Art & Photography Books
MIT Press Ltd Culture Is Not Always Popular Fifteen Years of
Book SynopsisA collection of writing about design from the influential, eclectic, and adventurous Design Observer.Founded in 2003, Design Observer inscribes its mission on its homepage: Writings about Design and Culture. Since its inception, the site has consistently embraced a broader, more interdisciplinary, and circumspect view of design's value in the world—one not limited by materialism, trends, or the slipperiness of style. Dedicated to the pursuit of originality, imagination, and close cultural analysis, Design Observer quickly became a lively forum for readers in the international design community. Fifteen years, 6,700 articles, 900 authors, and nearly 30,000 comments later, this book is a combination primer, celebration, survey, and salute to a certain moment in online culture. This collection includes reassessments that sharpen the lens or dislocate it; investigations into the power of design idioms; off-topic gems; discussions of design ethics; and ex
£30.60
MIT Press Ltd Performing Image The MIT Press
Book SynopsisAn examination of how artists have combined performance and moving image for decades, anticipating our changing relation to images in the internet era.In Performing Image, Isobel Harbison examines how artists have combined performance and moving image in their work since the 1960s, and how this work anticipates our changing relations to images since the advent of smart phones and the spread of online prosumerism. Over this period, artists have used a variety of DIY modes of self-imaging and circulation—from home video to social media—suggesting how and why Western subjects might seek alternative platforms for self-expression and self-representation. In the course of her argument, Harbison offers close analyses of works by such artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Yvonne Rainer, Mark Leckey, Wu Tsang, and Martine Syms.Harbison argues that while we produce images, images also produce us—those that we take and share, those that we see and assimi
£999.99
MIT Press Ltd Material Noise Reading Theory as Artists Book The
Book SynopsisAn argument that theoretical works can signify through their materiality—their “noise,” or such nonsemantic elements as typography—as well as their semantic content.In Material Noise, Anne Royston argues that theoretical works signify through their materiality—such nonsemantic elements as typography or color—as well as their semantic content. Examining works by Jacques Derrida, Avital Ronell, Georges Bataille, and other well-known theorists, Royston considers their materiality and design—which she terms “noise”—as integral to their meaning. In other words, she reads these theoretical works as complex assemblages, just as she would read an artist's book in all its idiosyncratic tangibility.Royston explores the formlessness and heterogeneity of the Encyclopedia Da Costa, which published works by Bataille, André Breton, and others; the use of layout and white space in Derrida's Glas; the typogr
£999.99
MIT Press Ltd The Birth of the Idea of Photography
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£25.60
MIT Press Ltd The Mental Life of Modernism Why Poetry Painting
Book SynopsisAn argument that Modernism is a cognitive phenomenon rather than a cultural one.At the beginning of the twentieth century, poetry, music, and painting all underwent a sea change. Poetry abandoned rhyme and meter; music ceased to be tonally centered; and painting no longer aimed at faithful representation. These artistic developments have been attributed to cultural factors ranging from the Industrial Revolution and the technical innovation of photography to Freudian psychoanalysis. In this book, Samuel Jay Keyser argues that the stylistic innovations of Western modernism reflect not a cultural shift but a cognitive one. Behind modernism is the same cognitive phenomenon that led to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century: the brain coming up against its natural limitations. Keyser argues that the transformation in poetry, music, and painting (the so-called sister arts) is the result of the abandonment of a natural aesthetic based on a set of rules shared be
£999.99
MIT Press Art in the Age of Machine Learning Leonardo
Book SynopsisAn examination of machine learning art and its practice in new media art and music. Over the past decade, an artistic movement has emerged that draws on machine learning as both inspiration and medium. In this book, transdisciplinary artist-researcher Sofian Audry examines artistic practices at the intersection of machine learning and new media art, providing conceptual tools and historical perspectives for new media artists, musicians, composers, writers, curators, and theorists. Audry looks at works from a broad range of practices, including new media installation, robotic art, visual art, electronic music and sound, and electronic literature, connecting machine learning art to such earlier artistic practices as cybernetics art, artificial life art, and evolutionary art. Machine learning underlies computational systems that are biologically inspired, statistically driven, agent-based networked entities that program themselves. Audry exp
£999.99
MIT Press Ltd Paper Revolutions
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£999.99
MIT Press Ltd London Couture and the Making of a Fashion Centre
Book SynopsisHow design collaboration, networks, and narratives contributed to the establishment of a recognized English couture industry in the 1930s and 1940s.In the 1930s and 1940s, English fashion houses, spurred by economic and wartime crises, put London on the map as a major fashion city. In this book, Michelle Jones examines the creation of a London-based couture industry during these years, exploring how designer collaboration and the construction of specific networks and narratives supported and shaped the English fashion economy. Haute couture—the practice of creative made-to-measure womenswear—was widely regarded as inherently French. Jones shows how an English version emerged during a period of economic turbulence, when a group of designers banded together in a collective effort to shift power within the international fashion system. Jones considers the establishment of this form of English design practice, analyzing the commercial, social, and po
£26.10
MIT Press Piranesi and the Modern Age
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MIT Press Ltd The Culture of the Case Madness Crime and Justice
Book SynopsisHow artists in twentieth-century Germany adapted the idea of the medical or legal case as an artistic strategy to push to the fore sexualities, scandals, and crimes that were otherwise concealed.In early twentieth-century Germany, the artistic avant-garde borrowed procedures from the medical and juridical realms to expose and debate matters that society preferred remain hidden and unspoken. Frederic J. Schwartz explores how the evocation or creation of a “case” provided artists with a means to engage themes that ranged from blasphemy to Lustmord, or sexual murder. Shedding light on the case as a cultural form, Schwartz shows its profound effect on artists and the ways it dovetailed with methods used by these figures to exploit fundamental changes taking place across the mass media of their time. As Schwartz shows, the case was a common denominator that connected seemingly disparate works. George Grosz and Rudolf Schlichter drew on it for t
£34.85
MIT Press Ltd Vegetal Entwinements in Philosophy and Art
Book SynopsisThe first reader in critical plant studies, exploring a rapidly growing multidisciplinary field—the intersection of philosophy with plant science and the visual arts.In recent years, philosophy and art have testified to how anthropocentrism has culturally impoverished our world, leading to the wide destruction of habitats and ecosystems. In this book, Giovanni Aloi and Michael Marder show that the field of critical plant studies can make an important contribution, offering a slew of possibilities for scientific research, local traditions, Indigenous knowledge, history, geography, anthropology, philosophy, and aesthetics to intersect, inform one another, and lead interdisciplinary and transcultural dialogues. Vegetal Entwinements in Philosophy and Art considers such topics as the presence of plants in the history of philosophy, the shifting status of plants in various traditions, what it means to make art with growing life-forms, and
£55.80
MIT Press Ltd Facing Black Star Ric Books Ryerson Image Centre
Book SynopsisThe Black Star Collection at The Image Centre: the expectations, challenges, and results of a decade of research in a key photo agency’s print collection.In 2005, Toronto Metropolitan (formerly Ryerson) University (TMU) acquired the massive collection Black Star Collection of the photo agency previously based in New York City—nearly 292,000 black-and-white prints. Preserved at The Image Centre at TMU, the images include iconic stills of the American Civil Rights movement by Charles Moore, among thousands of ordinary photographs that were classified by theme in the agency’s picture library. While the move of the collection from a corporate photo agency to a public cultural institution enables more access, researchers must still face the size of the collection, its structural organization, the materiality of the prints, and the lack of ephemera. Facing Black Star aims to fruitfully highlight this tension between research expectations and challenges
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MIT Press Ltd Narrating the Globe
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MIT Press Ltd Christa Sommerer Laurent Mignonneau The Artwork
Book Synopsis“More than a cabinet of curiosities, more than a terrarium, more than an aquarium”: a captivating look at thirty years of artistic work by the Austrian-French artist duo Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau.Working at the intersection of natural science, technology, and art, Austrian-French artist duo Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau pioneered the “Art of Interface”—innovative technical interfaces that enable physical interaction between simulative visual worlds and the world of natural sensory organs. Early on, the pair used algorithms to represent not only forms of the living but also their evolution and growth. Edited by Karin Ohlenschläger, Peter Weibel, and Alfred Weidinger, this publication in the Leonardo book series brings together key works of the artists since the early 1990s in pictures and text contextualized by renowned international authors: Reinhard Kannonier, Ryszard W. Kluszczyński, Birgit Mersmann, Tomoe
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MIT Press Ltd The City in the City
Book SynopsisAn exploration of the dramatic transformation of London’s financial district after 1945, viewed at four spatial scales: city, street, facade, interior.In The City in the City, Amy Thomas offers the first in-depth architectural and urban history of London’s financial district, the City of London, from the period of rebuilding after World War II to the explosive climax of financial deregulation in the 1980s and its long aftermath. Thomas examines abstract financial ideas, political ideology, and invisible markets as concrete realities; working on four spatial scales—city, street, facade, and interior—the book explores the grand plans, hidden alleys, neo-Georgian elevations, and sweaty dealing floors that have made the financial center work.Moving from politics to sociology, institutions to bodies, development plans to office desks, Thomas unravels the rich entanglements between the structure of the UK’s financial system and the
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MIT Press The Hidden Factor
Book SynopsisAn exquisitely illustrated introduction to the gestural mark in the designed world, exploring the tension between marks, which are felt, and images and words, which are conceptual.In The Hidden Factor, Steven Skaggs provides a beautifully illustrated and explained introduction to the mark—from those as physical as a scratch made by an animal, to those as accidental as a splatter of paint, to those as intentional as hand-drawn characters. Skaggs makes the case that, in the visual arts, gestures and mark-making operate on an equal level with image and word. While we might think of content as that which is communicated through text and images, Skaggs shows, through visual examples, that the gestural mark is often hidden within both images and the typographic forms that convey words.By mapping different kinds of marks and showing how marks combine with image and word, The Hidden Factor explains that our desire for conceptual information suppresses
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MIT Press RadioActivities
Book SynopsisA historical and theoretical account of the city of Berlin from the intertwined perspectives of architecture, environmental, and media studies.In 1945, having occupied German territory, Soviet troops made two strategic moves: they dismantled the Deutschlandsender III radio transmission tower, the single tallest structure at the time in Europe, and they seized the Haus des Rundfunks in West Berlin, a monumental building designed by Hans Poelzig. These moves were crucial both symbolically and technically, as together they sparked what would become a veritable radio war between the Eastern and Western blocs during the Cold War. In Radio-Activities, Alfredo Thiermann Riesco investigates this spatial conflict as he interrogates the political, technological, and environmental dimensions of architecture at a time when buildings began to interact with the remote transmission of information.By its very nature, the medium of radio promised to evaporate the intrinsic
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MIT Press Wolkenbügel
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MIT Press Ltd Graph Vision
Book SynopsisThis book details how a diverse set of architects began adopting graph theory to transform architectural theory and design, prompting a shift from geometry, which long held pride of place in architecture, to topology, which instead emphasized relations--
£51.30
MIT Press Ltd The Hero of Doubt
Book SynopsisThe first English anthology of the writings of a critical figure in the history of modern architecture in Europe.The first English anthology of the writings of the British-Italian architect, editor, critic, and educator Ernesto Rogers (1909?1969), The Hero of Doubt showcases the intellectual power and scope of one of the most influential yet, paradoxically, unrecognized exponents of the modern movement in Europe. These essays, edited by Roberta Marcaccio and newly translated from the Italian, reveal how, more than any other architect of the twentieth century, Rogers positioned himself as a mediator between the heroic generation of the modern masters and the younger intellectuals who went on to shape the contextualist turns of architectural postmodernism in the 1970s.The texts in this volume cover a period of 33 years, from Rogers?s initial adherence to fascism and his subsequent struggle as a Jewish intellectual after the proclamation of the racial purity laws, to his poignant post-war reflections on the issues of reconstruction, the education of the architect and, more broadly, the architect?s role in society. Tracing his nuanced critique of the excesses and inadequacies of both fascism and the utopianism of modernism, the writings show how, over time, Rogers?s ideas resonated through the post-war cultural scene in Italy and beyond. In sum, they fill an obvious lacuna within the history of the modern movement and provide a more layered understanding of postmodernity.This project has been made possible by generous grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Architectural Association, School of Architecture.
£43.20
MIT Press Ltd Lost Days Endless Nights
Book SynopsisA critical study and artist?s book on the history of photography and film from Los Angeles.Lost Days, Endless Nights tells a history from below?an account of the lives of the forgotten and dispossessed of Los Angeles: the unemployed, the precariously employed, the evicted, the alienated, the unhoused, the anxious, the exhausted. Through an analysis of abandoned archival works, experimental films, and other projects, Andrew Witt offers an expansive account of the artists who have lived or worked in Los Angeles, delving into the region?s history and geography, highlighting its racial, gender, and class conflicts.Presented as a series of nine case studies, Witt explores how artists as diverse as Agnès Varda, Dana Lixenberg, Allan Sekula, Catherine Opie, John Divola, Gregory Halpern, Paul Sepuya, and Guadalupe Rosales have reimagined and reshaped our understanding of contemporary Los Angeles.The book features portraits of those who struggle and attempt to get by in the city: dock workers, students, bus riders, petty criminals, office workers, immigrants, queer and trans activists. Set against the landscape of economic turmoil and environmental crises that shadowed the 1970s, Witt highlights the urgent need for a historical perspective of cultural retrieval and counternarrative. Extending into the present, Lost Days, Endless Nights advocates for an approach that actively embraces the works and projects that have been overlooked and evicted from the historical imaginary.
£43.20
MIT Press Albert Kahn Inc.
