Developing a phenomenology of the animal other through contemporary art

What is the place of materiality—the expression or condition of physical substance—in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts or manifested in virtual forms? In Surface, cultural critic and theorist Giuliana Bruno deftly explores these questions, seeking to understand materiality in the contemporary world. Arguing that materiality is not a question of the materials themselves but rather the substance of material relations, Bruno investigates the space of those relations, examining how they appear on the surface of different media—on film and video screens, in gallery installations, or on the skins of buildings and people. The object of visual studies, she contends, goes well beyond the image and engages the surface as a place of contact between people and art objects. As Bruno threads through these surface encounters, she unveils the fabrics of the visual—the textural qualities of works of art, whether manifested on canvas, wall, or screen. Illuminating the modern surface condition, she notes how façades are becoming virtual screens and the art of projection is reinvented on gallery walls. She traverses the light spaces of artists Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Tacita Dean, and Anthony McCall; touches on the textured surfaces of Isaac Julien’s and Wong Kar-wai’s filmic screens; and travels across the surface materiality in the architectural practices of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Herzog & de Meuron to the art of Doris Salcedo and Rachel Whiteread, where the surface tension of media becomes concrete. In performing these critical operations on the surface, she articulates it as a site in which different forms of mediation, memory, and transformation can take place. Surveying object relations across art, architecture, fashion, design, film, and new media, Surface is a magisterial account of contemporary visual culture.

The concept of chiasm has played major role in continental philosophy, where it has referred to various phenomenological and hermeneutic structures of reversibility, intertwining, and encounter. In Chiasmatic Encounters: Art, Ethics, Politics, fourteen international contributors representing various fields of expertise analyze this central concept and its significance for contemporary cultural theory. The authors discuss the work of major philosophers like Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Habermas, Levinas, Derrida, and Deleuze, adapting their ideas of chiasmatic relations to cultural analysis. As the internal and external horizons of perception and experience are intertwined and reversed, various cultural texts, like a Vermeer painting, a symphony of Sibelius, a David Lynch movie, or a young girl walking in her summer dress, are seen from new and unexpected angles. The book also addresses the chiasmatic crossing between ethics and politics-- between unconditional ethical responsibility and always conditional political choices. Representing the cutting edge of contemporary cultural theory and interdisciplinary thinking, Chiasmatic Encounters is essential reading for anyone working in continental philosophy, aesthetics, or political theory.

The narratives in this book are of journeys made in three wildernesses - on a coastal island, in a Western mountain range, and on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. The four men portrayed here have different relationships to their environment, and they encounter each other on mountain trails, in forests and rapids, sometimes with reserve, sometimes with friendliness, sometimes fighting hard across a philosophical divide.

Provides a collection of essays on modern art covering such artists as Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Robert Mapplethorpe

Ever since a native American prepared a paper "charte" of the lower Colorado River for the Spaniard Hernando de Alarcon in 1540, native Americans have been making maps in the course of encounters with whites (the most recent maps often support land claims). This book charts the history of these cartographic encounters, examining native maps and mapmaking from the earliest contacts onward.

Every day we share encounters with others as we inhabit the space around us. In offering insights and knowledge on this increasingly important topic, this book introduces a range of empirical and theoretical approaches to the study of shared encounters. It highlights the multifaceted nature of collective experience and provides a deeper understanding of the nature and value of shared encounters in everyday life. Divided into four sections, each section comprises a set of chapters on a different topic and is introduced by a key author in the field who provides an overview of the content. The book itself is introduced by Paul Dourish, who sets the theme of shared encounters in the context of technological and social change over the last fifteen years. The four sections that follow consider the characteristics of shared encounters and describe how they can be supported in different settings: the first section, introduced by Barry Brown, looks at shared experiences. George Roussos, in the second section, presents playful encounters. Malcolm McCulloch introduces the section on spatial settings and – last but not least – Elizabeth Churchill previews the topic of social glue. The individual chapters that accompany each part offer particular perspectives on the main topic and provide detailed insights from the author’s own research background. A valuable reference for anyone designing ubiquitous media, mobile social software and LBS applications, this volume will also be useful to researchers, students and practitioners in fields ranging from computer science to urban studies.

This book is divided into 5 sections starting with an historic perspective and fundamental aspects on the synthesis and recognition by imprinted polymers. The second section contains 8 up-to-date overview chapters on current approaches to molecular and ion imprinting. This is followed by two chapters on new material morphologies and in the last two sections various analytical applications of imprinted polymers are given, with the last four chapters devoted to the promising field of imprinted polymers in chemical sensors.The authors of this volume have widely different backgrounds; mainly polymer chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry and analytical chemistry, which means that this book has an interdisciplinary character and should appeal to a broad audience.

This book explores the long history of military encounters with UFOs, revealing hidden incidents of dogfights, nuclear interference, and mysterious confrontations with unidentified aerial phenomena. Military bodies across the world have encountered, experimented with and even had ‘combat’ with UFOs, or as the U.S. military now define them Unidentifiable Aerial Phenomenon, or UAPs. These observations and engagements have occurred since ancient times, and on all continents. Different nations and cultures have had vastly different analyzes of the UFO/UAP phenomenon, from the Roman Empire to Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union and Communist China to the Western democracies. The UFO/UAP phenomenon has not diminished and has, in fact, grown in proportion in recent years, and has now assumed the mantle of legitimacy in government circles, the media, and among the general public. What is less well-known or even concealed are the encounters that the military have had with UFOs – some of which have even proved fatal to the terrestrials concerned. There were reported dogfights with UFOs and German aircraft in the First World War and in the Second World War reports of what became known as ‘Foo Fighters’ became commonplace. However, it was after the war that UFO sightings increased exponentially, amongst which was a ‘dogfight’ with a Mustang P-51 and a UFO in October 1948, and two years later, for two consecutive weekends in 1952, UFOs hovered over Washington, D.C. Attempts were made by the U.S. Air Force to intercept the strange craft but were outrun by the UFOs. UFOs/UAPs may have tampered with world nuclear forces – including shutting down strategic missiles of the United States and, conversely, activating Soviet ICBMs, almost setting off an unordered (by Soviet authorities) launching of atomic warheads against the United States. UFOs may also have ‘returned fire’ against American military forces during the Vietnam War, sending projectiles back at patrol boats that had been fired by those military river craft at UFOs hours or days before. United States Air Force personnel, including a Lieutenant Colonel, also encountered UFOs on the ground and in the air at Rendlesham USAF/RAF base in the UK in 1980. UFOs have played ‘cat-and-mouse’ games with the latest fighter-bombers of the United States Navy since 2004, and these events have been captured on videotape, and are verified to have occurred by the pilots themselves. As readers will discover from the mass of evidence presented in this book, it is no longer a question of whether UFOs exist or not, and that not only are such phenomenon an incontrovertible fact but that the United States has crafted plans on how to resist an alien invasion. But is there any need for us humans to be concerned about the alien presence in the skies that surround our planet? Yes, be very concerned.