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An early version of the slide projector and an immediate predecessor of narrative cinema, the magic lantern provided the lens through which late-nineteenth century Europe and America viewed and imagined the world. Magic lantern slide shows were a popular, entertaining and educational way for people to learn about the world beyond their own horizons, and from Cairo to(...)
Memories of a lost world : travels through the magic lantern
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An early version of the slide projector and an immediate predecessor of narrative cinema, the magic lantern provided the lens through which late-nineteenth century Europe and America viewed and imagined the world. Magic lantern slide shows were a popular, entertaining and educational way for people to learn about the world beyond their own horizons, and from Cairo to Delhi to Adelaide and Cape Town, intrepid European and American photographers traveled to all corners of the world to document its peoples and customs. Now, for the first time, images of original magic lantern slides have been brought together in a single publication. Memories of a Lost World: Travels through the Magic Latern takes the reader back to a pre-globalised world in which regional customs and national cultures were as distinctive as they were diverse. From the bustling streets of Victorian London and the ruins of ancient Egypt to the temples of Japan and the tribesmen of New Guinea, Memories of a Lost World explores the world through a captivating collection of over 800 magic lantern slide images. This volume is not only an important source of primary historical information, but also conveys something of what the world was like before the advent of television and mass travel.
Transportation, Tourism, Migration
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L'urbanisation des territoires de transition entre la ville et la campagne ceux de la suburbia, est oublieuse de l'épaisseur du passé, des transformations complexes des sites, aussi bien que des représentations que l'on s'en fait. La notion de sub-urbanisme, définie par l'auteur comme une " subversion de l'urbanisme ", remet profondément en question un telle attitude.(...)
L'art de la mémoire, le territoire et l'architecture
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L'urbanisation des territoires de transition entre la ville et la campagne ceux de la suburbia, est oublieuse de l'épaisseur du passé, des transformations complexes des sites, aussi bien que des représentations que l'on s'en fait. La notion de sub-urbanisme, définie par l'auteur comme une " subversion de l'urbanisme ", remet profondément en question un telle attitude. Cet essai plaide pour une démarche qui appréhenderait le site comme la matrice d'un projet explorant les multiples strates spatio-temporelles du territoire : l'architecture comme instrument de la mémoire et la mémoire comme matière de l'architecture. Quatre sources alimentent la démarche : les travaux de Frances Yates sur L'Art de la mémoire, consacrés aux pratiques mnémotechniques des anciens ; la "métaphore romaine" proposée par Sigmund Freud pour évoquer le mode de conservation du passé dans la structuration de la psyché ; la démarche de l'artiste américain Robert Smithson avec son concept de non-site ; et enfin le parc de Lancy réalisé dans la banlieue de Genève par l'architecte Georges Descombes. A l'instar du sub-urbanisme qu'elle entreprend d'illustrer, cette démon tration s'aventure dans l'épaisseur narrative des lieux, et invite le lecteur-visiteur à frayer son chemin à travers de nombreuses couches de mémoire et de culture. Le mot d'ordre est extrapolation.
Architectural Theory
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Canada is a country whose national narrative is difficult to define, even for Canadians. This question is further complicated when looking at emerging artists who have grown up under intense globalization. In Canada, specific identities are difficult to pinpoint and, when they are, they are often portrayed as problematic stereotypes bound up in a colonialist history. (...)
Alternorthern: an exhibition of nine emerging Canadian artists
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Canada is a country whose national narrative is difficult to define, even for Canadians. This question is further complicated when looking at emerging artists who have grown up under intense globalization. In Canada, specific identities are difficult to pinpoint and, when they are, they are often portrayed as problematic stereotypes bound up in a colonialist history. “Alternorthern” was conceived in the tension that exists between nationalism, globalization, and individualism: the exhibition is a product of both cultural values and cultural hybridism. The nine artists in this exhibition function similarly in that they use their own identities to make gestures that transgress time and space. Each artist in the exhibition is Canadian, yet each creates work that speaks to issues pertinent to both Canadian and global geographic and political landscapes. The exhibition will open during the 2010 Olympics, when many of the stereotypes, symbols, themes, and political workings of Canada will be disseminated into the U.S. media. As Canada is in the throes of presenting its tourist identity on the international stage, this exhibition can function as a way of transgressing this identity. Thus, the curators see this exhibition not as a response to the event of the Olympics but as an opportunity to subvert and play with cultural dialogue that will exist during this time.
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In the dazzling global metropolis of Shanghai, what has it meant to call this city home? In this account—part microhistory, part memoir—Jie Li salvages intimate recollections by successive generations of inhabitants of two vibrant, culturally mixed Shanghai alleyways from the Republican, Maoist, and post-Mao eras. Exploring three dimensions of private life—territories,(...)
