Download or read book Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decay written by Siobhan Lyons and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-03 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection is the first book to comprehensively analyse the relatively new and under-researched phenomenon of ‘ruin porn’. Featuring a diverse collection of chapters, the authors in this work examine the relevance of contemporary ruin and its relationship to photography, media, architecture, culture, history, economics and politics. This work investigates the often ambiguous relationship that society has with contemporary ruins around the world, challenging the notions of authenticity that are frequently associated with images of decay. With case studies that discuss various places and topics, including Detroit, Chernobyl, Pitcairn Island, post-apocalyptic media, online communities and urban explorers, among many other topics, this collection illustrates the nuances of ruin porn that are fundamental to an understanding of humanity’s place in the overarching narrative of history.
Download or read book The New Urban Ruins written by Cian O'Callaghan and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2023-02 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an innovative perspective to consider contemporary urban challenges through the lens of urban vacancy. Centering urban vacancy as a core feature of urbanization, the contributors coalesce new empirical insights on the impacts of recent contestations over the re-use of vacant spaces in post-crisis cities across the globe. Using international case studies from the Global North and Global South, it sheds important new light on the complexity of forces and processes shaping urban vacancy and its re-use, exploring these areas as both lived spaces and sites of political antagonism. It explores what has and hasn't worked in re-purposing vacant sites and provides sustainable blueprints for future development.
Download or read book Reviewing the Past written by Zoltán Somhegyi and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though constantly in decay, ruins continue to fascinate the observer. Their still-standing survival is a loud affirmation of their presence, in which we can admire the struggle against the power of Nature aesthetically manifested during the decay. This volume takes a thematic approach to examining the aesthetics of ruins. It looks at the general aspects of architectural decay and its classical forms of admiration and then turns towards ruins from both classical and contemporary periods, from both Western and non-Western areas, and with examples from “high art” as well as popular culture. Combining the methodologies of art history, aesthetics and cultural history, this book opens up new ways of looking at the phenomenon of ruins.
Download or read book Performing Ruins written by Simon Murray and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-17 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book engages with the relationship between ruins, dilapidation, and abandonment and cultural events performed within such spaces. Following the author’s fieldwork in the UK, Bosnia Herzegovina, Poland, Germany, Greece, and Sicily, chapters describe, investigate, and reflect upon live performance events which have taken place in sites of decay and abandonment. The book’s main focus is upon modern economic ruins and ruins of warfare. Each chapter provides several case studies based upon the author’s own site visits and interviews with actors, directors, producers, curators, writers, and other artists. The book contextualises these events within the wider framework of Ruin Studies and provides brief summaries of how we might understand the ruin in terms of time, politics, culture, and atmospheres. The book is particularly preoccupied with artists’ reasons and motivations for placing performance events in ruined spaces and how these work dramaturgically.
Download or read book Utopian Horizons written by Zsolt Cziganyik and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-31 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 500th anniversary of Thomas More?s Utopia has directed attention toward the importance of utopianism. This book investigates the possibilities of cooperation between the humanities and the social sciences in the analysis of 20th century and contemporary utopian phenomena. The papers deal with major problems of interpreting utopias, the relationship of utopia and ideology, and the highly problematic issue as to whether utopia necessarily leads to dystopia. Besides reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary utopian investigations, the eleven essays effectively represent the constructive attitudes of utopian thought, a feature that not only defines late 20th- and 21st-century utopianism, but is one of the primary reasons behind the rising importance of the topic. The volume?s originality and value lies not only in the innovative theoretical approaches proposed, but also in the practical application of the concept of utopia to a variety of phenomena which have been neglected in the utopian studies paradigm, especially to the rarely discussed Central European texts and ideologies.
