Browse Books
Creative Infrastructures
Creative Infrastructures is a new collection of connected essays that examines the relationships between art innovation entrepreneurship and money. Essig uses her extensive knowledge of the field of arts entrepreneurship and puts it to broader practical use and greater impact by offering a theory for arts entrepreneurship that places more emphasis on means over ends. Essig uses illustrative case studies to show how her theoretical framework explains a number of innovative efforts in culturally and racially diverse communities.
The Ouroboros the serpent eating its own tail is a visual metaphor deployed by Essig in the opening essay to shift commonly held perspectives on especially the relationship between art and money. Art is the head; money is the tail feeding and nourishing the head in a cycle that enables the organism to not only survive but also thrive.
Between the art and the money is the body: innovation and entrepreneurship. Innovation is understood to be a novel idea that is implemented and has impact on a domain. For that is what the artist does: create something new and unique that has impact. Entrepreneurship is conceived of as the discovery or creation of a mediating structure that can convert the artistic innovation into capital (financial and other types) that can be re-invested in the artist and the making of more art. This book endeavours to untie the knotty relationships between artists and entrepreneurship in order to answer the question 'How can artists make work and thrive in our late-capitalist society?'
Other essays in the collection consider a range of topics including how aesthetic and cultural value are transmitted from the artist to the audience; the complexity of the tension between what art fundamentally is and the reproduction of that work and the recent foregrounding of the idea that art can produce positive social change – through current and late-twentieth-century trends in 'social impact art' or 'art for change'.
As in sports business and other sectors the star artists the top 1 per cent have disproportionately influenced the public expectations for what 'a successful artist' means. It isn’t necessary to retell the stories of the one per cent of arts entrepreneurs; instead Essig looks instead at the quotidian artist at what they do and why not what they make. All too often artists who are attentive to the 'business' of their creative practice are accused of 'selling out'. But for many working artists that attention to business is what enables an artist to not just survive but to thrive. When artists follow their mission Essig contends that they don’t sell out they spiral up by keeping mission at the forefront.
The closing essay is a work of speculative fiction based in all that comes before both in the preceding essays and in Essig’s work as an artist arts advocate and scholar of cultural policy. Returning to the symbol of the Ouroboros it connects the head (art) to the tail (not money specifically but resources) and back again. It is a 'future imaginary' in which she profiles three fictional artists in the year 2050.
The field of arts entrepreneurship is growing – thanks in large part to the work of Linda Essig. The case studies in the book are US-based but the issues addressed are universal.
This book is ideal for use in training programmes for arts administrators and advocates; policy analysts and business schools that are looking to add in arts programmes. It will be of great interest and significance to people working in the cultural industries in the United Kingdom and Europe especially Germany where there has also been some recent research interest on similar topics.
It is also relevant to the many artists who participate in training and professional development programmes in their community as well as those who are just starting out.
Insights in Applied Theatre
Much more than an archive these are the vivid still pertinent voices and messages of the pioneers worldwide.
The nineteen articles chosen by the editors of Applied Theatre Research represent key themes and elements from the early days of applied theatre that are still – and indeed now more than ever – relevant. They are all high-quality articles some of which were highly influential in their own time. All of them still have plenty to say to today’s applied theatre both in their own terms and sometimes in terms of how their publication influenced the development at the time of this still-expanding field or refracted it in ways that give us new insights with hindsight.
They have been arranged in sections according to some of the key themes – and problematic issues – that were discovered thought out and sometimes stumbled across by the pioneer writers in the collection. Each section is preceded by a critical editorial commentary on those themes besides thorough introductions to all the articles and in some cases re-evaluations. The editors have added substantial additional new material to the collection and in doing so bring their own applied theatre experience to bear on these themes as they raise general questions that are wide-ranging contemporary and urgent: from the vital and contested issues of power partnerships and the giving of voice through theatre to applied theatre’s proactive response to COVID-19 to the need to identify take account of and address the needs of all stakeholders in any applied theatre project.
