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Wild Renaissance
A Renaissance is underway. It can be seen as a response to environmental societal and ethical issues so acute that human survival is in question. Artistic philosophical and political it builds on the scientific revolutions of the last decades and positions itself in relation to technoscientific and transhumanist promises. Within this Wild Renaissance man no longer positions himself as master and owner imposing his will on a passive and purposeless nature. He makes ready to listen to a new partner: the world around him. He discovers the potential of its forces which he both harnesses and engages with joining them with his own. A new era is taking shape restoring man to his “wild” dignity and giving his existence meaning joy and ambition. An art is emerging that is redefining the paradigms of creation. Its work is in the vanguard of this societal project.
There is a major tendency in contemporary art and design and perhaps the most innovative one that is putting in place new ways of working and producing works which represent a significant break with the principles that have guided modernity up to the present. We are witnessing the beginnings of a renaissance that can be described as “wild.” Powerfully ambitious it stands as a response to the acute environmental societal and ethical questions raised in today’s world and at their heart the very survival of the human species as we enter the Anthropocene era. It bears witness to massive shifts in consciousness and echoes a call for a change that is becoming increasingly audible. Nature or more precisely a new way of being “wild” – that is to say of thinking and acting on the Earth is the key reference around which the contents of an alternative common destiny are being articulated. The “Wild Renaissance” is supplanting both the modernity that placed man at the center of the world assigning him the vocation of becoming the master and owner of nature and postmodernity which put an end to the great narratives and left only an absolute relativism incapable of supporting new sustainable models.
The word “renaissance” is not used lightly. It stems from a philosophical and ecological analysis of the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries in Italy. This upheaval did not come out of nowhere. Today as back then a period of some hundred and fifty yeas paved the way for its emergence. The proto-Wild Renaissance goes from the mid-19th century to the early 21st century. The evolution and convergence of art philosophy and the sciences of the environment can be observed there in relation to key historical and political moments that have repeatedly raised the question of the continuing habitability of the Earth.
The Wild Renaissance is articulated around a renewed vision of humankind and nature. Humankind no longer aspires to impose its will on a passive purposeless nature. Instead it is beginning to listen to a new partner: the world around it. Humanity is discovering the potential of these forces and entering into a relation with them allying them with its own. Humanity is going from from master to collaborator assuming an ecological responsibility that goes hand in hand with a revived dignity and an existence that is all the more exciting for all that. Already-established figures in contemporary art and design together with emerging creators are at the forefront of this new movement. The works and practices analyzed here are shown in a new light with a fresh understanding of their historical grounding conceptual underpinnings and significance for the present.
Previously published in French by Presses Universitaires de France (PUF).
Product Design, Technology, and Social Change
This cultural history critically examines product design and its development from pre-industrial times to the present day considering major milestones in the mass production of goods and services aiming to incorporate a more inclusive worldview than traditional surveys of the topic.
The breadth and versatility of product design through history has been profound. Products have long supported the integration and interpretation of emerging technologies into our lives. These objects include everything from tools accessories furniture and clothing to types of transportation websites and mobile apps. Products provide singular or multiple functions are tangible and intangible and in many instances have impacted the quality of our lives by saving time or money or by increasing feelings of personal satisfaction. At the same time many products have negatively impacted people and the environment. For nearly every product that makes it into the hands of a consumer there is also a designer who created it and someone who laboured to make it.
Examines the relationship between products consumption sustainability politics and social movements. This "pocket history" surveys product design from the agricultural revolution and the birth of cities through industrialisation and a digital design revolution.
New Queer Television
This edited collection will draw attention to how the mainstreamification of queer identities has crafted a dynamic field in which a wide variety of queer identities can be put on display and consumed by audiences.
Queer critics and queer theory as a whole tend to frame queer identities as marginal (Sedgwick 1990; Halberstam 2011) and these landmark scholars have cemented a foundational understanding of queerness that is now at odds with current shifts in media production. The chapters here will present a broad variety of queer identities from across a range of televisual genres and shows in an effort to reconsider the marginalisation of queerness in the twenty-first century. Doing so challenges pre-existing notions that such mainstreamification necessitates being subsumed by the cisheteropatriarchy. Therefore the project argues the converse: that
heteronormative assumptions are outdated and new queer representations lay the groundwork for filling gaps that queer criticism has left open.
artmaking as embodied enquiry
What can a fold be? Virtually anything and everything.
