Cybernetic-Existentialism: Freedom, Systems, and Being-for-Others in Contemporary Arts and Performance offers a unique discourse and an original aesthetic theory. It argues that fusing perspectives from the philosophy of Existentialism with insights from the 'universal science' of cybernetics provides a new analytical lens and deconstructive methodology to critique art. In this study, Steve Dixon examines how a range of artists' works reveal the ideas of Existentialist philosophers including Kierkegaard, Camus, de Beauvoir, and Sartre on freedom, being and nothingness, eternal recurrence, the absurd, and being-for-others. Simultaneously, these artworks are shown to engage in complex explorations of concepts proposed by cyberneticians including Wiener, Shannon, and Bateson on information theory and 'noise', feedback loops, circularity, adaptive ecosystems, autopoiesis, and emergence. Dixon's groundbreaking book demonstrates how fusing insights and knowledge from these two fields can throw new light on pressing issues within contemporary arts and culture, including authenticity, angst and alienation, homeostasis, radical politics, and the human as system.

Contemporary Curating, Artistic Reference and Public Reception undertakes a unique critical survey and analysis of prevailing group exhibition-making practices in Europe, the UK and North America. Drawing on curatorial literature and two in-depth case studies of group exhibitions, Bertrand advocates for a mode of curatorial practice that secures the content of artworks, in contrast to prevailing open-ended, indeterminate approaches. Proposing a third exhibition type beyond the current binary exhibition ontology that opposes art historical narratives to curatorial installations or Gesamtkunstwerk, the book directly tackles the enduring critique of curating as a mediating activity that produces sameness in group-exhibition contexts by establishing artistic equivalences. The book relies on the principles of analytical philosophy to assess how different exhibition-making approaches fix reference and determine artistic reception, reintroducing a standard to evaluate exhibitions beyond personal taste and thematic coherence. Bertrand ultimately proposes an alternative conception of practice that affirms the renewed relevance of the institutional group show in the present context. Contemporary Curating, Artistic Reference and Public Reception will be of interest to academics, researchers and students working in museum and curatorial studies, visual cultures, art theory and art history programmes. Art theorists and critics, as well as curators of contemporary art with a research-based practice, should also find much to interest them within the pages of the book.

As readers complete each section of dots in this fun activity book, beautiful animal portraits are revealed -- so intricate they're ready for display The 20 puzzles in this book are much more sophisticated than the one-dimensional images created in childhood connect-the-dots books. Tonal shading and expressive line work build as each numbered section is finished. Dot-to-dot puzzles have also been proven to increase short-term cognitive acuity, hand-eye coordination, and concentration skills. Whether readers are filling time on a rainy day, using the puzzles for a party game, or learning the principles of drawing, "1000 Dot-to-Dot: Animals" is fun for all ages.

This book provides an in-depth and thematic analysis of socially engaged art in Mainland China, exploring its critical responses to and creative interventions in China's top-down, pro-urban, and profit-oriented socioeconomic transformations. It focuses on the socially conscious practices of eight art professionals who assume the role of artist, critic, curator, educator, cultural entrepreneur, and social activist, among others, as they strive to expose the injustice and inequality many Chinese people have suffered, raise public awareness of pressing social and environmental problems, and invent new ways and infrastructures to support various underprivileged social groups.

Showcasing his entire Star Trek career to date, this visually stunning retrospective celebrates the inventiveness of Neville Page's designs. During a career spanning over twenty years, visionary creature designer Neville Page has applied his considerable expertise to the creation and development of the aliens of the Star Trek Universe. From the movies Star Trek (2009) through to Star Trek Beyond (2016), as well as the shows Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard, Page's incredibly detailed and intricate work has yielded some of the franchise's most memorable characters. Featuring captivating concept art and detailed sketches, Star Trek: The Art of Neville Page provides exclusive insight into Page's creative process. This is essential reading for Star Trek fans as it includes a vast collection of illustrations from his remarkable work, plus an exclusive foreword and insightful afterword by award-winning filmmakers, Alex Kurtzman and Michael Westmore. Covers all aliens developed by Page for the recent entries in the Star Trek franchise, including the Klingon redesign and the Kelpiens.

This book is about the digital interface and its use in interactive new media art installations. It examines the aesthetic aspects of the interface through a theoretical exploration of new media artists, who create, and tactically deploy, digital interfaces in their work in order to question the socio-cultural stakes of a technology that shapes and reshapes relationships between humans and non-humans. In this way, it shows how use of the digital interface provides us with a critical framework for understanding our relationship with technology.

