Visual Arts

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.

This original new book represents a variety of art forms across different professional contexts. Its focus is on the ways that educational practitioners and leaders from a range of cultures, disciplines, professions and organizations practice arts-based research, and it explores how these can enable innovative means of learning and enhance professional and organizational development.

This vibrant project allowed for long term systematic conversations between a large and unusually diverse group of twenty-nine people from eight organisations in six countries. It was unusually diverse in many senses: for some the word ‘data’ meant little, for others it was central to their daily work; for some artistic practice was core, while for others the arts were a means to an end; while some were social entrepreneurs running their own companies others were researching in universities and a number were doing both; some were working within the STEM disciplines of business, management, engineering, science, technology, sustainability and the built environment, others were in the social sciences of social and health care, education and youth work while others were engaged in rapid or long term social and cultural action as a means of resisting state violence and military occupation; some worked in one of the safest countries on the planet, others in one of the most tear-gassed refugee camps in the world.



Within these professional groups there were also ranges of experience, for example senior researchers, early career researchers, PhD students, seasoned professional artists and newcomers to arts forms. Whilst the main communication of this group was English, six other major languages were spoken, Estonian, Finish, Catalan, Spanish, Arabic and key stakeholders bought Swedish and Japanese into the space. This meant that while the conversations in and about arts-based practice were transnational, interdisciplinary and systematic, they had all the messy, troubled-ness that the intercultural on all of the above levels brings with it.

This unique and exciting collection discusses how creative arts practices can have a significant impact on research across a range of international contexts, drawing on their own field of research and educational experience. For instance, drama, music, dance and visual arts can be used to understand how learners internalise concepts, reflect on how decisions are made in the midst of action in leadership education, or investigate the use of the intuitive alongside the rational and analytical in their educational experience. Non-textual arts-based forms of research can also provide modes of investigation into pedagogical and professional practices when applied to fields that normally lie outside of the arts.

Its greatest strengths are its focus on arts-based research as a way of learning in a variety of contexts, and often in collaboration.  Its consistent theoretical, artistic and professional engagements make it a very readable and engaging read. 

The representation of a variety of art forms across different professional contexts means that this book will have appeal to several readerships in higher education, including the following groups.

Academics and practitioners using arts-based methods in organisation and business settings. Researchers in the arts and researchers generically in the social sciences, humanities and arts. University students of the arts, education and professional studies, especially those interested in the wider international and intercultural diversity of research methodologies.

Those working in international research teams using any form of qualitative research will also find this collection very interesting.  It also has potential interest for groups outside higher education with an interest in arts-based research – for example community groups looking to explore collaborative projects.

This book looks at the representation of female characters in French comics from their first appearance in 1905. Organised into three sections, the book looks at the representation of women as main characters created by men, as secondary characters created by men, and as characters created by women.



It focuses on female characters, both primary and secondary, in the francophone comic or bande dessinée, as well as the work of female bande dessinée creators more generally. Until now these characters and creators have received relatively little scholarly attention; this new book is set to change this status quo.



Using feminist scholarship, especially from well-known film and literary theorists, the book asks what it means to draw women from within a phallocentric, male-dominated paradigm, as well as how the particular medium of bande dessinée, its form as well as its history, has shaped dominant representations of women.



This is the first book to study the representation of women in the French-language drawn strip. There are no other works with this specific focus, either on women in Franco-Belgian comics, or on the drawn representation of women by men.



This is a very useful addition to both general discussions of French-language comics, and to discussions of women’s comics, which are focused on comics by women only.



As it is written in English, and due to the popularity of comic art in Britain and the United States, this book will primarily appeal to an Anglo-American market. However, the cultural and gender studies approach this text employs (theoretical frameworks still not widely seen in non-Anglophone studies of the bande dessinée) will ensure that the text is also of interest to a Franco-Belgian audience.



With a focus on an art-form which also inspires a lot of public (non-academic) enthusiasm, it will also appeal to fans of the bande dessinée (or wider comic art medium) who are interested in the representation of women in comic art, and to comics scholars on a broad scale.

Shiny Things combines an interest in visual art with a broad attention to popular culture – the wideness of its range is striking. It is more than just an expansion of subject matter, which many of today’s innovative books also have – it considers how a specific physical property manifests itself in both art and culture at large, and contributes to an analysis of and polemics about the world. It is accessibly written but with a careful application of contemporary theory.

