Raphael Gygax Livres

Writer Sibylle Berg has the eye of an entomologist: Under her gaze, humanity falls into a taxonomy of wretched characters, full of dramas and impossible dreams--though she always manages to carry them through their travails with a dose of empathy and a sense of humor. In this novella, previously unpublished in English, Berg boldly relates the lives of two children growing up in East Germany. They communicate through the things that were not said, the projects that came to nothing, their loneliness, boredom and confinement. The story allows for positive endings, but is no average coming of age narrative. Berg was born in Weimar in 1962, and though she currently lives in Zurich, she is still heralded as one of Germany's most provocative writers. This beautifully produced, small-edition volume includes illustrations by Swiss artist, Andro Wekua and American Rita Ackermann.

Twenty-five years ago, the first 8-bit Nintendo console went on the market; now most home computers have hundreds of thousands of times that power. Arcangel, who is 27 this year, is a full-fledged member of the generation that grew up on home video games. With Beige, a collective of fellow programmers, he has embarked on a hacker's nostalgia his return to Super Mario Brothers removes all of the action to leave a landscape of blue sky and puffy clouds; Shoot Andy Warhol is a working video game in which viewers gain points for hitting Warhol and lose them by accidentally shooting Colonel Sanders, the Pope or Flavor Flav instead. Arcangel appropriates and rewrites electronic history, and his accessible sites and published code offer viewers tools for action in a reality that is less and less tangible, through a field that has come to dominate our daily lives. Arcangel's work was shown at the 2004 Whitney Biennial.