Browse Books

Leigh Bowery
Performative Costuming and Live Art
An exploration of the life artistic practice social-historical context and cultural impact of Leigh Bowery. Vranou particularly considers Bowery's performative costuming and Live Art in relation to the ways they have influenced the broader spectrum of visual culture and the expanded field of performance studies.
Bowery’s cult status as an outrageously self-styled nightclub personality has obscured his significant contribution to performance studies and visual culture in favour of a justifiable discursive emphasis on his importance to fashion. The diversity of Bowery’s work and his marginality as an artist who emerged from a subcultural milieu complicated and thwarted his cultural value hindering as a consequence his incorporation into art institutions and performance narratives.
Through close analysis of Bowery’s key looks and non-theatrical performances the book examines the implications of his work in dominant histories of performance art and urgent discourses surrounding normativity representations of illness and body politics. It focuses on the performative dimension of Bowery’s costuming as an effective strategy for blurring the boundaries between art and life reflecting his aesthetics of freakishness and narcissistic desire his engagement in BDSM practices and the performance of extremity and the posttranssexual ethos behind his hybrid embodiments and trans-queer visual language.

Last Artist Standing
Living and Sustaining a Creative Life over 50
Last Artist Standing shares the essays of the lives of 31 artists over the age of 50 how they have sustained their creative lives what paths they have led showing who contemporary artists are today.
They are mentors to other artists having learned how to thrive and be creative through decades of life's travails. Sharon Louden wants to share these stories with the public so that their models can be replicated by all age groups both within and beyond the art world.
This collection addresses the ability of these artists to remain contemporary as they adapt through generational shifts the physical financial and professional challenges they have overcome to remain vibrant and sustaining artists and their role as inspirational models to others who may be turning to art late in their lives.

LIFE
A Transdisciplinary Inquiry
LIFE: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry examines nature cognition and society as an interwoven tapestry across disciplinary boundaries. This volume explores how information and communication are instrumental in and for living systems acknowledging an integrative account of media as environments and technologies.
The aim of the collection is a fuller and richer account of everyday life through a spectrum of insights from internationally known scholars of the natural sciences (physical and life sciences) social sciences and the arts.
How or should life be defined? If life is a medium how is it mediated? Viewed as interactions transactions and contexts of ecosystems life can be recognized through patterns across the sciences including metabolisms habitats and lifeworlds. The book also integrates discussions of embodiment ecological values literacies and critiques with bioinspired synthetic and historical design approaches to envision what could constitute artful living in an ever-evolving interdependent world.
The volume foregrounds systemic approaches to life drawing on a wide range of disciplines and fields including architecture art biology bioengineering chemistry cinema studies communication computer science conservation cultural studies design ecology environmental studies information science landscape architecture geography journalism materials science media archaeology media studies philosophy physics plant signalling and development political economy sociology and system dynamics.
This is the second volume in the MEDIA • LIFE • UNIVERSE Trilogy. It follows and builds upon the 2021 collection MEDIA: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry ISBN 9781789382655

Let's Talk about Critique
Reimagining Art and Design Education
This book explores the tradition of critique in art and design education. It examines how critique as a signature pedagogy in the field has evolved how it falls short and what else it can be. Current practices are contextualized and suggestions are made for ways to have more open inclusive and dynamic classroom conversations about art and design. Included is a discussion of the history of critique grounding current practice in the discipline’s history the field of education and characteristics of contemporary students.
The book is designed to be useful with an array of critique methods written by experienced arts educators. Each one guides the reader through a method describing “why you might do it this way” and “for what group purpose or type of assignment”. The text explores what the art critique is and what it can be offering practical updated approaches for faculty and students seeking more educationally beneficial and nuanced critique

Leaping into Dance Literacy through the Language of Dance®
The main aim of this book is to present the theory and purpose underpinning the approaches to dance literacy as explored by the Language of Dance® community in the USA and UK. Through their teacher training programs they are changing the face of dance-based dance literacy using motif notation.
Through their teacher training programs they are changing the face of dance-based dance literacy using motif notation. This book reveals how dance notation literacy has changed due to practices being focused on constructivist and constructionist pedagogy. Based on work by dance educator Ann Hutchinson Guest and expanded upon by her protégés this is the first book of its kind to bring together theory praxis original research outcomes taxonomies model lesson plans learning domain taxonomies of dance and voices of dance teachers who have explored using dance notation literacy. We are in a new era for educating with dance notation focusing on learners’ engagement by making connections between the learning domains using constructivist and constructionist learning approaches.
Arts-literate dancers can deepen their dance craft and transfer their arts knowledge capacities and skills to lifelong learning. Dance-based dance literacy practices using notation enhance learners’ flexibility adaptability self-direction initiative productivity responsibility leadership and cross-cultural skills.
The book will appeal to dance educators focusing on cognitive and metacognitive learning in dance using communication problem-solving and critical thinking.
Useful for preschool and primary teachers aiming to integrate dance into classroom experiences and for secondary teachers teaching dance and looking to upgrade their approach to dance literacy so students are able to achieve higher level cognitive learning problem solving and social skills in dance classrooms.
Choreographers and dance teachers will find new approaches to dance making and to expressing their craft using a system that is well codified and now augmented with examples to guide them with making their own projects and processes.
Anyone with an interest in the idea of dance literacy will find concrete examples of how to put their knowledge into practice to advance their teaching and dance making.

Local Childhoods in Global Times
This book presents different perspectives of childhood. With contributors from across the globe there are examples of local childhoods from different national contexts including America Australia Finland Hong-Kong Indonesia Japan Norway and Sweden.
Each chapter presents a different focus on early childhood showing the diversity and complexity across multiple countries. Issues emerge around multi-language development nationalism and multiculturalism. Across the chapters concepts around cultural theories of every-day life also show the ways in which practices of and in relation to children function to produce childhood as an artefact fiction and instrument.
It helps readers to develop an understanding of how changing perspectives on children and childhood and identity are expressed among children families and educators in and outside educational environments. It brings together active researchers in the field of global childhoods to sustain and develop our community of research and scholarship promoting internationalization through global childhoods as a way of cultural diversity and acceptance.
The book reflects on early childhood before and leading up to Covid-19. The editors were able to create a historical snapshot of early childhood pre-Covid from several countries. The pandemic has demanded major changes around learning agency voice and lived experience for children around the world. In some countries there are children in lockdown without access to learning and who have ceased to be recognised as a child. In other countries life has continued with social distancing and masks in educational spaces.
It will be a useful resource for students and academics in early childhood education and education studies more generally as well as practitioners and educators.

Living Histories
Global Conversations in Art Education
Living Histories is a collection of new scholarship that explores histories of art education through a series of international contexts. The first truly international text highlighting histories of art education with contributions from over 30 scholars based in 18 countries.
Art education holds an important role in promoting historical awareness of the multiple relations that connect pedagogic inquiry with culture heritage place and identity locally and globally. To keep pace with the movements of art and society Garnet and Sinner consider that art education requires more inclusive and holistic versions of history from transnational perspectives that break down barriers and cross borders in the pursuit of more informed and diverse understandings of the field. The broad focus of this edited collection is to provide both new perspectives of art education from around the world and to introduce transnationalism into the field as a way to conceptualize the entanglements of historical research in our globalized age. Transnational histories of art education focus on the linkages and flows that shift focus away from the nation-state to other transnational actors such as individuals communities institutions and/or organizations.
Contributions from scholars and educators based and working in Australia Austria Brazil Canada Colombia Croatia Czech Republic Finland India Iran Japan Malta South Africa Spain Trinidad and Tobago UK USA and Zimbabwe.
Includes chapters that adapt an approach of ‘artwork histories’ to explore the legacies of art education as an anticipatory mode of historical thinking and practice across the visual arts and sites of art education. The book offers an opportunity for authentic engagement and intellectual risk which includes the rejection of ‘correct’ interpretations of historical problems. As active agents art education historians are not passive collectors of the past but engaged in new ways of doing history predicated on cultivating stories that move beyond representation to attend to aesthetic dimensions that bridge historiography material culture oral history art history and teacher education. Living Histories provides an interpretation of historical thinking and consciousness through the interrelations of time and space to provoke critical and creative practices in education.
This is the latest book in the Artwork Scholarship series which aims to invite debate on and provide an essential resource for transnational scholars engaged in creative research involving visual literary and performative arts.
With contributors from 18 countries this book will have a substantial international readership among art educators and those interested in the history of art education primarily in universities and colleges. It will also be particularly useful for graduate students.
It will also appeal to scholars in arts education more broadly - music education dance education theatre education scholars cultural and art historians art theorists international educators and curators.

Landscape and the Moving Image
Elwes takes a journey through the twin histories of landscape art and experimental moving image and discovers how they coalesce in the work of artists from the 1970s to the present day.
Drawing on a wide geographical sampling Elwes considers issues that have preoccupied film and video artists over the years ranging from ecology gender race performativity conflict colonialism and our relationship to the nonhuman creatures with whom we share our world. The book is informed by the belief that artists can provide an embodied emotional response to landscape which is an essential driver in the urgent task of combating the environmental crisis we now face.
The book comprises a series of essays that explore how the moving image mediates our relationship to and understanding of landscapes. The focus is on artists’ film and video and draws on work from the 1970s to the present day. Early chapters map the theoretical terrain for both landscape and artists’ moving image creating a foundation for the chapters that follow devoted to practice. These address themes of identity politics performativity and animals and examine examples of British ‘weather-blown films’ and work from around the world including Indigenous Australian film landscapes. The book offers an informed personal view of the subject and threaded through the narrative is a concern with the environment and the vexed question of whether an appreciation of nature’s aesthetics undermines a commitment to ecology.
The book is written in a clear engaging style and is enlivened by Elwes's own experiences as a video artist writer and curator and the primary material she draws on derived from conversations with fellow practitioners across the years.
As a practitioner Elwes was a key figure in the early phases of video art in the UK as well as a curator and critic. She was professor of moving image art at the University of the Arts London; and is founding editor of the Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ)
This book will appeal to students undergraduate and post-graduate Ph.D. candidates researchers practitioners teachers and lecturers and a general readership of interested gallery-going public.

Lightwork
Texts on and from Collaborative Multimedia Theatre
This volume brings together performance texts from nine productions by the experimental theatre company Lightwork and one playtext from Lightwork’s precursor company Academy Productions presented between 1997 and 2011.
Lightwork specialized in collaboratively created and multimedia performance. The company also experimented with several performance forms that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century including verbatim and site-specific approaches. Because of this the texts cover a range of forms and formats – scripted plays such as Here’s What I Did With My Body One Day by Dan Rebellato and Blavatsky by Clare Bayley; multimedia adaptations of classical myths such as Back At You (based on the story of Echo and Narcissus) and Once I was Dead (based on the story of Daedalus and Icarus); site-specific experiments such as The Good Actor which took place in various spaces across Hoxton Hall a Victorian theatre in London’s East End; and the use of verbatim witness testimony from the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina War Crimes section in Sarajevo Story.
The defining aspect of the Lightwork aesthetic is that multimedia and scenographic experimentation does not come at the expense of the mainstays of dramatic theatre: character story and emotional resonance. What lies at the heart of the Lightwork shows you will encounter here are human-scale stories: relationships between lovers or family members confrontations with the past (both as personal and as cultural history) and in many cases matters of life or death that entail wrestling with causality consequence and fate.
The twelve-year span covered by this work reflects a period in British performance practice when the interrelation of page and stage process and production text and ‘non-text’ were being radically rethought. In the collaborative and processual theatre making that Lightwork exemplifies the text may be one element among many and is more likely to be the outcome of the process than its precursor.
How do such playtexts (or performance texts) differ from those that are conceived and scripted by a single desk-based playwright in advance of the rehearsal? What gaps are left when the work of many hands is channelled through the pen (or keyboard) of one among them? The texts featured in this volume represent a number of answers to these questions about the nature of writing for the stage.
The performance texts are each preceded (and sometime followed) by short essays written by some of the many people who have been involved in productions by Lightwork including established academics and theatre practitioners: David Annen Clare Bayley Gregg Fisher Sarah Gorman Andy Lavender Aneta Mancewicz Bella Merlin Alex Mermikides Jo Parker Dan Rebellato and Ayse Tashkiran. Their contributions reflect the collaborative nature of the company and the respect that it accorded the various disciplinary perspectives that make up a theatre company.
There are sections on scenography sound design and technical operation as well as on those crafts that might more usually draw attention: directing writing and acting. These contributions offer an insight into the collaborative multi-layered and sometimes messy business of their creation from an individual maker’s or spectator’s point of view.
This book will be invaluable for those who are making studying or researching performance in the twenty-first century and an essential resource for the rehearsal room.
Primary readership will include researchers educators students and practitioners interested in creative practice theatre-making integrated design and performance and contemporary theatre.
It will be an important resource for those on theatre and performance courses at all levels as well as acting theatre and performance design dramaturgy and direction courses creative writing courses and media arts programmes.
It will have appeal for general readers interested in new texts and processes in theatre and performance and individual texts are likely to be of interest to specialist researchers working in related fields – for example performance and the occult (Blavatsky) performance and conflict (Sarajevo Story).

Living Metal
Metal Scenes around the World
This is the first study of its kind focusing exclusively on scenes throughout the world; it makes an important contribution to metal studies.
Metal Scenes around the World is a collection of thirteen chapters that examine metal scenes from smaller communities like Dayton Ohio in the USA to entire countries such as Estonia. The goal of the book is to expand the research on metal scenes.
This is the only book produced on metal scenes to date and it will lead the way to more research in this new area of metal studies. The strongest element of the book is its international focus with chapters from such diverse settings as post-apartheid South Africa Graz Nantes Brazil and Turkey. The chapters are detailed richly embedded in local histories and contexts and provide important analyses of their respective scenes.
Foreword from Henkka Seppälä former bassist with the Finnish metal band Children Of Bodom.
Primary readership will be composed of fans and scholars of metal music and those in the fields of anthropology musicology and history. The diversity of the chapters connects metal to other disciplines in the music field and the book is likely to have appeal more widely to anyone who likes music.

Lessons from a Multispecies Studio
Uncovering Ecological Understanding and Biophilia through Creative Reciprocity
A highly original book in which the author proposes an expanded field of aesthetics guided by her philosophy and approach to working through the ways that philosophy can be manifested in art. She demonstrates the depth and complexity that she brings to her work through a sustained and committed relationship to working with animals across multiple projects.
The book tells real-world stories about the author’s creative encounters – with animals plant life mineral beings and forest ecosystems – in her Vancouver-based interspecies art practice Animal Lover and how they shifted her outlook on the Earth and all of life. Each chapter presents a weaving together of personal reflection interdisciplinary research critical thought and art methods. The threads converge on this main point: the need to move away from anthropocentrism and towards ecological understanding reciprocity and biophilia. The local journeys in each chapter are guided by more-than-human ways of knowing which provide an expanded sense of the world and an understanding of the imperative for action. This book is an invitation to readers to step into more-than-human worlds re-sense life and re-think their relationship with the planet and all its inhabitants. It asks readers to slow down look around and listen – and feel. Love for life is practised by all beings in their lively projects. It is what joins us together in the relational flourishing that is the vital wondrous complexity of the Earth.
The Anthropocene is a term used to describe the geological era in which we live marking the realization that humans have become such a force that we are affecting the Earth’s air lands oceans climate. At its core in the modern Eurocentric societies that typify this era is an entrenched worldview of nature as a means to fuel global capitalist-colonial systems. This anthropocentric worldview justifies the colonization and exploitation of ecosystems and nonhuman life seen as ‘resources’ available for human expansion and prosperity and readily available as free labour. The consequential outcomes are manifest in today’s climate emergency and ecological degradations including animal slavery industrial farming over-fishing deforestation and habitat loss and the coming environmental collapse with its sixth mass extinction. Within recent decades the sustainability of anthropocentric views have been called into question across disciplines. Lessons from a Multispecies Art Studio joins with these movements and offers new applied approaches – from interspecies art – to help shape and evolve human outlooks emotions and actions.
Primary readership will be research-creation academic artists working with animals and researchers working around animals; more-than-human-animal activists; artists and emerging artists as well as to art theorists and to those with a strong interest in environmental values.

The Lure of the Social
Encounters with Contemporary Artists
This new and original book is a creative practice ethnography which navigates a spectrum where at one end the author works closely with socially engaged artists as part of her ethnographic research and at the other she tries to find a critical distance to write about their art projects and the institutional structures that support their work such as art schools and conferences.
Artists increasingly find themselves working in participatory settings where skills in social engagement are as essential as their creative skills. The author was involved in the field of social practices from its early stages and stayed engaged with the primary movers in the field for nearly two decades as a witness participant and critical observer. Her writing evokes the people and places she discusses and her writing style is personal and accessible.
Over the course of the book readers are introduced to artists and their work and to the key debates and issues facing this fast-growing and emergent field. The author navigates the contradictions and paradoxes of this field of practice through description and analysis and importantly gives voice to the artists who are working to make art relevant in times of social and political uncertainty.
The problems addressed by social practices as well as their contradictions very much reflect our troubled political global moment. This book is a significant contribution to the field – few people have followed the development of social practices for as long as Coombs and her dual perspective as an art critic and anthropologist make her ideally placed to describe and evaluate the institutions and practices. While there are many books already in this growing field the experimental and intensely personal nature of this book sets it apart. It could be a useful teaching tool to generate debate around the tensions and paradoxes inherent in the field of social practices and politically engaged art. Students will appreciate the author’s attempt to convey what it was really like to be there at certain key events and insights gained from direct conversations with the artists curators and writers shaping the field.
Relevant to academics working in and students studying art and social practice community arts programmes contemporary anthropology cultural historians and those with an interest in the sociology of art protest or activism.
Will appeal to artists writers and students interested in the history of how social practices developed as a field through its practitioners discourse and lived experience.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
A Game Music Companion
Some 22 years after its creation The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is still held in high critical regard as one of the finest examples of the video game medium. The same is true of the game’s music whose superlative reception continues to be evident whether in the context of the game or in orchestral concerts and recordings of the game’s music.
Given music’s well-established significance for the video game form it is no coincidence that music is placed at the forefront of this most lauded and loved of games. In Ocarina of Time music connects and unifies all aspects of the game from the narrative conceit to the interactive mechanics from the characters to the virtual worlds and even into the activity of legions of fans and gamers who play replay and reconfigure the music in an enduring cultural site that has Ocarina of Time at its centre. As video game music studies begins to mature into a coherent field it is now possible to take the theoretical apparatus and critical approaches that have been developed in antecedent scholarship and put these into practice in the context of an extended concrete game example.
The most extensive investigation into the music of a single game yet undertaken this book serves three important primary purposes: first it provides a historical-critical account of the music of an important video game text; second it uses this investigation to explore wider issues in music and media studies (including interactivity fan cultures and music and technology); and third it serves as a model for future in-depth studies of video game music.

Language of Tomorrow
Towards a Transcultural Visual Communication System in a Posthuman Condition
This book gives an overview of the development of the evolution of language through a philosophical lens and is a culmination of research combining visual communication semiotic theory cultural studies linguistics artificial intelligence and new media.
It discusses the future of communication – through a pictographic framework – and the possibility of developing a standardized universal pictographic communication system that fosters mutual understanding and bridges diverse cultures. The research aims to locate the direction that research and development of a universal language for the posthuman era could take through the contextualization and realization of associated practice.
Highly relevant in today's discussion about globalization language and culture the combination of the view of design philosophy culture and technology makes this book unique.
Postgraduate students of design art philosophy and researchers and academics in the fields. Scholars and students working in linguistics. Cultural studies. Theory of art and design. Artificial intelligence (AI) and art-tech.

Lesbians on Television
New Queer Visibility & The Lesbian Normal
The twenty-first century has seen LGBTQ+ rights emerge at the forefront of public discourse and national politics in ways that would once have been hard to imagine. This book offers a unique and layered account of the complex dynamics in the modern moment of social change drawing together critical social and cultural theory as well as empirical research which includes interviews and multi-platform media analyses.
This original new study puts forward a much-needed analysis of twenty-first century television and lesbian visibility. Books addressing the representation of lesbians have tended to focus on film; analysis of queer characters on television has usually focused on representations of gay males. Other recent books have attempted to address lesbian gay and trans representation together with the result that none are examined in sufficient detail – here the exclusive focus on lesbian representation allows a fuller discussion. Until now much of the research on lesbian and gay representation has tended to employ only textual analysis. The combination of audience research with analysis in this book brings a new angle to the debates as does the critical review of the tropes of lesbian representation. The earlier stereotypes of pathological monsters and predators are discussed alongside the more recent trends of ‘lesbian chic’ and ‘lesbianism as a phase’.

L.A. Chic
A Locational History of Los Angeles Fashion
Los Angeles is undergoing a makeover. Leaving behind its image as all freeways and suburbs sunshine and noir it is reinventing itself for the twenty-first century as a walkable pedestrian friendly ecologically healthy and global urban hotspot of fashion and style while driving initiatives to rejuvenate its downtown core public spaces and ethnic neighborhoods. By providing a locational history of Los Angeles fashion and style mythologies through the lens of institutions such as manufacturing museums and designers and readings of contemporary film literature and new media L.A. Chic provides an in-depth analysis of the social changes urban processes desires and politics that inform how the good life is being re-imagined in Los Angeles.
Throughout the book Susan Ingram and Markus Reisenleitner dig up submerged and marginalized elements of the city’s cultural history but also tap into the global circuits of urban affect that are being mobilized for promoting L.A. as an example for the global multi-ethnic city of the future. Engagingly written highly visual and featuring numerous photographs throughout L.A. Chic will appeal to any culturally inclined reader with an interest in Los Angeles its cultural history and modern urban style.

Landscape and the Science Fiction Imaginary

Lexicon for an Affective Archive
To study an archive or archival materials is to encounter an affective and critical practice involved in the construction of memory. Lexicon for an Affective Archive edited by Giulia Palladini and Marco Pustianaz is an international collection of these encounters offering glimpses into the intimate relations inherent in finding remembering (or imagining) and creating an archive. Bringing together voices from a variety of fields across the humanities performance studies and contemporary art and engaging in a multidisciplinary analysis this beautifully designed and fully illustrated volume advances the idea of an “affective archive” as a useful conceptual tool – a tool which contributes to an understanding of an expanded notion of an archive and its central role in contemporary visual and performing arts.
A co-publication with NInA and Live Art Development Agency.

The Lived Experience of Improvisation
In Music, Learning and Life
