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The First Circle: Radical Humanism (2025)
by Claudia Hart and Natasha Chuk
hardcover book published by Realpolitrix Books
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Published by Realpolitrix Books, the fictional publishing company that Hart initiated in 2010, The First Circle: Radical Humanism focuses on the early adoption of computers by a pioneering generation of artists who worked creatively to lay the foundation of contemporary digital art by integrating a wide range of mediums, artistic practices, and theoretical approaches. It seeks to expand the current discourse on the history of digital art by highlighting the evolution of digital art outside of the framework that triangulates science, technology and industry. Its goal is to demonstrate the role of artists in the development of a digital media practice that post-NFT mostly celebrates the ideologies of innovation capitalism.
The book consists of a series of “computer origin” stories told by the 40 artists that Hart and Chuk interviewed, motivated by Hart’s personal quest for her own identity. According to Hart’s rule set, the artists in her archive must be born between 1945 and 1960, and have come of age in America during the tech-industry explosion that took place during that era.
These artists could not work with a documentary or social justice approach and could not be trained as computer or engineers nor embraced scientific methods. They also produced images which were post-photographic rather than abstract and algorithmic and, above all, integrated computers as a significant force in their practice during the period between 1995-2005. The findings of this rubric identify a first circle of artists working with computers, but also working in unexpected ways to create art that is uncanny, symbolic, expressive, and ultimately humanistic.
A Child’s Machiavelli
By Claudia hart
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A Child’s Machiavelli, now published in its third edition by Politrix Books, was redesigned by
Patrick Reynolds in its current form for its second edition by Beatrice Books, in 2019.
A Child’s Machiavelli wasInspired by Niccolo Machiavelli’s Renaissance treatise, The Prince, considered the first book of political philosophy. Hart’s interpretation began as a series of oil paintings and a small catalog, produced by the Realismus Studio, at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin in1995.
The catalog was eventually released as an expanded hardcover by Penguin USA in 1998, along with German and French editions. While keeping to the meaning of the original, Hart rewrote The Prince reflecting street values and the voice of youth culture - as if Machiavelli’s book, meant to advise kings on seizing power was a primer to teach good manners to small children. The book has proven prescient, uncannily prefiguring the brutal tenor of contemporary US public discourse.
Hart simplifies the core ideas embedded within The Prince by utilizing a child-friendly vocabulary and narrative style that is both comical and unsettling. The artwork in A Child’s Machiavelli, which Hart originally created as a series of oil paintings based on found images from Victorian-era and early 20th-century European picture book illustrations, has been transformed into stark black-and-white reproductions for this edition. The publication design has been simplified in comparison to previous editions, placing it closer to the look and feel of those books that inspired the original artwork.
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