April 2015
Shanghai homes: palimpsests of private life
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In the dazzling global metropolis of Shanghai, what has it meant to call this city home? In this account—part microhistory, part memoir—Jie Li salvages intimate recollections by successive generations of inhabitants of two vibrant, culturally mixed Shanghai alleyways from the Republican, Maoist, and post-Mao eras. Exploring three dimensions of private life—territories, artifacts, and gossip—Li re-creates the sounds, smells, look, and feel of home over a tumultuous century. First built by British and Japanese companies in 1915 and 1927, the two homes at the center of this narrative were located in an industrial part of the former "International Settlement." Before their recent demolition, they were nestled in Shanghai's labyrinthine alleyways, which housed more than half of the city's population from the Sino-Japanese War to the Cultural Revolution. Through interviews with her own family members as well as their neighbors, classmates, and co-workers, Li weaves a complex social tapestry reflecting the lived experiences of ordinary people struggling to absorb and adapt to major historical change. These voices include workers, intellectuals, Communists, Nationalists, foreigners, compradors, wives, concubines, and children who all fought for a foothold and haven in this city, witnessing spectacles so full of farce and pathos they could only be whispered as secret histories.
What is landscape?
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Landscape, John Stilgoe tells us, is a noun. From the old Frisian language (once spoken in coastal parts of the Netherlands and Germany), it meant shoveled land: landschop. Sixteenth-century Englishmen misheard or mispronounced this as landskep, which became landskip, then landscape, designating the surface of the earth shaped for human habitation. In What Is Landscape?(...)
What is landscape?
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Landscape, John Stilgoe tells us, is a noun. From the old Frisian language (once spoken in coastal parts of the Netherlands and Germany), it meant shoveled land: landschop. Sixteenth-century Englishmen misheard or mispronounced this as landskep, which became landskip, then landscape, designating the surface of the earth shaped for human habitation. In What Is Landscape? Stilgoe maps the discovery of landscape by putting words to things, zeroing in on landscape’s essence but also leading sideways expeditions through such sources as children’s picture books, folklore, deeds, antique terminology, out-of-print dictionaries, and conversations with locals. (“What is that?” “Well, it’s not really a slough, not really, it’s a bayou . . .”) He offers a written narrative lexicon of landscape as word, concept, and path to discoveries. What Is Landscape? is an invitation to walk, to notice, to ask: to see a sandcastle with a pinwheel at the beach and think of Dutch windmills—icons of triumph, markers of territory won from the sea; to walk in the woods and be amused by the Elizabethans’ misuse of the Latin silvaticus (people of the woods) to coin the word savages; to see in a suburban front lawn a representation of the meadow of a medieval freehold.
Landscape Theory
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First published in 1992 to wide critical acclaim, ''Pictures from home'' is Larry Sultan’s pendant to his parents. Sultan returned home to Southern California periodically in the 1980s and the decade-long sequence moves between registers, combining contemporary photographs with film stills from home movies, fragments of conversation, Sultan’s own writings and other(...)
Larry Sultan: pictures from home
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First published in 1992 to wide critical acclaim, ''Pictures from home'' is Larry Sultan’s pendant to his parents. Sultan returned home to Southern California periodically in the 1980s and the decade-long sequence moves between registers, combining contemporary photographs with film stills from home movies, fragments of conversation, Sultan’s own writings and other memorabilia. The result is a narrative collage in which the boundary between the documentary and the staged becomes increasingly ambiguous. Simultaneously the distance usually maintained between the photographer and his subjects also slips in an exchange of dialogue and emotion that is unique to this work. Significantly increasing the page count of the original book, this MACK design of ''Pictures from home'' clarifies the multiplicity of voices – both textual and pictorial – in order to afford a fresh perspective of this seminal body of work. Emphasising the cinematic motion of the family’s home videos, the Super-8 film stills have been newly digitised and magnified, with select scenes running full-bleed across double-page spreads. Meanwhile, Sultan’s photographs of his parents as they go about their daily lives – against the quintessential backdrop of the Reagan-era American dream – are supplemented with previously unpublished images. Most significantly, the book honours Sultan as the oft-hailed ‘King of Colour Photography’.
Photography monographs
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"Mute icons" challenges fixed aesthetic notions of beauty in architecture as both, disciplinary discourse and a spatial practice within the public realm, by intersecting historic antecedents and present instances within contemporary projects wherein indeterminacy, monolithicity and defamiliarization play a speculative role in constructing withdrawn, irritant and yet(...)
Mute icons: pressing dichotomy in contemporary architecture
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"Mute icons" challenges fixed aesthetic notions of beauty in architecture as both, disciplinary discourse and a spatial practice within the public realm, by intersecting historic antecedents and present instances within contemporary projects wherein indeterminacy, monolithicity and defamiliarization play a speculative role in constructing withdrawn, irritant and yet engaging architectural images. No longer concerned with narrative excesses or with the "shock and awe" of sensation making; the mute icon becomes intriguing in its deceptive indifference towards context, perplexing in its unmitigated apathy towards the body. Object and building, absolute and unstable, anticipated and strange, manifest and withdrawn, such is the dichotomy of mute icons. Dwelling in the paradox between silence and sign and aiming to debunk a false dichotomy between critical discourse, a pursue of formal novelty and the attainment of social ethics, "Mute icons" reaffirms the cultural need and socio-political relevance of the architectural image, suggesting a much-needed resolution to the present but incorrect antagonism between formal innovation, social responsibility and economic austerity. Intersecting relevant historical antecedents and polemic theoretical speculations with original design concepts and provocative representations of P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S recent work, the book aspires to stimulate authentic speculations on the real.
