Browse Books
Outback
Westerns in Australian Cinema
Focusing on the incidence of the ‘Westerns’ film genre in the 120-odd years of Australian cinema history exploring how the American genre has been adapted to the changing Australian social political and cultural contexts of their production including the shifting emphases in the representation of the Indigenous population.
The idea for the book came to the author while he was writing two recent articles. One was an essay for Screen Education on the western in Australian cinema of the 21st century; the other piece was the review of a book entitled Film and the Historian for the online journal Inside Story . Between the two he saw the interesting prospect of a book-length study of the role of the western genre in Australia’s changing political and cultural history over the last century – and the ways in which film can without didacticism provide evidence of such change. Key matters include the changing attitudes to and representation of Indigenous peoples and of women's roles in Australian Westerns.
When one considers that the longest narrative film then seen in Australia and quite possibly the world was Charles Tait’s The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) it is clear that Australia has some serious history in the genre and Kelly has ridden again in Justin Kurzel’s 2020 adaptation of Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang.
Watch This Space
Exploring Cinematic Intersections Between the Body, Architecture, and the City
This book and its individual essays examine key emerging and evolving practices theories and methodologies that operate in the blurred boundary between spatial design disciplines such as architecture interior and urban design and film and moving image studies more broadly.
The collection is an exploration of the evolving interdisciplinary rhetoric connecting spatial design disciplines like architecture and urban design with film and moving image studies. It is premised on the argument that the understanding of ‘space’ in these areas continues to draw on each other’s fields of reference and that in recent times this has expanded further to the point in which it blurs with multiple other disciplines including media art cultural studies and art practice to name but three. The result of this evolving interdisciplinary understating of ‘space’ in design disciplines and moving image studies is an expanded field of haptic-visual practice and theory that can be investigated as both a material and an image-based construct.
It engages with this evolving set of ideas and underlines how each of its primary discipline areas now increasingly incorporate tools and methodologies from each other’s fields. For example architects routinely engage with cinematic practice as a means of exploring space cultural theorists inspect filmic space as a two-dimensional surrogate of the real media artists incorporate knowledge of spatial design in video installations and film makers create spaces on screen that are informed by architectural theory. This all follows what can be defined as a discursive turn in our view of spatial relationships across disciplines which by definition is complex eclectic occasionally contradictory and at times characterised by surprising confluences.
Conceived as a form of mapping of these confluences and contradictions this book collects varied essays that in their own unique ways explore the diversity of how we today define understand and engage with notions of the body in architectural-urban space. It does so through a triadic structure that progresses from haptic relationships of the body in architectural space through film readings of represented space in mainstream cinema and concludes with ‘experimental spatial’ projects inspired by film and the moving image. This tripartite structure specifically encourages a look across disciplines broadening architectural urbanist media and cinematic concerns through insightful case studies that engage with their subjects by means of novel techniques i.e. employing graphic software for an analysis of pre-digital films deconstructing cinematography in modernist classics or researching urban edgelands via collaging and montage etc.
Decolonizing Islamic Art in Africa
New Approaches to Muslim Expressive Cultures
This collection explores the dynamic place of Muslim visual and expressive culture in processes of decolonization across the African continent. Presenting new methodologies for accentuating African agency and expression in the stories we tell about Islamic art it likewise contributes to recent widespread efforts to “decolonize” the art historical canon.
The contributors to this volume explore the dynamic place of Islamic art architecture and creative expression in processes of decolonization across the African continent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Bringing together new work by leading specialists in the fields of African Islamic and modern arts and visual cultures the book directs unprecedented attention to the agency and contributions of African and Muslim artists in articulating modernities in local and international arenas. Interdisciplinary and transregional in scope it enriches the under-told story of Muslim experiences and expression on the African continent home to nearly half a million Muslims or a third of the global Muslim population.
Furthermore it elucidates the role of Islam and its expressive cultures in post-colonial articulations of modern identities and heritage as expressed by a diverse range of actors and communities based in Africa and its diaspora; as such the book counters notions of Islam as a retrograde or static societal phenomenon in Africa or elsewhere. Contributors propose new methodologies for accentuating human agency and experience over superficial disciplinary boundaries in the stories we tell about art-making and visual expression thus contributing to widespread efforts to decolonize scholarship on histories of modern expression.
Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa
Presents new perspectives on queer visual culture in the Southwest Asia North Africa region from queer artists as well as scholars who work on queer themes. With contributions from both scholars and artists this volume demonstrates that queer visual culture in the SWANA region is not only extant but is also entering an era of exciting growth in terms of its versatility and consciousness. The volume focuses on artworks produced in the contemporary era while recognizing historical and contextual connections to Islamic art and culture within
localities and regions from the pre-modern and modern eras.