Interesting, informative, and entertaining, this will appeal to progressive thinkers looking for new ways of presenting ideas. This is scholarship that challenges stale thought and interacts with philosophical ideas in real time, with a versatility that can often be lacking in traditional academic scholarship.

Using art, especially contemporary art, as its recurrent point of reference, the authors argue that shininess has moved from a time when rarity gave shiny things a direct meaning of power and transcendence. Shininess today is pervasive; its attraction is a foundation of consumer culture with its attendant effects on our architecture, our conceptions of the body, and our production of spectacle. Power and the sacred as readings of the shiny have given way to readings of superficiality, irony and anxiety, while somehow shininess has maintained its qualities of fascination, newness and cleanliness.

Examines the meanings and functions of shininess in art and in culture more generally: its contradictions of both preciousness and superficiality, and its complexities of representation; the way shininess itself is physically and metaphorically present in the construction of major conceptual categories such as hygiene, utopias, the sublime and camp; and the way the affects of shininess, rooted in its inherent disorienting excess, produce irony, anxiety, pleasure, kitsch, and fetishism. All of these large ideas are embodied in the instantly noticeable, sometimes precious and sometimes cheap physical presence of shiny things, those things that catch our eye and divert our attention. Shininess, then, is a compelling subject that instantly attracts and fascinates people.

The book engages primarily with visual art, although it makes frequent use of material culture, as well as advertising, film, literature, and other areas of popular and political culture. The art world, however, is a place where many of the affects of shininess come into clearest focus, where the polemical semiotics of shine are most evident and consciously explored. 

Artists as diverse as Anish Kapoor (whose popular Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago is a repeating example in the book), Olafur Eliasson, Jeff Koons, Carolee Schneemann, Audrey Flack, Fra Angelico and Gerard ter Borch centre the book in an art discourse that opens up to automobiles, Richard Nixon and Liberace.

Will be relevant to academics, scholars and students with an interest in contemporary theory and material and popular cultures. Potential interest across the humanities: philosophy, gender studies, perhaps public relations, advertising and marketing.

It will also appeal to more general readers with an interest in popular and material cultures, art and aesthetics.  It is written in a genuinely accessible style, and its ideas and theory are embodied through examples and narratives.  Will be of interest to readers of Oliver Sacks, James Gleick, George Lakoff, James Elkins or Rebecca Solnit. 

While Eastern European migration is predominantly seen as one-way, permanent, for economic reasons and as going bilaterally from East to West Europe, this book investigates alternative patterns of migration and mobility across Europe.

This original new book explores how visual artists take part in regular cross-border mobilities, onward migrations and transnational communications across Europe for work and the effects of this on their feelings of home and belonging. It assesses how far there is a culture of mobility amongst visual artists from the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, for whom a combination of onward migration and regular cross-border mobilities is a necessity for career progression. This is due to the ‘glass ceiling’ in the Baltic States with regard to a lack of local art markets, few dealers buying art and governments not providing enough funding.

How then do artists from the Baltic States get onto the global art market in the face of such barriers? This is a particularly important question, as these artists come from a region where migration, mobilities and cross-cultural exchanges were not freely available during the Soviet Union. This transdisciplinary investigation into visual artists’ working practices, ways of moving and placing dwellings addresses this issue.

Mobile working practices have an impact on artists’ feelings of home and belonging, which can be seen in their artworks that compare different cultures. This is a result of their particular combination of onward migration and regular mobilities, the multiple flows in and out of the home cities and the workings of the global art market within which these artists are operating. Nevertheless, these movements are determined by the forces of the global art world, whereby a particular politics of migration and mobility is experienced by artists from the Baltic States wanting to ‘make it’ in the global art world.

With its focus on Baltic artists and their mobilities, the scope and space explored is the whole of Europe and the mobilities explored in this text are crucially enabled by the freedom of movement in the European Union. 

The book is multidisciplinary and at the intersection of art, geographic mobility and creative practice. It combines visual cultures and social sciences in order to answer questions more thoroughly as well as to contextualise an analysis of artworks in a conversation with the artists themselves.

This topic is current, with the situation of the ‘refugee crisis’ and Brexit that has created a culture of anti-immigration and resurgence in anti-Eastern European sentiment in government, mainstream media and society.

The book discusses the implications of these complex itineraries on the conventional sociological notions of home, mobility and diaspora. The author argues that artists form a ‘diaspora of practice’ rather than of ethnicity, their homes are multiple as are the directions of their settlement.

Primary appeal will be to artists and art professionals; scholars working and researching on mobilities and migration issues; those working on the concepts of belonging and home; sociologists; anthropologists; those in the fields of cultural studies and European Union studies.