The articles are grouped in six sections covering areas such as diversity of geography community contexts forms of applied theatre and organizational factors that characterize applied theatre; the definition and nature of applied theatre; how the best intentioned projects could be compromised by any of the many opportunities for applied theatre to go wrong; opportunities for change it can offer and the incorporation of new media technologies and ethnographic performance two factors that have now become major preoccupations for our field particularly in the years since the articles were written. The final section recognizes that applied theatre has been around not for 30 years but for thousands and in countless cultures.
The editorial chapters have strong connections with the rest of the book but are written with the editors’ deep insights into the field and are sharp in their focus and context. The book offers useful insights into the start of applied theatre and its development as an area of practice and research. The chapter collection is relevant and includes influential names in the field who have contributed significantly to the development of applied theatre over time.
The primary market will be academics and advanced practitioners in applied theatre drama education and theatre studies – including the expanding fields of drama therapy theatre and health etc. It will also be useful for educators exploring creative pedagogy and drama in education strategies across the curriculum.
It will be valuable introductory background reading for advanced undergraduate and post-graduate students in drama theatre studies and theatre arts performance studies and community theatre.
The Music Diva Spectacle
This original new book has a unique focus on diva camp as popular music praxis. The author analyses case studies of diva concert tour shows in order to present a performance studies reading of camp the culture-sharing process of production and audience reception. Detailed case studies include contemporary stars Madonna Kylie Beyoncé Lady Gaga and a look at audience drag.
The book contains detailed descriptions of artists’ performances along with the analysis of exciting and popular contemporary performers. The emphasis on camp is particularly interesting as thinking about queerness has pushed camp into the background in recent years. This is an interesting and exciting revival of the question of camp in contemporary queer performance.
The book considers and investigates the relationship between camp theory as an academic subject and the figure of the diva as one that utilizes and expresses camp in various ways. It seeks to establish how camp is appropriated or owned by the diva and how this impacts on and is in turn appropriated and owned by the audience.
Primary readership will be among researchers and educators working in the fields of cultural studies performance studies theatre studies music studies LGBTQ+ studies critical race studies as well as undergraduate students interested in these topics. It will be a useful classroom resource and addition to recommended reading lists.
The Music Diva Spectacle may have interest for more general readers with an interest in the subjects of the case studies but the main focus is on the academic market.
Visual Futures
The overall subject of the book is visual culture. What sets it apart and gives it such an original emphasis is its multi-disciplinarity and the range of critical voices ranging through film studies architecture creative practice biology pedagogy and media theory which are brought to bear upon the question of visuality and its relationship to futurity.
In our everyday lives we navigate across a vast sea of visual imagery. Yet we rarely pause to question how or why we derive meaning from this sea. Nor do we typically contemplate the impact that it has on our motivations our assumptions about science and about other people and our actions as individuals and collectives. This book is a collection of interdisciplinary perspectives from science to film from graffiti and virtual environments to architecture and education that examines the ways in which we interact and engage with the visual elements of our environments.
Visual Futures provides an interdisciplinary examination of how we visualize and use visuals to make meaning within our environment. A diverse range of contributions and perspectives from biology film virtual reality urban graffiti architecture critical pedagogy and education challenge our current attitudes norms and practices of looking and seeing opening up questions about the future. The future is a concept with significant political stakes and the work of rethinking and reimagining possible worlds requires a host of practices which include the work of seeing of image-making and of representation – all of which is political work taken up by the book contributors.
Primary readership will be among scholars and students of visual culture media studies digital cultures fine art architecture education science communication and sociology. Clearly aimed at an academic readership it will also appeal to practising artists architects software developers and educators.
Equality in the City
This collection considers the city of the future and its relationship to its citizens. It responds to the foregrounding of digital technologies in the management of urban spaces and addresses some of the ways in which technologies are changing the places in which we live and the way we live in them.
A broad range of interdisciplinary contributors reflect on the global agenda of smart cities the ruptures in smart discourse and the spaces where we might envisage a more user-friendly and bottom-up version of the smart future. The authors adopt an equality studies lens to assess how we might conceive of a future smart city and what fissures need to be addressed to ensure the smart future is equitable. In the project of envisaging this they consider various approaches and arguments for equality in the imagined future city putting people at the forefront of our discussions rather than technologies.
In the smart discourse hard data technological solutions global and national policy and macro issues tend to dominate. Here the authors include ethnographic evidence rather than rely on the perspective of the smart technologies’ experts so that the arena for meaningful social development of the smart future can develop.
