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Visual Culture

La notte dei simulacri - Sogno, cinema, realtà virtuale
While deep in sleep, we inhabit spaces where sounds, images and people around us appear vivid and tangible. But once we open our eyes, the spell lifts and these folly- and wonder-tainted visions turn out to be no more than a dream. Something similar also occurs during virtual reality simulations, those multisensorial experiences in which the course of events can be simply interrupted by removing the headset from one’s eyes, just like suddenly waking up.The worlds of dream and of virtual reality have far more in common than one would think: both revolve around a subjective point of view, and above all both engage an aesthetic relation with images, a dimension that begins to be investigated in the 1800s – a time that more than others focused on revealing the workings of our dreams – and that in the advent of digital technology has found its fullest and most complete realization. At the centre of this framework is cinema, the art that in the 20th century expressed and gave form to human fantasies and nightmares, channelling the immersive experience out of the rigid bidimensional quality of the screen, “piercing” its surface like Buster Keaton in one of his most famous films.This book sheds light on what the early sensational landscapes and cycloramas have in common with the new media art of Zoe Beloff and Char Davies, on how Mickey Mouse goes hand in hand with Cocteau and Kurosawa, and on how modern VR devices can be considered an evolution of sleep masks: the author presents us with an archaeological approach to the history of media and to the concept of immersivity inviting us to recognise a new type of artistic horizon, projected beyond mere visual data.
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La notte dei simulacri

Sogno, cinema, realtà virtuale

Giancarlo Grossi

pages: 197 pages

While deep in sleep, we inhabit spaces where sounds, images and people around us appear vivid and tangible. But once we open our eyes, the spell lifts and these folly- and wonder-tainted visions turn out to be no more than a dream. Something similar also occurs during virtual reality simulations, those multisensorial experiences in which the course
Scienza delle immagini - Iconologia, cultura visuale ed estetica dei media
While the advent of the digital era and the rapid evolution of technology have led to major change in the coordinates of the visible world and the relationship between word and image, experience and representation, new research methods have become necessary to explore the reasons behind the increasingly extensive production and circulation of images. One of the founding fathers of this vast field of study that has established itself on an international level as visual culture, W.J.T. Mitchell has contributed to the great turnaround in theoretical interest in the “society of the spectacle” and, coining the expression “pictorial turn”, has promoted a philosophical approach since the 1990s that attributes images with the same value of interpreting reality as that attributed to language. Here the reader will find a collection of sixteen of his most recent essays, ranging from media aesthetics to semiotics, in which the author examines the cultural dimension of images and the places and ways in which they manifest themselves, drawing upon ideas and terms that have now earned their place in the critical vocabulary. With the successful distinction between “image” and “picture”, where “image” means the mental representation or pure form of figures, clearly distinguished from the “picture” through which it is revealed, that is to say a material object that can be burned, broken or ripped, such as a painting or sculpture. Rich in incursions into the history of art, cinema and photography, but also into politics and biocybernetics, this volume lays the foundations for a “science of images” in which the visual becomes a fundamental link between humanistic research and empirical sciences.
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Scienza delle immagini

Iconologia, cultura visuale ed estetica dei media

W.J.T. Mitchell

pages: 276 pages

While the advent of the digital era and the rapid evolution of technology have led to major change in the coordinates of the visible world and the relationship between word and image, experience and representation, new research methods have become necessary to explore the reasons behind the increasingly extensive production and circulation of image
Come vedere il mondo - Un'introduzione alle immagini: dall'autoritratto al selfie, dalle mappe ai film (e altro ancora)
The fact that the power of images has grown out of all proportion is obvious to everyone. With the advent of new media, image production has increased massively and the circulation of images is so pervasive that it affects every moment of our lives. In the United States alone, more photographs are taken every two minutes than were taken throughout the entire 19th century, and every month ninety-three million selfies are uploaded onto the internet, not to mention the millions of new videos posted daily on social networking sites. The world of today, which is younger, more urbanized, connected and overheated than ever before, inevitably seems to have been fragmented. The image of the Earth itself – no longer that compact blue marble sphere immortalized in 1972 by the analogue shot taken by the astronauts on Apollo 17 – is presented to us through a mosaic of satellite photos that are put together in a form that reproduces the details with great accuracy, but is really “virtual”, because it is no longer linked to a single time and place. How can we now relearn to look at a world that technological innovations, dramatic climate and political changes have transformed so radically over the course of a few decades, and that continues to change at an unsustainable pace before our very eyes? Nicholas Mirzoeff explores the world in which we produce images and how they, in their turn, shape our existence, triggering profound political and social changes. In doing so, the author makes reference to a vast repertoire of theoretical writings – from John Berger to Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze – and examines numerous phenomena of contemporary culture from a historical perspective, moving between the various disciplines and geographical contexts. From the selfie, a form of self-portrait that is no longer exclusive to the elite but has become a tool with which the global majority communicates, to drones, which have replaced generals in the art of visualizing war, Come vedere il mondo is an essential map for finding our way through the sea of images in which we are immersed.
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Come vedere il mondo

