RECEIVED AND NOTED.

BOOKS

Ars Electronica: Facing the Future--A Survey of Two Decades, edited by Timothy Druckrey. MIT Press/457 pp./$40.00 (hb). This volume surveys the past 20 years of critical issues debated at the Ars Electronica Festival. Based in Linz, Austria, the festival first gathered in 1979 to discuss the future direction of the arts and culture in an age of electronic media and computer technology. Theorists, philosophers, technologists, scientists, sociologists and artists have come together nearly every year since to share their views on the role of new technology. The discussions have covered a range of topics from technological warfare and communication technology to cyberfeminism. This anthology includes articles by over 60 writers and scholars on key topics discussed at the festival, organized into three categories, history, theory and practice and covers a large amount of territory regarding current debates on electronic media and its role in contemporary practices.

Art, Technology, Technique. Pluto Press (22883 Quicksilver Dr., Sterling, VA 21066-2012)/153 pp./price unavailable. Each essay in the fourth volume of the Art, Criticism and Theory series addresses issues of technology and aesthetics across a range of media and cultural movements. Art of the Scrapbook: A Guide to Handbinding and Decorating Memory Books, Albums, and Art Journals, by Diane Maurer-Mathison. Watson-Guptill Publications/144 pp./$24.95 (sb).

Artists Books: A Critical Survey of the Literature, by Stefan Klima. Granary Books/109 pp./$17.95 (sb). In five short essays, Klima attempts to put the history of critical writing on artists' books in perspective. He quotes numerous sources on the evolution of the interest in bookwork throughout the past 30 years, citing artists, exhibition catalogs, exhibition reviews and articles. Although such an undertaking is formidable, this introduction is a helpful addition to the field. A significant bibliography lists nearly 500 articles on the subject.

Body and the East: From the 1960s to the Present, edited by Zdenka Budovinac. MIT Press/192 pp./$25.00 (hb). With essays on 80 artists from 14 Eastern European countries, this book explores the phenomenon of "body art," with all of its social, political, metaphorical and philosophical implications. Most of the artists represented here have at some point turned their attention to issues of freedom or lack thereof under politically repressive conditions. This book makes clear the extent to which body art in general challenges notions of "acceptable" artistic practice.

Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959, by Eric Schaefer. Duke University Press/488 pp./$21.95 (sb). This book provides an entertaining look at America's obsession with films that pander to and exploit people's basest desires.

Carmel: A Timeless Place, by Steve Shapiro. Central Coast Press (P.O. Box 3654, San Luis Obispo, CA 93403)/128 pp./$29.95 (hb). Shapiro's photographs present an insider's view of the picturesque village of Carmel, a place that has inspired countless artists of every discipline. Cinema Interval, by Trinh T. Minh-ha. Routledge/274 pp./$24.95 (sb). Cinema Interval effectively brings together award-winning, feminist filmmaker Minh-ha's interviews and conversations with other critics on film, art, music, language, life and theory. Through these interviews, this unique artist's ideas about the relationship between word and image are revealed and reinforced.

Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, edited by Steve Neale and Murray Smith. Routledge/338 pp./$75.00 (hb), $24.99 (sb). In Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, Neale and Smith, both English film studies scholars, explore the historiography, economics, industry, institutions, aesthetics, technology and audience of Hollywood films such as Batman (1989), Brain Stoker's Dracula (1992), Blue Steel (1990), The Player (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994) and Fargo (1996). Smith begins the book with his "Theses on the philosophy of Hollywood history" in which he considers a range of arguments that attempt to define a "new" or "post-classical" Hollywood on the basis of the interconnections between film style and production. Richard Maltby's chapter gives a detailed overview of institutional and economic developments in the post-war era. Donald Gomery opens the second section of the book with a chapter on innovations in corporate business practice in the post-war American film industry. He stresses the strategies of Lew Wasserman at MCA-U niversal including the independent marketing of stars and the promotion of made-for-TV movies. Tino Balio offers a broader look at the industry in her study of the globalization of Hollywood. Justin Wyatt examines who the major independent producer-distributors are while James Schamus looks at the content of independent cinema. Among the essays of interest in the third part of the book are Michael Allen's survey of technological developments in Hollywood since the end of World War II that he concludes were driven by desires for spectacular realism. Neale focuses on recent widescreen aesthetics that have displaced classical film conventions. K. J. Donnelly cites the Batman films as exemplary in his discussion of popular music in recent cinema and Gianluca Sergi considers the extent to which sound has become a major attraction for audiences. Among the arresting observations in the fourth section of the book which focuses on audience are those of Pam Cook on sexual violence and Hilary Radner on the new generatio n of women in film who refuse to accept the violence of men.