By framing this volume as unambiguously located within queer studies the editors challenge existing literature that merely includes some examples of queer studies or queer representation but does not necessarily use queer studies as a lens through which to engage with visual culture and/or with the SWANA region. Through four interrelated sections - Gender and Normativity Trans* Articulations Intersectional Sexuality and Queer SWANA - this volume probes several previously unexplored academic areas namely the intersections of queer studies with other fields.
Part of the Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East series.
Critical Digital Art History
Interface and Data Politics in the Post-Digital Era
Digital Art History has often aligned itself with the practical concerns of digital technology and the responsibilities of art institutions and associated institutional roles such as collection managers information specialists curators and conservators. This emphasis on practicalities and implementation while undeniably important has often meant that there is little room for critical examination of the broader implications of digital technology and computational methodologies in art history.
This anthology seeks to address the dearth of critical reflection by approaching the use of digital technology in art history from a theoretical perspective and critically assessing specific case study examples. This book also considers the political dimensions associated with the large-scale digitization and the application of digital tools within museums and collection management.
A long-standing concern of the field—and also a major focal point of this book—is museum and collecting practices in the digital era. While there is a certain degree of continuity in the field there are some important shifts and changes too. One of the key changes is the widespread uptake of artificial intelligence tools and an increased attention to both the broader historical and societal aspects of the use of digital tools within museums and collection management.
World Film Locations: Los Angeles
Volume 2
World Film Locations: Los Angeles Volume 2 is an engaging and highly visual city-wide tour of both well known and slightly lesser known films shot on location in one of the birthplaces of cinema and the ‘screen spectacle’. It pairs 50 synopses of carefully chosen film scenes with evocative full-colour film stills.
When the World Film Locations series was launched in 2011 with volumes on Los Angeles New York Paris and Tokyo the world was a different place. Although interest in film locations has grown steadily for years as people seek to walk in the footsteps of their cinematic idols by visiting sites from their favorite movies – the recent global lockdown seems to have only increased an appetite for cinetourism; prompting us to consider a second volume for one of the world’s most evocative and enduring locations. The city of Los Angeles with its meandering sun-baked sweep and beautifully fractured topography continues to lure filmmakers into its clutches – affording an endless panoply of locations to prop up both character and story. Since 2011 thousands of new productions have made the most of what the city has to offer; using reusing and discovering places that will surely become sites of pilgrimage in years to come - and while this volume includes just 50 of them our modest selection is carefully curated to compliment volume 1 and further reveal both the well-known and more hidden parts of a Los Angeles in constant flux.
The heart of Hollywood’s star-studded film industry for more than a century Los Angeles and its abundant and ever-changing locales – from the Santa Monica Pier to the infamous and now-defunct Ambassador Hotel – have set the scene for a wide variety of cinematic treasures from Chinatown to Forrest Gump Falling Down to the coming-of-age classic Boyz n The Hood.
This second volume marks an engaging citywide tour of the many films shot on location in this birthplace of cinema and the screen spectacle. World Film Locations: Los Angeles Vol 2 pairs fifty incisive synopses of carefully chosen film scenes – both famous and lesser-known – with an accompanying array of evocative full-colour film stills demonstrating how motion pictures have contributed to the multifarious role of the city in our collective consciousness as well as how key cinematic moments reveal aspects of its life and culture that are otherwise largely hidden from view.
Insightful essays and interviews throughout turn the spotlight on the important directors iconic locations thematic elements and historical periods that provide insight into Los Angeles and its vibrant cinematic culture. Rounding out this information are city maps with information on how to locate key features as well as photographs showing featured locations as they appear now.
A guided tour of the City of Angels conducted by the likes of John Cassavetes Robert Altman Nicholas Ray Michael Mann and Roman Polanski World Film Locations: Los Angeles Vol 2 is a concise and user-friendly guide to how Los Angeles has captured the imaginations of both filmmakers and those of us sitting transfixed in theatres worldwide.
Dissens and Sensibility
Why Art Matters
An introduction to pedagogy of dissensus.
A pedagogy of dissensus is informed by the dissensual characteristics of art. The book includes both theoretical foundations and examples of how the theory is unfolded in different contexts ranging from educational practice to arts-based research. Motivated by the author’s long-held interest in the role of art in society in general and education in particular it is a vital new contribution to arts-based approaches to education.
