Nancy And Visual Culture

In an exciting range of original responses to Nancy's work, these 12 essays reanimate the dialogue between interdisciplinary scholars and practicing artists that originally gave birth to visual culture as a field of study. A new translation of Nancy's essay, 'The Image: Mimesis and Methexis', reveals how Nancy's work informs, challenges and inspires our encounters with visual culture.

The creation and processing of visual representations in the life sciences is a critical but often overlooked aspect of scientific pedagogy. The Educated Eye follows the nineteenth-century embrace of the visible in new spectatoria, or demonstration halls, through the twentieth-century cinematic explorations of microscopic realms and simulations of surgery in virtual reality. With essays on Doc Edgerton's stroboscopic techniques that froze time and Eames's visualization of scale in Powers of Ten, among others, contributors ask how we are taught to see the unseen.

The nineteenth century was a period of science and imagery: when scientific theories and discoveries challenged longstanding boundaries between animal, plant, and human, and when art and visual culture produced new notions about the place of the human in the natural world. Just as scientists relied on graphic representation to conceptualize their ideas, artists moved seamlessly between scientific debate and creative expression to support or contradict popular scientific theories—such as Darwin’s theory of evolution and sexual selection—deliberately drawing on concepts in ways that allowed them to refute popular claims or disrupt conventional knowledges. Focusing on the close kinship between the arts and sciences during the Victorian period, the art historians contributing to this volume reveal the unique ways in which nineteenth-century British and American visual culture participated in making science, and in which science informed art at a crucial moment in the history of the development of the modern world. Together, they explore topics in geology, meteorology, medicine, anatomy, evolution, and zoology, as well as a range of media from photography to oil painting. They remind us that science and art are not tightly compartmentalized, separate influences. Rather, these are fields that share forms, manifest as waves, layers, lines, or geometries; that invest in the idea of the evolution of form; and that generate surprisingly kindred responses, such as pain, pleasure, empathy, and sympathy.

How the world—and the world of visual culture in particular—creates itself in a creative act that knows no economic return. How does the world form itself? How does it create itself as a world? And how do we understand the role of the visual in this regard? Most responses to these questions within cultural theory and visual culture refer to the rise of globalization, thus highlighting the acceleration of exchanges, the proliferation of information and communication devices, and the multiplication of globally circulated goods and images that characterize the world we live in. Visual Cultures as World Forming takes a different approach by focusing on the taking place of the world, a creative act that knows no economic return. This taking place does not lead to more proliferation of goods, additional financial exchanges, further communications, or an increase in the distribution of visual material, but leads to the continued “worlding” of the world. This approach is predominantly, but not exclusively, inspired by the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. Through a reading of his work and of some of his contemporaries both inside and outside of the Western canon, Madani and Martinon attempt to expose how the world—and the world of visual culture in particular—creates itself and the ways in which each one of us is embodying this creation without economy. Copublished with Goldsmiths, University of London

[The Russian and American contributors] share a very high level of expertise and an impressive command of their material, which ranges from film to billboards to currency. Everything in this book, including the introduction, is worth reading... consistently fascinating... -- Choice... a lightning rush of images and ideas that constitute inviting material for future speculation. -- Times Literary SupplementThis collection of essays is a fine, even an exhilarating piece of work. Her brilliant analysis surveys a kaleidoscope of breaks and continuities: betweeen literature and non-print media, high culture and popular culture, homo sovieticus and homo russicus. -- Slavic and East European JournalOf interest for scholars in several disciplines, Soviet Hieroglyphics provides many insights into recent Russian visual culture. -- Canadian Slavonic PaperThese incisive essays describe contemporary Russian culture under conditions of social collapse. Focusing on visual culture, the book highlights the recurrent tension between two opposing tendencies in Russia today: the impulse to eradicate the cultural hieroglyphics of the Soviet past and the compulsion to reinscribe those sacred images onto contemporary texts.

A collection of fifteen original essays analyzing gender in the imagery of science.

The first genuine appraisal of Virilio's contribution to contemporary art, photography, film, television and more. This collection of 13 original writings, including a newly translated piece by Virilio himself, is indispensable reading for all students and researchers of contemporary visual culture. Paul Virilio is one of the leading and most challenging critics of art and technology of the present period. Re-conceptualising the most enduring philosophical conventions on everything from technology and photography to literature, anthropology, cultural, and media studies through his own original theories and arguments, Virilio's work has produced substantial debate, compelling readers to ask if his criticism is out of touch or out in front of traditional perspectives.

Focusing on images of or produced by well-to-do nineteenth-century European women, this volume explores genteel femininity as resistant to easy codification vis-?is the public. Attending to various iterations of the public as space, sphere and discourse, sixteen essays challenge the false binary construct that has held the public as the sole preserve of prosperous men. By contrast, the essays collected in Women, Femininity and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789-1914 demonstrate that definitions of both femininity and the public were mutually defining and constantly shifting. In examining the relationship between affluent women, femininity and the public, the essays gathered here consider works by an array of artists that includes canonical ones such as Mary Cassatt and Fran?s G?rd as well as understudied women artists including Louise Abb? and Broncia Koller. The essays also consider works in a range of media from fashion prints and paintings to private journals and architectural designs, facilitating an analysis of femininity in public across the cultural production of the period. Various European centers, including Madrid, Florence, Paris, Brittany, Berlin and London, emerge as crucial sites of production for genteel femininity, providing a long-overdue rethinking of modern femininity in the public sphere.