For centuries folds/folding has captured the world’s imagination. Folds readily appear in revivals of the ancient craft of origamithe simplest acts of pedestrian life in art design architecture performing arts linguistics the philosophical turnings of the mind and last but not the least in the many ingenious computations of (bio)engineering and technology. What awaits our understanding is how deeply the fold roots into embodiment into our very impulse to create.
This book is about folding as a vibrant stimulus for trans-disciplinary artistic research – whether for the performative for product realization or simply to enliven body mind and spirit. Conceived as art-made-differently Susan and Glenna share the abundance of their decade-long collaboration in developing their approach to practice research in the fold. In addition to their own insights they invite eight of their collaborators to contribute each a veteran artist. The fold is destined for artmaking – for making any art. Etching into the very fabric of embodiment the fold practice reaches outside the constraints of disciplinary silos into niche areas that embrace the unknown with all its underlying tensions and ambiguities.
Reflecting on a current and unique somatic oriented arts research practice and pedagogy with an intriguing blend of interdisciplinary concern and theory practice and includes a wide variety of practice samples and images.
Encountering the Plague
This edited collection features fourteen newly commissioned articles each of which responds to the theme of plague from different disciplinary perspectives. Contributors focus on the impact of COVID-19 on everyday life but also draw on insights from different historical experiences of plague as a way of exploring human responses to epidemics past and present.
Each chapter opens with a different illustration that serves as a source for subsequent discussion enabling readers to make connections between everyday objects experiences and broader critical debates about plague and its impact on humanity. Thought-provoking commentaries stem from a variety of humanities disciplines including archaeology electronic literature history linguistics media and cultural studies and musicology and the book is divided into four sections: Rituals and RitesRites and Behaviours; Plague in History; Covid-19 - texts and discourse; Creative Responses to Plague.
As a collection Encountering the Plague explores ways in which humanities research can play a meaningful role in key social and political debatesand provides compelling examples of how the past can inform our understanding of the present.
Outback
Focusing on the incidence of the ‘westerns’ film genre in the 120-odd years of Australian cinema history exploring how the American genre has been adapted to the changing Australian social political and cultural contexts of their production including the shifting emphases in the representation of the Indigenous population.
The idea for the book came to the author while he was writing two recent articles. One was an essay for Screen Education on the western in Australian cinema of the 21st century; the other piece was the review of a book entitled Film and the Historian for the online journal Inside Story . Between the two he saw the interesting prospect of a book-length study of the role of the western genre in Australia’s changing political and cultural history over the last century – and the ways in which film can without didacticism provide evidence of such change. Key matters include the changing attitudes to and representation of Indigenous peoples and of women's roles in Australian Westerns.
When one considers that the longest narrative film then seen in Australia and quite possibly the world was Charles Tait’s The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) it is clear that Australia has some serious history in the genre and Kelly has ridden again in Justin Kurzel’s 2020 adaptation of Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang.
World Film Locations: Los Angeles
World Film Locations: Los Angeles Volume 2 is an engaging and highly visual city-wide tour of both well known and slightly lesser known films shot on location in one of the birthplaces of cinema and the ‘screen spectacle’. It pairs 50 synopses of carefully chosen film scenes with evocative full-colour film stills.
When the World Film Locations series was launched in 2011 with volumes on Los Angeles New York Paris and Tokyo the world was a different place. Although interest in film locations has grown steadily for years as people seek to walk in the footsteps of their cinematic idols by visiting sites from their favorite movies – the recent global lockdown seems to have only increased an appetite for cinetourism; prompting us to consider a second volume for one of the world’s most evocative and enduring locations. The city of Los Angeles with its meandering sun-baked sweep and beautifully fractured topography continues to lure filmmakers into its clutches – affording an endless panoply of locations to prop up both character and story. Since 2011 thousands of new productions have made the most of what the city has to offer; using reusing and discovering places that will surely become sites of pilgrimage in years to come - and while this volume includes just 50 of them our modest selection is carefully curated to compliment volume 1 and further reveal both the well-known and more hidden parts of a Los Angeles in constant flux.
