In the Beginning Was the Image: the Omnipresence of Pictures


Book Description

The authors of the 6th volume of the series Visual Learning outline the topic of visuality in the 21st century in a trans- and interdisciplinary theoretical frame from philosophy through communication theory, rhetoric and linguistics to pedagogy.




Image Temporality


Book Description

Media technology plays a significant role in addressing the different sense modalities of the recipient or user. This role seems to deeply influence our concepts of time and space: The more a media technology is becoming a trigger for sensory and perceptual experiences, the bigger is the influence on temporality and spatiality. Image Temporality could be one part of the temporality discourse to connect the concepts of static and dynamic images with the approaches in modern media theory, philosophy of mind, perceptual theory, aesthetics, and film studies as well as the complex range of image science.This volume monitors and discusses the relation of time, space and visual media within the perspective of an autonomous image science.




Interrogating the Image


Book Description

Interrogating the Image argues that movies examining the role film and television plays in the lives of their audience have created changes both in the movies themselves and in their viewers, and considers fourteen films where the moving picture is central to the narratives. Three films discussed--The Purple Rose of Cairo, Pleasantville, and The Truman Show--offer frame-breaking experiences for their characters that allow spectators to appreciate the ruptures between lived reality and media-play, delivering therapeutic payoffs that can be restorative, reconstructive, or rejective. Other examples come from the worlds of cinema (The Majestic, Matinee, Cinema Paradiso), television (Bamboozled, Network, Natural Born Killers, Medium Cool), and the sociopolitical realm where media dominates (Being There, Wag the Dog, Bob Roberts, Bulworth). Meanwhile, significant interpretive stances--reflective/reflexive, critical, and ironic--are engendered and embraced by filmmakers and audiences who create and consume these works. The result is a media-saturated culture, in transformation and best understood using cinema's interrogative resources.




Digilect


Book Description

The high degree of internet penetration and its social (and linguistic) effects evidently influence how people, and especially the highly susceptible younger generations, use language. The primary aim of the book is not only to identify the characteristic features of the digital language variety (this has already been done by several works) but to examine how digital communication affects the language of other mediums of communication: orality, handwritten texts, digitally created but not digitally perceived, that is printed texts, including in particular advertisements (which quickly respond to linguistic change). Naturally, the book presents the characteristics of the digital language variety (and coins the term digilect) but only to give a framework to the impact analysis. It is important to document changes in progress and thus direct attention to potential outcomes. The current linguistic change is different from previous ones primarily in its speed and form of spreading, and it not only brings innovative grammatical forms and writing/spelling solutions but may also have far-reaching cultural and educational consequences in the long run.




In the Beginning was the Image


Book Description

The authors of the 6th volume of the series Visual Learning outline the topic of visuality in the 21st century in a trans- and interdisciplinary theoretical frame from philosophy through communication theory, rhetoric and linguistics to pedagogy.




NERD – New Experimental Research in Design


Book Description

Design has long expressed and established itself as an independent research competence – a fact that also companies, institutions and politicians have come to acknowledge. What is still needed, however, is a stronger public platform for design to confidently reflect upon this process and to establish and communicate the specific innovative and experimental dimension of design research. For this reason, BIRD, the Board of International Research in Design, has developed the New Experimental Research in Design / NERD format. The edited conference contributions of twelve young researchers from all over the world provide an impressive and diverse and insightful range of intelligent and inspiring approaches in design research, giving rise to further debate and action in the rapidly evolving field.




Images on the Move


Book Description

In contemporary society, digital images have become increasingly mobile. They are networked, shared on social media, and circulated across small and portable screens. Accordingly, the discourses of spreadability and circulation have come to supersede the focus on production, indexicality, and manipulability, which had dominated early conceptions of digital photography and film. However, the mobility of images is neither technologically nor conceptually limited to the realm of the digital. The edited volume re-examines the historical, aesthetical, and theoretical relevance of image mobility. The contributors provide a materialist account of images on the move - ranging from wired photography to postcards to streaming media.




The Great Within


Book Description

A book for anyone who wants to understand the psychological nature of contemplative practice as a transformative process. Renowned psychologist Han de Wit explores the psychology found in age-old contemplative traditions and takes us deep into the mind of the spiritual practitioner. Using Buddhism as a framework, and drawing insights from several world religions, he demonstrates how contemplative practices can open us up to our own wisdom and compassion. The result is a vivid illumination of the process of spiritual transformation and an important contribution to contemporary psychology and psychotherapy.




The Civil Contract of Photography


Book Description

In this groundbreaking work, Ariella Azoulay thoroughly revises our understanding of the ethical status of photography. It must, she insists, be understood in its inseparability from the many catastrophes of recent history. She argues that photography is a particular set of relations between individuals and the powers that govern them and, at the same time, a form of relations among equals that constrains that power. Anyone, even a stateless person, who addresses others through photographs or occupies the position of a photograph’s addressee, is or can become a member of the citizenry of photography. The crucial arguments of the book concern two groups that have been rendered invisible by their state of exception: the Palestinian noncitizens of Israel and women in Western societies. Azoulay’s leading question is: Under what legal, political, or cultural conditions does it become possible to see and show disaster that befalls those with flawed citizenship in a state of exception? The Civil Contract of Photography is an essential work for anyone seeking to understand the disasters of recent history and the consequences of how they and their victims are represented.




A Gust of Photo-Philia


Book Description

The first transnational history of photography’s accommodation in the art museum Photography was long regarded as a “middle-brow” art by the art institution. Yet, at the turn of the millennium, it became the hot, global art of our time. In this book—part institutional history, part account of shifting photographic theories and practices—Alexandra Moschovi tells the story of photography’s accommodation in and as contemporary art in the art museum. Archival research of key exhibitions and the contrasting collecting policies of MoMA, Tate, the Guggenheim, the V&A, and the Centre Pompidou offer new insights into how art as photography and photography as art have been collected and exhibited since the 1930s. Moschovi argues that this accommodation not only changed photography’s status in art, culture, and society, but also played a significant role in the rebranding of the art museum as a cultural and social site.