Architectural Theory
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During the two hundred millennia we've been on the planet, nothing has shaped us more profoundly than the city. In a fascinating narrative that ranges through cities famous and forgotten, acclaimed historian Ben Wilson tells the glorious story of how urban living has allowed human culture to flourish. Beginning with Uruk, the world's first city, he shows that cities(...)
Metropolis: a history of the city, mankind's greatest invention
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During the two hundred millennia we've been on the planet, nothing has shaped us more profoundly than the city. In a fascinating narrative that ranges through cities famous and forgotten, acclaimed historian Ben Wilson tells the glorious story of how urban living has allowed human culture to flourish. Beginning with Uruk, the world's first city, he shows that cities created such a blossoming of human endeavor--new professions, new forms of art, worship, and trade--that they kick-started civilization itself. Despite outbreaks of plague and war, and outlasting empires, the city endured and new cities sprang up to capture the inimitable energy of human beings together. Wilson reveals the innovations nurturned amid the density of urban centers over the centuries: civics in the agora of Athens, global trade in ninth-century Baghdad, finance in the coffeehouses of London, domestic comforts in the heart of Amsterdam, peacocking in Belle Epoque Paris. In the modern age, the skyscrapers of New York City inspired utopian visions of community design, while the trees of twenty-first-century Seattle and Shanghai point to a sustainable future in the age of climate change. Page turning and irresistible, ''Metropolis'' is a history of cities that is also a history of how humanity lives.
Urban Theory
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In this book, Vladimir Belogolovsky reflects on nearly twenty years of conversations with leading creatives from around the world whose focus is on art, photography, architecture, design, critical theory, and more. His intimate dialogues are with prolific visionaries, the likes of Paul Andreu, Aaron Betsky, Tatiana Bilbao, Christo, Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, Toyo Ito,(...)
Imagine buildings floating like clouds: Thoughts and visions of contemporary architecture from 101 key creatives
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In this book, Vladimir Belogolovsky reflects on nearly twenty years of conversations with leading creatives from around the world whose focus is on art, photography, architecture, design, critical theory, and more. His intimate dialogues are with prolific visionaries, the likes of Paul Andreu, Aaron Betsky, Tatiana Bilbao, Christo, Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, Toyo Ito, Glenn Murcutt, Renzo Piano, Moshe Safdie, Ric Scofido, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, Michael Sorkin, Stanley Tigerman, Bernard Tschumi, Lin Utzon, Massimo Vignelli, Madelon Vriesendorp, and so many others. He exposes the complexity of their thought processes, while comparing and contrasting them to one another to distill more than 101 ideas. His engaging narrative captures the stories behind every project and every personality while exploring many important questions, including: What makes a building architecture? How would a Futurist solve problems vs those whose focus is on nostalgia? The selection of interviews gathers many answers and intentions, but inevitably, also many more questions. ''Imagine buildings floating like clouds'' represents a diverse group of multitalented, creative people who work in disparate places culturally and climatically and came of age in very different times- from the revolutionary 1960s to our own time, when the future, for many, is being more feared than desired.
Contemporary Architecture
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Contemporary engagements with documentary are multifaceted and complex, reaching across disciplines to explore the intersections of politics and aesthetics, representation and reality, truth and illusion. Discarding the old notions of “fly on the wall” immediacy or quasi-scientific aspirations to objectivity, critics now understand documentary not as the neutral picturing(...)
Documentary Across Disciplines
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Contemporary engagements with documentary are multifaceted and complex, reaching across disciplines to explore the intersections of politics and aesthetics, representation and reality, truth and illusion. Discarding the old notions of “fly on the wall” immediacy or quasi-scientific aspirations to objectivity, critics now understand documentary not as the neutral picturing of reality but as a way of coming to terms with reality through images and narrative. This book collects writings by artists, filmmakers, art historians, poets, literary critics, anthropologists, theorists, and others, to investigate one of the most vital areas of cultural practice: documentary. Their investigations take many forms—essays, personal memoirs, interviews, poetry. Contemporary art turned away from the medium and toward the world, using photography and the moving image to take up global perspectives. Documentary filmmakers, meanwhile, began to work in the gallery context. The contributors consider the hybridization of art and film, and the “documentary turn” of contemporary art. They discuss digital technology and the “crisis of faith” caused by manipulation and generation of images, and the fading of the progressive social mandate that has historically characterized documentary. They consider invisible data and visible evidence; problems of archiving; and surveillance and biometric control, forms of documentation that call for “informatic opacity” as a means of evasion.