Referencing philosophers and theorists such as Jacques Rancière Gert Biesta Dennis Atkinson and Helga Eng Lisbet Skregelid demonstrates why art matters because of its ability to create necessary disturbance and resistance in education. In this book she argues that art has something to offer education because it challenges existing norms has no definitive answers and contributes to new ways of seeing both oneself others and one’s surroundings. Placing art at the center and enabling dissensus in education can contribute as a contrast to the dominating policy led by economic ambition and competition.
Infrastructure in Dystopian and Post-apocalyptic Film, 1968-2021
Dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies from 1968 to 2021 usually conclude with optimism with a window into what is possible in the face of social dysfunction - and worse. The infrastructure that peeks through at the edges of the frame surfaces some of the concrete ways in which dystopian and post-apocalyptic survivors have made do with their damaged and destroyed worlds.
If the happy endings so common to mass-audience films do not provide an all-encompassing vision of a better world the presence of infrastructure whether old or retrofitted or new offers a starting point for the continued work of building toward the future.
Film imaginings energy transportation water waste and their combination in the food system reveal what might be essential infrastructure on which to build the new post-dystopian and post-apocalyptic communities. We can look to dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies for a sense of where we might begin.
Gender, Race and Religion in Video Game Music
This book provides semiotically-focused analyses and interpretations of video game music focusing specifically on musical representation of three demographic diversity traits. Adopting a narratologist orientation to supplement existing ludological scholarship these analyses apply music semiotics to crucial modern-day issues such as representation of gender race and religion in video games.
An original and welcome contribution to the field it considers musical meaning in relation to the aspects of gender race and religion. This book will help readers to develop language and context in which to consider video game music in terms of society and representation and will encourage future research in these critical areas.
Yee analyses music's contributions to video games' narrative and thematic meanings specifically concerning three master categories of identity – gender race and religion. Containing twenty-five detailed analytical case studies of musical representation in video game music it sets out theoretical and conceptual frameworks beneficial for interpreting musical meaning from video game soundtracks. Though players and commentators may be tempted to view a game's soundtrack as mere 'background music' this research demonstrates video game music's social relevance as a major factor impacting players' cultural attitudes values and beliefs.
Part I explores immersion interactivity and interpretation in video game music proposing a theory of 'interpretative interactivity' to account for players' semiotic agency in dialogue with their ludic agency. Part II explores gender representation in a trajectory from conventional gender construction alternative femininities/masculinities and potential for non-binary representational possibilities. Part III explores musical representation of nationality culture and race proposing the concept of 'racialised fantasy' and applying frameworks from race scholarship to connect media representations of race to real world racial justice movements. Part IV examines religion introducing the concept of 'sonic iconography' to connect theological
meanings to the use of sacred music in video game music.
Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective
Constellating performance archives
Taking as its starting point the first-ever retrospective exhibition (2021) of performance art icon Jess Dobkin the book reflects on the internationally acclaimed artist’s playful and provocative practice as performer activist curator and community leader. At the same time it grapples with a question that is vital for art and performance studies: How do archives perform?
More than a discrete showing of a single artist’s work the exhibition including its new staging in book form is a large-scale research experiment in performance curation investigating what it might mean for art institutions to take seriously the embodied and communal nature of performance art in their practices of archiving and museological display.
In Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective a cast of renowned international performance theorists and artists dive into this exploration alongside Dobkin curator Emelie Chhangur and performance theorist and dramaturg Laura Levin. These contributions appear alongside a riot of full colour photographs providing access to Dobkin’s celebrated artistic productions from the last 30 years.
Call Me by Your Name
Perspectives on the Film
Adapted by James Ivory from André Aciman’s novel and directed by Luca Guadagnino the film Call Me by Your Name has been passionately received among audiences and critics ever since its 2017 release.
A love story between seventeen-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and graduate student Oliver (Armie Hammer) and set in 1983 ‘Somewhere in northern Italy’ Call Me by Your Name presents a gay relationship in a romantic idyll seemingly untroubled by outside pressures prejudices or tragedy. While this means it offers audiences welcome opportunities to swoon in front of an LGBTQ+ romance that equals classic heterosexual romances onscreen its relevance or political significance today may not be immediately apparent. And yet the film is abundantly infused with narrative thematic and stylistic elements that can be interpreted as speaking powerfully to contemporary audiences on questions of sexual identity.
This edited collection addresses how the film helps inform our understanding of contemporary sexual identity and romance. How does this love story explore wider tensions that exist between the specific and the general between the open and the hidden and between the past and the present? The contributors to the collection explore these questions in stimulating and contemplative manners.