The first in the Media-Life-Universe trilogy, this volume explores a transdisciplinary notion of media and technology, exploring media as technology, with special attention to its material, historical and ecological ramifications. The authors reconceptualize media from environmental, ecological and systems approaches, drawing not only on media and communication studies, but also philosophy, sociology, political science, biology, art, computer science, information studies and other disciplines.

Featuring a group of internationally known scholars, this collection explores evolving definitions of media and how media technologies are transforming theory and practice. As the current media includes a wider and wider range of concepts, products, services and institutions, the definition of media continues to be in a state of flux. What are media today? How is media studies evolving? How have technologies transformed communication and media theory, and informed praxis? What are some of the futures of media?

The collection challenges traditional notions of media, as well as concepts such as freedom of expression, audience empowerment and participatory media, and explores emergent media including transmedia, virtual reality, online games, metatechnology, remediation and makerspaces. 

This is the first volume in the MEDIA • LIFE • UNIVERSE Trilogy. LIFE: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry 9781789382655 follows and builds upon this 2021 collection.

Concerned with the relationship between Friday mosque and city in the Islamic context. Focusing particularly on the Friday mosque, the book aims at exploring the concept of liminal(ity) in spatial terms and discuss it in terms of the relationship between the Friday mosque and its surrounding urban context. Transition spaces/zones between the mosque and the urban context are discussed through the case studies from various contexts. In doing so, the manuscript reveals different forms of liminality in spatial sense.

Considers widely-studied topics such as the ‘Friday mosque’ or the ‘Islamic city’ through a fresh new lens, critically examining each case study in its own spatial urban and socio-cultural context. While these two well-known themes – concepts that once defined the field – have been widely studied by historians of Islamic architecture and urbanism, this collection specifically addresses the functional and spatial ambiguity or liminality between these spaces. Thus, instead of addressing the Friday mosque as the central signifier of the ‘Islamic city’, the articles in this volume provide evidence that there was (and continues to be) a tremendous variety in the way architectural borders became fluid in and around Friday mosques across the Islamic geography, from Cordoba to Jerusalem and from London to Lahore.

By historicizing different cases and contributing to our knowledge of the way human agency through ritual and politics shaped the physical and social fabric of the city, the papers collectively challenge the generalizing and reductionist tendencies in earlier scholarship.  The disciplinary approaches are varied, and include archaeology, art history, history, epigraphy and architecture.  

The original approach in the book, addressing of the topic of liminality from different points of view and in different periods, creates a fresh approach that invites students and scholars to think deeply about the imbrication of congregational mosques in the daily life of the cities that host them. Moreover, in considering mosque and city together, the mosque appears as a living space subject to change and history and made with political and social purpose, rather than as a holy space disconnected from the rest of the world.

Traditional studies of mosques focus on architecture and aesthetic language and try to establish a lineal development of the building typology connected to the history of Islam across different territories. The present study offers an alternative (though not competing) perspective where locality and politics play a major role in the materialization of the congregational mosque as a religious and communal space. The wide historical frame enables comparison of congregational mosques in different historical periods: it is particularly a strong contrast to see how the liminality of the mosque changes between the early and classical periods of Islam on one side and the more contemporary times on the other. The consideration of diverging cultural, political and sectarian settings is another interesting element of comparison. 

Primary market will include scholars, academics and students working on or studying Islamic studies, particularly Islamic history, Islamic architecture and Islamic archaeology. 

Also of relevance to architectural historians, architects, art historians, city planners, city historians, urban designers, architectural critics, historians, sociologists, archeologists, and those interested in religious studies, and in archaeology of religion.

This edited collection explores a subject of great potential for both art historians and museologists – that of the nature of the specimen and how it might be reinterpreted. Through its cross-disciplinary contributions, written by a team of art historians, artists, poets, anthropologists, critics and curators, this book looks at how artistic encounters in museums, ranging from anatomy museums to contemporary cabinets of curiosity, can provoke new modes of thinking about art, science and curating.

Museological literature in the past focused on artefacts or objects; this is an original contribution to the field and offers new readings of old issues, inspiring new understandings of the relationships between art, science and curating.

Brings together international expertise from art practitioners, historians, creative writers and theorists in France, the United States, United Kingdom and New Zealand. Contributions from creative practitioners draw upon their own experience of producing artworks in response to specific scientific collections while historians, anthropologists, critics and writers examine how museums stimulate, incite and otherwise inspire artistic awareness of science and its specimens.