Book SynopsisA study of Albert Kahn Incorporated—the architecture firm closely associated with the Ford Motor Company and other auto companies—that explores capitalism and political economy through the built environment of industry and culture.In Albert Kahn Inc. Claire Zimmerman provides a history of second-wave industrialization associated with the growth and development of the United States auto industry and its global footprint. A forensic analysis of the “architects of Ford,” the book theorizes how building and capitalism intersected in the case of twentieth-century industrial buildings, but also in other kinds of architecture and in the built environment writ large. Generally a marginal subject in histories of architecture, industrialism here exposes the expansionist modern project in Western architecture and culture, which was based on natural resource extraction and labor exploitation. With more than 140 full-color illustrations, the book combin
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MIT Press Ltd Time Machines
Book SynopsisA riveting exploration of the relationship between art and telegraphy, and its implications for understanding time and history in nineteenth-century France.In Time Machines Richard Taws examines the relationship between art and telegraphy in the decades following the French Revolution. The optical telegraph was a novel form of visual communication developed in the 1790s that remained in use until the mid-1850s. This pre-electric telegraph, based on a semaphore code, irrevocably changed the media landscape of nineteenth-century France. Although now largely forgotten, in its day it covered vast distances and changed the way people thought about time. It also shaped, and was shaped by, a proliferating world of images. What happens, Taws asks, if we think about art telegraphically?Placed on prominent buildings across France?for several years there was one on top of the Louvre?the telegraph?s waving limbs were a ubiquitous sight, shifting how public space was experienced and represented. The system was depicted by a wide range of artists, who were variously amused, appalled, irritated, or seduced by the telegraph?s intractable coded messages and the uncanny environmental and perceptual disruption it caused. Clouds, architecture, landscapes, and gestures: all signified differently in the era of telegraphy, and the telegraph became a powerful means to comprehend France?s technological and political past. While Paris?s famous arcades began to crisscross the city at ground level, a more enigmatic network was operating above. Shifting attention from the streets to the skies, this book shows how modern France took shape quite literally under the telegraph?s sign.
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MIT Press Ltd Urban Humanities New Practices for Reimagining
Book SynopsisOriginal, action-oriented humanist practices for interpreting and intervening in the city: a new methodology at the intersection of the humanities, design, and urban studies.Urban humanities is an emerging field at the intersection of the humanities, urban planning, and design. It offers a new approach not only for understanding cities in a global context but for intervening in them, interpreting their histories, engaging with them in the present, and speculating about their futures. This book introduces both the theory and practice of urban humanities, tracing the evolution of the concept, presenting methods and practices with a wide range of research applications, describing changes in teaching and curricula, and offering case studies of urban humanities practices in the field.Urban humanities views the city through a lens of spatial justice, and its inquiries are centered on the microsettings of everyday life. The book's case studies report on real-world proj
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MIT Press Ltd Memo for Nemo
Book SynopsisA cultural history of living in the undersea, both fictional and real, from Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo to NASA’s ECC02 project.In Memo for Nemo, William Firebrace investigates human inhabitation of the undersea, both fictional and real. Beginning with Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo—an undersea Renaissance man with a library of 12,000 volumes on his submarine—and proceeding through aquariums, undersea photography, artificial seas on land, nuclear-powered submarines, undersea film epics, giant squid, and NASA satellites, Firebrace examines the undersea as a zone created by exploration and invention. Throughout, the history of undersea life is accompanied by an imagined undersea, envisioned by cultural figures ranging from Verne and Herman Melville to Orson Welles and Jimi Hendrix. Firebrace takes readers though the enormous sequence of rooms (impossible in real life) in Nemo’s submarine, recounts the competition among nin
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MIT Press Ltd The Monster Leviathan
Book SynopsisVisionary proposals for a mythic and strange architecture—or anarchitecture—through which we can imagine other and better worlds.Lurking under the surface of our modern world lies an unseen architecture—or anarchitecture. It is a possible architecture, an analogous architecture, an architecture of anarchy, which haunts in the form of monsters that are humans and machines and cities all at once; or takes the form of explosions, veils, queer, playful spaces, or visions from artwork and video games. In The Monster Leviathan, Aaron Betsky traces anarchitecture through texts, design, and art of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, and suggests that these ephemeral evocations are concrete proposals in and of themselves. Neither working models nor suggestions for new forms, they are scenes just believable enough to convince us they exist, or just fantastical enough to open our eyes.The Monster Leviathan gives students and lovers
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MIT Press Ltd Emergency Money
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£43.20
MIT Press Things That Move
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MIT Press The Additional Element in Architecture
Book SynopsisAn ingenious reconstruction?and revealing analysis through ?visual archaeology??of avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich''s lost arkhitektons.Among the Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich?s most intriguing works, the arkhitektons are also the most enigmatic, as these quasi-architectural sculptures made between 1920 and 1930 were almost entirely lost, along with many of the accompanying drawings, or planits. In The Additional Element in Architecture, Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Paulina Bitraìn bring Malevich?s elusive arkhitektons to startling, three-dimensional life and show how these objects form a comprehensive universe that embodies the artist?s Suprematism?his belief in the supremacy of pure artistic sensation in abstraction. The book features digital reconstructions of 15 arkhitektons and planits that are lost in their original physical form. Using a method they call visual archaeology, Alonso and Bitraìn explore how these structures figure in Malevich?s investigations of spatial form. In the authors? view, the arkhitektons and planits constitute a series of changing configurations, or ?states,? rather than fixed or closed monolithic sculptures that can be reckoned with individually. They are provisional assemblages of prismatic volumes linked only by gravity and equilibrium?ephemeral arrangements that digital modeling exposes and opens to new analysis. Along with its illustrations and analysis of the ingeniously recreated arkhitektons and planits, Alonso and Bitrán provide historiographical notes on the different appearances of these models, as well as a critical consideration of how Malevich?s own conception of the ?additional element? might place these beguiling figures within a wider history of modern architecture.
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MIT Press Ltd Also Known As
Book SynopsisAn exploration of conceptual frameworks common to architecture and digital media.Also Known As offers analogies between objects and architecture, finding shared structures in physical things and architectural ideas, to render ideas relevant to a broad design audience. In this collection of written and visual work, Michelle JaJa Chang bridges conceptual frameworks found in architectural design and contemporary representation to examine design technology?s social, material, and political effects. In architectural practice, where visual representation typically precedes building, techniques like drawing and imaging do not merely structure appearances. They are schemas, or organizational theories, connecting the abstract to the real. Buildings evidence representation?s abilities to show how something is (through description) and how things should be (through projection).Also Known As is a book in fragments. Some ideas are examined in depth, in essay form, while others are explored as anecdotal discoveries. Longer essays begin with a description of an object or phenomenon outside of architecture (e.g., a surveillance blimp, ancient bowls, a cartoon) in the manner of case reports. Observations on curious objects and events are also occasions to consider more complex systems in architecture. Richly illustrated and accompanied by an afterword by architect Jesús Vassallo, Also Known As offers a unique perspective for readers interested in architecture, media, computation, design, and arts from the informed perspective of a practitioner.
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MIT Press Ltd David Hammons
Book SynopsisThe first anthology of texts on the luminary contemporary artist David Hammons.David Hammons is a collection of essays on the one of the most important living Black artists of our time, David Hammons (b. 1943). Documenting five decades of visual practice from 1982 to the present, the book features contributions from scholars, artists, and cultural workers, and includes numerous images of the artist and his work that are not widely available. Contributions include essays from cultural critics including Guy Trebay and Greg Tate; artists Coco Fusco and Glenn Ligon; and scholars such as Robert Farris Thompson, Alex Alberro, and Manthia Diawara.A star of the West Coast Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and the winner of a Prix de Rome prize as well as a MacArthur Fellowship, David Hammons rose to fame in Los Angeles with his body prints, in which he used his entire body as a printing plate. His later work engaged with materials that he found in urban environments?from greasy brown paper bags, discarded hair from barber shops, and empty bottles of cheap wine?which he turned into things of wonder while also commenting on a country?s neglect of its citizens. In this volume, a new generation of scholars, Tobias Wofford, Abbe Schriber, and Sampada Aranke, broaden the theoretical mapping of Hammons?s career and its impact, challenging viewers to imagine, in the words of Aranke, ?how to see like Hammons.?
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MIT Press Ltd The Architecture of the Wire
Book SynopsisA visually inspiring architectural history of the wire and its representations that illuminates the relationship between telecommunications, technology, and architecture.The Architecture of the Wire explores the development of telecommunications infrastructure and its impact on the architectural and urban culture of the modern age?from poles, wires, and cables, to ?micro-architectures,? such as the théâtrophone and the telephone booth. Starting with the intrepid worldwide infrastructures of the late nineteenth century, Carlotta Darò proposes a new history that explores the multiple links and crossroads of such technical ?things? with architecture and art.Based on extensive research of North American company archives, and French institutional ones, and drawing on secondary literature in art and architectural history, media studies, and the history of technology, Darò examines the aesthetic implications of material objects that have forever changed our urban, rural, and domestic environments.
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MIT Press Picturing Aura
Book SynopsisThe remarkable history of efforts to visualize the human aura and the lives of its pictures in religion, science, art, and culture.Picturing Aura is the first book of its kind: an extended historical, anthropological, and philosophical study of modern efforts to visualize the hidden radiant force encompassing the living body known as our aura. This rich, interdisciplinary study by Jeremy Stolow chronicles the rise and global spread of modern instruments and techniques of picturing aura, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, exploring how its images are put to work in the diverse realms of psychical research, esotericism, art photography, popular culture, and the New Age alternative medical and spiritual marketplace.At their core, pictures of auras are boundary objects that operate simultaneously in multiple conceptual and practical realms, serving varying goals of making art, healing bodies, and exploring the cosmos. Drawing on extensive arc
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MIT Press Ltd Fail Better
Book SynopsisFrom the distinguished art critic and historian, vital essays on key artists and critics, revealing how they redefined art and criticism over the last six decades.?Serious art anticipates the future as much as it reflects the present,? Hal Foster remarked in a 2015 interview. ?By the same token serious art history is driven by the present as much as it is informed by the past.? In Fail Better, Foster, an art critic and historian whose influential work spans disciplines and decades, brings this peripatetic perspective to contemporary art, art criticism, art history, and his own work over the past 50 years.In these 40 texts, Foster reviews artists from Richard Hamilton and Jasper Johns to Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha; considers contemporaries from Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman to Jeremy Deller and Adam Pendleton; and traces the development of criticism since the early 1960s, with essays on such influential figures as Susan Sontag and Rosalind Krauss and institutions like Artforum magazine and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.Taking his title from Beckett??try again, fail again, fail better??Foster notes that, etymologically, an essay is always an attempt, more or less failed. Critics fail artworks, because there can never be a definitive reading; art fails its historical moment, because it cannot resolve the contradictions that prompt it. But in these failures Foster finds historical consciousness, and with it the promise of future work, future illumination. In his ?reckonings? he turns his own long history of criticism to account, and succeeds in conveying shifting concepts of art and criticism, the work of key artists and critics, and the relationships between criticism, theory, history, and politics over the last six decades.
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MIT Press Tacita Dean
Book SynopsisA highly anticipated and richly illustrated anthology of essays on the work of artist Tacita Dean.This volume explores the deeply-influential work of Tacita Dean, recognized increasingly as one of the key artists of our times. Emerging initially as part of the generation of the so-called ?Young British Artists? in the 1990s, Dean (b. 1965) has reinvented the manner in which artists use analogue mediums such as drawing, photography, and film, prompting major questions in her work around the issues of time, memory, history, and chance events. Dean?s films embrace long takes that achieve a near-photographic stillness; they have been dedicated to obsolescent objects or stranded buildings, failed quests, as well as extraordinary figures?usually other artists and writers?nearing the end of their lives. But Dean?s contemplative films have been rigorously reinvented as a form over the course of her career, and linked to a widening series of projects involving writing, chalk drawings, found photographs, dance, and theater. This anthology explores the artist?s expansive practice, gathering essays and interviews by authors from an array of disciplines including art criticism, philosophy, literature, and film. Spanning 25 years of the artist?s career, the volume includes writings by George Baker, Douglas Crimp, Brian Dillon, Briony Fer, Hal Foster, Mark Godfrey, Louise Hornby, Rosalind Krauss, Elisabeth Lebovici, Jean-Luc Nancy, Tamara Trodd, Marina Warner, Peter Wollen, and the artist herself.
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MIT Press Cloud Between Paris and Tehran
Book SynopsisA theoretical examination of veiling, shame, and modesty in the films of the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami through the lenses of Islamic philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis.In Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran, Joan Copjec examines the films of the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. The key to these films, she argues, lies in the image of a fragile yet sheltering tree that appears in several of his films. This simple image depicts a central concept of Islamic philosophy, which is known as the ?Cloud? or the ?Imaginal World.? It designates the place out of which all the things of this world manifest themselves and ?covers,? or veils, that which must remain hidden. The concept of the Cloud plays a significant role in defining: 1) the unique nature of the Islamic God, who is not a creator or father; 2) the nature of the image, which assumes a priority and a greater power than it is elsewhere accorded; and 3) the nature of modesty, shame, and sexuality.Copjec walks her readers through the thicket of Islamic philosophy while demonstrating how its abstract concepts produce what audiences see on screen. The most ambitious aspect of the book lies in its attempt to demonstrate the inheritance by psychoanalysis of a new notion of knowledge, or gnosis, formulated by Muslim thinkers, who radically redefined the relation between body and thought.
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MIT Press Ltd Deep Change
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£34.20
MIT Press Ltd How Artifacts Afford
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MIT Press Passages in Modern Sculpture
Book SynopsisStudies major works by important sculptors since Rodin in the light of different approaches to general sculptural issues to reveal the logical progressions from nineteenth-century figurative works to the conceptual work of the present.
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MIT Press Ltd The Classical Language of Architecture The MIT
Book SynopsisThe author's purpose is to set out as simply and vividly as possible the exact grammatical workings of an architectural language.Classical architecture is a visual language and like any other language has its own grammatical rules. Classical buildings as widely spaced in time as a Roman temple, an Italian Renaissance palace and a Regency house all show an awareness of these rules even if they vary them, break them or poetically contradict them. Sir Christopher Wren described them as the Latin of architecture and the analogy is almost exact. There is the difference, however, that whereas the learning of Latin is a slow and difficult business, the language of classical architecture is relatively simple. It is still, to a great extent, the mode of expression of our urban surroundings, since classical architecture was the common language of the western world till comparatively recent times. Anybody to whom architecture makes a strong appeal has probably already discovered somethi
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Pennsylvania State University Press The Sleep of Reason
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£80.96
Pennsylvania State University Press The Absent Image Lacunae in Medieval Books
Book SynopsisExplores the late medieval concepts of absence and void, with a special focus on the materiality of emptiness in later medieval manuscripts. Trade Review“With a Midas-like touch, Elina Gertsman has a gift for turning her every subject into scholarly gold. The Absent Image is no exception.”—Brigitte Buettner Studies in Iconography“Gertsman makes a convincing argument, and at times shows a wonderful novelistic sensibility in describing the micro-dramas on display.”—Times Literary Supplement“Elina Gertsman’s The Absent Image is a rarefied treat for connoisseurs – a kind of apophatic art history. She explores a phenomenon that is seldom studied: the voids, gaps and empty frames that manuscript artists used to represent the unrepresentable.”—Barbara Newman London Review of Books“The book is amusing and thought-provoking in the best sense, and the lavish illustrations create much food for thought, not out of nothing but from a wealth of varied examples.”—Thomas Rainer CAA.Reviews“Gertsman’s book is absolutely brilliant, a paragon of scholarship to be held up as a model to students and colleagues alike.”—Lauren Mancia Medieval Review“This is an intellectually ambitious, rigorously argued, and erudite book that explores visual strategies and their theoretical underpinnings of ‘empty spaces’ in medieval manuscripts. A must-read for scholars of medieval and northern Renaissance art and intellectual history.”—Nino Zchomelidse,author of Art, Ritual, and Civic Identity in Medieval Southern Italy“This is one of the most original books I have read—original in its conception and subject, in the materials studied and illustrated, in the numerous questions posed, and in its compelling conclusions. It is a potentially paradigm-shifting work that will affect how we perceive illustrated manuscripts and that should finally put to rest for art historians the ‘intentional fallacy’ long rejected by literary historians.”—Richard K. Emmerson,author of Apocalypse Illuminated: The Visual Exegesis of Revelation in Medieval Illustrated Manuscripts
£77.96
Pennsylvania State University Press The Mineral and the Visual
Book SynopsisExamines the social roles, cultural meanings, and active agency of precious stones in jeweled crowns, illustrated lapidaries, and illustrated travel accounts in the European Middle Ages.Trade Review“Brigitte Buettner’s groundbreaking study marshals gem-encrusted jewels, lapidary knowledge, and medieval travelers’ accounts to forge a multifaceted understanding of the power of precious stones in medieval art and culture. Richly illustrated with uncommon images, The Mineral and the Visual is exciting and compelling, illuminating the intersection of geologic and artistic worlds, and the social meanings of precious stones, acquired from near and far, in the European Middle Ages.”—Mariah Proctor-Tiffany caa.reviews“The way the author combines stones with ideas . . . and the economics behind them over a longer period of time is innovative, and based on a richness in sources that is as dazzling as the medieval artworks discussed themselves.”—Sigrid van Roode Bedouin Silver“The author’s profound expertise and fresh methodological approach offer an important stimulus to further discussions and will doubtlessly inspire future research on the material world of the Middle Ages.”—Melanie N. Reiter Sehepunkte“The Mineral and the Visual meticulously reinstates the marvelousness of medieval gemstones, rendering them potent, pulsing, and alive, and authoritatively sets the terms for future scholarship.”—Joseph Salvatore Ackley Speculum“Buettner opens up perspectives for future research that go far beyond a secular interpretative horizon of pure materiality and natural knowledge—an excellent complement to Gemma spiritalis.”—Gia Toussaint 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual“Reading The Mineral and the Visual made me feel like a student again, filled with curiosity and excitement. This book is rich, interesting, complex, refreshing.”