Cook interweaves a discussion of the role of "women's pictures" in the development of feminist film criticism. She examines Mary Anne Doane's theory on the "male gaze" that associates women's spectatorial pleasure of film with pain through recent developments in theories of spectatorship, particularly that of Judith Mayne, demonstrating the extent of her knowledge of film theory and contemporary Hollywood that this book confronts.

--Sarah Miles Watts

--Sarah Miles Watts is a professor of English and Film studies at SUNY Geneseo and Assistant for Development at Visual Studies Workshop.

Deep Design: Nine Little Art Histories, by Libby Lumpkin. Art Issues Press/152 pp./$l7.95 (sb). Educator and curator Lumpkin presents nine essays that playfully yet thoroughly explore the current state of art theory. She points out some of the inherent problems in the discipline and suggests ways in which it might become more accessible to the masses, who often dismiss it as mere academic babble.

Fauna, by Joan Fontcuberta and Pere Formiguera. Photovision (Apartado 164, E-41710 Uterera, Spain)/136 pp./$23.00 (hb). Before meeting his end on a lonely cliff in Scotland in 1955, the mysterious figure of Professor Peter Ameisenhaufen was driven to travel around the world looking for traces and specimens of long-forgotten, unknown and sometimes mythical creatures. His scientific training and passion for the work culminated in the highly detailed, yet sometimes cryptic and paranoiac, archive of field notes from which this book has been made. Although much of the professor's work is believed to have been lost, this volume will amaze the viewer with its scientific photographs and notes on the habits and internal structures of such creatures as the fire-breathing Pirofagus catalanae, the unsettlingly intelligent Centaurus neandertalensis and the deadly 12-legged snake Solenoglypha polipodida.

Fleurs de Peau (Skin Flowers), edited by G[acute{e}]rard L[acute{e}]vy and Serge Bramly. Kehayoff/103 pp./price unavailable (hb). The images in this collection came into the hands of L[acute{e}]vy after a brief telephone conversation during which he was offered the chance to purchase what he expected to be "insipid clich[acute{e}]s" from the heir of a darkroom amateur. He began forming a polite refusal when his interest was piqued by dark hints of medical photographs, underworld figures and prisoners covered with tattoos. Promising to keep the photographer's name unknown, L[acute{e}]vy purchased the antique images and presents them here as the work of an artist/dermatologist working in Lyons during the 1930s. The "Autochrome plates" reproduced in this collection are the result of a color process patented by the Lumi[grave{e}]re brothers in 1903.

Gender and Society in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema, by David William Foster. University of Texas Press/181 pp./$30.00 (hb), $14.95 (sb). Germaine Krull: Photographer of Modernity, by Kim Sichel. MIT Press/363 pp./$65.00 (hb). Sichel's massive monograph on one of the most interesting early twentieth-century photographers is an excellent publication that raises the scholarship and understanding of Krull's career. Krull first gained considerable success as a participant in "the New Vision" photography and for her 1928 book M[acute{e}]tal that emphasized the power and disorienting effect of the machine and new industry. An extensive text on her active life and work accompanies nearly 150 duotone reproductions of her early photographs in Munich, as well as those from Paris in the '30s, Africa in the '40s and Tibet in the '60s.

Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations In the Hermeneutics of the Visual, edited by Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell. Routledge/260 pp./$27.99 (sb). This is a collection of critical essays that explore visual culture in contemporary theory and ethics from a wide range of perspectives and disciplines.