The heart of Hollywood’s star-studded film industry for more than a century Los Angeles and its abundant and ever-changing locales – from the Santa Monica Pier to the infamous and now-defunct Ambassador Hotel – have set the scene for a wide variety of cinematic treasures from Chinatown to Forrest Gump Falling Down to the coming-of-age classic Boyz n The Hood.
This second volume marks an engaging citywide tour of the many films shot on location in this birthplace of cinema and the screen spectacle. World Film Locations: Los Angeles Vol 2 pairs fifty incisive synopses of carefully chosen film scenes – both famous and lesser-known – with an accompanying array of evocative full-colour film stills demonstrating how motion pictures have contributed to the multifarious role of the city in our collective consciousness as well as how key cinematic moments reveal aspects of its life and culture that are otherwise largely hidden from view.
Insightful essays and interviews throughout turn the spotlight on the important directors iconic locations thematic elements and historical periods that provide insight into Los Angeles and its vibrant cinematic culture. Rounding out this information are city maps with information on how to locate key features as well as photographs showing featured locations as they appear now.
A guided tour of the City of Angels conducted by the likes of John Cassavetes Robert Altman Nicholas Ray Michael Mann and Roman Polanski World Film Locations: Los Angeles Vol 2 is a concise and user-friendly guide to how Los Angeles has captured the imaginations of both filmmakers and those of us sitting transfixed in theatres worldwide.
Critical Digital Art History
Digital Art History has often aligned itself with the practical concerns of digital technology and the responsibilities of art institutions and associated institutional roles such as collection managers information specialists curators and conservators. This emphasis on practicalities and implementation while undeniably important has often meant that there is little room for critical examination of the broader implications of digital technology and computational methodologies in art history.
This anthology seeks to address the dearth of critical reflection by approaching the use of digital technology in art history from a theoretical perspective and critically assessing specific case study examples. This book also considers the political dimensions associated with the large-scale digitization and the application of digital tools within museums and collection management.
A long-standing concers of the field—and also a major focal point of this book—is museum and collecting practices in the digital era. While there is a certain degree of continuity in the field there are some important shifts and changes too. One of the key changes is the widespread uptake of artificial intelligence tools and an increased
attention to both the broader historical and societal aspects of the use of digital repositories and tools.
Infrastructure in Dystopian and Post-apocalyptic Film, 1968-2021
Dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies from 1968 to 2021 usually conclude with optimism with a window into what is possible in the face of social dysfunction - and worse. The infrastructure that peeks through at the edges of the frame surfaces some of the concrete ways in which dystopian and post-apocalyptic survivors have made do with their damaged and destroyed worlds.
If the happy endings so common to mass-audience films do not provide an all-encompassing vision of a better
world the presence of infrastructure whether old or retrofitted or new offers a starting point for the continued work of building toward the future.
Film imaginings energy transportation water waste and their combination in the food system reveal what might be essential infrastructure on which to build the new post-dystopian and post-apocalyptic communities. We can look to dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies for a sense of where we might begin.
Decolonizing Islamic Art in Africa
This collection explores the dynamic place of Muslim visual and expressive culture in processes of decolonization across the African continent. Presenting new methodologies for accentuating African agency and expression in the stories we tell about Islamic art it likewise contributes to recent widespread efforts to “decolonize” the art historical canon.
The contributors to this volume explore the dynamic place of Islamic art architecture and creative expression in processes of decolonization across the African continent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Bringing together new work by leading specialists in the fields of African Islamic and modern arts and visual cultures the book directs unprecedented attention to the agency and contributions of African and Muslim artists in articulating modernities in local and international arenas. Interdisciplinary and transregional in scope it enriches the under-told story of Muslim experiences and expression on the African continent home to nearly half a million Muslims or a third of the global Muslim population.