In Smithereens
The Costume Remains of Lea Anderson's Stage
What happens to contemporary dance costumes when the show is over and their surrounding legacy slips from view? How might costumes be mobilised towards representational repair post-performance? Located within Lea Anderson’s choreographic archive this book charts a series of hands-on interventions with the fabric remains of her companies The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs. Centred on practices of Disintegration Preservation Transaction and Display they offer provocative modes of engaging with the physical leftovers of performance the degrading of memory and legacy around pre-digital theatre work and the temporal material transitions of artefacts enduring outside of traditional museological contexts.
How might we regard these mercurial items? As precious relics to be protected in museum holdings ghostly harbingers of residual performance histories or inconvenient detritus? The book travels from props-makers’ studios to auction houses and galleries incorporating film-making artefact handling and curation along the way in lively dialogue with perspectives from dance history material culture sociology and performance studies. The choreographic archive is envisioned as repository of the awkward scattered remains of legacy blown apart into fragments. Smithereens which can if we allow them demand an alternative after-life that disrupts the vanishing inflicted on these costumes and the companies who danced in them.
The Architect's Dream
Form and Philosophy in Architectural Imagination
Sean Pickersgill demonstrates that the goal of creating meaningful architecture can take a variety of critical and philosophical paths. The importance of architecture as an expression of broad complex social drivers is complemented by the equally popular idea that architecture as an intellectual pursuit retains its own autonomy as a self-referential culture. This book uniquely places the emphasis for innovation in architecture within the domain of critical thinking generally and a specific understanding of the semantics of built form.
The book draws on a broad range of subject areas from film to philosophy to anthropology to mathematics and economics to show that the path to meaningful creative practice is always based in an understanding of the principal drivers for change and meaning in society.
It is not a simple recipe book or workshop manual for others to reproduce. It requires the engaged reader to employ their own creative abilities to find what potential lies in each of the propositions and it will encourage the scholastic architect to continue to mine the rich veins of intellectual culture to demonstrate the latent purposiveness inherent in all meaningful architecture.
Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art
Some have called this an age of absurdity and as such Contemporary Absurdities Existential Crises and Visual Art presents the contributions of artists theorists and scholars whose words and works investigate the absurd as a condition of a tactic for and a subject in the contemporary.
The absurd is a lens on the disturbances of our moment and a challenge to the propositions about and solutions for the world. The absurd shakes off the paralysis that what we know must be the only thing we (re)produce. Those willing to recognize that and confront it rather than flee from it are thereby introduced to the political writ large.
This edited collection adopts ideas and practices associated with the absurd to explain how the contemporary moment is absurd and how absurdity is a useful potentially radical tool within the contemporary.
Critical art allows the absurd a space within which audiences can observe their own tendencies and assumptions. The absurd in art reveals our inculcation into hegemonic belief structures and the necessity to question the systems to which we subscribe. Today we see the absurd in memes performative politics and art expressing the
confusion and disorientation wrought by the endless emerging crises of our 24/7 relations.
Obsessions of a Showwoman
The Performance Worlds of Marisa Carnesky
Explores ‘showwomanry’ tracing a trajectory of incredible weird women at work: women who were stone eaters fire walkers women who hypnotized alligators or presented crucifixion shows; women in entertainment who worked for themselves; women that were often referred to as showgirls despite their extraordinary skill and artistry.
Carnesky continues an important lineage of performing women with bombastic theatrical flair and an extraordinary skill that ‘do not work for the management or the man. Showwomen work for themselves and other people work for them”. Carnesky has been a central figure in performance and live art during the last thirty years; her practice as a showwoman promotes alternative visions of matriarchal entertainment utopias and a new relationship to women’s position to power and politics.
The term showwoman introduces a new identity a new kind of performer who does not control or exploit others but opens up a possibility for collaboration that enables ‘shared experiences of visceral euphoria applause loss shape abjection hustle and struggle marginalisation and the fight against patriarchal injustices’ (Carnesky
2019 53). The book will use Carnesky’s work to showcase women working in radical ways treading the margins of cabaret and live art disrupting normative ideologies through the spectacular and opening new lines of feminist enquiry through weirdness absurdity provocation in live art and popular culture.
The Physical and the Digital City
Invisible Forces, Data, and Manifestations
The Physical and the Digital City is a unique collection of projects where researchers and designers show how the theories of technology underpinning the digital urban environment are applied in practical and spatial terms. The authors are experts in their respective fields who pursue cutting edge solutions for city-making and consider the theoretical premise critically. It is designed to be a self-contained and interdisciplinary reference text to introduce students designers and scholars to the idea of physical/digital and its urban application.
