Visual Arts

Product Design, Technology, and Social Change
A Short Cultural History
This cultural history critically examines product design and its development from pre-industrial times to the present day considering major milestones in the mass production of goods and services aiming to incorporate a more inclusive worldview than traditional surveys of the topic.
The breadth and versatility of product design through history has been profound. Products have long supported the integration and interpretation of emerging technologies into our lives. These objects include everything from tools accessories furniture and clothing to types of transportation websites and mobile apps. Products provide singular or multiple functions are tangible and intangible and in many instances have impacted the quality of our lives by saving time or money or by increasing feelings of personal satisfaction. At the same time many products have negatively impacted people and the environment. For nearly every product that makes it into the hands of a consumer there is also a designer who created it and someone who laboured to make it.
Examines the relationship between products consumption sustainability politics and social movements. This "pocket history" surveys product design from the agricultural revolution and the birth of cities through industrialisation and a digital design revolution.

Product Design, Technology, and Social Change
A Short Cultural History
This cultural history critically examines product design and its development from pre-industrial times to the present day considering major milestones in the mass production of goods and services aiming to incorporate a more inclusive worldview than traditional surveys of the topic.
The breadth and versatility of product design through history has been profound. Products have long supported the integration and interpretation of emerging technologies into our lives. These objects include everything from tools accessories furniture and clothing to types of transportation websites and mobile apps. Products provide singular or multiple functions are tangible and intangible and in many instances have impacted the quality of our lives by saving time or money or by increasing feelings of personal satisfaction. At the same time many products have negatively impacted people and the environment. For nearly every product that makes it into the hands of a consumer there is also a designer who created it and someone who laboured to make it.
Examines the relationship between products consumption sustainability politics and social movements. This "pocket history" surveys product design from the agricultural revolution and the birth of cities through industrialisation and a digital design revolution.

Global Culture after Gombrich
Art, Mind, World
Ernst Gombrich can be considered the most influential art historian of the 20th-century. Until now however the global impact of his work has been under-appreciated. Global Culture after Gombrich: Art Mind World presents essays by historians of art and culture - themselves students of Gombrich or associated with his scholarly home the Warburg Institute - from Asia the USA and Europe.
Subjects range from picture-making’s place in human evolution to the visual marginalia of the Renaissance and from nineteenth-century modernism to the implications of the latest neuroscience for cultural history. Other chapters treat fundamental issues such as the notion of connoisseurship the fate of the idea of ‘culture’ or the cultural specificity of modernism. They range from theoretical broadsides – notably a defence of the ‘intelligence’ of art - to intricate reflections – for example on caricature as a style.
In showing how Gombrich initiated enquiries that have spread in numerous – and global – directions Global Culture after Gombrich: Art Mind World makes a vital contribution to contemporary debates around the languages of art history and showcases the range of approaches and methods by which art history is and has yet to be written.

