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Everything Is Sampled: Digital and Print Mediations in African Arts and Letters
by Akin AdesokanEverything Is Sampled examines the shifting modes of production and circulation of African artistic forms since the 1980s, focusing on digital culture as the most currently decisive setting for these changes. Drawing on works of cinema, literature, music, and visual art, Akin Adesokan. addresses two main questions. First, given the various changes that the institutions producing African arts and letters have undergone in the past four decades, how have the representational impulses in these forms fared in comparison with those at work in pervasively digital cultures? Second, how might a long view of these artistic forms across media and in different settings affect our understanding of what counts as art, as text, as authorship? Immersed in digital culture, African artists today are acutely aware of the media-saturated circumstances in which they work and actively bridge them by making ethical choices to shape those circumstances. Through an innovative development and analysis of five modes of creative practice—curation, composition, adaptation, platform, and remix—Everything Is Sampled offers an absorbingly complex yet nuanced approach to appreciating the work of several generations of African writers, directors, and artists. No longer content to just fill a spot in the relay between the conception and distribution of a work, these artists are now also quick to view and reconfigure their works through different modes of creative practice.
The Image in Early Cinema: Form and Material (Early Cinema In Review: Proceedings Of Domitor Ser.)
by Scott Curtis Joshua Yumibe Tom Gunning Philippe GauthierIn The Image in Early Cinema, the contributors examine intersections between early cinematic form, technology, theory, practice, and broader modes of visual culture. They argue that early cinema emerged within a visual culture composed of a variety of traditions in art, science, education, and image making. Even as methods of motion picture production and distribution materialized, they drew from and challenged practices and conventions in other mediums. This rich visual culture produced a complicated, overlapping network of image-making traditions, innovations, and borrowing among painting, tableaux vivants, photography, and other pictorial and projection practices. Using a variety of concepts and theories, the contributors explore these crisscrossing traditions and work against an essentialist notion of media to conceptualize the dynamic interrelationship between images and their context.
Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943
by Jacqueline Reich and Piero GarofaloWhen Benito Mussolini proclaimed that "Cinema is the strongest weapon," he was telling only half the story. In reality, very few feature films during the Fascist period can be labeled as propaganda. Re-viewing Fascism considers the many films that failed as "weapons" in creating cultural consensus and instead came to reflect the complexities and contradictions of Fascist culture. The volume also examines the connection between cinema of the Fascist period and neorealism—ties that many scholars previously had denied in an attempt to view Fascism as an unfortunate deviation in Italian history. The postwar directors Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio de Sica all had important roots in the Fascist era, as did the Venice Film Festival. While government censorship loomed over Italian filmmaking, it did not prevent frank depictions of sexuality and representations of men and women that challenged official gender policies. Re-viewing Fascism brings together scholars from different cultural and disciplinary backgrounds as it offers an engaging and innovative look into Italian cinema, Fascist culture, and society.
Early Cinema in Asia
by Nick DeocampoEarly Cinema in Asia explores how cinema became a popular medium in the world's largest and most diverse continent. Beginning with the end of Asia's colonial period in the 19th century, contributors to this volume document the struggle by pioneering figures to introduce the medium of film to the vast continent, overcoming geographic, technological, and cultural difficulties. As an early form of globalization, film's arrival and phenomenal growth throughout various Asian countries penetrated not only colonial territories but also captivated collective states of imagination. With the coming of the 20th century, the medium that began as mere entertainment became a means for communicating many of the cultural identities of the region's ethnic nationalities, as they turned their favorite pastime into an expression of their cherished national cultures. Covering diverse locations, including China, India, Japan, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Iran, and the countries of the Pacific Islands, contributors to this volume reveal the story of early cinema in Asia, helping us to understand the first seeds of a medium that has since grown deep roots in the region.
You Are Tearing Me Apart, Lisa!: The Year's Work on The Room, the Worst Movie Ever Made (The Year's Work)
by Adam M. RosenWhen released in 2003, The Room, an obscure, self-financed relationship drama by an eccentric self-taught filmmaker named Tommy Wiseau, should have been completely forgotten. Yet nearly two decades later, "the worst movie ever made"—as many a critic would have it—has become the most popular cult film since The Rocky Horror Picture Show.In You Are Tearing Me Apart, Lisa!, contributors explore this priceless cultural artifact, offering fans and film buffs critical insight into the movie's various meanings, historical context, and place in the cult canon. Even if by complete accident, The Room touches on many issues of modern concern, including sincerity, authenticity, badness, artistic value, gender relations, Americanness, Hollywood conventions, masculinity, and even the meaning of life. Revealing the timeless, infamous power of Wiseau's The Room, You Are Tearing Me Apart, Lisa! is a deeply entertaining deconstruction of an original work of all-American failure.
Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater (Musical Meaning and Interpretation)
by Nina PennerStorytelling in Opera and Musical Theater is the first systematic exploration of how sung forms of drama tell stories. Through examples from opera's origins to contemporary musicals, Nina Penner examines the roles of character-narrators and how they differ from those in literary and cinematic works, how music can orient spectators to characters' points of view, how being privy to characters' inner thoughts and feelings may evoke feelings of sympathy or empathy, and how performers' choices affect not only who is telling the story but what story is being told. Unique about Penner's approach is her engagement with current work in analytic philosophy. Her study reveals not only the resources this philosophical tradition can bring to musicology but those which musicology can bring to philosophy, challenging and refining accounts of narrative, point of view, and the work-performance relationship within both disciplines. She also considers practical problems singers and directors confront on a daily basis, such as what to do about Wagner's Jewish caricatures and the racism of Orientalist operas. More generally, Penner reflects on how centuries-old works remain meaningful to contemporary audiences and have the power to attract new, more diverse audiences to opera and musical theater. By exploring how practitioners past and present have addressed these issues, Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater offers suggestions for how opera and musical theater can continue to entertain and enrich the lives of 21st-century audiences.
The Art of Ballet Accompaniment: A Comprehensive Guide
by Gerald R. LishkaThe Art of Ballet Accompaniment: A Comprehensive Guide addresses every imaginable topic and challenge that a ballet accompanist—whether a novice or a more experienced practitioner—might encounter.More than just a facile anthology of accessible music, this inclusive guide details all aspects of playing for ballet, including a complete manual for editing piano literature to accompany ballet technique classes. Author Gerald R. Lishka encourages ballet accompanists to be imaginative, creative, independent artists who can also communicate effectively with dance instructors. In addition, he clarifies the necessary balance between the use of existing musical scores and the art of improvisation. Featuring a new foreword by Kyra Nichols, an expanded section on Lishka's personal philosophy, an updated section on barre from Alison Hennessey, and over 100 music examples, The Art of Ballet Accompaniment offers invaluable advice for all levels of pianists and accompanists.
Boats on the Marne: Jean Renoir's Critique of Modernity
by Prakash YoungerBoats on the Marne offers an original interpretation of Jean Renoir's celebrated films of the 1930s, treating them as a coherent narrative of philosophical response to the social and political crises of the times. Grounded in a reinterpretation of the foundational film-philosopher André Bazin, and drawing on work from a range of disciplines (film studies, art history, comparative literature, political and cultural history), the book's coordinated consideration of Renoir's films, writings, and interviews demonstrates his obsession with the concept of romanticism. Renoir saw romanticism to be a defining feature of modernity, a hydra-headed malady which intimately shapes our personal lives, culture, and politics, blinding us and locking us into agonistic relationships and conflict. While mapping the popular manifestations of romanticism that Renoir engaged with at the time, this study restores the philosophic weight of his critique by tracing the phenomenon back to its roots in the work and influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who first articulated conceptions of human desire, identity, community, and history that remain pervasive today. Prakash Younger argues that Renoir's films of the 1930s articulate a multi-stranded narrative through which the director thinks about various aspects of romanticism and explores the liberating possibilities of an alternative paradigm illuminated by the thought of Plato, Montaigne, and the early Enlightenment. When placed in the context of the long and complex dialogue Renoir had with his audience over the course of the decade, masterpieces such as La Grande Illusion and La Règle du Jeu reveal his profound engagement with issues of political philosophy that are still very much with us today.
The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies (The Year's Work)
by William Preston RobertsonA massive underground sensation, The Big Lebowski has been hailed as the first cult film of the internet age. In this book, 21 fans and scholars address the film's influences—westerns, noir, grail legends, the 1960s, and Fluxus—and its historical connections to the first Iraq war, boomers, slackerdom, surrealism, college culture, and of course bowling. The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies contains neither arid analyses nor lectures for the late-night crowd, but new ways of thinking and writing about film culture.