The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750-1990, by Richard Butsch. Cambridge University Press/448 pp./$24.95 (hb). Ryder University professor Butsch draws enlightening connections between audiences, entertainment and how the American public has influenced, and in turn been shaped by, stage plays, live music, film, radio and television.

Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change, edited by Vivian Sobchack. University of Minnesota Press/256 pp./$18.95 (sb). From topics such as "quick change" artists of the early twentieth century to cosmetic surgery and recent Hollywood sci-fi films to the writing of Kafka and Burroughs among others, this book presents an engaging selection of essays on the historical, philosophical, psychoanalytic, artistic and mythic implications of morphing. It includes discussion of forms that range from mythology to cinema to performance art.

The Mind's Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers, by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Aperture/109 pp./$19.95 (hb). Few would question that Cartier-Bresson is one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century. However, lesser-known or recognized are his contributions to photographic criticism. The Mind's Eye is the first compilation of his writings on photography and it includes both texts that have appeared previously in books and journals and some never before published in English. The brief writings are organized into three sections entitled, "The Camera as Sketchbook," "Time and Place" and "On Photographers and Friends." Although the book offers moments of insight on the part of the now 90-year-old photographer, they are infinitely more enjoyable if read as the sometimes meandering thoughts of a well-known and celebrated artist than as essays intended to prompt critical debate. This is confirmed by the inclusion of the reproduced, handwritten journal entries that weave through the text. So me of the thoughts expressed in the writings are understandably conservative or even simplistic in their stance, such as the statement that "blurred backgrounds in color photographs are distinctly displeasing," making it all the more difficult to take them seriously as works of great criticism. However, the true highlight of this slender volume is the third and final section in which Cartier-Bresson comments on his friends, such as Robert Capa, Andr[acute{e}] Kert[acute{e}]sz and Jean Renoir. For anyone who has ever enjoyed one of Cartier-Bresson's decisive moments, this book will make interesting reading, if not for what it reveals about the medium of photography in general, then for what it reveals about one photographer in particular.

Notes for Friends: Along Colorado Roads, by Robert Adams. University Press of Colorado/80 pp./$24.95 (sb). Adams's most recent book of black and white photographs consists of 59 images of paths, from the literal, cracked pavement, to the metaphoric vistas atop high mountains. These roads are universal. We have all travelled them at one time or another. There is no accompanying text, aside from two short poems. On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art and Place, by Lucy R. Lippard. The New Press/182 pp./$25.00 (hb). Cultural critic Lippard draws on historical sources, sociology, art history, critical theory and personal observations to explore the various ways in which tourist sites are conceived, and compiles a series of engaging essays on the complexities of the tourist experience.

On the Way to an Ambush, by Bruce Connew. Victoria University Press/175 pp./price unavailable (sb). Connew, a New Zealand photojournalist, presents a record of time spent in Burma in 1989 documenting the Karen people's war with the Burmese government. The photographs, journal entries, letters, notes and documents that he presents in this haunting book attest not only to the horrors of human brutality and war, but to the determination of the human spirit, here represented both by the Karen's struggle and by Connew's role in it.

Overhearing Film Dialogue, by Sarah Kozioff. University of California Press/323 pp./$48.00 (hb), $18.95 (sb). Overhearing Film Dialogue represents Kozloff's refutation of what she describes as film scholarship's "longstanding antipathy to speech in film." Operating under the fundamental assumption that dialogue has long been associated with femininity and therefore trivialized, Kozloff endeavors to deconstruct what she considers to be a neglected element of film scholarship and restore it to its rightful place in academic discourse. To her credit, Kozloff makes a solid case for such a reassessment. She methodically and painstakingly dissects the structure and usage of film dialogue in a way that gives the reader pause to pay more attention to the way we hear and relate to language in film. Part One of the book is primarily a survey of the functions of dialogue and its structural and stylistic variables, while Part Two looks at dialogue through the contextual lens of specific film genres.

