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Swiss artist HR Giger (1940-2014) is most famous for his creation of the space monster in Ridley Scott's 1979 horror sci-fi film Alien, which earned him an Oscar. In retrospect, this was just one of the most popular expressions of Giger's biomechanical arsenal of creatures, which consistently merged hybrids of human and machine into images of haunting power and dark psychedelia. The visions drew on demons of the past, harking back as far as Giger's earliest childhood fears as well as evoking mythologies for the future. Above all, they gave expression to the collective fears and fantasies of his age: fear of the atom, of pollution and wasted resources, and of a future in which our bodies depend on machines for survival. From surrealist dream landscapes created with a spray gun and stencils to album cover designs, from guillotine-like sculptures to self-designed bars, Giger personally guides us through his multi-faceted universe in this definitive introduction to a master o...

The rural, remote, and wild territories we call "countryside", or the 98% of the earth's surface not occupied by cities, make up the front line where today's most powerful forces-climate and ecological devastation, migration, tech, demographic lurches-are playing out. Increasingly under a 'Cartesian' regime-gridded, mechanized, and optimized for maximal production-these sites are changing beyond recognition. In his latest publication, Rem Koolhaas explores the rapid and often hidden transformations underway across the Earth's vast non-urban areas. Countryside, A Report gathers travelogue essays exploring territories marked by global forces and experimentation at the edge of our consciousness: a test site near Fukushima, where the robots that will maintain Japan's infrastructure and agriculture are tested; a greenhouse city in the Netherlands that may be the origin for the cosmology of today's countryside; the rapidly thawing permafrost of Cen...