Michael Stipe with Douglas Coupland: Our Interference Times
A Visual Record
For this second book in an ongoing exploratory series, multifaceted artist Michael Stipe has collaborated with the writer and artist Douglas Coupland on an investigation of how analog imagery is crashing on the shores of our digital future. For Stipe the signature mark of this phenomenon is the moiré pattern. Culled from Stipe’s vast archive of personal images, the book is a contemplation on the tug-of-war between pixels and halftone, between past memory and new memory and their vagaries of representation.
As an undergraduate studio art major at the University of Georgia, Michael Stipe (born 1960) studied photography and painting before leaving school upon the formation of R.E.M., the band for which he served as frontman and singer/songwriter until its dissolution in 2011. The sensibility that he began to develop during his time as an art student transferred to his spectrum of work for R.E.M., from art directing all graphic, video and stage design, to writing, composing and performance, and his iconoclastic personal style. Stipe’s visibility as a media figure in the popular culture of the 1980s and ’90s left an indelible mark on the aesthetic trends of the time, many of which have trickled down to contemporary culture.
Featured spread is from 'Michael Stipe with Douglas Coupland: Our Interference Times.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Guardian
Miranda Sawyer
There are a lot of regimented grids in the book, though these are often out of whack, or they’re details of something that you can’t quite work out, that you think is something different. On more than one occasion, you find yourself turning your head, wondering: What IS that?, until you see. Photographs are laid out to play off each other, with one almost chatting to its facing companion.
Garage
Nick Fulton
[Our Interference Times] addresses [Stipe's] anxiety that digital technology is eroding people’s association with the analog world and driving a wedge between humanity and nature, between young and old.
New York Times: T Magazine
Jameson Fitzpatrick
Stipe... has trained his eye on places where the analog and the digital intersect to form the pattern of the current moment.
New York Magazine: Strategist
...this experimental book draws from Stipe’s personal images and photography to explore the intersection between what the authors describe as the analog and the digital. It’s an abstract concept illustrated through pixelated images, moiré patterns, and screenshots.
ARTnews
Andy Battaglia
Stipe’s new photography book, Our Interference Times: A Visual Record... is scattered, with photographs of things too diffuse to be circumscribed. But it follows a sequence, and storylines of a sort start to coalesce after you flip through a few times—even if still more than a little elusively.
Artnet
The book offers a smattering of mostly unresolved shots, including pixelated pictures of old prints, phone snapshots of architectural oddities and studio assemblages, plus video stills and computer-rendered portraits. Although it is a disparate group of subjects, pattern do emerge.
The Guardian
Miranda Sawyer
A hefty tome that explore[s] the dissonance between the analogue and the digital...
Featured spreads are from photographer and R.E.M. front man Michael Stipe's new artist's book, Our Interference Times, made with the influential Canadian writer and artist, Douglas Coupland, with whom Stipe has been discussing ideas and culture for more than two decades. A glitchy, almost hallucinogenic, collage of images from Stipe's massive personal archive, this strange and provocative 200-page abstraction captures an in-between state, a constantly shifting moiré pattern neither analog nor digital, referencing both past and future. At the end, the image captions reads like a readymade autobiographical poem. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9.75 x 13 in. / 200 pgs / illustrated throughout. LIST PRICE: U.S. $60.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $85 ISBN: 9788862086783 PUBLISHER: Damiani AVAILABLE: 9/17/2019 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA LA
Michael Stipe with Douglas Coupland: Our Interference Times A Visual Record
Published by Damiani.
For this second book in an ongoing exploratory series, multifaceted artist Michael Stipe has collaborated with the writer and artist Douglas Coupland on an investigation of how analog imagery is crashing on the shores of our digital future. For Stipe the signature mark of this phenomenon is the moiré pattern. Culled from Stipe’s vast archive of personal images, the book is a contemplation on the tug-of-war between pixels and halftone, between past memory and new memory and their vagaries of representation.
As an undergraduate studio art major at the University of Georgia, Michael Stipe (born 1960) studied photography and painting before leaving school upon the formation of R.E.M., the band for which he served as frontman and singer/songwriter until its dissolution in 2011. The sensibility that he began to develop during his time as an art student transferred to his spectrum of work for R.E.M., from art directing all graphic, video and stage design, to writing, composing and performance, and his iconoclastic personal style. Stipe’s visibility as a media figure in the popular culture of the 1980s and ’90s left an indelible mark on the aesthetic trends of the time, many of which have trickled down to contemporary culture.
