The infinity of lists
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Author and philosopher Umberto Eco is currently resident at the Louvre, and his chosen theme of study is "the vertigo of lists." Reflecting on this enormous trove of human achievements, he has embarked on an investigation of the phenomenon of cataloging and collecting. This book, featuring lavish reproductions of artworks from the Louvre and other world-famous(...)
The infinity of lists
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$54.00
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Summary:
Author and philosopher Umberto Eco is currently resident at the Louvre, and his chosen theme of study is "the vertigo of lists." Reflecting on this enormous trove of human achievements, he has embarked on an investigation of the phenomenon of cataloging and collecting. This book, featuring lavish reproductions of artworks from the Louvre and other world-famous collections, is a philosophical and artistic sequel to Eco’s recent acclaimed books, History of Beauty and On Ugliness, books in which he delved into the psychology, philosophy, history, and art of human forms. Here he examines the Western mind’s predilection for list-making and the encyclopedic. His central thesis is that in Western culture a passion for accumulation is recurring: lists of saints, catalogues of plants, collections of art. This impulse has recurred through the ages from music to literature to art.From medieval reliquaries to Andy Warhol’s compulsive collecting, Umberto Eco reflects in his inimitably inspiring way on how such catalogues mirror the spirit of their times.
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An exhibition catalogue from the Migros Museum featuring 21 artists and architects including Anish Kapoor, Jane and Louise Wilson, James Casebere, and Daniel Libeskind among others. The exhibition takes as its point of departure three contexts in which space occupies a central position: Sigmund Freud’s notion of “das Unheimliche” and psychoanalytical elaboration of(...)
Contemporary Art Monographs
November 2003, Zurich / Gdansk
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered : spatial emotion in contemporary art and architecture
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An exhibition catalogue from the Migros Museum featuring 21 artists and architects including Anish Kapoor, Jane and Louise Wilson, James Casebere, and Daniel Libeskind among others. The exhibition takes as its point of departure three contexts in which space occupies a central position: Sigmund Freud’s notion of “das Unheimliche” and psychoanalytical elaboration of space and its emotion; Michel Foucault’s other spaces – heterotopias and their counter-site qualities of socio-political implications; and Walter Benjamin’s outmoded and repressed space with all its auratic traces (fake or authentic) of philosophical and historic charge. “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” aims to exploit the psychological associations of space with its multiplicity of emotional overtones, mapping its extremes and its psychic environment. Focusing on spatial pathologies (agoraphobia, vertigo, claustrophobia...), the exhibition identifies space as a cause of mental disorder, fear or estrangement, ultimate trauma. Hysteria, panic and neurosis overlap with other spatial stories of psychic unrest and unease: distortions and perversions (warped space); anxiety and enigmas (haunted space); spatial inconvenience and discomfort, perfectly domestic and yet alienating; space half-spoken, half-pronounced: a promise, a puzzle, a magic spell, temptation.
Contemporary Art Monographs
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The art of producing color in movies is a fascinating process with a long history. Many people don’t realize that, as early as the 1890s, much of silent cinema was in color. They also may not know that women were the main workforce behind the techniques that first produced these effects, a tradition that continued as the practice evolved. Breakthroughs in color technology(...)
Architecture and Film, Set Design
October 2024
Color in motion: Chromatic explorations of cinema
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The art of producing color in movies is a fascinating process with a long history. Many people don’t realize that, as early as the 1890s, much of silent cinema was in color. They also may not know that women were the main workforce behind the techniques that first produced these effects, a tradition that continued as the practice evolved. Breakthroughs in color technology have created ongoing opportunities for filmmakers to experiment with new forms of narrative and emotional storytelling. Spectacular, psychological and sensory, color has become an integral part of the cinematic experience. From the earliest hand-painted films to Technicolor and today’s digital cinema, Color in Motion takes readers on a journey through the evolution and significance of color in film. Presenting insightful analysis, engaging case studies and inspiring conversations with scholars and experts in the field, with topics ranging from animation to the intersections of color and race in cinema, it traces the historical development of color technologies and their impact onscreen. Incorporating vivid images of color films throughout history—Serpentine Dance, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Fantasia, The Red Shoes, Vertigo, West Side Story, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Moonlight and more, as well as new multispectral scans of rare silent-era film prints—this essential volume celebrates color’s enduring influence on the medium of film.
Architecture and Film, Set Design
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"Visual cultures as time travel" makes a case for cultural, aesthetic, and historical research that is oriented toward the future, not the past, actively constructing new categories of assembly that don't yet exist. Ayesha Hameed considers the relationship between climate change and plantation economies, proposing a watery plantationocene that revolves around two islands:(...)
Visual cultures as time travel
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"Visual cultures as time travel" makes a case for cultural, aesthetic, and historical research that is oriented toward the future, not the past, actively constructing new categories of assembly that don't yet exist. Ayesha Hameed considers the relationship between climate change and plantation economies, proposing a watery plantationocene that revolves around two islands: a former plantation in St. George's Parish in Barbados, and the port city of Port of Spain in Trinidad. It visits a marine research institute on a third island, Seili in Finland, to consider how notions of temporality and adaptation are produced in the climate emergency we face. Henriette Gunkel introduces the idea of time travel through notions of dizziness, freefall, and of being in vertigo as set out in Octavia Butler's novel Kindred and Kitso Lynn Lelliott's multimedia installation South Atlantic Hauntings, exploring what counts as technology, how it operates in relation to time, including deep space time, and how it interacts with the different types of bodies—human, machine, planetary, spectral, ancestral—that inhabit the terrestrial and extraterrestrial worlds. In conversation, Hameed and Gunkel propose a notion of time travel marked by possibility and loss—in the aftermath of transatlantic slavery and in the moment of mass illegalized migration, of blackness and time, of wildfires and floods, of lost and co-opted futures, of deep geological time, and of falling.
Critical Theory
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The virtues of being open to new and transformative experiences are rhapsodized but not really illuminated in this discursive and somewhat gauzy set of linked essays. Cultural historian Solnit, an NBCC award winner for River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, allows the subject of getting lost to lead her where it will, from early American(...)
A field guide to getting lost
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The virtues of being open to new and transformative experiences are rhapsodized but not really illuminated in this discursive and somewhat gauzy set of linked essays. Cultural historian Solnit, an NBCC award winner for River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, allows the subject of getting lost to lead her where it will, from early American captivity narratives to the avant-garde artist Yves Klein. She interlaces personal and familial histories of disorientation and reinvention, writing of her Russian Jewish forebears' arrival in the New World, her experiences driving around the American west and listening to country music, and her youthful immersion in the punk rock demimonde. Unfortunately, the conceit of embracing the unknown is not enough to impart thematic unity to these essays; one piece ties together the author's love affair with a reclusive man, desert fauna, Hitchcock's Vertigo and the blind seer Tiresias in ways that will indeed leave readers feeling lost. Solnit's writing is as abstract and intangible as her subject, veering between oceanic lyricism ("Blue is the color of longing for the distance you never arrive in") and pensées about the limitations of human understanding ("Between words is silence, around ink whiteness, behind every map's information is what's left out, the unmapped and unmappable") that seem profound but are actually banal once you think about them.
Architectural Theory