Unfortunately for the reader, much of Kozloff's scholarship is encumbered by continuous counterarguments. For every example the author finds to support her thesis she brings up something to refute it (often coming to the conclusion that film is, indeed, a complex and sophisticated language that transcends mere dialogue), yet also arbitrarily brushes aside entire genres of film and generations of filmmakers that do not fit into her narrow feminist framework. Kozloff devotes no attention to auteur filmmakers, the mavericks who took a wrecking ball to the conventions of film structure, aesthetic and dialogue that snugly fit Kozloff's thesis. In her extended exploration of the "blathering woman stereotype" that she indicts as being responsible for the devaluation of dialogue, Kozloff seldom mentions a single antithetical example, curiously neglecting, for example, Mae West (cited by many film scholars as arguably the first feminist role model). Nor does she discuss any contemporary models of competent, assertive women "finding their voice," instead spending an inordinate amount of time deconstructing a curious selection of contemporary films of questionable merit such as The, Fugitive (1993) and Moonstruck (1987).

The film genres Kozloff uses to illustrate her point are perhaps the least challenging she could have chosen. She resorts to stylistic stereotypes (Westerns, gangster films, melodramas and screwball comedies) that easily support her stock feminist theory. Yet she conveniently avoids discussion of some of the more complex and mature examples of these genres such as The Searchers (1956), The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948) and other late-career John Ford and John Huston films in the case of the Western. Her assertion that the talkative gangster's inevitable death by the film's end is somehow a payback for breaking the strictures of masculinity proves that Kozloff has a fanciful imagination, but fails entirely to take into consideration the Production Code's insistence on moral closure.

Kozloff also declines to dig deeply into the more subtle and insidious effects of both the Production Code and larger economic factors that have decidedly impacted the use of language in film. In an industry where the bottom line forever supersedes aesthetic or ideological concerns, the lack of sophistication in average viewers in the U.S. and the limitations of an international audience regarding complex forms of the English language has always played a significant role in the dialogue of Hollywood films.

Ultimately, many of Kozloff's observations seem largely self-evident (such as the revelation that an actor's performance or a film's soundtrack effects how dialogue is perceived; or her three-page explanation of irony) and her critical lens does little to further the theories of feminist film analysis that she appropriates as foundational underpinnings of her work. In the end, it remains unclear whether or not Kozloff has actually come to any conclusions of her own (the "conclusions" chapter runs a scant two-and-a-half pages), other than the suggestion that film dialogue may, in fact, be worth paying a little more attention to.

Peter Hutchison

Peter Hutchison writes about film from his home in Upstate New York.

Photography and Politics in America From the New deal into the Cold War, by Lili Corbus Bezner. Johns Hopkins University Press/307 pp./$39.95 (hb).

Process Color Manual, by Michael and Pat Rogondino. Chronicle Books/256 pp./$35.00 (hb). This revised and updated edition of Computer Color provides graphic designers with 24,000 different CMYK combinations that match from computer display to printed page.

Sisters on Screen: Siblings in Contemporary Cinema, by Eve Rueschmann. Temple University Press/240 pp./$69.50 (hb), $22.95 (sb). Although film scholars have explored the diverse relationships between mothers and daughters and those between females, sisterhood, a now widely-used term to imply female solidarity, has rarely been the focus of study. Rueschmann's text interweaves a discussion of a range of films that center on the lives of sisters, including Diane Kurys's Peppermint Soda (1977), Jane Campion's An Angel at My Table (1990), Gillian Armstrong's 1990 remake of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995). Her text is reinforced by psychoanalytic theory and references to feminist film scholars, yet the language is dear and accessible. Two chapters deal exclusively with the films of Ingmar Bergman and Margarethe von Trotta, and the other chapters engage with multiple films that concern the lifelong emotional and often conflicting bonds of shared fantasies, adolesce nt competition and reverence and familial memory and adult recognition inherent in sisterhood.