Un'introduzione alle immagini: dall'autoritratto al selfie, dalle mappe ai film (e altro ancora)

Nicholas Mirzoeff

pages: 220 pages

The fact that the power of images has grown out of all proportion is obvious to everyone. With the advent of new media, image production has increased massively and the circulation of images is so pervasive that it affects every moment of our lives. In the United States alone, more photographs are taken every two minutes than were taken throughout
Superfici - A proposito di estetica, materialità e media
In a culture marked by the virtual and rapidly changing new media, what is the place of the surface, the very expression of a physical substance? A border area between internal and external worlds, a threshold that separates the visual from the tactile, the surface is also and above all a place of material relations. In order to discover the materiality of the images that fill the contemporary and grasp their significance, it is therefore essential to explore the space of these relations and how they are mediated through surfaces that may take on the features of skin, of a dress, of a cinema screen or of a canvas, and even the screens of the electronic devices that dominate our daily lives. In following the thread of these encounters we discover how the visual is structured and understand that the image is not just a two-dimensional element, but something porous, an epidermis that absorbs time, a place where forms of memory and transformation can find expression; it is a device for bringing distant space-time dimensions together. Delving deep into the object relations between art, architecture, fashion, design, cinema and new media, Giuliana Bruno asks questions about the concept of materiality and its many manifestations.Superfici is a magisterial wandering through contemporary visual culture; a walk that traverses the light spaces of artists such as Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Tacita Dean and Anthony McCall, touches the tactile surfaces of the cinema screens of Isaac Julien, Sally Potter and Wong Kar-wai and travels across materiality in the architectural practices of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Herzog & de Meuron to the art of Doris Salcedo and Rachel Whiteread, where the surface tension of media becomes concrete. It is a dissertation that manages to dispel a myth – that the surface is something superficial.
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Superfici

A proposito di estetica, materialità e media

Giuliana Bruno

pages: 320 pages

In a culture marked by the virtual and rapidly changing new media, what is the place of the surface, the very expression of a physical substance? A border area between internal and external worlds, a threshold that separates the visual from the tactile, the surface is also and above all a place of material relations. In order to discover the materi
Atlante delle emozioni - In viaggio tra arte, architettura e cinema
What is “emotional geography”? Giuliana Bruno answers this question in her Atlante delle emozioni (Atlas of Emotion): an expert and compelling foray into fields ranging from geography to art, architecture, design, fashion, cartography and cinema, on which she explores a varied and fascinating landscape in a unique attempt to condense the cultural history of visual-spatial arts in a single map. Seeing and travelling are inseparable, the author argues, demonstrating this through an evocative montage of words and images that turn the voyeur into a voyager, also revealing that not only sight and site, but also motion and emotion, are invariably connected. Bruno opens up the world of emotional imagery through artistic movements, historical trajectories  and cultural memories. In doing so she talks about artists such as Gerhard Richter, Annette Messager, Rachel Whiteread and Louise Bourgeois; architects like Daniel Libeskind and Jean Nouvel, and the work of numerous filmmakers including Peter Greenaway and Roberto Rossellini, Chantal Akerman and Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Wim Wenders and Wong Kar-wai. She also discusses the architecture of cinema and its precursors – the cabinet of curiosities, wax museum, anatomical theatre, magic lantern, georama and panorama – garden design, the veduta, the arts of memory and mapping… and, last but not least, her own travels to Italy, the country of her birth. The fascinating and daring visual journey on which Giuliana Bruno is our guide, offers novel views and interpretations at every turn. Atlante delle emozioni is an affective map that puts us in touch with the mental landscapes and inner worlds of what the author calls “emotional geography”, a highly-significant interpretive category taken up by scholars the world over.
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Atlante delle emozioni

In viaggio tra arte, architettura e cinema

Giuliana Bruno

pages: 592 pages

What is “emotional geography”? Giuliana Bruno answers this question in her Atlante delle emozioni (Atlas of Emotion): an expert and compelling foray into fields ranging from geography to art, architecture, design, fashion, cartography and cinema, on which she explores a varied and fascinating landscape in a unique attempt to condense the cultur

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