Beyond Vision

A powerful reminder to anyone who thinks design is primarily a visual pursuit, The Senses accompanies a major exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum that explores how space, materials, sound, and light affect the mind and body. Learn how contemporary designers, including Petra Blaisse, Bruce Mau, Malin+Goetz and many others, engage sensory experience. Multisensory design can solve problems and enhance life for everyone, including those with sensory disabilities. Featuring thematic essays on topics ranging from design for the table to tactile graphics, tactile sound, and visualizing the senses, this book is a call to action for multisensory design practice. The Senses: Design Beyond Vision is mandatory reading for students and professionals working in diverse fields, including products, interiors, graphics, interaction, sound, animation, and data visualization, or anyone seeking the widest possible understanding of design. The book, designed by David Genco with Ellen Lupton, is edited by Lupton and curator Andrea Lipps. Includes essays by Lupton, Lipps, Christopher Brosius, Hansel Bauman, Karen Kraskow, Binglei Yan, and Simon Kinnear.

At 18 years old, Victoria Nolan found out she was going blind. As her vision became more restricted, so did her independence. Her childhood dream had been to become a teacher, but she had to fight constantly against misconceptions about her capabilities as a visually impaired person. Even starting a family meant risking further vision loss, and as she struggled to deal with her disability, her goals for the future seemed impossible. Not wanting her children to grow up seeing their mother as someone who "couldn't," she sought opportunities to prove herself. That's when she started rowing. Discovering her competitive fire, Victoria made the Canadian National Adaptive Rowing Team in 2007. In this collection of reflections on and off the water, Victoria Nolan travels the world winning medals and breaking records. This personal story of triumph will inspire as she describes her frustration, her hard work, and her growing sense of accomplishment.

In this unique and exhilarating autobiography, Allan Jones – Canada’s first blind diplomat – vividly describes how an untreatable eye disease slowly decimated his visual world, most challengingly during his postings in Tokyo and New Delhi, and how he discovered and took to heart the revelatory Indian philosophy that changed his life. Advaita Vedanta, the most iconoclastic and liberating of the classical Indian philosophies, profoundly altered the author’s experience of self and world. He found that the true self, as distinct from the individual ego, far exceeds the boundaries of individuality. It lies beneath sightedness or blindness and is absolutely unaffected by the latter. This welcome shift of perspective was reinforced by startling discoveries in contemporary physics, evolutionary biology, and developmental psychology that are fully consistent with Advaitic metaphysics. As for the practical applications of metaphysics, this book demonstrates step by step how Advaitic insight and practice significantly reduce physical and psychological tension. The most telling examples have to do with adjustments compelled by extreme circumstances. Thus Jones describes how he drew upon Advaitic mindfulness techniques to maintain his white cane mobility skills in the teeth of permanent spinal, nerve, and muscle pain. The arc of Beyond Vision moves from the claustrophobically personal to the openness of the transpersonal. It begins in a dysfunctional family background, breaking out into a full life encompassing an adventurous foreign service career, spiritual exploration, and an unconventional kind of marital love.

Beyond Vision is the first English-language collection of essays on art by Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), Russian philosopher, priest, linguist, scientist, mathematician – and art historian. In addition to seven essays by Florensky, the book includes a biographical introduction and an examination of Florensky’s contribution as an art historian by Nicoletta Misler. Beyond Vision reveals Florensky’s fundamental attitudes to the vital questions of construction, composition, chronology, function and destination in the fields of painting, sculpture and design. His reputation as a theologian and philosopher is already established in the English-speaking world, but this first collection in English of his art essays (translated by Wendy Salmond) will be a revelation to those in the field. Pavel Florensky was a true polymath: trained in mathematics and philosophy at Moscow University, he rejected a scholarship in advanced mathematics in order to study theology at the Moscow Theological Academy. He was also an expert linguist, scientist and art historian. A victim of the Soviet government’s animosity towards religion, he was condemned to a Siberian labor camp in 1933 where he continued his work under increasingly difficult circumstances. He was executed in 1937.

How the shift from montage to navigation alters the way images--and art--operate as models of political action and modes of political intervention. Navigation begins where the map becomes indecipherable. Navigation operates on a plane of immanence in constant motion. Instead of framing or representing the world, the art of navigation continuously updates and adjusts multiple frames from viewpoints within and beyond the world. Navigation is thus an operational practice of synthesizing various orders of magnitude. Only a few weeks prior to his untimely death in 2014, Harun Farocki briefly referred to navigation as a contemporary challenge to montage--editing distinct sections of film into a continuous sequence--as the dominant paradigm of techno-political visuality. For Farocki, the computer-animated, navigable images that constitute the twenty-first century's "ruling class of images" call for new tools of analysis, prompting him to ask: How does the shift from montage to navigation alter the way images--and art--operate as models of political action and modes of political intervention? Contributors Ramon Amaro, James Bridle, Maïté Chénière, Kodwo Eshun, Anselm Franke, Jennifer Gabrys, Tom Holert, Inhabitants, Doreen Mende, Matteo Pasquinelli, Laura Lo Presti, Patricia Reed, Nikolay Smirnov, Hito Steyerl, Oraib Toukan, and Brian Kuan Wood.

Beyond Vision brings together eight essays by Casey O'Callaghan. The works draw theoretical and philosophical lessons about perception, the nature of its objects, and sensory awareness through sustained attention to extra-visual and multisensory forms of perception and perceptual consciousness. O'Callaghan focuses on auditory perception, perception of spoken language, and multisensory perception. The first essays concern the nature of audition's objects, focusing on sounds, especially drawing attention to the ways in which they contrast with vision's objects. The middle essays explore forms of auditory perception that could not be explained without understanding audition's interactions with other senses. This bridges work on sound perception with work on multisensory perception, and it raises multisensory perception as an important topic for understanding perception even in a single modality. The last essays are devoted to multisensory perception and perceptual consciousness. They argue that no complete account of perception overall or of multisensory perceptual consciousness can be developed in modality-specific terms-perceiving amounts to more than just seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling at the same time. The final essay presents a new framework for understanding what it is to be modality-specific or to be multisensory.

Brings together a hundred of the most significant photographs taken in the last 150 years, chosen for their scientific importance.

How does the brain piece together the information required to achieve object recognition, figure-ground segmentation, object completion in cases of partial occlusion and related perceptual phenomena? This book focuses on principles of Gestalt psychology and the key issues which surround them, providing an up-to-date survey of the most interesting and highly debated topics in visual neuroscience, perception and object recognition. The volume is divided into three main parts: Gestalt and perceptual organisation, attention aftereffects and illusions, and color vision and art perception. Themes covered in the book include: - a historical review of Gestalt theory and its relevance in modern-day neuroscience - the relationship between perceptive and receptive fields - a critical analysis of spatiotemporal unity of perception - the role of Gestalt principles in perceptual organization - self-organizing properties of the visual field - the role of attention and perceptual grouping in forming non-retinotopic representations - figural distortions following adaptation to spatial patterns - illusory changes of brightness in spatial patterns - the function of motion illusions as a tool to study Gestalt principles in vision - conflicting theories of color vision and the neural basis of it - the role of color in figure-ground segmentation - chromatic assimilation in visual art and perception - the phenomena of colored shadows. Including contributions from experts in the field, this book will provide an essential overview of current research and theory on visual perception and Gestalt. It will be key reading for researchers and academics in the field of visual perception and neuroscience.