Download or read book Nothing Happened written by Susan A. Crane and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past is what happened. History is what we remember and write about that past, the narratives we craft to make sense out of our memories and their sources. But what does it mean to look at the past and to remember that "nothing happened"? Why might we feel as if "nothing is the way it was"? This book transforms these utterly ordinary observations and redefines "Nothing" as something we have known and can remember. "Nothing" has been a catch-all term for everything that is supposedly uninteresting or is just not there. It will take some—possibly considerable—mental adjustment before we can see Nothing as Susan A. Crane does here, with a capital "n." But Nothing has actually been happening all along. As Crane shows in her witty and provocative discussion, Nothing is nothing less than fascinating. When Nothing has changed but we think that it should have, we might call that injustice; when Nothing has happened over a long, slow period of time, we might call that boring. Justice and boredom have histories. So too does being relieved or disappointed when Nothing happens—for instance, when a forecasted end of the world does not occur, and millennial movements have to regroup. By paying attention to how we understand Nothing to be happening in the present, what it means to "know Nothing" or to "do Nothing," we can begin to ask how those experiences will be remembered. Susan A. Crane moves effortlessly between different modes of seeing Nothing, drawing on visual analysis and cultural studies to suggest a new way of thinking about history. By remembering how Nothing happened, or how Nothing is the way it was, or how Nothing has changed, we can recover histories that were there all along.
Download or read book The Black Utopians written by Aaron Robertson and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2024-10-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Washington Post most anticipated fall book | One of Literary Hub's most anticipated books of 2024 A lyrical meditation on how Black Americans have envisioned utopia—and sought to transform their lives. How do the disillusioned, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty? What, in other words, does utopia look like in black? These questions animate Aaron Robertson’s exploration of Black Americans' efforts to remake the conditions of their lives. Writing in the tradition of Saidiya Hartman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robertson makes his way from his ancestral hometown of Promise Land, Tennessee, to Detroit—the city where he was born, and where one of the country’s most remarkable Black utopian experiments got its start. Founded by the brilliant preacher Albert Cleage Jr., the Shrine of the Black Madonna combined Afrocentric Christian practice with radical social projects to transform the self-conception of its members. Central to this endeavor was the Shrine’s chancel mural of a Black Virgin and child, the icon of a nationwide liberation movement that would come to be known as Black Christian Nationalism. The Shrine’s members opened bookstores and co-ops, created a self-defense force, and raised their children communally, eventually working to establish the country’s largest Black-owned farm, where attempts to create an earthly paradise for Black people continues today. Alongside the Shrine’s story, Robertson reflects on a diverse array of Black utopian visions, from the Reconstruction era through the countercultural fervor of the 1960s and 1970s and into the present day. By doing so, Robertson showcases the enduring quest of collectives and individuals for a world beyond the constraints of systemic racism. The Black Utopians offers a nuanced portrait of the struggle for spaces—both ideological and physical—where Black dignity, protection, and nourishment are paramount. This book is the story of a movement and of a world still in the making—one that points the way toward radical alternatives for the future.
Download or read book Toxic Heritage written by Elizabeth Kryder-Reid and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-21 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toxic Heritage addresses the heritage value of contamination and toxic sites and provides the first in-depth examination of toxic heritage as a global issue. Bringing together case studies, visual essays, and substantive chapters written by leading scholars from around the world, the volume provides a critical framing of the globally expanding field of toxic heritage. Authors from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and methodologies examine toxic heritage as both a material phenomenon and a concept. Organized into five thematic sections, the book explores the meaning and significance of toxic heritage, politics, narratives, affected communities, and activist approaches and interventions. It identifies critical issues and highlights areas of emerging research on the intersections of environmental harm with formal and informal memory practices, while also highlighting the resilience, advocacy, and creativity of communities, scholars, and heritage professionals in responding to the current environmental crises. Toxic Heritage is useful and relevant to scholars and students working across a range of disciplines, including heritage studies, environmental science, archaeology, anthropology, and geography.
Download or read book Connecting with Ambivalent Heritage written by Tiina Äikäs and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-09-05 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the difficult and contested sites of deindustrialized society on the brink of transformation to either heritage or wasteland, this volume looks at the creative ways that such sites are (re)used and suggests that they are not always merely abject or abandoned. As a result, our understanding of the meanings given to left over spaces is enhanced by an examination of the ways they are used. Ambivalent heritage sites are not always recognized for their potential, although artists and people from different recreational activities, such as industrial sites and parkour, use and experience these places in different ways. The contributors introduce fresh ideas on how to approach these sites and the people invested in them, employing multidisciplinary methodologies from archaeology and heritage studies to ethnography and sociology. Through the use of Northern-European case studies such as a former sanatorium, a prison and the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, the reader gains a new perspective on these sites of contestation, which are cherished despite their problematic status. The conclusion is that due to the rapid societal change we are experiencing in the contemporary world, heritage professionals must start to acknowledge and deal with the difficulties that ambivalent heritage sites pose.
