Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry analyzes modern and contemporary art’s drive to blur with life, and how this is connected to the democratic state’s biologized control of life. Art’s ambition to transform life intersects in striking ways with modern biopower’s aim to normalize, purify, judge, and transform life—rendering it bare. This book finds the answer to the question: How did autonomous art become such an effective tool of the capitalist state?

Circular Facts is a collaborative endeavor between three European contemporary art organizations: Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht; Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp; and The Showroom, London, which acted as an informal think tank and a mutual support structure for the production and dissemination of artistic projects.

Using non-linear heuristic methods and experimental webs of information to draw links between the cities of Utrecht, and Slab City, California, USA, this book brings together speculative proposals that ask basic questions about public space, conceived as a physical and conversational sphere.

What happens when you look at design as some thing more than a service-based relationship between client and designer? What new strategies and models help to question and challenge the limits of design? What outer circumstances influence this kind of practice?

A Long Time Between Suns has been edited as an archival assemblage of The Otolith Group’s two-venue solo exhibition at Gasworks (February 15 – April 5, 2009) and The Showroom (September 8 – October 25, 2009).