Muthanna/Mirror Writing in Islamic Calligraphy: History, Theory, and Aesthetics
by Esra Akin-KivançMuthanna, also known as mirror writing, is a compelling style of Islamic calligraphy composed of a source text and its mirror image placed symmetrically on a horizontal or vertical axis. This style elaborates on various scripts such as Kufic, naskh, and muhaqqaq through compositional arrangements, including doubling, superimposing, and stacking. Muthanna is found in diverse media, ranging from architecture, textiles, and tiles to paper, metalwork, and woodwork. Yet despite its centuries-old history and popularity in countries from Iran to Spain, scholarship on the form has remained limited and flawed. Muthanna / Mirror Writing in Islamic Calligraphy provides a comprehensive study of the text and its forms, beginning with an explanation of the visual principles and techniques used in its creation. Author Esra Akin-Kivanc explores muthanna's relationship to similar forms of writing in Judaic and Christian contexts, as well as the specifically Islamic contexts within which symmetrically mirrored compositions reached full fruition, were assigned new meanings, and transformed into more complex visual forms. Throughout, Akin-Kivanc imaginatively plays on the implicit relationship between subject and object in muthanna by examining the point of view of the artist, the viewer, and the work of art. In doing so, this study elaborates on the vital links between outward form and inner meaning in Islamic calligraphy.
The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom
by Alfred L. Martin Jr.Even after a rise in gay and Black representation and production on TV in the 1990s, the sitcom became a "generic closet," restricting Black gay characters with narrative tropes.Drawing from 20 interviews with credited episode writers, key show-runners, and Black gay men, The Generic Closet situates Black-cast sitcoms as a unique genre that uses Black gay characters in service of the series' heterosexual main cast. Alfred L. Martin, Jr., argues that the Black community is considered to be antigay due to misrepresentation by shows that aired during the family viewing hour and that were written for the imagined, "traditional" Black family. Martin considers audience reception, industrial production practices, and authorship to unpack the claim that Black gay characters are written into Black-cast sitcoms such as Moesha, Good News, and Let's Stay Together in order to closet Black gayness.By exploring how systems of power produce ideologies about Black gayness, The Generic Closet deconstructs the concept of a monolithic Black audience and investigates whether this generic closet still exists.
The Invention of Robert Bresson: The Auteur and His Market
by Colin BurnettChallenging the prevailing notion among cinephiles that the auteur is an isolated genius interested primarily in individualism, Colin Burnett positions Robert Bresson as one whose life's work confronts the cultural forces that helped shape it. Regarded as one of film history's most elusive figures, Bresson (1901–1999) carried himself as an auteur long before cultural magazines, like the famed Cahiers du cinéma, advanced the term to describe such directors as Jacques Tati, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jean-Luc Godard. In this groundbreaking study, Burnett combines biography with cultural history to uncover the roots of the auteur in the alternative cultural marketplace of midcentury France.
Indiana Across the Land
by Lee Mandrell DeeDee Niederhouse-MandrellThe captivating landscapes of America's heartland offer an inviting escape from the everyday in Indiana Across the Land. Although a road trip from the shores of Lake Michigan to the Ohio River could be accomplished in only six hours, photographers Lee Mandrell and DeeDee Niederhouse-Mandrell take readers the long way around the Hoosier state, embarking on a breathtaking journey across the seasons, down windswept dunes, through old-growth forests, over burbling creeks and yawning chasms, past icy lighthouses and worn-down barns, and into the southern cypress swamps. More than 140 photographs capture the beauty of the Indiana Dunes National Lake Shore, Ouabache State Park, Turkey Run State Park, Squire Boone Caverns, and many other landmarks and natural wonders, both well-known and rarely glimpsed.
Globalizing Music Education: A Framework (Counterpoints: Music and Education)
by Alexandra Kertz-WelzelHow do globalization and internationalization impact music education around the world? By acknowledging different cultural values and priorities, Alexandra Kertz-Welzel's vision challenges the current state of international music education and higher education, which has been dominated by English-language scholarship. Her framework utilizes an interdisciplinary approach and emphasizes the need for developing a pluralistic mode of thinking, while underlining shared foundations and goals. She explores issues of educational transfer, differences in academic discourses worldwide, and the concept of the global mindset to help facilitate much-needed transformations in global music education. This thinking and research, she argues, provides a means for better understanding global transfers of knowledge and ways to avoid culturally and linguistically hegemonic standards. Globalizing Music Education: A Framework is a timely call to action for a more conscious internationalization of music education in which everyone can play a part.