Download or read book Aesthetics of Care written by Yuriko Saito and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-07-14 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building upon her previous work on everyday aesthetics, Yuriko Saito argues in this book that the aesthetic and ethical concerns are intimately connected in our everyday life. Specifically, she shows how aesthetic experience embodies a care relationship with the world and how the ethical relationship with others, whether humans, non-human creatures, environments, or artifacts, is guided by aesthetic sensibility and manifested through aesthetic means. Weaving together insights gained from philosophy, art, design, and medicine, as well as artistic and cultural practices of Japan, she illuminates the aesthetic dimensions of various forms of care in our management of everyday life. Emphasis is placed on the experience of interacting with others including objects, a departure from the prevailing mode of aesthetic inquiry that is oriented toward judgment-making from a spectator's point of view. Saito shows that when everyday activities, ranging from having a conversation and performing a care act to engaging in self-care and mending an object, are ethically grounded and aesthetically informed and guided, our experiences lead to a good life.
Download or read book The Topographic Imaginary written by Ari J. Blatt and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-13 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early 1980s, art photographers from metropolitan France have been training their lenses on ordinary landscapes throughout the country they call home. The Topographic Imaginary is the first book to study this important and flourishing trend. It examines work by artists who meld documentary and creative modes to attune viewers to places that mainstream culture tends to tune out, but which, as Ari J. Blatt argues, are in fact more meaningful than they initially appear. From views of building sites in Paris, peri-urban edgelands, or a tangle of trees in a forest, to those that ponder the play of light and shadow on roadside fields in Normandy or the tacky colors painted on dated village shopfronts, images that signal the emergence of a “topographic turn” in contemporary French photography constitute new ways of seeing and sensing France’s diverse national territory. As Blatt suggests, they also represent a visual laboratory through which to investigate how landscape “scapes” our understanding of French culture. In their efforts to reimagine a more traditional and time-worn idea of France’s shared common space, topographic photographs animate conversations about capital and class; cities and their peripheries; the politics and impact of development; migration and borders; memory, history, and affect; empire and postcolonialism; national identity; and the changing environment. The Topographic Imaginary thus reveals how attending to place in pictures provides valuable insight into the disposition of a nation in flux.
Download or read book Good Pictures written by Kim Beil and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A picture-rich field guide to American photography, from daguerreotype to digital. We are all photographers now, with camera phones in hand and social media accounts at the ready. And we know which pictures we like. But what makes a "good picture"? And how could anyone think those old styles were actually good? Soft-focus yearbook photos from the '80s are now hopelessly—and happily—outdated, as are the low-angle portraits fashionable in the 1940s or the blank stares of the 1840s. From portraits to products, landscapes to food pics, Good Pictures proves that the history of photography is a history of changing styles. In a series of short, engaging essays, Kim Beil uncovers the origins of fifty photographic trends and investigates their original appeal, their decline, and sometimes their reuse by later generations of photographers. Drawing on a wealth of visual material, from vintage how-to manuals to magazine articles for working photographers, this full-color book illustrates the evolution of trends with hundreds of pictures made by amateurs, artists, and commercial photographers alike. Whether for selfies or sepia tones, the rules for good pictures are always shifting, reflecting new ways of thinking about ourselves and our place in the visual world.
Download or read book Deindustrializing Montreal written by Steven High and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-06-13 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Point Saint-Charles, a historically white working-class neighbourhood with a strong Irish and French presence, and Little Burgundy, a multiracial neighbourhood that is home to the city’s English-speaking Black community, face each other across Montreal’s Lachine Canal, once an artery around which work and industry in Montreal were clustered and by which these two communities were formed and divided. Deindustrializing Montreal challenges the deepening divergence of class and race analysis by recognizing the intimate relationship between capitalism, class struggles, and racial inequality. Fundamentally, deindustrialization is a process of physical and social ruination as well as part of a wider political project that leaves working-class communities impoverished and demoralized. The structural violence of capitalism occurs gradually and out of sight, but it doesn’t play out the same for everyone. Point Saint-Charles was left to rot until it was revalorized by gentrification, whereas Little Burgundy was torn apart by urban renewal and highway construction. This historical divergence had profound consequences in how urban change has been experienced, understood, and remembered. Drawing extensive interviews, a massive and varied archive of imagery, and original photography by David Lewis into a complex chorus, Steven High brings these communities to life, tracing their history from their earliest years to their decline and their current reality. He extends the analysis of deindustrialization, often focused on single-industry towns, to cities that have seemingly made the post-industrial transition. The urban neighbourhood has never been a settled concept, and its apparent innocence masks considerable contestation, divergence, and change over time. Deindustrializing Montreal thinks critically about locality, revealing how heritage becomes an agent of gentrification, investigating how places like Little Burgundy and the Point acquire race and class identities, and questioning what is preserved and for whom.