The Human Shutter
Photographs, Stereoscopic Depth, and Moving Images
This transdisciplinary study offers a fresh perspective on the intersections of photography cinema and visual perception making it an essential addition to collections in art history film studies and photography.
Robert L. Bowen delves into the complex relationship between art binocular vision space and time across both early and modern histories of photography. Central to Bowen’s analysis is the concept of "the human shutter" a metaphor for binocular rivalry which he interprets as a form of proto-cinema—linking early photographic processes with the evolution of cinematic temporality.
The book provides a rich examination of the near-simultaneous emergence of still moving and stereoscopic depth media while challenging the gradualist view of visual technologies. Through a preliminary taxonomy of rare stereoviews Bowen draws connections between experimental film painting philosophy and perception theory opening new avenues for understanding the history of visual media.
Additionally Bowen traces the fascinating journey of early pioneers like Antoine Claudet and Giorgio Sommer whose work in motion and binocular vision plays a pivotal role in rethinking the origins of photographic cinema. Bowen bridges this history with contemporary innovations including the dissolution of time in photography with the advent of generative AI.
The volume also highlights the work of modern and contemporary artists and filmmakers such as Marcel Duchamp Robert Smithson Lucy Raven Ken Jacobs and OpenEndedGroup who have explored stereoscopic spaces and perceptions in innovative ways.
Key for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying art art history film photography and new media. It is also relevant to photographers photo historians experimental filmmakers video artists digital media artists painters and sculptors seeking fresh insights into their respective fields. Will resonate with readers interested in the history of 19th-century photography and the development of stereoscopic media.
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Screened and Reconstructed Urban Memory: Remembering and Forgetting İstanbul in Şahsiyet [Persona] Web TV Series
This chapter attempts to explore the screened city of İstanbul in Şahsiyet [Persona] TV series with the aim of providing insights into new cultural meanings intertwined with the urban memory manufactured in web television series. Şahsiyet was first released in a digital media platform in 2018 and has recently become world-wide known after Haluk Bilginer who acted Agâh won the International Emmy Awards in 2019 for his performance in the series. Remembering and forgetting the places with visual representations of Agâh's mental processes to figure out a longveiled crime the urban memory of İstanbul is reconstructed by means of a variety of representation techniques and spatial compositions on which this study attempts to analyze. This analysis shows not only how the urban environments and their spatial qualities become the spine of the visual narrative but also how the representation of city in TV series reconstructs the memory of places.

The Spatial Imagery of Fractal Narratives: Marwan Hamed's The Yacoubian Building
The Egyptian film The Yacoubian Building (2006) is a mosaic of interrelated characters who all live in the same building that exists in Downtown Cairo. Referred to as the social microcosm genre the film ensembles a large cast of people who go about their lives crisscrossing and sometimes colliding all joined together by chance. Such unrelated stories interacting in unpredictable ways are known as fractals. This paper aims to explore and comprehend the notion of fractals as spatial narratives where space is entirely structured by complexity and unexpected encounters rather than linearity and order. The research framework overlaps two theories of fractals. The first is the notion of fractal city drawn from the writings of Greek urban theorist Nikos Salingaros where he highlights urban growth and composition of spatial elements. The second is adopted from Professor Wendy Everett from the University of Bath who examines the idea of complexity in filmic narratives. Through examining The Yacoubian building (2006) the paper attempts to layer the physical and non-physical aspects of fractals i.e. the actual Yacoubian building its physicality against the backdrop of its socio-political historical layers overlayered with the notion of fate and randomness containing the intertwined narratives of our characters.

Architectural Research and Design in Hong Kong through the Creative Use of Film
This essay presents methodological approaches and experimental exercises in the intersection between film and architecture employed in design studios and applied to the urban spaces of Hong Kong. It discusses the results in relation to the larger context of the architectural discipline and urban design research and positions them within a lineage of teachings on architecture through film. The outcomes contribute to an understanding of complex hybrid high-density urban environments and the aesthetic experience thereof and to a reexamination of architectural fundamentals in architectural design and education.

Introduction: Of Stories and Settings – A Familiar Exchange
This is the introduction to the book in which each author's contribution is discussed along with an explanation where the chapter sits in the whole structure of the book. As a brief case study the introduction also provides an insight on contemporary science fiction films with particular focus on set design linking film backdrops and spaces with architectural theory.

Broadcasting the Visage of Urban Warfare: A case study of NaJa & de Ostos’ The Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad
The chapter examines a speculative architectural project The Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad which employs a magical realist narrative to critically interrogate a hypothetical architectural intervention into the city fabric of a city at war. As the artists/architects of NaJa & deOstos devise this thought experiment to show architecture's progressive dematerialization into an image-making practice the chapter asks question regarding its role in relation to designs completely negligent of local contexts. Also it puts forth a supposition akin to Baudrillard's bold statement made about the Gulf War namely: is architecture considered as an image-making practice which can be often independent of the local context (site specificity) create experiences in a thought-provoking way while remaining critical to the protocols of its own making?