Furthermore it elucidates the role of Islam and its expressive cultures in post-colonial articulations of modern identities and heritage as expressed by a diverse range of actors and communities based in Africa and its diaspora; as such the book counters notions of Islam as a retrograde or static societal phenomenon in Africa or elsewhere. Contributors propose new methodologies for accentuating human agency and experience over superficial disciplinary boundaries in the stories we tell about art-making and visual expression thus contributing to widespread efforts to decolonize scholarship on histories of modern expression.
Watch this Space
This book and its individual essays examine key emerging and evolving practices theories and methodologies that operate in the blurred boundary between spatial design disciplines such as architecture interior and urban design and film and moving image studies more broadly.
The collection is an exploration of the evolving interdisciplinary rhetoric connecting spatial design disciplines like architecture and urban design with film and moving image studies. It is premised on the argument that the understanding of ‘space’ in these areas continues to draw on each other’s fields of reference and that in recent times this has expanded further to the point in which it blurs with multiple other disciplines including media art cultural studies and art practice to name but three. The result of this evolving interdisciplinary understating of ‘space’ in design disciplines and moving image studies is an expanded field of haptic-visual practice and theory that can be investigated as both a material and an image-based construct.
It engages with this evolving set of ideas and underlines how each of its primary discipline areas now increasingly incorporate tools and methodologies from each other’s fields. For example architects routinely engage with cinematic practice as a means of exploring space cultural theorists inspect filmic space as a two-dimensional surrogate of the real media artists incorporate knowledge of spatial design in video installations and film makers create spaces on screen that are informed by architectural theory. This all follows what can be defined as a discursive turn in our view of spatial relationships across disciplines which by definition is complex eclectic occasionally contradictory and at times characterised by surprising confluences.
Conceived as a form of mapping of these confluences and contradictions this book collects varied essays that in their own unique ways explore the diversity of how we today define understand and engage with notions of the body in architectural-urban space. It does so through a triadic structure that progresses from haptic relationships of the body in architectural space through film readings of represented space in mainstream cinema and concludes with ‘experimental spatial’ projects inspired by film and the moving image. This tripartite structure specifically encourages a look across disciplines broadening architectural urbanist media and cinematic concerns through insightful case studies that engage with their subjects by means of novel techniques i.e. employing graphic software for an analysis of pre-digital films deconstructing cinematography in modernist classics or researching urban edgelands via collaging and montage etc.
The Human Shutter
This book provides four key insights beginning with how photographic stillness depth and motion emerged en masse departing from the gradualist narratives familiar in histories of photography and film.
Secondly the book addresses the role of binocular vision in the history of painting and photography. Thirdly the rich history of early stereoviews that constitute the origins of photographic cinema and other instances of temporality is examined. The author explains how binocular rivalry termed ‘the human shutter’ provokes a reexamination of the standard chronology of cinema. The role of the human shutter is demonstrated with a preliminary taxonomy of astonishing images excavated from the photographic archive. Lastly focusing on what happens after light arrives at the retina numerous artists and theorists have employed the stereoscope as a metaphor for critical thinking.
In addition to these new perspectives the book contains significant original research particularly regarding early photographers who have explored motion with binocular vision especially Antoine Claudet and Giorgio Sommer.
Equally important to this discussion are modern and contemporary artists and experimental filmmakers who have focused on stereoscopic spaces including Marcel Duchamp Robert Smithson Lucy Raven Ken Jacobs Alfons Schilling Arakawa and Gins and OpenEndedGroup.
Global Culture after Gombrich
Ernst Gombrich can be considered the most influential art historian of the 20th-century. Until now however the global impact of his work has been under-appreciated. Global Culture after Gombrich: Art Mind World presents essays by historians of art and culture - themselves students of Gombrich or associated with his scholarly home the Warburg Institute - from Asia the USA and Europe.
Subjects range from picture-making’s place in human evolution to the visual marginalia of the Renaissance and from nineteenth-century modernism to the implications of the latest neuroscience for cultural history. Other chapters treat fundamental issues such as the notion of connoisseurship the fate of the idea of ‘culture’ or the cultural specificity of modernism. They range from theoretical broadsides – notably a defence of the ‘intelligence’ of art - to intricate reflections – for example on caricature as a style.