The international contributors respond purposefully to the smart imperative to the disruptive potential of smart technologies in our cities: issues of change design austerity ownership citizenship and equality. The collection examines the pull between equality and engagement in smart futures. To date the topic of smart cities has been approached from the perspective of digital media human geography and information communications technology. This collection however presents a different angle. It seeks to open new discussions about what a smart future could do to bridge divides to look at governmentality in the context of (in)equality in the city. The collection is an approachable discussion of the issues that surround smart digital futures and the imagined digital cities of the future. It is aspirational in that it seeks to imagine a truly egalitarian city of the future and to ponder how that might come about.
Primary readership will be academics and students in social science architecture urban planning government employees and those working or studying in social justice and equality studies
Sight Readings
Jazz photography has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Photographs of musicians are popular with enthusiasts while historians and critics are keen to incorporate photographs as illustrations. Yet there has been little interrogation of these photographs and it is noticeable that what has become known as the jazz photography 'tradition' is dominated by a small number of well-known photographers and 'iconic' images.
Many photographers including African American photojournalists studio photographers early twentieth-century émigrés the Jewish exiles of the 1930s and vernacular snapshots are frequently overlooked. Drawing on ideas from contemporary photographic theory supported by extensive original archival research Sight Readings is a thorough exploration of twentieth century jazz photography and it includes discussions of jazz as a visual subject its attraction to different types of photographers and offers analysis of why and how they approached the subject in the way they did.
One of the remarkable things about this book is its movement back and forth between detailed archive research the empirical documentation of photographers their techniques working practices equipment etc. and cultural theory the sophisticated discussion of aesthetics cultural sociology the politics of identity etc. The result is both a fine scholarly achievement and an engaging labour of love.
Lessons from a Multispecies Studio
A highly original book in which the author proposes an expanded field of aesthetics guided by her philosophy and approach to working through the ways that philosophy can be manifested in art. She demonstrates the depth and complexity that she brings to her work through a sustained and committed relationship to working with animals across multiple projects.
The book tells real-world stories about the author’s creative encounters – with animals plant life mineral beings and forest ecosystems – in her Vancouver-based interspecies art practice Animal Lover and how they shifted her outlook on the Earth and all of life. Each chapter presents a weaving together of personal reflection interdisciplinary research critical thought and art methods. The threads converge on this main point: the need to move away from anthropocentrism and towards ecological understanding reciprocity and biophilia. The local journeys in each chapter are guided by more-than-human ways of knowing which provide an expanded sense of the world and an understanding of the imperative for action. This book is an invitation to readers to step into more-than-human worlds re-sense life and re-think their relationship with the planet and all its inhabitants. It asks readers to slow down look around and listen – and feel. Love for life is practised by all beings in their lively projects. It is what joins us together in the relational flourishing that is the vital wondrous complexity of the Earth.
The Anthropocene is a term used to describe the geological era in which we live marking the realization that humans have become such a force that we are affecting the Earth’s air lands oceans climate. At its core in the modern Eurocentric societies that typify this era is an entrenched worldview of nature as a means to fuel global capitalist-colonial systems. This anthropocentric worldview justifies the colonization and exploitation of ecosystems and nonhuman life seen as ‘resources’ available for human expansion and prosperity and readily available as free labour. The consequential outcomes are manifest in today’s climate emergency and ecological degradations including animal slavery industrial farming over-fishing deforestation and habitat loss and the coming environmental collapse with its sixth mass extinction. Within recent decades the sustainability of anthropocentric views have been called into question across disciplines. Lessons from a Multispecies Art Studio joins with these movements and offers new applied approaches – from interspecies art – to help shape and evolve human outlooks emotions and actions.
Primary readership will be research-creation academic artists working with animals and researchers working around animals; more-than-human-animal activists; artists and emerging artists as well as to art theorists and to those with a strong interest in environmental values.
Epidemic Urbanism
Includes 36 chapters that deploy interdisciplinary approaches to the analysis of the mutual relationship between pandemics and the built environment. The chapters share the story of a pandemic in a particular city or region from five continents and are organized in four sections to convey the mechanisms of change that affect vulnerabilities and responses to epidemic illnesses: 'Urban Governance' 'Urban Life' 'Urban Infrastructure' and 'Urban Design and Planning'. Two prominent scholars from the disciplines of public health and medical anthropology provide a prologue and epilogue: Sandro Galea writes on 'Pandemics and urban health' and Richard J. Jackson on 'Urbanism and architecture in the post-COVID era'.
The contributors to this new study are historians public health experts art and architectural historians sociologists anthropologists doctors and nurses. In researching their contributions all have spoken to an audience that includes the public practitioners and academic readers; the resultant case studies reveal a diverse range of urban interventions that are connected to the impact of epidemics on society and urban life as well as the conceptualization of and response to disease.
Epidemic illnesses – not only a product of biology but also social and cultural phenomena – are as old as cities themselves. The recent pandemic has put into perspective the impact of epidemic illness on urban life and exposed the vulnerabilities of the societies it ravages as much as the bodies it infects. How can epidemics help us understand urban environments? How might insights from the outbreak and responses to previous urban epidemics inform our understanding of the current world? With these questions in mind this book gathers scholarship from a range of disciplines to present case studies from across the globe each demonstrating how cities in particular are not just the primary place of exposure and quarantine but also the site and instrument of intervention.
This book seeks to explore the profound and complex ways that architecture and landscape design were impacted by historical epidemics around the world from North America to Africa and Australia and to convey this information in a way that meaningfully engages a public readership. The chapters analyse the development of urban infrastructure institutions and spaces in western and eastern societies in response to historical pandemics. They also demonstrate how epidemic illnesses and their responses exploit and amplify social inequality in the urban contexts and communities they impact.
Entanglements of Two: A Series of Duets
Drawing out the particularities of working in twos with a focus on collaborative performance making this book considers the duet as a particular configuration in which to think the duo a microcosm of humankind and presents everyday entanglement of form and practice seen through the lens of the smallest multiple unit.
This book explores the practical philosophical and aesthetic implications of performers working in pairs. It focuses on a ten-year period in the work of Karen Christopher alongside wider reflections on the duet as a concept in artistic and social life. The book presents an investigation of the entanglement of form and practice seen through the lens of the smallest multiple unit of collaboration: the pair.
During this ten-year period Christopher set out to create a series of duets by working with one other artist. The 25 pieces in the collection includes reflections from an international group of collaborators artists linguists physicists theologians philosophers and performance scholars. Many of them deal with the question of artistic collaboration and entanglement contemplating the significance of those terms both on an interpersonal and global level.
This book provides a fascinating insight into the creative working process of a particular artist whilst providing a blueprint for how collaboration might take place. There are many passages that might provide inspiration for other artists and overall the book makes a moving and heartfelt plea for interpersonal open-ness and mutual investment.
Primary readership will be among international theatre-makers artists performance and art scholars philosophers teachers directors actors dancers performance artists and those interested in creative and personal writing about performance art and art-making. It will be of particular relevance to those with an interest in Karen Christopher or in the other contributors.
Strategic Advertising Mechanisms
It is the first time that the different strategic advertising mechanisms are explained in a single book. And this is also the first time that a book has brought together the most important and transcendent (for its applicability to the advertising market) strategic advertising mechanisms.
The text explains from classic mechanisms such as Rosser Reeves's USP or Procter & Gamble's copy strategy to modern mechanisms such as Kevin Roberts's Lovemarks or Douglas Holt's iconic brands. It also considers European mechanisms such as Jacques Séguéla’s star strategy or Henri Joannis’s psychological axis. The book has the most complete academic review.
Strategic Advertising Mechanisms: From Copy Strategy to Iconic Brands integrates the most important strategic advertising mechanisms developed throughout the time: USP brand image positioning Lovemarks... This is the first and only book to date that compiles the most consolidated methods by advertisers or advertising agencies (P&G Bates Ogilvy or Euro) in the history of modern advertising.
Primary readership will be among practitioners researchers scholars and students in a range of disciplines including communication advertising business and economic information and communication sociology psychology and humanities. There may also be appeal to the more general reader with an interest in how advertising strategic planning works.
Punk Identities, Punk Utopias
Punk Identities Punk Utopias: Global Punk and Media seeks to unpack and illuminate punk as a trajectory of ‘timelesness…as a set of diverse but confluent values and appropriations’ that have both reflected and informed an increasingly complex indefinable social political and economic setting. Whereas the first two volumes in the series were broadly focused on local punk ‘scenes’ in a disparate range of countries and regions around the world Punk Identities Punk Utopias extends that critical enquiry to reflect broader social political and technological concerns impacting punk scenes around the world from digital technology and new media to gender ethnicity identity and representation. This new volume therefore draws upon the interdisciplinary areas of cultural studies musicology and social sciences to present an edited text on the notion of identities ideologies and cultural discourse surrounding contemporary global punk scenes. It is hoped that the books in the Global Punk series will add to the academic discussion of contemporary popular culture particularly in relation to punk and the critical understanding of transnational and cross-cultural dialogue.
Punk is a global phenomenon and the Global Punk series aims to reflect contemporary scenes around the world since the millennium. Punk and its subsequent variants from hardcore to post-punk have always crossed borders and become assimilated within countercultural practices with local national and regional variations.
Produced in collaboration between the Punk Scholars Network and Intellect Books the Global Punk book series focuses on the development of contemporary global punk (c. 2000 onwards) reflecting upon its origins aesthetics identity legacy membership and circulation. Critical approaches draw upon the interdisciplinary areas of (among others) cultural studies art and design sociology musicology and social sciences in order to develop a broad and inclusive picture of punk and punk-inspired subcultural developments around the globe. The series adopts an essentially analytical perspective raising questions about the dissemination of punk scenes and subcultures and their form structure and contemporary cultural significance in the daily lives of an increasing number of people around the world.
This book has a genuine crossover appealed. It will be a key resource for established academics postdoctoral researchers and Ph.D. students as well as being suitable for adoption as an undergraduate student textbook. Suitable courses will include those in the fields of popular music youth culture sociology urban/cultural geography political history heritage studies media and cultural studies.
The Impact of Touch in Dance Movement Psychotherapy
This book explores the therapeutic use of touch focusing on an in-depth case study of work in an NHS setting with a client with learning disabilities and situating this within a wide theoretical context. This is a unique and influential study illustrating the impact of touch in dance movement psychotherapy and laying the ground for a theory on the use of touch in Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP).
The case study illustrates the impact of touch upon the therapeutic relationship with the use of video transcription and descriptive reflexive accounts of the session content. The case analysis sections establish the ground for a paradigm shift and for emergent theory and methods in support of the use of touch in Dance Movement Psychotherapy and other contexts. The role touch takes is beyond its affect which expands our understanding of its potency as an intervention. The writing is embedded in many years of practice-led-research in the field of dance and somatic practices in particular Body-Mind Centering® and Contact Improvisation in which touching and being touched is met with curiosity as a place of insight and revelation beyond the bounds of taboo and social diktat.
The study considers the philosophical landscape of both touch and non-touch. This book explores and reflects upon the use of touch considering the wider context and socially imposed perceptions that would prevent touch from taking place – including philosophical and social discourses. Through telling the story of a client case the book offers a wealth of thought-provoking content to inspire continued dialogue.
Key strengths of this book are the depth warmth and perceptiveness of the case history and the way in which this is successfully linked with theory. Particular attention is paid to embodied cognition and exosystemic theory the two leading developments of current thinking.
With the ethical practical and philosophical content the book will be of interest to psychotherapists health and social care practitioners as well as arts in health practitioners and beneficiaries in educational programs and settings.
Primary readership will be among DMP psychotherapists body psychotherapists drama therapists Body Mind Centering® practitioners arts in health practitioners people working with clients with learning disabilities and any practitioner and researcher interested in understanding the role touch may play in the psychotherapeutic encounter.
Sine ni Lav Diaz
This original collection fills a gap in the literature on Lav Diaz and more broadly on slow and durational cinema. The importance of the director in contemporary world cinema is beyond doubt.
This collection considers Lav Diaz and his works holistically without being confined to a specific approach or research method. On the contrary it involves almost all the major contemporary academic approaches to cinema. It focuses on an auteur who has been celebrated immensely in recent times and yet has remained largely unexplored in cinema studies. The book will address this research gap.
As such this book aims to situate Diaz at the crucial juncture of ‘new’ auteurism Filipino New Wave and transnational cinema but it does not neglect the industrial–exhibitional coordinates of his cinema. The rationale behind this project is to raise questions on the oeuvre of a significant auteur to situate him in and outside of his immediate national context(s) to present a repository of critical approaches on him to reconsider the existing critical positions on him to find newer avenues to enter (and exit) his canon that will consciously avoid the time-worn rhetoric of long take and slowness of the proverbial ‘slow cinema’ camp and to find corridors in him that will lead to informed ways of reaching other movements/auteurs in other times other places.
It explores various other aspects of Diaz and his cinema whose notoriety the editors believe should not rely solely on its incredible running time. The collection looks at Diaz from the perspectives of a national and a transnational critic – one of the two editors is from the Philippines the other from another Asian location. It concentrates both on the spatial and the temporal to place him within the intricacies of the culture and creative industries and the distribution practices and politics in his native place to allow space for his ‘detractors’ who (perhaps rightly) focus on and object to his ‘artlessness’ and also to read him in the context of his fascination for the epic novel and novelistic cinema his engagement with Dostoevsky and Jose Rizal among others.
This is the first book-length study on the Filipino auteur Lav Diaz. It looks critically at his career and corpus from various perspectives with contributions from cinema studies researchers film critics festival programmers and artists. It offers a nuanced overview of the filmmaker and the cinematic traditions he belongs to for film enthusiasts researchers and general readers alike.
Primary readership will be researchers scholars educators and students in film studies. Also academics and researchers interested and working in cultural studies and Philippine studies.
Becoming a Visually Reflective Practitioner
Professional practice is increasingly becoming more complex demanding dynamic and diverse. This important and original new book considers how self-study using arts-based methods can enable purposeful reflection toward understanding and envisioning professional practice. Ideally for visual arts practitioners on all levels this book presents a self-study model grounded in compelling research that highlights arts-based methods for examining four areas of professional practice: professional identities work cultures change and transitions and envisioning new pathways.
Chapters address the components of the self-study model artistic methods and materials and strategies for interpreting self-study written and visual outcomes with the aim of goal setting. Each chapter includes visuals references and end-of-chapter prompts to engage readers in critical and visual reflection. Appendices offer resources and guidelines for creating and assessing self-study outcomes.
The fluctuating nature of professional practice necessitates the pursuit of discernment and clarity that can be achieved through an ongoing reflective practice. Self-study is a systematic and flexible methodology for purposeful reflection on professional practice that embraces dialogic interpretive rhizomatic and visual inquiry. Self-study can occur at any level of practice and in the context of work-related professional development formal study or as a self-initiated inquiry. An arts-based self-study model for visual arts practitioners is explored and focuses on four intersectional components shaping professional practice: professional identities work cultures and communities transition and change within professional practice and envisioning new pathways for professional practice.
The self-study model is grounded in contemporary theory practice and compelling research and embraces robust strategies for understanding the complexities of professional practice that can include dual multiple overlapping hybrid and conflicting professional identities tensions within work cultures and unexpected changes within professional practice. Each chapter focuses on a component of the self-study model and an area of professional practice concluding with references and end-of-chapter prompts that are aimed to facilitate critical reflection-on-practice and the creation of written and visual responses.
With visual arts practitioners in mind various arts-based methods for self-study are discussed that highlight visual journaling as a key method for engaging in self-study. Interpretive research methods are discussed to guide readers in understanding the phases and processes for interpreting written and visual self-study outcomes. Processes are outlined to help readers determine key insights themes issues and questions from their self-study outcomes how to use them in formulating new questions and articulating new professional goals. Several levels for interpretation are presented to offer readers options relative to their professional needs and aims.
Throughout the text charts and visuals serve to summarize and visualize key chapter points. Images by visual arts practitioners appear throughout the text and represent a wide range of artistic media methods and approaches appropriate for self-study. The appendices provide additional resources for enhanced understanding of chapter concepts and key terms guidelines and rubrics for writing reflections creating visual responses and using a visual journal in the self-study process.
Primary readership will be visual arts practitioners at all levels. Ideal for university level graduate courses or as a guide for individuals and small groups of practitioners who seek to engage in arts-based self-study as professional development.
Painting, History and Meaning
This compelling new study considers contemporary painting’s relationship with time and with events ideas and paintings from the past. Following French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s determination of painting as entailing a series of temporal sites Painting History and Meaning examines works that tendentiously engage with aspects and events derived from the past.
A unique examination of the relationship that contemporary painting has with history and historical material Painting History and Meaning is a timely response to and discussion of how contemporary painters and artists have addressed a significant area of concern for both practitioners and theorists in recent years.
Craig Staff explores art that has encompassed strategies of excavation anachronism and memorialization examining key works by artists including Dana Schutz Tomma Abts Gerhard Richter Marlene Dumas Johannes Phokela and Taus Makhacheva. A scholarly examination of contemporary painting through an innovative interdisciplinary research methodology this fascinating study illuminates the complex relationship between painting and history.
Primary readership will be the fine art academic community art and painting practitioners scholars and academics. Will appeal to second and third year undergraduate and postgraduate students of fine art and art history. Of interest to students of cultural studies history curatorial studies and continental philosophy and to those in the visual arts wanting to develop their understanding of contemporary art.
Prototyping across the Disciplines
If people from different fields are going to work together on projects then they need to begin to understand each other. They can be separated by the words they use the ways they work and how they think. However in many fields there is common ground in the attempts to create what is sometimes called inventive knowledge. These fields progress not only by understanding increasingly more about what already exists but by making guesses about possible better futures. The guesses consist of small forays into that future using strategies that are variously called learning through making research through design or more simply prototyping.
While traditionally associated primarily with industrial design and more recently with software development prototyping is now used as an important tool in areas ranging from materials engineering to landscape architecture to the digital humanities. This book collects current theories and methods of prototyping in a dozen disciplines illustrating them through case studies of actual projects whether in industry or the classroom.
This edited collection aims to provide a context a theoretical framework and a set of methodologies for interdisciplinary collaboration in design. Each chapter offers a different disciplinary perspective on prototyping providing a case study as a point of comparison for identifying commonalities and divergences in current practices. Contributions are from a group of scholars with worldwide experience of working and presenting in design and who are currently based in Canada the United States Chile and Brazil.
This book isn’t just about design across the disciplines it is about how prototyping works in different disciplines. Prototyping is a crucial part of the design process and a practice used by creators from all design disciplines from architects and engineers to industrial and service designers to test a concept or process and evaluate an idea.
Much research has been published on prototyping in design; what makes this new book unique is the cross disciplinary nature showing designers how they can learn from various approaches to improve their skills. Disciplines discussed include post-human design theatre tabletop game design landscape architecture and arts entrepreneurship.
Primarily of interest to design scholars and practitioners with an interest in integrative design. Undergraduates and graduate students in design HCI (human-computer interaction) and the digital humanities. Textbook potential.
Architecture and the Urban in Spanish Film
This will be the first edited collection in English on urban space and architecture in Spanish popular film since 1898. Building on existing film and urban histories this innovative volume will examine Spanish film through contemporary interdisciplinary theories of urban space the built environment visuality and mass culture from the industrial through to the digital age.
Architecture and Urbanism in Spanish Film brings together the innovative scholarship of an international and interdisciplinary group of film architecture and urban studies scholars thinking through the reciprocal relationship between the seventh art and the built environment. Some of the shared concerns that emerge from this volume include the ways cinema as a new technology reshaped how cities and buildings are built and inhabited since the early twentieth century; the question of the mobile gaze; film's role in the shifting relationship between the private and the public; film and everyday life; monumentality and the construction of historical memory for a variety of viewing publics; the impact of the digital and the virtual on filmmaking and spectatorship.
Primary readership will be those researching teaching and studying Spanish film international film studies urban cultural studies cultural studies and architects who are interested in interdisciplinary endeavours.
Data Dating
What does it mean to love with technology? Does data improve our emotional interactions? The collection approaches the query with critical essays and works of new media art to look into the construction of love and its practices in the time of digitally mediated relationships. With expertise coming from recognized researchers critics and artists in the field of media and cultural studies it analyses relationship trends and affect cultures that have emerged from technological acceleration.
