This book presents the most recent body of work by artists Ed Hill and Suzanne Bloom, the collaborative team known as MANUAL. Masters of digital media, the artists’ photo-constructions and time-based works play extensively with the subject of Arcadia, a mythic, poetic space based on an actual geographical place.
This publication focuses on a body of work, broadly titled Arcadia Project, created between 1996 and 2002, which deals with the concept and mythology of Arcadia. Seventeen black and white and 32 color reproductions are accompanied by three essays. Edward W. Earle, curator of Digital Media at the International Center of Photography, considers the artists’ content in view of technological developments and their complex relation to nature. In her essay "The Trees for the Forest," writer-critic Lucy Lippard, an outsider to digital technologies but someone deeply invested in the issues of artistic identity and geographic place, characterizes MANUAL’s approach as "not just a visual pun on history and spectacle . . . but a new kind of allegory." The third essay, by the artists themselves, traces the evolutionary concept of Arcadia and brings it full circle to their specific geographic focus, rural Vermont.