One of the most important contributions this book will make is drawing together several threads of research and practice to encourage interdisciplinary discussion.

It provides new ways of thinking about the relationships between art, science, museums and their objects. It concentrates on the ways in which scientific collections kindle novel aesthetic strategies and inspire new scholarly interpretations of art, science, curating and epistemology. In so doing it will make a considerable contribution to the fields of art writing, creative practice, art theory, the history of science and curating.

This book will appeal to academics, researchers, undergraduates and postgraduates studying fine art, curating, museology, art history, the history of science, creative writing; visual artists, curators, and other creative practitioners. Also of interest to museum audiences.  Reading list potential.

There is an urgent focus on education around the world, and this book is pushing directly into this territory. It will appeal to a wide range of readers – to anyone who is passionate about art and or education – and will have a strong international appeal as the contributors have international profiles and the book is poised to address global issues concerning contemporary art, education, and independent practice.

In this collection of original essays, the writers engage with the work of the artists who took part in Art School. Each contribution provides a lens through which each writer can focus on specific moments within the evolution of Art School, working outwards to explore how these moments resonate with the wider fields of art-in-education and radical pedagogies. These texts respond to a widespread concern with art and its place in education, while retaining a committed and informed engagement with the phenomena they assess.

Art School takes place as a series of independent projects, exhibitions, workshop and residency programmes, bringing active contemporary artists into educational systems to inspire and expand their teachings.

Responding to a growing desire to rethink art education at all levels, it is for those committed to new forms of social imagination and social engagement in contemporary art. This book is for curators, schoolteachers and other educators, and also for artists and art students who wish to extend their practice beyond the gallery.

Less a manifesto or a declaration of doctrine than an emergent set of experiments, Curriculum considers the school as a zone of artistic and curatorial practice, foregrounding the potential of contemporary art (understood in wide terms) to stimulate students’ creativity in original and open ways.

Although the book focuses on a specific project in Ireland, that project exemplifies trends in art and education that are happening around the world and includes contributions from an international group of scholars all well-known in their field.

Contributors: Clare Butcher, Gerard Byrne, Juan Canela, Helen Carey, Daniela Cascella, Fiona Gannon, Jennie Guy, Andrew Hunt, Hannah Jickling & Helen Reed, Alissa Kleist, Rowan Lear, Peter Maybury, Annemarie Ní Churreáin, Nathan O’Donnell, Sofia Olascoaga and Priscila Fernandes, Matt Packer and Sjoerd Westbroek.

Artists: Sven Anderson, John Beattie, Clare Breen, Sarah Browne, Karl Burke, Rhona Byrne, Ella de Búrca, Vanessa Donoso Lopez, Priscila Fernandes, Hannah Fitz, Jane Fogarty, Kevin Gaffney, Adam Gibney, Fiona Hallinan, Elaine Leader, Maria McKinney, Maeve Mulrennan, Mark O’Kelly, Sarah Pierce, Naomi Sex and Orlaith Treacy.

Primary interest will be among educators, artists, curators, academics and students, and others working or studying in a variety of settings including school, universities, museums, and other arts organisations.

Of interest to these groups in the following ways:

Artists: Learning about how other artists are working in sites of education.

Curators: Reading about the curatorial mechanisms that support artists maintaining the ethics and integrity of their practice when working with younger audiences in schools.

Gallerists: Extending the horizons of audience and public outreach.

Museums: Considering new models of education, outreach, exhibition, and off-site events.

Schools: Learning about new models of artist residencies and workshops.

Students and Parents: Researching the potential of contemporary artists’ impact on education.    

Educators: Forming a critical perspective of how contemporary arts practice can be integrated in curricula.

Local and National Arts Agencies: Learning about how independent curatorial and artistic practice can co-exist within sites of education.

This publication was funded by the Arts Council of Ireland and the Arts Office of Wicklow County Council.

This book introduces two conceptual models of photography: the Turin Shroud and the universal Turing machine. The Turin Shroud inspires a discussion on photography’s frequently acclaimed ‘ontological privilege’, which has conditioned an understanding of photography as a sui generis breed of images wherein pictorial representation is coextensive with human vision. This is then contrasted with a discussion of the universal Turing machine, which integrates photography into a framework of media philosophy and algorithmic art. Here, photography becomes more than just the present-day sum of its depiction traditions, devices and dissemination networks. Rather, it is archetypical of multiple systems of abstraction and classification, and various other symbolic processes of transformation.