Data Dating: Love Technology and Desire is a comprehensive study of love and intimacy under digitalism that reflects on the structure of feeling(s) and libido environments in the high-tech and media-bound landscapes of contemporary technocracies. Organized around ten chapters and ten works of new media art the collection offers an extensive critical analysis of technologized romance (and other emotional relations) as well as provides an insight into the codification execution deployment and evolution of the patterns of togetherness in the so-called Tamagotchi era.
The chapters engage in the problems of new material planes that have emerged from the abstraction of networked communication and dispersion of traditional notions of physicality. They close-read the templates of contemporary fantasy fetish and eroticism as shaped by platform capitalism datafication and new commodity cultures in which self-promotion for bonding relies on the new possibilities that are coming in with new media self-mediation formats. Central to the analysis is the carbon-silicon dynamics of love’s contemporary DNA and libidinal techne – practiced in the environment where screens interfaces algorithms data protocols and non-organic objects of affection and affect delineate organize and program the trajectories of encounter limerence and erotic pleasure. All the chapters are authored by recognized researchers in the field of love emotion media technology and cultural studies and they critically explore various aspects of love/intimacy under technocracy approaching them with expertise the goes beyond the typical high-modernist and post-structural reading of the media-ridden life practices and environments.
More importantly the collection includes landmark works of new media art coming from prominent new media artist gathered around 'Data Dating' – new media art exhibition curated by Valentina Peri (co-editor of the collection) and presented in Paris Tel Aviv and London. As such the collection proffers a unique and original critical approach – one that combines artistic practice and cultural criticism – to comment upon the transformation of human relationships and emotional standards under technological development with reference to the social change and cultural condition.
The collection of essays each accompanied by a work of media art that provides a comprehensive insight into the construction of love and its practices in the time of digitally mediated relationships.
Primary readership will be among educators researcher and students in disciplines including cultural studies media and communications philosophy sociology psychology and gender LGBTQ+ and sexual studies. It will be an extremely valuable resource for those in these fields.
It will be of interest to other groups including art curators online platform designers social media content managers and designers and data specialists.
The Return of Twin Peaks
In 2017 twenty-five years after its initial release a new season of Twin Peaks shook the world of television.
This new book is a detailed analysis of the third season of the television series and aims to elucidate some of the meanings of Twin Peaks: The Return and explain these in terms of philosophical mythological and spiritual approaches. It focuses on the third season of Twin Peaks but also refers to the first two seasons and to the film Fire Walk with Me.
Divided into three sections the book first examines the third season as expanded storytelling through the lens of Gene Youngblood's theory of synesthetic cinema intertextuality integrationist and segregationist approaches in the realm of fiction and focuses on the role of audio and visual superimpositions in The Return. It goes on to question the nature of the reality depicted in the seasons via scientific approaches such as electromagnetism time theory and multiverses. The third and final section aims to transcend this vision by exploring the role of theosophy the occult and other spiritual sources.
The author’s focus on the role of spirituality and science in Twin Peaks is what distinguishes this book from other works on the famous television series. The work of a scholar who is also a fan the book should appeal to any hard-core Twin Peaks viewer.
Foreword by Matt Zoller Seitz editor-at-large at RogerEbert.com and the television critic for New York magazine.
This will be essential reading for fans of Twin Peaks and academics writing about it.
Also of interest for students with an interest in philosophy religion science or spiritualism in visual and popular culture.
Fortunes of War
Eric Lesdema’s photographic series Fortunes of War was awarded the UN Nikon World Prize in 1997. Originally a series of fifteen images this extended edit includes 83 colour photos accompanied by a series of essays by leading academics in the field. The essays explore ideas raised by the prescient nature of the work offering a highly original and engaging debate about its alternative approach to documentary photography which views photography as an alternate space with the potential to project events rather than record them. In exploring an approach that cuts against the traditional concept central to documentary photography since its inception the book thus raises important questions about twenty-first century interpretations and applications of photography and media. With thought-provoking research and a diverse array of essay contributions Fortunes of War proposes new lines of interdisciplinary investigation reflection and inquiry.
Nikon Award info: https://www.artimage.org.uk/artists/l/eric-lesdema/