In Lionel Shriver’s entertaining send-up of today’s cult of exercise—which not only encourages better health, but now like all religions also seems to promise meaning, social superiority, and eternal life—an aging husband’s sudden obsession with extreme sport makes him unbearable. After an ignominious early retirement, Remington announces to his wife Serenata that he’s decided to run a marathon. This from a sedentary man in his sixties who’s never done a lick of exercise in his life. His wife can’t help but observe that his ambition is “hopelessly trite.” A loner, Serenata disdains mass group activities of any sort. Besides, his timing is cruel. Serenata has long been the couple’s exercise freak, but by age sixty, her private fitness regimes have destroyed her knees, and she’ll soon face debilitating surgery. Yes, becoming more active would be good for Remington’s heart, but then why not just go for a walk? Without several thousand of your closest friends? As Remington joins the cult of fitness that increasingly consumes the Western world, her once-modest husband burgeons into an unbearable narcissist. Ignoring all his other obligations, he engages a saucy, sexy personal trainer named Bambi, who treats Serenata with contempt. When Remington sets his sights on the legendarily grueling triathlon, MettleMan, Serenata is sure he’ll end up injured or dead. And even if he does survive, their marriage may not. The Motion of the Body Through Space is vintage Lionel Shriver written with psychological insight, a rich cast of characters, lots of verve and petulance, an astute reading of contemporary culture, and an emotionally resonant ending.

Body and space refer to vital and interrelated dimensions in the experience of sounds and music. Sounds have an overwhelming impact on feelings of bodily presence and inform us about the space we experience. Even in situations where visual information is artificial or blurred, such as in virtual environments or certain genres of film and computer games, sounds may shape our perceptions and lead to surprising new experiences. This book discusses recent developments in a range of interdisciplinary fields, taking into account the rapidly changing ways of experiencing sounds and music, the consequences for how we engage with sonic events in daily life and the technological advancements that offer insights into state-of-the-art methods and future perspectives. Topics range from the pleasures of being locked into the beat of the music, perception–action coupling and bodily resonance, and affordances of musical instruments, to neural processing and cross-modal experiences of space and pitch. Applications of these findings are discussed for movement sonification, room acoustics, networked performance, and for the spatial coordination of movements in dance, computer gaming and interactive artistic installations.

The last decade has seen a new wave of interest in philosophical and theoretical circles in the writings of Walter Benjamin. In Body-and Image-Space Sigrid Weigel, one of Germany's leading feminist theorists and a renowned commentator on the work of Walter Benjamin, argues that the reception of his work has so far overlooked a crucial aspect of his thought - his use of images. Weigel shows that it is precisely his practice of thinking in images that holds the key to understanding the full complexity, richness and topicality of Benjamin's theory.

Whilst both collective and collaborative drawing is being widely explored internationally, both within and beyond educational institutions, there is surprisingly little serious research published on the topic. This realisation led to the first international Drawing Conversations Symposium, accompanied by the Drawn Conversations Exhibition at Coventry University, UK, in December 2015. The two events drew a strong and global response, and brought together a wide range of participants, including academics, artists, researchers, designers, architects and doctoral students. This book considers what happens, and how, when people draw together either in the form of a collaboration, or through a collective process. The contributions here serve to establish the field of collective and collaborative drawing as distinct from the types of drawing undertaken by artists, designers, and architects within a professional context. The volume covers conversations through the act of drawing, collaborative drawing, drawing communities, and alternative drawing collaborations.

Mapping key co-ordinates of meaning, identity and power across sites of body and city, the author explores a wide range of critical thinking including Lefebvre and Freud and analyses the dialectic between the individual and the external.

Body - Space - Expression: The Development Of Rudolf Laban's Movement And Dance Concepts (Approaches To Semiotics).

A collaboration between dancer/somatic practitioner Ira Ferris and artist/scenographer Elia Bosshard, SPACE BODY HABIT is a transcription of conversations and experiences that unfolded during a two-week research residency at Frontyard, a multipurpose creative space in Marrickville, Sydney. Set to explore the many ways we perceive, or fail to perceive spaces, the book comprises a series of spatio-somatic and phenomenologically-driven exercises, followed by in-depth discussions on themes as varied as: first impressions and knowing space by heart, body as a space and supremacy of vision, care for spaces and observing spaces from the more-than-human perspective, posture and perception, repetition and choices, comfort and entrapment, sharing spaces with others and dissolving boundaries between spaces, creativity and mental space, language and the agency of spaces, memory and habitual pathways, structures and flexibility, physical and psychological spaces, voids and empty spaces, belonging to a place and knowing others through their spaces, designated spaces and liminal spaces, contracts and trust, boredom and perseverance... With the starting premise that interaction with space is often habitual and perception of space often unconscious, the book explores ways to deepen and enhance our awareness of space and its impact on our day-to-day life. What else might we open ourselves to if we challenge the ingrained relationship to space and inhabit familiar spaces in new ways? The ​​exercises and conversations were inspired and informed by reading texts on space/place and the body, including: Rhythm Analysis by Henri Lefebvre, The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, The Memory of Place by Dylan Trigg, Bodies of Water by Astrida Neimanis, Escapism by Yi-Fu Tuan, and Bertolt Brecht by Meg Mumford. The authors wish to acknowledge that this research residency and the writing of the book took place on the unceded land of the Gadigal and Wangal people of the Eora nation. Their care of the land, their respect for the lineage, their reciprocity with the place, are to be our inspiration as we find ever better ways to be in spaces and pass them on to others.

The first of its kind, 'Body, Space, Image' is a remarkable book about improvisation - a narrative of discovery that sets the mind loose from the rut of everyday perception. From a starting point in movement, improvisation is extended to include groups working together and the physical setting of performance - space, light, sound, objects. Generously illustrated with examples drawn from twenty years of experimental performance, 'Body, Space, Image' explores ways of working and ways of thinking about performance that will inspire both the beginner and the experienced artist. It is a manual intended to stimulate rather than a comprehensive system of working, and includes a unique collection of images - from dance, theatre and painting - and statements by working artists. Words and images combine to celebrate and record one of the most exacting art forms developed in the twentieth century.

The essays collected in this volume are intended to stimulate research in the anthropology of architecture on the basis of a critical history of the body and its cultural constructions. The analogy between architecture and the human body is rooted in the fundamental impact the latter has on ordering, symbolising, and interpreting the world. Correspondingly, the metaphorical conceptualisation of the built environment in terms of the human body was already practiced in early cultures and has determined architectural theory since antiquity. While the architectural treatises of early modern times vividly imagine anthropomorphic and anthropometric figures, they seem to be overcome by an architectural theory that is based on purely rational as well as mechanical laws. However, these figures were never totally abandoned, and Le Corbusier's Modulor is only one, if not the most prominent example, for their ongoing reception and transformation in modern times.The human sciences of the 19th century played a significant role in this process. Physiology and psychology brought about not only new experimental devices for analysing the human body and its physiological functions, but also new images of the body that directly went into aesthetics, art history, and architectural theory. This new understanding of the body had a large impact on the production and reception of modern architecture. Due to this background the arts eventually became anthropologically grounded. The book includes contributions from: Tobias Cheung, Scott Drake, Günter Feuerstein, Tanja Jankowiak, Eckhard Leuschner, Harry Francis Mallgrave, Indra Kagis McEwen, Irene Nierhaus, Philipp Osten, Heleni Porfyriou, Paolo Sanvito, Christoph Schnoor, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Frank Zöllner, Beatrix Zug-Rosenblatt, and others.