—Elina Gertsman,author of The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books“The Mineral and the Visual offers readers a rich and compelling journey through the world of medieval minerals. Of interest to specialists and nonspecialists alike, it advances theoretical and methodological discussions of materials and materiality and expands our ideas about stones, gems, and the natural world. Weaving together a vast array of sources, both textual and visual, Buettner’s study presents a new understanding of the field of discourse in which these fascinating objects operated.”—Heidi Gearhart,author of Theophilus and the Theory and Practice of Medieval Art“Buettner weaves together scintillating description, meticulous scholarship, and current theory to create an unrivaled picture of her subject. She makes the case that gems are the apex of materials: substances that are active, global, exotic (and paradisaical), kingly, and in all ways powerful.”—Cynthia Hahn,author of Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400-circa 1204
£71.36
Pennsylvania State University Press A New Antiquity
Book Synopsis
£999.99
Pearson Education Digital Photography for the Over 50s In Simple Steps
Book SynopsisThis title helps the reader understand and practice digital photography.Table of ContentsTop Ten Tips 1. Digital Photography Basics a) Charge your camera b) Install your camera’s software c) Download and install Picasa d) Insert a memory card e) Set the capture format f) Set the picture quality g) Set the picture size h) Take your first picture i) Review the pictures stored in your camera j) Care for your camera 2. Use Automatic Settings a) Use autofocus b) Use face detection c) Use auto flash d) Reduce red-eye e) Use auto exposure f) Use auto white balance g) Use Scene modes h) Use the self-timer i) Take continuous shots j) Stabilize the image 3. Use Manual Settings a) Use the zoom b) Use manual focus c) Set the shutter speed d) Set the aperture size e) Set the ISO speed f) Set manual white balance g) Use color modes h) Use Panorama mode 4.Get the Best Shot Possible a) Consider how to focus the shot b) Consider how to frame the shot c) Consider the quality of the light d) Consider the direction of the light e) Consider your point of view f) Use the rule of thirds g) Use dynamic symmetry h) Tell one story at a time 5. Transfer Your Photos a) Create a photo folder b) Set up Picasa to work with your photo folder c) Create backup sets in Picasa d) Connect your camera to your computer e) Import photos into Picasa f) Make backups of your imported photos g) View your imported photos h) Archive your photos 6. Organize Your Photos a) View the contents of a folder all at once b) View the contents of a folder one photo at a time c) Change the properties of a folder d) Move a photo into a different folder e) Rename a photo f) Add a caption to a photo g) Tag a photo h) Use Quick Tags i) Identify the people in your photos j) Identify the places in your photos k) Create an album l) Search for photos 7. Process the Image a) Adjust exposure automatically b) Adjust exposure manually c) Adjust white balance automatically d) Adjust white balance manually e)
£10.44
Form Drawing as Prayer
Book Synopsis
£16.99
University of Texas Press Architecture of Minoan Crete
Book SynopsisThe first comprehensive study of the entire range of Minoan architecture from 7000 BC to 1100 BC, extensively illustrated and written for both scholars and general readers.Trade Review"Architecture of Minoan Crete: Constructing Identity in the Aegean Bronze Age investigates the prehistoric and early historic architectural material record of the island of Crete from a perspective largely informed by reflexive archaeological theory... A highlight of the book is its visual aesthetic which emphasises for the reader that not only does McEnroe have a solid grasp of all the issues involved but he is also a highly skilled surveyor and draftsman... Architecture of Minoan Crete is a highly engaging and visually appealing volume that will make a handsome addition to any Aegeanist's library. The author's light narrative touch and his consideration of such a wide timeframe have culminated in a welcome general introduction to the subject." Frank Lynam, Archaeological Review from CambridgeTable of Contents Preface Acknowledgments Chapter 1. The Land, the People, Identity Chapter 2. Architecture and Social Identity in Neolithic Crete (ca. 7000-3000 BC) Chapter 3. Local, Regional, and Ethnic Identities in Early Prepalatial Architecture (ca. 3000-2200 BC) Chapter 4. Architectural Experiments and Hierarchical Identity in Late Prepalatial Architecture (ca. 2200-1900 BC) Chapter 5. The First Palaces and the Construction of Power (ca. 1900-1750 BC) Chapter 6. The Protopalatial City and Urban Identity (ca. 1900-1750 BC) Chapter 7. The Second Palace at Knossos and the Reconstruction of Minoan Identity (ca. 1750-1490 BC) Chapter 8. Comparing the Neopalatial Palaces (ca. 1750-1490 BC) Chapter 9. Houses and Towns in the Neopalatial Period (ca. 1750-1490 BC) Chapter 10. Buildings, Frescoes, and the Language of Power in the Final Palatial Period (ca. 1490-1360 BC) Chapter 11. After the Palaces (ca. 1360-1200 BC) Chapter 12. Survival and Memory in LM IIIC (ca. 1200-1100 BC) Conclusion. Architecture and Identity Appendix. Useful Websites Notes Glossary Works Cited Index
£21.59
University of Washington Press Building Reuse
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Whether you are new to sustainability as a counterpart to historic preservation or a seasoned professional who knows LEED backward and forward, there is much inspiration to be found in Building Reuse." * Washington Trust for Historic Preservation *
£38.30