The Soul of a Small Texas Town, by David Wharton. University of Oklahoma Press/320 pp./$39.95 (hb). This book combines photographs and written texts by Wharton to document life in rural McDade, Texas between 1984 and 1989. It is at once humorous and thought provoking, poignant and quirky and it reveals the "human side" of a small American town with a history all its own yet familiar to those who have experienced rural life anywhere.

Space Site Intervention: Situating Installation Art, edited by Erika Suderburg. University of Minnesota Press/352 pp./ $62.95 (hb), $24.95 (sb). Suderburg assembles essays by some of today's most prominent critics, curators and artists on the subject of Installation. The result is an ambitious and encompassing survey of installation art and its practitioners.

Visual Space Perception: A Primer, by Maurice Hershenson. MIT Press/238 pp./$22.00 (sb). This small primer clearly and succinctly discusses technical models and concepts of human visual space perception in order to provide an overview of the field. Hershenson's impetus for writing this book came from the gap he observed between oversimplified texts and extremely specific literature on the subject. This book bridges this gap in a time of renewed interest in the field.

Where is Ana Mendieta?: Identity, Performativity, and Exile, by Jane Blocker. Duke University Press/165 pp./ $17.95 (sb). In this well-researched and intelligently written book, Blocker examines the work and short, tumultuous life of Mendieta, an important artist in conceptual and performative photography. The book traces how her forced move from Cuba to Iowa in 1961 at the age of 12 and living her life in exile, between two cultures, impacted her work. Blocker shows how Mendieta's work cannot slide into essentialist feminist theory, but how it is a complex weave of personal experiences, Cuban traditions and cultural identity. Five chapters discuss many of Mendieta's projects both formally and theoretically, providing thoughtful access to this powerful work.

World Press Photo 2000, edited by the World Press Photo Foundation. Thames and Hudson/148 pp./$22.50 (sb). Every year since 1955 an international jury has been convened in Holland under the auspices of the World Press Photo Foundation to select the best press photographs of the year. This book presents the best of 1999 as selected by the jury.

EXHIBITION CATALOGS

Art is Life/Life is Art: The Graphic Work of Dieter Roth. University of Iowa Museum of Art/39 pp./price unavailable(sb). Roth's humor, subtly and prolific output made him revered among his fellow artists. This exhibition catalog provides numerous reproductions of Roth's books, an essay by curator Katherine A. Edwards that situates Roth's work within a theoretical framework and an essay by Buzz Spector that discusses Roth's Gesammelte Werke and its relation to the archive.

The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso, by Dorothy Kosinski. Yale University Press/289 pp./$45.00 (hb). This hefty publication accompanies an exhibition of the same name organized by the Dallas Museum of Art. It demonstrates the curious and creative interaction between painting and photography by some of the leading artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the important role photography played in their work. Hardly announcing the end of painting, photography was used to document works in process, document studio work and act as a foundation and study for painting and sculpture. The essays address the work of the 13 artists represented in the exhibition: Pierre Bonnard, Constantin Brancusi, Edward Degas, Paul Gauguin, Fernand Khnopff, Alphose Mucha, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin, Medardo Rosso, Franz von Stuck, F[acute{e}]lix Vallotton and Edouard Vuillard.

Artists Books. Brooklyn Museum of Art/64 pp./price unavailable (sb). Itself resembling 'an artists' book, this exhibition catalog bares short descriptions of the content and technique of each book along with an illustration. The books are categorized in terms of multiples, limited editions and unique works.

Bernd and Hilla Becher: Basic Forms, essay by Thierry de Duve. Te Neues/159 pp./$22.95 (hb). The 64 photographs reproduced for this book were on display at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York City in 1990 for an exhibition showing the thematic range of the Bechers' work. For those unfamiliar with their oeuvre of industrial buildings, water towers, grain elevators and the like, the images may appear to suffer from monotony or a lack of "artistic style." However, it is just this method of portraying the industrial landscape that Thierry de Duve's essay praises when he says that to appreciate this work is "to learn the differences in composition, rhythm and formal solutions where an ordinarily distracted eye would see only indifference and standardization." The essay also discusses whether this German pair are "photographers" or "artists who make use of the camera" and how their work relates to the state of architecture and sculpture.