Download or read book Interactive Storytelling written by Rebecca Rouse and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-11-26 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2018, held in Dublin, Ireland, in December 2018. The 20 revised full papers and 16 short papers presented together with 17 posters, 11 demos, and 4 workshops were carefully reviewed and selected from 56, respectively 29, submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: the future of the discipline; theory and analysis; practices and games; virtual reality; theater and performance; generative and assistive tools and techniques; development and analysis of authoring tools; and impact in culture and society.
Download or read book The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Interest Groups Lobbying and Public Affairs written by Phil Harris and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-20 with total page 1532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The growing need for a concise and comprehensive overview of the world of interest groups, lobbying, and public affairs called for a compendium of existing research, key theories, concepts, and case studies. This project is the first transnational encyclopedia to offer such an interdisciplinary and wide overview of these topics, including perspectives on public relations, crisis management, communication studies, as well as political science, political marketing, and policy studies. It is an interdisciplinary work, which involved an extraordinary pool of contributors made up of leading scholars and practitioners from all around the globe; it is a live and evolving project focused on drawing together grounded international knowledge for our diverse and developing world. The 200+ entries of the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Interest Groups, Lobbying and Public Affairs (to be found as a live reference work online here, and in two print volumes in 2022) address these research avenues, tackling a growing demand for a comprehensive international reference work regarding key global sectors and policymaking structures, looking beyond the traditional markets of Europe and North America to incorporate practice and research from Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America. This encyclopedia acts as a synthesis of existing research, and aims to aid academics, students, and practitioners navigate their relevant fields around the globe.
Download or read book Frictionlessness written by Jakko Kemper and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-12-14 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frictionlessness provides an examination of the environmentally destructive digital design philosophy of "frictionlessness" and the critical significance of a technological aesthetic of imperfection. If there is one thing that defines digital consumer technologies today, it is that they are designed to feel frictionless. From smart technologies to cloud computing, from from one-click shopping to the promise of seamless streaming-digital technology is framed to host ever-faster operations while receding increasingly into the background of perception. The environmental costs of this fetishization of frictionlessness are enormous and unevenly distributed; the frictionless experience of the end user tends to be supported by opaque networks of exploited labor and extracted resources that disproportionately impact the Global South. This situation marks an urgent need for alternate, less destructive aesthetic relations to technology. As such, this book examines imperfection, as an aesthetic concept that highlights existential conditions of finitude and fragility, as a particularly powerful counterweight to the dominant digital design philosophy of frictionlessness. While frictionlessness aims to draw the user's perception away from the exploitative and destructive conditions of digital production, imperfection forms an aesthetic source of friction that alerts users to the fragile nature of technology and the finite resources on which it relies. These arguments are elaborated through a close reading of three technological objects-a video game that was programmed to expire, an audiovisual performance that laments the fate of disused technology and a collection of music albums that dramatize a techno-cultural logic of relentless consumerism. Together, these case studies underline the value of technological aesthetics of imperfection and point to the need for a renewed ethics of care in relation to technology.
Download or read book Thinking with the Familiar in Contemporary Literature and Culture Out of the Ordinary written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What grows out of the ordinary? This volume focuses on that which has been regarded as ordinary, self-evident and formulaic in literary and cultural phenomena such as diasporic cuisine, pet adoption narratives, Prairie writing, romance between stepsiblings, the program of a political party, and everyday shopping in poetry. The book argues that by engaging with that which is perceived as ordinary we also gain understanding of how otherness becomes defined and constituted. The volume seeks new ways to access that which might lie in-between or beyond the opposition between exploitation and emancipation, and contests the hegemonic logic of revealing oppression and rebuilding liberation in contemporary critical theory to create new ways of knowing which grow out of the ordinary.
