Maciunas' Learning Machines (Paperback, 2nd revised and enlarged edition 2011)

The art of cross-linked thinking consists in facilitating dealing with complexity and admitting new insights. This approach, prevailing in all realms of knowledge, determines also the artistic praxis of Fluxus initiator George Maciunas. This book shows some hundred diagrams and maps related to history from antiquity to postmodernism; they serve to visualize artistic, political, and economic correlations. If it were up to Maciunas, there wouldn t be any real concept of the past without percepts. With his maps, diagrams, and tables, a big part of which is published for the first time, he tries to draw a picture of history in a different way. The result seems fascinating both on a scientific and artistic level. It opens insights into eye-opening correlations between dates and facts as well as makes appear completely novel forms of knowledge transfer.