Associate Professor Philip Glahn Publishes New Book on Visionary Art Collective
Philip Glahn, Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Critical Studies at Tyler, has coauthored a new book about Mobile Image, a pioneering new media art collective founded in 1977 by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz. The Future is Present: Art, Technology, and the Work of Mobile Image (The MIT Press, 2024), coauthored with Cary Levine, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, highlights the collective's prescient vision, as well as its continued importance and resonance.
The book explores Mobile Image's ambitious digital media and performance art projects, which utilized emerging technologies from satellites to electronic message platforms. For instance, the collective's project Hole In Space (1980) set up a real-time public space video conference between New York and Los Angeles, which the general public would activate over three evenings to connect with strangers and their loved ones across the two cities. As the authors argue, Mobile Image's work demonstrated technology's potential for self-representation, social unity, and creative collaboration.
The Future Is Present also demonstrates how the work of Mobile Image continues to have profound implications for art, technology, and the politics of public and private experience today. Glahn and Levine discussed their book and Mobile Image’s innovative artmaking in a recent interview with STIRworld.
Glahn’s research and teaching focus on the histories, theories and practices of art as technology, labor and activism. His writings on the legacies of avant-garde strategies, the politics of drawing, digital media and new social formations, radio and the public sphere, as well as other topics have appeared in publications including Art Journal, Afterimage, The Brooklyn Rail, and Parallax. His research has been supported by several grants including a Fulbright Fellowship and a Helena Rubinstein Fellowship for Critical Studies as part of the Whitney Independent Studies Program. Prior to his appointment at Tyler, he taught art history and criticism at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn College and Hunter College, where at the latter he received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching.