Part of the Living and Sustaining a Creative Life series of books, edited by Sharon Louden, Artists as Writers offers first-person narratives that explore the day-to-day lives of individuals who use writing as both a creative practice and a means of sustaining their daily lives.

This collection features thirty-two chapters where writers share their insights, offering pathways for others to follow. They delve into how they balance multiple roles, the choices they made, the challenges they faced, and the successes they achieved.

Contributors include writers from Ethiopia, Jamaica, Guatemala, Nigeria, Palestine, Poland, Sweden, and the United States , who vividly recount the circuitous journeys that brought them to where they are today. Through richly detailed stories, they reveal how writing became a central force in their lives and how it continues to sustain them emotionally, creatively, and financially.

More than half a century after his death, Soviet filmmaker Aleksandr Rou remains a cinematic icon across Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Dubbed ‘King of the Fairy Tales’ and ‘The Main Storyteller of the Country’, Rou revolutionized Soviet fantasy and fairy-tale cinema during a remarkable directorial career spanning from 1938 to 1972.

Deftly navigating the shifting ideological landscapes of the Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, Rou created an idiosyncratic succession of weird, witty and wonderful films that celebrated and perpetuated the nation’s folkloric traditions while constantly refreshing them for new generations of appreciative young audiences. In English-speaking countries, by contrast, Rou’s films remain relatively little known. With streaming platforms now increasing their accessibility to western viewers, this book provides a timely introduction to his unique and exhilarating blend of mirth and magic.

'This book takes us on a journey through the fairy-tale films of Alexander Rou, one of the Soviet Union's most prolific and inventive filmmakers of the genre. Deborah Allison's always engaging and enjoyable writing provides the cultural and technical contexts as she reveals the features that make up Rou’s personal style, whilst also highlighting the narratives, actors and special effects in Rou's work. To put it in fairy-tale language: this is a beautifully woven carpet, whose intricate pattern emerges as we read and takes us on a flight into Rou’s fairy-tale world.'

–Birgit Beumers, Professor emerita in Film Studies, Aberystwyth University

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).

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.

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.

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 effects of COVID-19 on everyday life, drawing also 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.



Encountering the Plague explores ways in which humanities research can play a meaningful role in key social and political debates, and provides compelling examples of how the past can inform our understanding of the present.

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.

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.

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.

 

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.