Body Talk: Between Architecture and Analogy in Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975)
Recent developments in virtual 3D platforms whether in news reporting military training or mixed-media installations have grappled with the space-making techniques inherent in moving image technologies. This arguably disruptive proliferation however can be traced back to earlier origins in virtual design not only in the postwar developments of 3D video games and architectural software platforms but also in the very fabric of film itself. This chapter situates the infamous penultimate scene of one particular film—Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975)—within this interdisciplinary context of shifting spatial design. By analyzing the ways in which Antonioni decenters standard camera rhetoric techniques that film critic Seymour Chatman connects to the director's underlying interest in filmic architecture this chapter calls attention to an under-examined historical moment in which film architecture and the origins of virtual design converge. How have such artistic embodied precedents affected continued developments in spatial technologies today?

Illuminating Spaces: Cinematic Travels and Emotional Inhabitation of Tokyo in Café Lumière
This chapter introduces a cinematic approach for studying space by analyzing the architecture of the shot and how emotions are conveyed through the experience of travel in Café Lumière (2003) set in Tokyo. The director Hou Hsiao-hsien's insistence on shooting in real locations reveals how each location is unique and replete with audio-visual cues that can be extracted from the mises en scène. Strategies that privilege the haptic senses are employed to apprehend the spaces and landscapes featured in the film. These methods derived from film studies and architecture exploit the synergistic potential offered by the two disciplines: just as moving images constitute the primary medium for filmmakers drawings are utilized by architectural practitioners to tangibly express and idea or fact. The actualization of drawings can disclose new information about the source material. This methodology underscores cinema's deeply entrenched and intertwined relationship with space.

Tracing Body and Space in Eisenstein's Early Silent Films
In this chapter I will discuss how I have deployed computer algorithms and automation to re-visualize shots from his early silent films — Strike (1925) and Battleship Potemkin (1925). By doing so I will demonstrate ways in which new digital research methods can offer new ways of understanding Eisenstein's use of the body as an active spatial element in his films. This contemporary visual approach takes inspiration from several scholars from throughout history including Sergei Eisenstein who have used new media not just as a mode of representation but also as a research tool in its own right. As an architect operating in a contemporary digital environment I contend that utilising new media as a tool to analyse historic artefacts allows us to not only reveal previously unseen information embedded within them but also offers an opportunity to reflect on current spatial practice.

Architecture and Complexity, New Heterogeneous Spaces, and Old ‘New Media’
Irena Latek Canadian architect and artist is professor at the school of Architecture of l'Université de Montréal director of the laboratory of research-creation « medialabAU ». Architect graduated from the Polytechnic School of Warsaw she also studied at the University of Montreal. She was director of the Research Institute for the History of Architecture (IRHA) of Canadian Centre for Architecture Université de Montréal and the University McGill from 1997 to 2000 and founding member of the Institute Art Culture Technologie of l'Université de Montréal (IACT). Irena Latek situates her research at the junction of architecture and the medias digital arts. The projects she has realized with the « medialabAU » team in video or through interactive interfaces take the form of installations questioning contemporary urbanities. She developed the « collage mouvant » an original method for the conception of architecture and the interpretation of space through video. Her work has been exhibited in Canada Spain Germany and France; notably she presented monographic exhibitions: Intervalles Montreal Cinémathèque québécoise 2015-2016 Flux Montreal Centre d'Exposition UdeM 2015 Transporters Ecotopia —Utopia Montréal Centre d'Exposition UdeM 2009 Ubiquités publiques Desynchronized Public Spaces Montréal SAT 2005 Espaces mouvants Soft Public Spaces Montréal SAT 2003 and Barcelona Galerie Ras 2004. Her work has been the subject of several articles and press reviews. She presents in a theoretical return her work in numerous articles chapters of books and her monographic book among which are: « Espacements ». In In situ / de visu / in motu. Architecture cinéma et arts technologiques. edited by Irena Latek Sophie Paviol Clotilde Simond and Françoise Very Gollion: Infolio 2014. « Sortie du cadre » In Perspectives sur la Perspective edited by Philippe Cardinali and Marc Perelman Paris: Fabula 2017. Flux et Intervalles - Irena Latek. Montreal: Antheism-BookArt 2017.