Camera Della Donna, Temple Gallery, Temple University/unpaginated/price unavailable (sb). Camera Della Donna presents American and Italian women photographers who explore feminine issues. The catalog devotes one page to images from each artist and another page to both English and Italian text on each artist's work.

Confluence of Cultures: Celebration of Korean/American Partnership, Gallery Korea (460 Park Ave., New York, NY)/ unpaginated/price unavailable (sb). This exhibition catalog was published to coincide with the Winter 1999/2000 exhibition of artworks by Korean alumni and students of Pratt Institute in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the Korean Cultural Service in New York. Included is painting, photography, sculpture, installation and mixed media work.

Cuba: Que Bol[acute{a}]!, Photographs by Tania Jovanovic. Ocean Press/89 pp./price unavailable (sb). The first two sections of Cuba: Que Bol[acute{a}] depict people in the streets of Havana and in various workplaces. The remaining sections, "Carnival and the 26th of July," "The Civilian Militia" and "The Reverly and the Afro-Cuban Rites," focus on specific topics. Throughout the essay the photographs portray a people full of emotions as evidenced by their celebrations, politics and cultural values. Although Jovanovic at times seems to portray romanticized representations of the Cuban people who willingly posed in front of the camera, she also succeeds in becoming invisible and photographing in such a way as to transcend the moment and reveal the energy and humanity of everyday life. Documenting a Myth: The South as Seen by Three Women Photographers, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery (Reed College, Portland, OR)/50 pp./price unavailable (sb). Co-curator Naomi Rosenblum contributes an essay that contextual izes and introduces southern photographers Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, Dorris Wootten and Bayard Wootten. Lloyd Ullberg: Modernist Photographer, with an essay by A. D. Coleman. Barry Singer Gallery/unpaginated/price unavailable (sb).

Photography at Princeton: Celebrating Twenty-Five Years of Collecting and Teaching the History of Photography, edited by Peter C. Bunnell. The Art Museum, Princeton University/340 pp./price unavailable (sb). This historic survey presents a selection of photographs from the Princeton University collection accompanied by six short essays by former Princeton students.

Speaking of Book Art: Interviews with British and American Book Artists, by Cathy Courtney. Anderson-Lovelace (13040 Alta Tierra Rd., Los Altos Hills, CA 94022)/241 pp./price unavailable (sb). In 1983, Courtney began writing a column for the London-based publication Art Monthly because there was little awareness and discussion of artists' books in England. The interviews collected here are form the late '90s and represent the work of influential book artists including Betsy Davids, Helen Douglas, Johanna Drucker, Joan Lyons and Telfer Stokes. The conversations between Courtney and the bookmakers are personal and range from general biography to detailed analyses of specific books, supplemented with numerous illustrations.

Steel and Real Estate: Margaret Bourke-White and Corporate Culture in Cleveland 1927-1929, by Geraldine Wojno Kiefer. College of Wooster Art Museum/55 pp./price unavailable (sb).

W. Eugene Smith: Photographic Poet, essay by Ben Lifson. Barry Singer Gallery (111 Petaluma Blvd. N., Petaluma, CA 94952)/29 pp./price unavailable (sb). With an introduction by critic Lifson that reveals Smith to have been a virtual nightmare for magazine publishers to work with and an artist in the truest sense rather than a photojournalist in the traditional sense, this catalog presents a smattering of images from some of the photographer's best-known bodies of work. Even in these few photographs, including some of the signature images from series such as Nurse Midwife Series, Saipan, A Man of Mercy, Pittsburgh Series and Minamata, to name just a few, Smith's emerges as a purely poetic vision. As Lifson states in the introduction, Smith "was after truth, not fact."