This is the first comprehensive English-language study of East Asian art history in a transnational context, and challenges the existing geographic, temporal, and generic paradigms that currently frame the art history of East Asia. This pioneering study proposes an important new framework that focuses on the relationship between China, Japan, and Korea. By reconsidering existing concepts of 'East Asia', and examining the porousness of boundaries in East Asian art history, the study proposes a new model for understanding trans-local artistic production - in particular the mechanics of interactions - at the turn of the 20th century.

Born in Yugan, near Jingdezhen, the birthplace of porcelain, Bai Ming has contributed to the revival of contemporary Chinese ceramics and introduced it to a new worldwide audience through numerous exhibitions. Today he is arguably China's greatest exponent of this most traditional art form. In this book, Bai Ming traces his career, revealing a sensitive yet creative and flamboyant style, built on the most rigorous traditional techniques. Focussing particularly on his blue and white ceramic work, this book, through a large selection of glorious images and the artist's own words, reveals Bai Ming's exquisite style and superb attention to detail.

This book analyzes practices of collecting in European art museums from 1989 to the present, arguing that museums actualize absence both consciously and unconsciously, while misrepresentation is an outcome of the absent perspectives and voices of minority community members which are rarely considered in relation to contemporary art. Difficult knowledge is proposed as a way of dealing with absence productively. Drawing on social art history, museology, postcolonial theory, and memory studies, Margaret Tali analyzes the collections of four modern and contemporary art museums across Europe: the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest, the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, and the Kumu Museum in Tallinn.

An exquisite, full colour country almanac by artist Catherine Hyde, following the phases of the moon and a hare's journey throughout the twelve months of the year in a lyrical tribute to the natural world.

Waking from the winter solstice a hare begins her journey. Through the landscape and its changing seasons, moving in harmony with the moon. Atmospheric and gorgeous paintings show the hare running in January, watching in February, leaping in March, until it comes full circle, sleeping in December.

Twelve double page paintings of the hare's journey are accompanied by full pages of art, showing a tree, a flower and a bird for each month of the year. This rich celebration of flora, fauna and country life includes hawthorn and cowslips, swallows, blackbirds, buzzards and owls, harebells, holly, olive, rowan, poppies and much more. Titbits of text folklore, fairytale, myth and legend complement the art complete this desirable gift book.

People often feel the presence of someone when no one is there. This may be a way of embodying the fear of the unknown, the ghost under the bed. It may be a near-palpable memory of an absent person, triggered by an article of clothing, a photograph, a scent, an old recording. And it can at rare times be a feeling of immanence, of being close to spirit or divinity. Regardless of the source, the sense of presence-in-absence reinforces a need - which seems hard-wired into the psyche - to experience a human essence outside the body. The exhibition and its accompanying catalog include artworks that indicate such presences through surrogates: shadows, imprints, or masks; objects as memento mori, or as other matter or energy. The title is derived from the phenomenon known as the phantom limb syndrome. Those experiencing this have lost some part of their bodies but feel it to be still present. While it is a source of sensation and frequently pain, the phantom limb here symbolizes the weight of absence, the longing to fill the spaces that accrue through life. Phantom Bodies includes works by artists who create the perception of a human aura through the use of material traces, shadow and light, or the sublimation of the body into other forms of matter and energy. Palpably felt yet invisible, the phantom limb of the title is here an analogy for absent persons whose vestiges link memory, consciousness, and the concept of the soul. Artists in the exhibition include Magdalena Abakanowicz, Barry X Ball, Christian Boltanski, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Adam Fuss, Ken Gonzalez-Day, Alicia Henry, Damien Hirst, Shirazeh Houshiary, Anish Kapoor, Elizabeth King, Deborah Luster, Sally Mann, Teresa Margolles, Ana Mendieta, Shirin Neshat, Gerhard Richter, Doris Salcedo, Annelies Å trba, and Bill Viola. The catalog contains color plates accompanied by illustrated essays by Martha Buskirk, Lisa Saltzman, and Eleanor Heartney; an introduction by Mark W. Scala; and a foreword by Susan H. Edwards.

Anton van Dalen: Community of Many chronicles the historic artist Anton van Dalen's lifelong visual investigation informed by the influences of war, religion and migration, his devotion to nature, and his dedication to documenting the technological and cultural evolutions within our society across a variety of mediums, from drawing and sculpture to collage and painting. Born in the Netherlands in 1938 to a conservative Calvinist family, Anton witnessed first-hand the terrors of both technological and human destruction during the Second World War. Since he immigrated to New York in 1966 and settled in the East Village, Anton has served as witness, storyteller and documentarian of the dramatic cultural shifts in the neighbourhood through his masterfully honed and singular iconography. Featuring critical essays by John Yau and Tiernan Morgan, this heavily illustrated publication is the first comprehensive monograph on Anton van Dalen's work that provides a language by which to discuss the consequences of human brutality towards nature and our entanglement with technology. Anton has been included in group exhibitions at notable institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New Museum, New York; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; and the New-York Historical Society. He has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at Temple Contemporary, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, Philadelphia; University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Exit Art, New York. His Avenue A Cut-Out Theatre has toured since 1995 both nationally and internationally and has been shown at numerous institutions including The Drawing Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and The New-York Historical Society.

Celebrate the history and explore the unique universe of tokidoki in this 400-page monographTokidoki, which translates to “sometimes� in Japanese, is an internationally recognized and iconic lifestyle brand based on the vision of Italian artist Simone Legno. Since debuting in 2005, tokidoki has amassed a cult-like following for its larger-than-life characters and has emerged as a sought-after global lifestyle brand. Tokidoki has managed to develop commercial public collaborations with brands and organizations like Sephora, Levi's, MLB, the San Francisco Giants, and T-Mobile, while also developing more artistic partnerships with Karl Lagerfeld and the Guggenheim museum, and crossovers with other iconic pop culture characters like Barbie, Hello Kitty, Marvel heroes, and Peanuts.

Mapping Paradigms in Modern and Contemporary Art defines a new cartographic aesthetic, or what Simonetta Moro calls carto-aesthetics, as a key to interpreting specific phenomena in modern and contemporary art, through the concept of poetic cartography. The problem of mapping, although indebted to the "spatial turn" of poststructuralist philosophy, is reconstructed as hermeneutics, while exposing the nexus between topology, space-time, and memory. The book posits that the emergence of "mapping" as a ubiquitous theme in contemporary art can be attributed to the power of the cartographic model to constitute multiple worldviews that can be seen as paradigmatic of the post-modern and contemporary condition. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in art history, art theory, aesthetics, and cartography.

Learn the skills to set any scene or capture any mood. With this book, your manga drawings will spring to life and leap off the page! Drawing Action Scenes and Characters is most suited to digital artists, but the tips and techniques in this book are applicable to illustrators of all schools and persuasions. No matter where you're at in your development as a manga master, this companion volume helps bring your skills to the next level. Follow along through the forty mini-lessons, created and guided by experts tapping into years of experience in the Japanese animation and entertainment industries. Open new pathways to your visual storytelling possibilities as your characters find themselves in increasingly complex and compellingly rendered scenarios. Tuttle's How to Create Manga series guides users through the process of reaching a professional-looking final drawing through actual sketch progressions, practical tips and caution on common missteps to avoid. Other books in the series include How to Create Manga: Drawing the Human Body, How to Create Manga: Drawing Facial Expressions and How to Create Manga: Drawing Clothing and Accessories.

For over twenty years Liliane Tomasko has explored the themes of dreams, sleep, and the unconscious. This book follows the development of her work as a painter. It begins with figurative works in oil on canvas in which she captures the material qualities of unmade beds, piles of clothes, and other melancholy still lifes and somber interiors. It then traces the gradual dissolution of these initial motifs and the emergence of her abstract paintings in which intertwined lines and layers of color are woven into visual structures and materialized as emotions that allow us to look deep into our innermost being.

Known for his colourful, irreverent, and often politically charged paintings, Halim Flowers is a contemporary visual artist, spoken word performer, and author who has become one of the hottest newcomers in the contemporary art scene. As a minor, Flowers was arrested and wrongfully sentenced to two life sentences in Washington, DC, later to be released under a new juvenile lifer resentencing law. His experiences aired on HBO in the Emmy award-winning documentary Thug Life in DC, as well as Kim Kardashian-West's film The Justice Project. Since his release, Flowers has produced a stunning spectrum of paintings expressing his ardent advocacy for human rights, and his resonant, up-lifting mantra "Love is the vaccine". This beautifully illustrated volume provides the first full treatment of Flower's artistic vision, with insightful interpretation from leading scholars of this star on the rise.

This book celebrates and seeks to understand the overlooked appearances of hybrid forms in visual culture; artefacts and practices that meld or interweave incongruous elements in innovative ways. And with an emphasis on the material aspects of such entities, the book adopts the term 'mixed form' for them. Focusing on key phenomena in the last half millennium such as the cabinet of curiosities, the broadside ballad and the chapbook as early forms of image-text, the scrapbook, assemblage, and, in digital times, so-called 'mixed reality,' the book argues that while the quality of inconsistency is traditionally dismissed, its expression nevertheless plays a vital role in social life. Crucially, Mixed Forms of Visual Culture relates its phenomena to the emergence of the division of labour under capitalism and addresses the shifting relationships between art and life, when singularity and uniformity are variously valued and dismissed in the two arenas, and at different points in history. Two of the book's chapters take the form of visual essays, with one comprising an anthology of found scrapbook pages and the other offering an analysis of artists' scrapbooks. The book is richly illustrated throughout.

Edward's adventures now take him to Tuscany, Italy. Here we see our Gentleman traveling through the rolling Tuscan countryside experiencing mediaeval hill towns, beautiful landscapes and sumptuous food and Italian lifestyle. The aim of this project is to produce a series of small sketchbooks that give a real flavour of iconic places around the world through the eyes of Edward - our modern gentleman.

A magisterial study of celebrated photographer Walker Evans Walker Evans (1903-75) was a great American artist photographing people and places in the United States in unforgettable ways. He is known for his work for the Farm Security Administration, addressing the Great Depression, but what he actually saw was the diversity of people and the damage of the long Civil War. In Walker Evans, renowned art historian Svetlana Alpers explores how Evans made his distinctive photographs. Delving into a lavish selection of Evans's work, Alpers uncovers rich parallels between his creative approach and those of numerous literary and cultural figures, locating Evans within the wide context of a truly international circle. Alpers demonstrates that Evans's practice relied on his camera choices and willingness to edit multiple versions of a shot, as well as his keen eye and his distant straight-on view of visual objects. Illustrating the vital role of Evans's dual love of text and images, Alpers places his writings in conversation with his photographs. She brings his techniques into dialogue with the work of a global cast of important artists-from Flaubert and Baudelaire to Elizabeth Bishop and William Faulkner-underscoring how Evans's travels abroad in such places as France and Cuba, along with his expansive literary and artistic tastes, informed his quintessentially American photographic style. A magisterial account of a great twentieth-century artist, Walker Evans urges us to look anew at the act of seeing the world-to reconsider how Evans saw his subjects, how he saw his photographs, and how we can see his images as if for the first time.

Sam Durant is a multimedia artist whose work engages social, political, and cultural issues. His work has been widely exhibited in the UK, Europe, Asia and the Americas. It has been included in the Panama, Sydney, Venice, and Whitney Biennials and can be found in many public collections including MOMA, New York, Project Row Houses, Houston and Tate Modern, London. Based in Los Angeles, Durant teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. Durant's 'The Meeting House' (2016) was a public art project at The Old Manse, a National Historic Landmark built in 1770 and former home and gathering place for politicians, thinkers, and transcendentalists including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The sister exhibition at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles in 2017, 'Build Therefore Your Own World', introduced new works that expanded upon Durant's premise of the interdependence between transcendentalists, abolitionists, and African American writers of pre- and post-revolutionary America in the creation of American culture and identity.Featured in The Meeting House / Build Therefore Your Own World is a full-colour photo documentation of the project in Concord, MA and Los Angeles, CA as well as new essays by Pedro Alonzo, independent curator, and Tim Phillips, pioneer in the field of conflict resolution and reconciliation; and a new collection of poems by Tisa Bryant, Robin Coste Lewis, Danielle Legros Georges, and Kevin Young, who recently became Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York.

The first major exhibition and catalog dedicated to the work of groundbreaking painter and filmmaker Mike Henderson. Mike Henderson (b. 1944) is a painter, filmmaker, and professor emeritus at University of California, Davis. Published to accompany his first museum retrospective, this catalog surveys Henderson's paintings and films from 1965 to 1985, which are rooted as much in Francisco Goya's horror of humanity as in Sun Ra's hope for a new Black future. In the work of that time, Henderson depicted scenes of racial violence, heteromasculinity, and abject social conditions with force and unflinching directness. In 1985, a studio fire damaged much of Henderson's output from the previous two decades, obscuring vital ideas about a time of tumult and change, often referred to as a world on fire. Mike Henderson: Before the Fire, 1965-1985 addresses Henderson's multifaceted art of that period, which examined and offered new ideas about Black life in the visual languages of protest, Afrofuturism, and surrealism. Published in association with the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis Exhibition dates: Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art January 29-June 25, 2023