how this narrative field continues to grow in relevance. Split into four distinct approaches (Cognitive Estrangement, Futures, Posthumanism and Ecologies), this unique collection gathers key examples of the influence of science fiction in recent cultural development: from the integration and acceleration of technological change to global urbanisation and concepts of futurity; from the boundaries of social structures and non-human life to the threatening self-evidence of climate change. The volume also includes a brand new essay by David Musgrave on Kobo Abe's novel Inter Ice Age 4. MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology.