O’Kane, Paul. Technologies of Romance II.  London, United Kingdom: eeodo Publishers. 2018.

Technologies of Romance Part II is the second book in a sequel. Author Paul  O’Kane lecturers in Fine Art and Critical Studies at Central St Martin’s and Chelsea College of Art, and at SOAS, University of London, and makes and exhibits artworks concerned with a history of technologies and narrative. He writes for leading art journals, including Art Monthly and Third Text, and has published over 100 articles, reviews and catalogue essays. He is a founder member of the small artists’ book publishing imprint eeodo. His interest as an artist, writer and lecturer is in the mechanized image and the way in which art’s values and forms are influenced by a history of technologies. In this book, O’Kane addresses topics such as, “Technology, Communication and Politics, and “21^st Century Distractions”. He compares our current technological state of existing to that of Romanticism. Comparing the “alone-but-not-lonely” existence of early poets to people in today’s digital era, escapism and distraction have found a new space to access at hand as we slip into “micro virtual events” and communicate for behind the screen. Written with poetic historic reference O’Kane , like Bjung Chul-Han, does not state his opinion so much as to observe and transcribe what he witnesses. Currently this book is provoking a realm of thinking which I had not considered before. His use of nostalgic anecdote to relate complexities of virtual realities is introspectively and politically provoking and represents a certain severity through temporal experiences.

LeWitt, Sol. “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967), pp. 79–83, reprinted in Gary Garrels, ed., – Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective (exh. cat.), 2000, p. 369