In showing how Gombrich initiated enquiries that have spread in numerous – and global – directions Global Culture after Gombrich: Art Mind World makes a vital contribution to contemporary debates around the languages of art history and showcases the range of approaches and methods by which art history is and has yet to be written.
Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa
Presents new perspectives on queer visual culture in the Southwest Asia North Africa region from queer artists as well as scholars who work on queer themes. With contributions from both scholars and artists this volume
demonstrates that queer visual culture in the SWANA region is not only extant but is also entering an era of exciting growth in terms of its versatility and consciousness. The volume focuses on artworks produced in the contemporary era while recognizing historical and contextual connections to Islamic art and culture within
localities and regions from the pre-modern and modern eras.
By framing this volume as unambiguously located within queer studies the editors challenge existing literature that merely includes some examples of queer studies or queer representation but does not necessarily use queer studies as a lens through which to engage with visual culture and/or with the SWANA region. Through four interrelated sections - Gender and Normativity Trans* Articulations Intersectional Sexuality and Queer SWANA - this volume probes several previously unexplored academic areas namely the intersections of queer studies with
other fields.
Part of the Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East series.
Gender, Race and Religion in Video Game Music
This book provides semiotically-focused analyses and interpretations of video game music focusing specifically on musical representation of three demographic diversity traits. Adopting a narratologist orientation to supplement existing ludological scholarship these analyses apply music semiotics to crucial modern-day issues such as representation of gender race and religion in video games.
An original and welcome contribution to the field it considers musical meaning in relation to the aspects of gender race and religion. This book will help readers to develop language and context in which to consider video game music in terms of society and representation and will encourage future research in these critical areas.
Yee analyses music's contributions to video games' narrative and thematic meanings specifically concerning three master categories of identity – gender race and religion. Containing twenty-five detailed analytical case studies of musical representation in video game music it sets out theoretical and conceptual frameworks beneficial for interpreting musical meaning from video game soundtracks. Though players and commentators may be tempted to view a game's soundtrack as mere 'background music' this research demonstrates video game music's social relevance as a major factor impacting players' cultural attitudes values and beliefs.
Part I explores immersion interactivity and interpretation in video game music proposing a theory of 'interpretative interactivity' to account for players' semiotic agency in dialogue with their ludic agency. Part II explores gender representation in a trajectory from conventional gender construction alternative femininities/masculinities and potential for non-binary representational possibilities. Part III explores musical representation of nationality culture and race proposing the concept of 'racialised fantasy' and applying frameworks from race scholarship to connect media representations of race to real world racial justice movements. Part IV examines religion introducing the concept of 'sonic iconography' to connect theological
meanings to the use of sacred music in video game music.
In Smithereens
Smithereens centres on an artistic material encounter with costumes from the archive of iconic British choreographer Lea Anderson. It offers new strategies to understand performances through their material remnants – suggesting alternative ways in which these arguably haunted costumes can live on as ghosts inside and outside of the archive.
What happens to contemporary dance costumes when the show is over and their surrounding legacy slips from view? How might costumes be mobilised towards representational repair post-performance? Located within Lea Anderson’s choreographic archive this book charts a series of hands-on interventions with the fabric remains of her companies The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs. Centred on practices of Disintegration Preservation Transaction and Display they offer provocative modes of engaging with the physical leftovers of performance the degrading of memory and legacy around pre-digital theatre work and the temporal material transitions of artefacts enduring outside of traditional museological contexts.
How might we regard these mercurial items? As precious relics to be protected in museum holdings ghostly harbingers of residual performance histories or inconvenient detritus? The book travels from props-makers’ studios to auction houses and galleries incorporating film-making artefact handling and curation along the way in lively dialogue with perspectives from dance history material culture sociology and performance studies. The choreographic archive is envisioned as repository of the awkward scattered remains of legacy blown apart into fragments. Smithereens which can if we allow them demand an alternative after-life that disrupts the vanishing inflicted on these costumes and the companies who danced in them.