ARTISTS' BOOKS

The Practical Speller, by Deborah Muirhead. Self Prrblished/36 pp./$150.00 (hb). This color laser printed limited edition is made from paint and collage placed on top of a nineteenth-century speller. Emulating the structure of the speller (columns of single words), Muirhead pastes down her own words to weave fragmented narratives that honor the generations of slaves whose stories have gone unrecorded. Her attempts to erase the colonial past by whiting out large portions of the speller directs the viewer's focus to particular words (e.g., "hymn," "story," "venom ""cabin,"" mis name" and "dis place") that bleed through the white paint like ghostly imprints. Generations, regeneration, genes and the life cycle, all characterized by botanical illustrations of seed pods, appear on every left-hand page. Each is numbered as a scientific specimen, alluding to a contained and examined existence. The strength and beauty represented by these plants is echoed on the right-hand pages by a pair of large female hands. These same soft dark hands relentlessly appear on each page, engaged in domestic toil. Soul & Psyche, by Barbara Rosenthal. Visual Studies Workshop Press/148 pp./$15.00 (sb). Soul & Psyche is a collection of the authors' journals and photographs accumulated over a period of six years.

CD-ROMS

4 Seasons: The Dragon Year, produced by David Glynn (tel. (888) NY-NY-ORK or e-mail [e-mail])/price unavailable. Internationally exhibited painter and photographer Glynn attempts to use multimedia technology to present combinations of his own photographic and painted images, audio and video. The result is a piece that looks like an artist's first attempt at using Macromedia Director. The overall format in which the user is required to click on small images on a template in order to experience the full image is rather unsophisticated and the relationship between Eastern philosophy and nude models is vague at best. The images themselves, mostly of the models dancing or swimming underwater, provide the piece with its strength, capturing the beauty, the grace and the mysticism of the human body in motion. Archival Quality, by Christine Tamblyn. Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies (6518 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90028)/price unavailable. Representing an overview of more than three de cades of the artist's life and work, this interactive piece takes the form of an archive. Easy to navigate and complete with video and audio clips, photographs, journal entries, essays and other writings by and about the now deceased artist, Archival Qualify has the power to provide the Tamblyn novice with 'a thorough introduction and to provide those already familiar with her work with new insight into the prolific artist's career. It is user friendly, well-designed and like most successful interactive work allows users to choose where they will direct their attention--whether on the images themselves or by reading the many critical essays both by and about the artist.

Exploring the Art and Science of Stopping Time: The Life and Work of Harold E. Edgerton, produced by James Sheldon. MIT Press/price unavailable. This innovative and engaging work chronicles the life and philosophy of "Doc" Edgerton, inventor of strobe photography, and contains hundreds of his stunning photographs and short films, demonstrating how each was made. Probably best known for his stop-action photographs of such things as a bullet piercing an apple or a drop of milk forming crown of droplets as it hits the surface, Edgerton made scores of other images and films of athletes, dancers and animals in motion, demonstrating along the way how "stopping time" by means of high-speed and strobe photography reveals a way of seeing the unseen. The CD-ROM is organized into three "rooms": Biography, which contains highlights of Edgerton's life and the impulses and influences behind his work; Archives, in which users can explore the visual work itself and find explanations of how each image was created; and Strobe Alley where experiments involving flowing water, bursting balloons, bouncing balls and rotating fans are recreated. Sheldon adeptly blends the biographical, historical, scientific and artistic elements so effectively that users can spend hours in any of the rooms marveling at image after image both for their beauty and for their innovation. The CD-ROM is a pleasure to navigate and as fun as it is insightful. It offers its users the opportunity to satisfy their own curiosities about movement and time as they observe first-hand how one man made a career out of doing the same.

Interactive: AIUEONN Six Features, by Takahiko limura (e-mail [e-mail]). Distributed by Heure Equise! (e-mail [e-mail]).

Complete Camera, produced by Touchstone Productions Ltd. (Tel: [phone] or e-mail [e-mail]).

VIDEOS

Observer/Observed and Other Works of Video Semiology, produced by Takahiko limura (e-mail [e-mail] or visit www2.gol.com/users/iimura/Front.html). 22 mins.

Contributors include Kostas Epimenidis, Rachel Siegel, Daniel Smith, Karen vanMeenen, Erik Wander and Cynthia Young.