We are pleased to present the Art Signal Magazine’s Issue 2. As we usually recommend, consider joining our Newsletter mailing list to be updated about new issue’s publications and Art Signal ongoings. Enjoy the reading!

• Nodes and Meetings: ‘Be-bomb, Transatlantic War Through Images’ by Alicia Escobio Alonso

• In 1946, following the Second World War and the dropping of the atomic bomb, the exhibition “Beneath the Bomb. The jazz of the transatlantic war of images, 1946 - 1956” began to circulate, and can now be seen at the MACBA, from the 5th of October 2007 until the 7th of January, 2008. We penetrate the genealogy of art and the theory of the post-war era on the second floor, where the exhibition organizer, Serge Guilbaut, begins his attempt…

• Interviews: ‘The Triumph of Memory: Interview with Hugo Salinas, director of Docupolis’ by Pablo G. Polite

• If people remembered more often that the first films —films which started in 1896 with the Lumière brothers— were documentaries, it would require a lot less effort to justify the importance, sense and raison d’être of an event such as Docúpolis, the documentary film festival which has been held for the past seven years in the Centre for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona (CCCB). Conceived originally by the Tercer Ojo collective …

• Files: ‘The Still Life and Archistructures Series’, Photographs by Adrian Tyler

• Science tells us that all matter is composed from combinations of only 102 elements. Within these confines the processes of construction and decay, both natural and artificial, extend through time. That these changes take place in various dimensions simultaneously is a challenge for artists and philosophers …

• Metropolis: ‘A Return to Techne: On Cecil Balmond’ by Michelle Linden

• In today’s digital era of slick renderings and animations, many architects are enamored with the forms and shapes made possible by a litany of advances in design and building technology. Indeed, no one is more enamored of form than Cecil Balmond. However unlike many designers, Balmond’s work is underpinned by the science underlying beauty rather than merely showcasing form for form’s sake. …

• Monographs: ‘Jem Cohen’s Chain, or The Cinema of Public Space’ by Chuck Tryon

• In a famous passage in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin writes, “Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of the second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling.”(1) Benjamin’s comments call attention …

• Books and publications: ‘Japan Style’ by Gian Carlo Caza

• This book, written by the renowned expert, Gian Carlo Caza (Professor of the History of Eastern Art and director of the Hokusai International Research Centre at the University of Venice) tries to explain that which we clearly recognise as the “Japanese style”. A subtle mixture of cultural contexts and materials developed over centuries by the inhabitants of the archipelago in the Sea of Japan …