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This forward-thinking collection brings together over sixty essays that invoke images to summon, interpret, and argue with visual studies and its neighboring fields such as art history, media studies, visual anthropology, critical theory, cultural studies, and aesthetics. The product of a multi-year collaboration between graduate students from around the world, spearheaded by James Elkins, this one-of-a-kind anthology is a truly international, interdisciplinary point of entry into cutting-edge visual studies research. The book is fluid in relation to disciplines; it is frequently inventive in relation to guiding theories; it is unpredictable in its allegiance and interest in the past of the discipline--reflecting the ongoing growth of visual studies.
Based on a 2012 symposium on Perfection, held at the Whitechapel Gallery in East London, this book explores the ways in which artists engage with ideas of perfection, drawing on screenings, performances and discussions. The symposium featured the work of an eclectic group of artists and writers, who use photographic lenses of many kinds to create works that engage with or disrupt ideas of perfection. Framed from an artist’s perspective and spanning a diverse range of artworks that question how these ideas shape our personal identities and our social and political systems, On Perfection considers the multifaceted nature of lens-based practices.
"This book analyses emergent visual trends in Japan from the late 1960s to the present. Adopting a case study approach, it deconstructs the role that visual practices can play in shaping a variety of countercultural discourses related to politics, gender, identity, censorship, ethics and disasters. In demonstrating how photography, reportage, photojournalism and film can drive countercultural shifts in society, this book shows how visual art forms which transgress or subvert socio-cultural boundaries in Japan also have a wider impact due to the interconnectedness between these practices from a global perspective"--
Is art created with computers really art? This book answers ‘yes.’ Computers can generate visual art with unique aesthetic effects based on innovations in computer technology and a Postmodern naturalization of technology wherein technology becomes something we live in as well as use. The present study establishes these claims by looking at digital art’s historical emergence from the 1960s to the start of the present century. Paul Crowther, using a philosophical approach to art history, considers the first steps towards digital graphics, their development in terms of three-dimensional abstraction and figuration, and then the complexities of their interactive formats.
Adopting a multi-method critical approach to the global revival of folklore-themed horror media, Transnational Horror contests Anglophone film scholarship’s widespread adherence to its own film-historical canons. Navigating alternative meanings of 'folk horror' and locating these meanings within a transnational framework, the volume proposes a curatorial paradigm of critical transnationalism in the study of global film cultures and genre formations. The book proposes an alternative genealogy of horror media: a genealogy that decolonises, in provincialising, the dominant film-historical canons associated with the horror genre, and contributes to the formation of a transnational field of horror criticism that troubles the normative geopolitics of canonisation in film and genre studies. Through diverse accounts of scale and regionality as categorical markers of screen media, the contributors to the volume develop critical tools to address the mobility of 'folk horror' as mode and as genre, which operates within and beyond the normative registers of national belonging.
The book explores the multi-faceted nature of contemporary reflections on agency, focusing on various discursive practices that shape the posthumanist approach to the relationship between the human and non-human world from a planetary perspective. The chapters delve into critical human-animal studies, examine new non-anthropocentric identity constructs, and offer analyses that reinterpret meanings through semiotic inversions and challenge static cultural patterns. The book concludes with discussions on decolonization practices that aim to liberate agency from oppressive systems, particularly those dominated by imperial phallogocentrism.
In Postsocialist Conditions: Idea and History in China’s “Independent Cinema,” 1988-2008, WANG Xiaoping offers a comprehensive survey and trenchant critique of China’s “Independent Cinema” by the sixth-generation auteurs. By showing the multi-valence of the postsocialist conditions in contemporary Chinese society, their films articulate a new cultural-political logic in postsocialist China, which is also the logic of the market in this era of neoliberal transformation, brought about by the forces of marketization since the late 1980s. The directors laudably show the spirits of humanism and the humanitarian concerns of the underclass, yet the shortage and repudiation of class analysis prohibits the artists from exploring the social contradictions and the cause of class restructuration.
Already acknowledged by Metacritic and the Guinness World Records as the highest-rated series in the history of television, Breaking Bad has elicited an unprecedented amount of criticism. Writers both popular and academic, columnists as well as eager commenters, have addressed every imaginable topic, from the show’s characterization and major scenes, to fine details such as Walt’s knack for picking up habits from those he kills, and the symbolism inherent within the cars that characters own. This book considers another perspective, one relatively unexplored to date. By considering the series from the perspective of its interior spaces, two possibilities emerge. Firstly, the spaces become...
"This book, the broadest and most enterprising survey of its kind, showcases the creativity, ingenuity, and inspiration of up-and-coming photographic artists in over 200 images. Curators at the Musee de l'Elysee in Lausanne selected the photographers from hundreds of candidates submitted by more than sixty of the world's top photography schools. The panel's choice was made with one key question in mind: are these images likely to be known in twenty years' time?"--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Outside of the capital London, no other British city has attracted more film-makers than Liverpool. Sometimes standing in for London, New York, Chicago, Paris, Rome or Moscow, and sometimes playing itself – or a version of its own past in Beatles biopics – Liverpool is an adaptable filmic backdrop that has attracted film-makers to its ports for decades. A place of passion, humour and pride, Liverpool evokes caverns and cathedrals, ferries and football grounds; it is a city so vivid we see it clearly even if we’ve never been there. From the earliest makers of moving images – among them the Mitchell & Kenyon film company, the Lumière brothers and pioneering early cinematographer Claude Friese-Greene – who preserved the city, the river, the docks, the streets and the people, Liverpool has endured as a cinematic destination. This collection celebrates that survival instinct and will be welcomed by enthusiasts of British cities, films and culture.