The Architect's Dream
Sean Pickersgill demonstrates that the goal of creating meaningful architecture can take a variety of critical and philosophical paths. The importance of architecture as an expression of broad complex social drivers is complemented by the equally popular idea that architecture as an intellectual pursuit retains its own autonomy as a self-referential culture. This book uniquely places the emphasis for innovation in architecture within the domain of critical thinking generally and a specific understanding of the semantics of built form.
The book draws on a broad range of subject areas from film to philosophy to anthropology to mathematics and economics to show that the path to meaningful creative practice is always based in an understanding of the principal drivers for change and meaning in society.
It is not a simple recipe book or workshop manual for others to reproduce. It requires the engaged reader to employ their own creative abilities to find what potential lies in each of the propositions and it will encourage the scholastic architect to continue to mine the rich veins of intellectual culture to demonstrate the latent purposiveness inherent in all meaningful architecture.
Dissens and Sensibility
The book is motivated by the author's long-lasting interest in the role of art in society in general and education in particular and is a contribution to arts-based approaches to education. An introduction to pedagogy of dissensus: a pedagogy informed by the dissensual characteristics of art. The book includes both theoretical foundations and examples of how the theory is unfolded in different contexts ranging from educational practice to own arts-based research. This publication is a unique opportunity to launch the relevance of the pedagogy of dissensus in an international context.
The author invites readers to encounter dissensus as an educational strategy through examples from her own research and teaching. Referencing philosophers and theorists such as Rancière Gert Biesta and Dennis Atkinson she demonstrates art’s ability to create necessary disturbance and resistance in art education. Putting art at the centre of education and democracy the author shows what an art education focusing on concepts and issue-based art rather than form colours and composition can contribute as a contrast to the dominating practice in art.
Obsessions of a Showwoman
Explores ‘showwomanry’ tracing a trajectory of incredible weird women at work: women who were stone eaters fire walkers women who hypnotized alligators or presented crucifixion shows; women in entertainment who worked for themselves; women that were often referred to as showgirls despite their extraordinary skill and artistry.
Carnesky continues an important lineage of performing women with bombastic theatrical flair and an extraordinary skill that ‘do not work for the management or the man. Showwomen work for themselves and other people work for them”. Carnesky has been a central figure in performance and live art during the last thirty years; her practice as a showwoman promotes alternative visions of matriarchal entertainment utopias and a new relationship to women’s position to power and politics.
The term showwoman introduces a new identity a new kind of performer who does not control or exploit others but opens up a possibility for collaboration that enables ‘shared experiences of visceral euphoria applause loss shape abjection hustle and struggle marginalisation and the fight against patriarchal injustices’ (Carnesky
2019 53). The book will use Carnesky’s work to showcase women working in radical ways treading the margins of cabaret and live art disrupting normative ideologies through the spectacular and opening new lines of feminist enquiry through weirdness absurdity provocation in live art and popular culture.
Entangled Histories of Art and Migration
Dedicated to the stories of migrants refugees asylum seekers and exiles this collection asks how these stories are interwoven with art art practices activism reception and (re-)presentation. It explores the complex entanglements of art and aesthetic practices with migration flight and other forms of enforced dislocation and border/border crossings in global contexts - the latter significant phenomena of social transformation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
These complex entanglements take centre stage when migration shapes forms and aesthetics (and vice versa) when actors employ image politics and visualisation strategies in and about migration at different times and places or when materialities sites and spaces gain importance for decision-making processes. Taking an art and cultural studies perspective the book questions the significance of spatial changes for artistic practice in migration and elaborates on new or different theory-formation.
Interweaves histories of modernism and exile in different urban environments and focuses on historical dislocations in the first half of the twentieth century when artistic and urban movements constituted themselves in global exchange. Although this book takes a historical perspective it is written with an awareness of current flight movements and will make a significant contribution to the theory and methodology of research on exile.
The knowledge of previous historical exile experiences is important for the understanding of contemporary flight movements: after all these are not singular phenomena. For migration movements in the first half of the 20th century and for those of today it is equally possible to speak of urban centres of attraction for refugees: Today Berlin is a European metropolis of exile; in the 1930s and 1940s Paris Prague London New York Istanbul and Shanghai were destinations for refugees.