Böcker i Image-serien

Painting, according to recent findings, dates back more than seventy thousand years, and, across the millenia, it proved to be an extremely robust and versatile medium of human self-reflection. Today, painting is a medium almost exclusively confined to the artistic production of pictures. It has lost its dominant position in contemporary art and has finally become one artistic medium amongst others. Given the incredible number of pictures produced today, it seems to be reasonable and relevant to discuss whether and how painting is still pertinent to contemporary image production. This book will offer a variety of perspectives on the role of painting in the 21st century to address these questions.

Technologies and techniques have informed artistic practices and discourses since the avantgardes' heyday, and their proliferation, now in an increasingly digital culture, has continually transformed the very idea of the medium in global contemporary art. The contributions from internationally renowned scholars, curators, and artists gathered in the present volume map and interrogate this intimate nexus by forging diverse pathways through the political force fields, technological milieus, and ecological environments in which both art and media are situated and interwoven in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As a festschrift, the book also pays tribute to the impact and influence of the art historian Eric C. H. de Bruyn's work.

How to account for the peculiar attraction of certain photos? How to deal with the specific use of images in particular contexts? Monika Schwarzler presents a variety of photographic case studies exploring visual phenomena from the point of view of media analysis as well as from sociological, aesthetic, and psychoanalytic perspectives. The topics range from a new reading of Thomas Struth's street photographs to CERN photos with their charged rhetoric, from the assault of photographic close-ups to speculations on an anonymous slide collection featuring a woman with an ever-present white handbag. The book is intended for an audience receptive to the analytical appeal of images, prepared to go beyond what can be taken at face value.

Since the introduction of photography by commercial studio photographers and the colonial state in Kenya, this global medium has been intensely debated and contested among Muslims on the cosmopolitan East African coast. This book does not only explore the making, circulation, and consumption of popular photographs, but also the other side, their rejection and obliteration, an essential aspect of a medium's history that should not be neglected. It deals with various social spaces of refusal in the local Muslim milieu and in that of traditional spirit mediums in which (gendered) visibility was (and is) contested in various and creative ways. It focuses on the aesthetics of withdrawal: the various ways and techniques that process the photographic act as well as the photographic image to theatricalize the surface of the image in new ways by veiling, masking, and concealing. In a fragmented historical perspective, Heike Behrend seeks to complement, decenter, and counter the history of photography as it has been told by the West and to narrate another history beginning with preceding local media such as textiles and spirit possession.

Why do Japanese artists team up with engineers in order to create so-called Device Art What is a nanoscientist's motivation in approaching the artworld? In the past few years, there has been a remarkable increase in attempts to foster the exchange between art, technology, and science - an exchange taking place in academies, museums, or even in research laboratories. Media art has proven especially important in the dialogue between these cultural fields. This book is a contribution to the current debate on art & science interdisciplinarity, and the discourse of innovation. It critically assesses artistic positions that appear as the ongoing attempt to localize art's position within technological and societal change - between now and the future.

What is the subject of video?Charlotte Klink traces the development of electromagnetism in the pursuit of »Electric Seeing« that emerged in the 19th century as well as its curious relation to psychoanalysis and the contemporary discovery of the structure of the human psyche. In doing so, she exposes how this development laid the foundation of what we know today as »video«. This comprehensive theory of video entails a discussion of the technological, historical, and etymological roots, the media-theoretical concepts of medium and index, the philosophical and art-theoretical environment in which video emerged in the 1960s, the psychoanalytic concept of the phantasm, and artworks by artists such as Yael Bartana, Hito Steyerl, and Bjørn Melhus.

Western humanism has established a reifying and predatory relation to the world. While its collateral visual regime, the perspectival image, is still saturating our screens, this relation has reached a dead end. Rather than desperately turning towards transhumanism and geoengineering, we need to readjust our position within community Earth. Facing this predicament, Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie develop the notion of the common image - understood as a multisensory perception across species; and common ethics - a comportment that transcends species-bound ways of living. Highlighting the notion of the common as opposed to the immune, the authors ultimately advocate otherness as a common ground for a larger than human communism.

Scientific research on climate change has given rise to a variety of images picturing climate change. These range from colorful expert graphics, model visualizations, photographs of extreme weather events like floods, droughts or melting ice, symbols like polar bears, to animated and interactive visualizations. Climate change graphics have not only increased knowledge about the subject, they have begun to influence popular awareness of global weather events. The status of climate pictures today is particularly crucial, as global climate change as a long-term process cannot be seen.When images are widely distributed, they are able to shape how the world is thought about and seen. It is this implicit basic assumption of the power of images to influence reality that this book addresses: today's images might become the blueprint for tomorrow's realities.»Image Politics of Climate Change« combines a wide interdisciplinary range of perspectives and questions, treated here in sixteen interdisciplinary case studies. The author's specializations include both visual practice and theory: in the fields of climate sciences, computer graphics, art, curating, art history and visual studies, communication and cultural science, environmental and science & technology studies. The close interlinking of these viewpoints promotes in-depth insights into issues of production and analysis of climate visualization.

What is the cultural dimension of sustainability? This book offers a thought-provoking answer, with a theoretical synthesis on »cultures of sustainability«. Describing how modernity degenerated into a culture of unsustainability, to which the arts are contributing, Sacha Kagan engages us in a fundamental rethinking of our ways of knowing and seeing the world. We must learn not to be afraid of complexity, and to re-awaken a sensibility to patterns that connect. With an overview of ecological art over the past 40 years, and a discussion of art and social change, the book assesses the potential role of art in a much needed transformation process.

In 2001, Freestyle, a survey exhibition curated by Thelma Golden at the Studio Museum in Harlem, introduced both a young generation of artists of African descent and the ambitious yet knowingly opaque term post-black to a pre 9-11 and pre-Obama world. In Taking Stakes in the Unknown, Nana Adusei-Poku contextualizes the term post-black in its socio-historical and cultural context. Whilst exploring its present legacy and past potential, she examines works by artists who were defined as part of the post-black generation: Mark Bradford, Leslie Hewitt, Mickalene Thomas and Hank Willis Thomas - and, by expanding the scope of the definition, the Black German artist Philip Metz.

Collective Actions is one of the most significant artistic practices to emerge from Moscow Conceptualism. The group's enigmatic idea of 'Empty action' is the focal point for Marina Gerber's exploration of this practice in relation to labour in the late Soviet Union. Based on interviews with members of the group (Monastyrski, Panitkov, Alexeev, Makarevich, Elagina, Romashko, Hänsgen and Kiesewalter) she exposes the relation between their jobs, their individual art practices and their contribution to the collective in the context of post-Stalinist debates on labour and free time. Departing from the mundane fact that Collective Actions' practice took place in free time from work for the Soviet State, Gerber identifies Empty action as a form of 'art after work'.