The book will help students and designers to develop a clear understanding of the physical and digital principles underpinning urban assemblages and a solid set of references to start working within this topic with confidence. Of interest to all students and scholars interested in urban studies (geography planning urban design social sciences and humanities) and human-computer interaction (media studies computer science social sciences cognitive sciences anthropology and psychology). The book will clarify the role of digital technologies within the city along with its possible implications for people and communities.
It is oriented to the academic and professional communities interested in architectural urban and digital design from different angles. This includes those interested in computational architecture for example eCAADe Education and Research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe ACADIA Association of Computer Aided Design in Architecture CAADRIA Computer Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia SIGraDi Sociedad Iberoamericana de Grafica Digital CAAD Futures Foundation as well as those interested in the human-computer interaction.
Entangled Histories of Art and Migration
Theories, Sites and Research Methods
Dedicated to the stories of migrants refugees asylum seekers and exiles this collection asks how these stories are interwoven with art art practices activism reception and (re-)presentation. It explores the complex entanglements of art and aesthetic practices with migration flight and other forms of enforced dislocation and border/border crossings in global contexts - the latter significant phenomena of social transformation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
These complex entanglements take centre stage when migration shapes forms and aesthetics (and vice versa) when actors employ image politics and visualisation strategies in and about migration at different times and places or when materialities sites and spaces gain importance for decision-making processes. Taking an art and cultural studies perspective the book questions the significance of spatial changes for artistic practice in migration and elaborates on new or different theory-formation.
Interweaves histories of modernism and exile in different urban environments and focuses on historical dislocations in the first half of the twentieth century when artistic and urban movements constituted themselves in global exchange. Although this book takes a historical perspective it is written with an awareness of current flight movements and will make a significant contribution to the theory and methodology of research on exile.
The knowledge of previous historical exile experiences is important for the understanding of contemporary flight movements: after all these are not singular phenomena. For migration movements in the first half of the 20th century and for those of today it is equally possible to speak of urban centres of attraction for refugees: Today Berlin is a European metropolis of exile; in the 1930s and 1940s Paris Prague London New York Istanbul and Shanghai were destinations for refugees.
Entangled Histories of Art and Migration
Theories, Sites and Research Methods
Dedicated to the stories of migrants refugees asylum seekers and exiles this collection asks how these stories are interwoven with art art practices activism reception and (re-)presentation. It explores the complex entanglements of art and aesthetic practices with migration flight and other forms of enforced dislocation and border/border crossings in global contexts - the latter significant phenomena of social transformation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
These entanglements take centre stage when migration shapes forms and aesthetics (and vice versa) when actors employ image politics and visualisation strategies in and about migration at different times and places or when materialities sites and spaces gain importance for decision-making processes.
Giving space to these stories of art and migration and its power of pluriverse knowledge production the book takes an art and cultural studies perspective and questions the significance of spatial changes for artistic practice in migration and elaborates on new or different theory formation. Bringing together its case studies and theoretical approaches the argumentation unfolds over the five sections of the book Visibilities | Invisibilities Sites | Spaces Materiality | Materialisation Racism | Resistance and Practices | Performativity.
Consent Practices in Performing Arts Education
This book explores consent as a foundational principle to guide practices and policies in university level performing arts education. It includes descriptions of the structural power dynamics present in educational spaces as well as tools for defusing them. It adapts the consent-forward protocols that are foundational to intimacy training in order to apply them to classroom and rehearsal spaces across performing arts disciplines.
This includes opening lines of communication actively discussing personal boundaries and modeling behavior that respects those boundaries. Additionally the book uses experiential reflections to address the real-world challenges that teachers face as they work to reshape their teaching habits and processes to include consent practices.
Digital Embodiment and the Arts
Exploring Hybrid Spaces through Emerging Technologies
A timely examination of the use of emerging technologies in the arts in recent decades from the first wave of Virtual Reality through to the current use of Mixed Augmented and Extended Realities. It highlights the necessity of understanding technological experiences through the assumption that all experience is embodied. An explosion of digital culture and experience has most certainly given artists and creative practitioners new ways of exploring a hybridisation of creative practices with access to technological tools only previously dreamt of. Further there are a number of threads around digital embodiment and its centrality to the digital experience.
The book is divided into 3: Section 1 explores the whole notion of embodied experience through a study of space and virtuality imagination and technology. Section 2 lays the ground for a more explicit understanding of the role the body has in our engagement with the digital technologies focussing on three distinct bodies: the gravitational body the virtual body and finally the hybrid body. Section 3 is split into three chronological chapters in terms of technological developments that of VR Virtual Worlds and Augmented Mixed and Extended Realities.
While individual aspects and themes covered here can be found in some recent books there is little that places digital embodiment within the arts in the way this book does. A unique synthesis.