Camera Constructs

Photography and architecture have a uniquely powerful resonance - architectural form provides the camera with the subject for some of its most compelling imagery, while photography profoundly influences how architecture is represented, imagined and produced. Camera Constructs is the first book to reflect critically on the varied interactions of the different practices by which photographers, artists, architects, theorists and historians engage with the relationship of the camera to architecture, the city and the evolution of Modernism. The title thus on the one hand opposes the medium of photography and the materiality of construction - but on the other can be read as saying that the camera invariably constructs what it depicts: the photograph is not a simple representation of an external reality, but constructs its own meanings and reconstructs its subjects. Twenty-three essays by a wide range of historians and theorists are grouped under the themes of ’Modernism and the Published Photograph’, ’Architecture and the City Re-imagined’, ’Interpretative Constructs’ and ’Photography in Design Practices.’ They are preceded by an Introduction that comprehensively outlines the subject and elaborates on the diverse historical and theoretical contexts of the authors’ approaches. Camera Constructs provides a rich and highly original analysis of the relationship of photography to built form from the early modern period to the present day.

This book contains extended and revised versions of the best papers presented at the 22nd IFIP WG 10.5/IEEE International Conference on Very Large Scale Integration, VLSI-SoC 2014, held in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, in October 2014. The 12 papers included in the book were carefully reviewed and selected from the 33 full papers presented at the conference. The papers cover a wide range of topics in VLSI technology and advanced research. They address the current trend toward increasing chip integration and technology process advancements bringing about stimulating new challenges both at the physical and system-design levels, as well as in the test of these systems.

With a cast ranging from Pancho Villa to Dolores del Río and Tina Modotti, Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution demonstrates the crucial role played by Mexican and foreign visual artists in revolutionizing Mexico's twentieth-century national iconography. Investigating the convergence of cinema, photography, painting, and other graphic arts in this process, Zuzana Pick illuminates how the Mexican Revolution's timeline (1910-1917) corresponds with the emergence of media culture and modernity. Drawing on twelve foundational films from Que Viva Mexico! (1931-1932) to And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (2003), Pick proposes that cinematic images reflect the image repertoire produced during the revolution, often playing on existing nationalist themes or on folkloric motifs designed for export. Ultimately illustrating the ways in which modernism reinvented existing signifiers of national identity, Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution unites historicity, aesthetics, and narrative to enrich our understanding of Mexicanidad.

How abstract design decisions in 2D platform games create rich worlds of meaning for players. Since the 1980s, 2D platform games have captivated their audiences. Whether the player scrambles up the ladders in Donkey Kong or leaps atop an impossibly tall pipe in Super Mario Bros., this deceptively simple visual language has persisted in our cultural imagination of video games. In Run and Jump, Peter McDonald surveys the legacy of 2D platform games and examines how abstract and formal design choices have kept players playing. McDonald argues that there is a rich layer of meaning underneath, say, the quality of an avatar’s movement, the pacing and rhythm of level design, the personalities expressed by different enemies, and the emotion elicited by collecting a coin. To understand these games, McDonald draws on technical discussions by game designers as well as theoretical work about the nature of signs from structuralist semiotics. Interspersed throughout are design exercises that show how critical interpretation can become a tool for game designers to communicate with their players. With examples drawn from over forty years of game history, and from games made by artists, hobbyists, iconic designers, and industry studios, Run and Jump presents a comprehensive—and engaging—vision of this slice of game history.

The author is dead, long live the author! This paradox has shaped discussions on authorship since at least the 1960s, when the dominant notion of the individual author-genius was first critically questioned. The ongoing discussion has mainly focused on literature and the arts, but has ignored nearly any artistic practice beyond these two fields. “Constructions of Media Authorship” aims to fill this gap: the volume’s interdisciplinary contributions reflect historical and current artistic practices within various media and attempt to grasp them from different perspectives. The first part sheds a new light on different artistic and design practices and questions the still dominant view on the individual identifiable author. The second part discusses creative practices in literature, emphasizing the interrelation of aesthetic discourses and media practices. The third part investigates authoring in audiovisual media, especially film and TV, while the final part turns to electronic and digital media and their collective creativity and hybrid mediality. The volume is also an attempt to develop new methodological approaches, focusing on the interplay between various human and non-human actors in different media constellations.

New forms of art, culture and theory have recently emerged through engagements with the realities of the social world and everyday life which are not primarily about representation but rather about participation and narration. These new forms are based on viewer responses and engagement, thus performatively creating open-ended situations rather than autonomous works with closure. Performative theory, drawing mostly on studies of speech acts, proves adequate to describe and analyse these new forms of art and culture and their engagement with the real. Performative Realism scrutinizes a range of contemporary works that experiment with audience participation and processuality within art and culture, as well as it takes issue with theories of performativity and performance. Performative Realism contains contributions from leading Danish scholars working within a broad range of academic fields such as Media Studies, Art History, Theatre Studies and Cultural Studies. The issues addressed covers Scandinavian as well as international installation art, performance art, theatre, photography, movies, literature and role-playing.

Video is a part of everyday life, comparable to driving a car or taking a shower. It is nearly omnipresent, available on demand and attached to nearby anything, anywhere. Online Video became something vital and independent. With all the video created by the cameras around us, constantly uploading, sharing, linking, and relating, a blue ocean is covering our planet, an ocean of video. What might look as bluish noise and dust from the far outside, might embed beautiful and fascinating living scapes of moving images, objects constantly changing, re-arranging, assembling, evolving, collapsing, but never disappearing, a real cinema. Andreas Treske describes and theorizes these objects formerly named video, their forms, behaviours and properties.

This study contextualizes magical realism within current debates and theories of postcoloniality and examines the fiction of three of its West African pioneers: Syl Cheney-Coker of Sierra Leone, Ben Okri of Nigeria and Kojo Laing of Ghana. Brenda Cooper explores the distinct elements of the genre in a West African context, and in relation to: * a range of global expressions of magical realism, from the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez to that of Salman Rushdie * wider contemporary trends in African writing, with particular attention to how the realism of authors such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka has been connected with nationalist agendas. This is a fascinating and important work for all those working on African literature, magical realism, or postcoloniality.