Andrew Benjamin: Writing Art and Architecture (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, architecture, art, art criticism, design, painting, sculpture
“In his new book, the philosopher Andrew Benjamin turns his attention to architecture, design, sculpture, painting and writing. Drawing predominantly on a European tradition of modern philosophical criticism running from the German Romantics through Walter Benjamin and beyond, he offers a sequence of meditations on a diverse ensemble of works and themes: on the library and the house, on architectural theory, on Rachel Whiteread, Peter Eisenman, Anselm Kiefer, Peter Nielson, David Hawley, Terri Bird, Elizabeth Presa and others.
In Benjamin’s hands, criticism is bound up with judgment. Objects of criticism always become more than mere documents. These essays dissolve the prejudices that have determined our relation to aesthetic objects and to thought, releasing in their very care and attentiveness to the ‘objects themselves’ the unexpected potentialities such objects harbour. In his sensitivity to what he calls ‘the particularity of material events’, Benjamin’s writing comes to exemplify new possibilities for the contemporary practice of criticism itself.”
Publisher: Re.press, Melbourne, 1 October 2010
Transmission series
ISBN: 9780980668360 (pbk. with colour images)
ISBN-ebook: 9780980668377
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license
170 pages
Wilhelm S. Wurzer (ed.): Panorama: Philosophies of the Visible (2002)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, architecture, critique, phenomenology, philosophy, photography, psychoanalysis, screen
“The new electronic age has seen a radical transition from book to screen, a development which has obscured the fact that it is not what we see which matters but how we see what we see. We live in a time when the visible needs to be retheorised. Panorama presents a broad analysis of philosophies of the visible in art and culture, particularly in painting, film, photography, and literature. The work of key philosophers–Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Barthes, Blanchot, Foucault, Bataille, Derrida, Lyotard and Deleuze–is examined in the context of visibility, expressivity, the representational and the postmodern.”
Contributors: Zsuzsa Baross, Robert Burch, Alessandro Carrera, Dana Hollander, Lynne Huffer, Volker Kaiser, Reginald Lilly, Robert S. Leventhal, Janet Lungstrum, Ladelle McWhorter, Ludwig Nagl, Anne Tomiche, James R. Watson, Lisa Zucker.
Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, 2002
ISBN 0826460046, 9780826460042
254 pages
PDF, PDF (updated on 2017-11-7)
Comments (4)Joseph Nechvatal: Immersive Ideals / Critical Distances. A Study of the Affinity Between Artistic Ideologies Based in Virtual Reality and Previous Immersive Idioms (1999)
Filed under thesis | Tags: · aesthetics, architecture, art history, immersion, philosophy of art, technology, virtual reality
This thesis researches into the ideals behind Virtual Reality technology (and its central property of total-immersion) by looking at VR through the prism of a philosophy of visual art. Its conclusive understanding is achieved through a broad formulation of an aesthetic theory of immersive consciousness (indicative of an emerging immersive culture) by joining choice immersive examples of simulacra technology into mental connections with relevant examples culled from the histories of art, architecture, information-technology, sex, myth, space, consciousness and philosophy.
Keywords: architecture| Conceptual Art | consciousness | information-technology | myth | sex | space | virtual reality
Written in candidacy for a Ph.D. at the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA), University of Wales College, Newport, Wales, U. K.
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Later published as a book (2009)