Inventions In The Visual Arts

Humans have created visual representations of the world since the dawn of man. While early painting and sculpture was often rudimentary, the history of visual art is characterized by rapid evolution; today’s artists use high-tech tools to share their vision. Inventions in the Visual Arts: From Cave Paintings to CAD provides a closer look at the development of cave paintings, sculptures, sketch books, cameras, and computer-aided design software. These inventions have surprising links to one another, which the book outlines in chronological order, and have forever changed the landscape of art—and beyond.

"Using both historical and contemporary examples, this publication traces the complex relationships between art, technology, and science, focusing on technological and artistic media from the nineteenth century to the present day." "The interplay of technological invention and artistic innovation requires a variety of methods, ranging from the fine arts and cultural studies to the history of science and media archaeology. Among the key themes, which the contributions examine from a variety of perspectives, are: the status of technology as a shared feature of or "boundary object" between art and science; the conflicts among ethical, aesthetic, and economic values in the system of art versus that of technology; the paradox that inventions are regarded as achievements of individual geniuses but can actually only be made and successfully applied if they have been sanctioned by the sociohistorical zeitgeist."--BOOK JACKET.

"Larry Shiner challenges our conventional understandings of art and asks us to reconsider its history entirely, arguing that the category of ine art is a modern invention - and that the lines drawn between art and craft emerged only as the result of key European social transformations during the long eighteenth century"--Publisher's description.

American art museums share a mission and format that differ from those of their European counterparts, which often have origins in aristocratic collections. This groundbreaking work recounts the fascinating story of the invention of the modern American art museum, starting with its roots in the 1870s in the craft museum type, which was based on London’s South Kensington (now the Victoria and Albert) Museum. At the turn of the twentieth century, American planners grew enthusiastic about a new type of museum and presentation that was developed in Northern Europe, particularly in Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia. Called Kulturgeschichte (cultural history) museums, they were evocative displays of regional history. American trustees, museum directors, and curators found that the Kulturgeschichte approach offered a variety of transformational options in planning museums, classifying and displaying objects, and broadening collecting categories, including American art and the decorative arts. Leading institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, adopted and developed crucial aspects of the Kulturgeschichte model. By the 1930s, such museum plans and exhibition techniques had become standard practice at museums across the country.

Bringing together the results of experiments on discovery and invention in visualization conducted by the author over a three year period, this book reports new findings on the generation of creative inventions and concepts using mental imagery, and proposes a reconceptualization of the creative process. Creative Imagery introduces the concept of “preinventive forms” and describes an approach to creative invention differing from those typically used in problem-solving studies. There are two unique features of this book. First, it combines the experimental methods of cognitive science with the opportunity to explore and discover creative inventions in imagination. Second, it provides readers with numerous opportunities to use the creative imagery techniques to develop their own inventions and conceptual discoveries. This text is of particular interest to scientists working in the fields of experimental psychology, cognitive psychology, and cognitive science. The techniques for generating creative inventions will also be of interest to people working in engineering, architectural design, and the visual arts.

Chinese edition of The art of invention:The Creative Process of Discovery and Design by Steven J. Paley. In Traditional Chinese. Distributed by Tsai Fong Books, Inc.

Today the media arts not only address the great themes of our times, they inhabit the very media of which they speak. The contemporary is global, but only because of the media that enable globalisation. Those media are almost nowhere apparent in the mainstream practice of art that we see in biennials from Venice to Sao Paolo. The media arts reflect back to us our present condition, and in the archive present us with the ghosts of what we were, and what we failed to become. This book brings the reader into the centre of these strange encounters, introducing us to the rich legacies and futures of the most important arts of the last hundred years. It also looks ahead to the future and asks what happens to the condition of being human within the new constellation into which we are entering?