Teaching Innovation in Architecture and Building Engineering: Challenges of the 21st century
by David Bienvenido-Huertas María Luisa de la Hoz-Torres Antonio Jesús Aguilar AguileraThis book presents contributions on teaching innovation in university architecture and building engineering studies. The authors explain how the construction sector demands that future architects and building engineers have the knowledge and skills that allow them to meet the decarbonization objectives established by international organizations and that this causes the level of knowledge to be higher. The contributors further discuss new technologies and the internationalization of studies presenting new challenges university studies must face. This heterogeneity is represented in the chapters that make up this book developed by researchers from different countries. The book is divided into three blocks: (i) Active learning methodologies; (ii) Innovative methodologies applied to learning process; and (iii) Traditional vs. Advanced Techniques. The chapters of the book represent an advance in the current knowledge of teaching innovation techniques in university architecture and building engineering studies.
Image Statistics in Visual Computing
by Tania Pouli Erik Reinhard Douglas W. CunninghamTo achieve the complex task of interpreting what we see, our brains rely on statistical regularities and patterns in visual data. Knowledge of these regularities can also be considerably useful in visual computing disciplines, such as computer vision, computer graphics, and image processing. The field of natural image statistics studies the regular
Diffusion-Driven Wavelet Design for Shape Analysis
by Hong Qin Tingbo HouFrom Design Methods and Generation Schemes to State-of-the-Art ApplicationsWavelets are powerful tools for functional analysis and geometry processing, enabling researchers to determine the structure of data and analyze 3D shapes. Suitable for researchers in computer graphics, computer vision, visualization, medical imaging, and geometric modeling
Immersive Virtual Reality for a Building Occupant-Centric Design: Defining, Validating and Applying an Innovative Framework (Digital Innovations in Architecture, Engineering and Construction)
by Arianna LatiniThis book discusses the cutting-edge intersection of Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) and research on building occupants. It presents an innovative way of using IVR to revolutionise the comprehension of human-dimension responses to indoor built environments. A robust, innovative, and sequential protocol is defined and validated with a Virtual Environment against a real-world counterpart to provide readers with methodological approaches suitable for carrying out rigorous experimental research in building occupant research. This comprehensive guide provides also practical applications of the proposed guidelines to show the potential and effectiveness of IVR for conducting studies in different indoor environmental conditions in a multi-sensory approach. The book serves as a resource for researchers who want to exploit the full potential of VR in collecting reliable data useful for understanding human dimensions within built environments.
Design for Dementia, Mental Health and Wellbeing: Co-Design, Interventions and Policy (ISSN)
by Kristina Niedderer, Geke Ludden, Tom Dening and Vjera Holthoff-DettoThis edited volume offers the first overview and reflective discussion of how design can contribute to people’s wellbeing and mental health in the context of dementia, mental illness and neurodiversity. This book explores and promotes holistic, salutogenic and preventive strategies that recognise and respond to people’s needs, wants, wishes and rights to further health, wellbeing and equality. Bringing together years of experience as designers and clinicians, the contributors to the book emphasise how design can be a collaborative, creative process as well as an outcome of this process, and they reveal how this is guided by mental health and design policy. Through its three parts, the book explores themes of ethics, citizenship and power relationships in co-design, providing an overview of current developments and approaches in co-design; of the culturally and value sensitive adaptation of design interventions and their applications, many of which are a result of co-design; and of policy and related standards in and for design and mental health. In this way, the book demonstrates how design can help to support people, their care partners and care professionals in promoting mental health and wellbeing, and it offers a rich resource on how to create a sustainable future for care in this domain. The book provides a unique and holistic overview and resource for designers, researchers, students, policy providers and health and care professionals to help support the development and adoption of person-centred design processes and interventions.
The Art-Science Symbiosis
by Marcelo Velasco Ignacio NietoThis book delves into the long-standing human aspiration to combine art and science. In six chapters, The Art-Science Symbiosis outlines new approaches to understand current scientific practice in general and art-science in particular, showcasing how contemporary art can provide a unique perspective on the meaning and potential of collaboration. With more than a hundred full colour images, The Art-Science Symbiosis serves as a resource for researchers interested in the art-science integration, as well as a general reference for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work.In the book, twenty-two works have been selected based on their inherent merits and for the emergent knowledge that their art-science integration produces. These works have sparked novel questions, ideas and curiosity amongst scientists and artists alike which, we hope, will promote further dialogue not only amongst them but with the general public, inspiring a process that may leadto diverse, complex, and promising results with real-world consequences we have as yet to uncover.The Key messages of the book are:● Contemporary art is a powerful space of dialogue between science and the public● Interdisciplinary work based on symmetrical collaboration promotes groundbreaking results● Artistic inquiry can lead to new understanding of scientific exploration● Art-science practice could be started using a simple methodology
Museums and Entrepreneurship: The Effects of Capitalising on Culture in the 21st Century
by Eve Kalyva Pamela Bianchi Iro KatsaridouMuseums and Entrepreneurship: The Effects of Capitalising on Culture in the 21st Century addresses the largely under-examined impact that different entrepreneurial endeavours have on museum practices today.It identifies an entrepreneurial turn in today’s neoliberal context and critically evaluates how this turn redefines museums in organisational, conceptual and empirical terms. It assesses the challenges that different types of museums face, examining how they are conceptualised, managed and experienced in order to remain financially viable while also remaining relevant to the communities they should serve. It brings to the fore the dynamic relationships formed across corporate sponsors, private collectors, cultural administrators and local communities that shape today’s museum practices in a global context. Evidence-based in its approach and with case studies from Europe, the United States, South America and China, this volume engages with entrepreneurship across theory and practice and combines perspectives from museum studies, curating, exhibition design, business and management.Shedding new light on discussions around cultural branding, sponsorship, the politics of display and experience economy, and highlighting the importance of resilience, decolonisation and social responsibility, Museums and Entrepreneurship is essential reading for students and researchers in museum and heritage studies, curatorial studies, arts and heritage management and business.
Visual Literacy: A Conceptual Approach to Graphic Problem Solving
by Richard Wilde Judith WildeNow in a more affordable format for students, this stimulating hands-on course in creative thinking gets right down to specific design problems and offers viable solutions to them. Nineteen challenging assignments and over one thousand pieces of solution art executed by the authors’ students are presented. Each visual problem shows the actual assignment sheet given to the students and includes an analysis of the problem’s underlying intent, addressing principles such as formal reference, negative-positive relationships, cropping techniques, and other important issues.
A Handbook of Pottery Glazes
by David GreenThis book contains some general ceramic history to keep its subject in perspective, but it has naturally been difficult to avoid creating the impression that the quality of glaze on the surface is of greater importance than the aesthetics of a pot as a whole. However, this is only a trap for the unwary or the insensitive. No one has yet complained of the suggestion in the old Preface that 'If the pots are really good in the first place then the job of the glaze is not very difficult; if the pots are bad in themselves then the glaze can add nothing. -- from the Preface of the book
Illuminating the Vitae patrum: The Lives of Desert Saints in Fourteenth-Century Italy
by Denva GallantDuring the fourteenth century in Western Europe, there was a growing interest in imitating the practices of a group of hermits known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Laypeople and religious alike learned about their rituals not only through readings from the Vitae patrum (Lives of the Desert Fathers) and sermons but also through the images that brought their stories to life.In this volume, Denva Gallant examines the Morgan Library’s richly illustrated manuscript of the Vitae patrum (MS M.626), whose extraordinary artworks witness the rise of the eremitic ideal and its impact on the visual culture of late medieval Italy. Drawing upon scholarship on the history of psychology, eastern monasticism, gender, and hagiography, Gallant deepens our understanding of the centrality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers to late medieval piety. She provides important insights into the role of images in making the practices of the desert saints both compelling and accessible to fourteenth-century city dwellers, who were just beginning to cultivate the habit of private devotion on a wide scale.By focusing on the most extensively illuminated manuscript of the Vitae patrum to emerge during the trecento, this book sheds new light on the ways in which images communicated and reinforced modes of piety. It will be of interest to art historians, religious historians, and students focusing on this period in Italian history.
Traces of a Jewish Artist: The Lost Life and Work of Rahel Szalit (Dimyonot)
by Kerry WallachGraphic artist, illustrator, painter, and cartoonist Rahel Szalit (1888–1942) was among the best-known Jewish women artists in Weimar Berlin. But after she was arrested by the French police and then murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz, she was all but lost to history, and most of her paintings have been destroyed or gone missing. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, this biography recovers Szalit’s life and presents a stunning collection of her art.Szalit was a sought-after artist. Highly regarded by art historians and critics of her day, she made a name for herself with soulful, sometimes humorous illustrations of Jewish and world literature by Sholem Aleichem, Heinrich Heine, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, and others. She published her work in the mainstream German and Jewish press, and she ran in artists’ and queer circles in Weimar Berlin and in 1930s Paris. Szalit’s fascinating life demonstrates how women artists gained access to Jewish and avant-garde movements by experimenting with different media and genres.This engaging and deeply moving biography explores the life, work, and cultural contexts of an exceptional Jewish woman artist. Complementing studies such as Michael Brenner’s The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, this book brings Rahel Szalit into the larger conversation about Jewish artists, Expressionism, and modern art.