Working Title

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Working Title is about all the supposedly mundane things involved in creative work that you're not supposed to talk about: the prerequisites, formalities, long waits, copyright battles, packaging dilemmas, and project pitches (like the one you're reading now). This book delves into European and transatlantic audiovisual media from the 1960s and 1970s, including performances, visual art, installations, and films, which might seem well-known to us as avant-garde artworks from "the past"—but in this book, they don't remain there. Exploring the less visible media among these works—from video games, photography, television, and YouTube videos to legal texts, containers, rubbish, and paperwork—Kalani Michell unsettles the familiar motivating mythologies of art of this era and makes space for the heavy lifting these media do, carving out what and how they mean for us today and revisiting their forgotten futures.