The letters of the alphabet have been the object of speculation since their invention almost 4000 years ago. The symbols represent sounds, yet they exist in their own right, often invested with quasi-magical power. This book examines the many imaginative, often idiosyncratic ways in which the letters of the alphabet have been assigned value in political, spiritual, or religious belief systems over two millennia. The birth of writing was linked to religion and cosmology and was endowed with semi-divine status. Plato saw letter-forms as reflecting ideas, while the Pythagoreans assimilated them to number-theory. The Greeks employed letters for occult and divinatory purposes, while the Romans used them in more practical ways, such as the invention of shorthand. The Middle Ages saw the rise of further theories about letters in Christian philosophy, alchemy and Kabbalah. Theories of their divine origin and mystical significance continued into the 18th and 19th centuries, becoming involved with nationalism and revolutionary political theory. In our own day letters of the alphabet are the subject of scholarly research, and inspiration to graphic artists and a fertile field for mystical speculation. This book explores this realm, and should be of interest to cultural historians, art historians, and anyone interested in the history of typography.

One hundred years ago, the crude realism of early cinematic exercises caused shockwaves among audiences - some even panicked. "On one occasion", read a news report from the time, "an old lady in the audience, quite unable to suppress a scream, started up in her seat and tried to scramble out," knocking over others on her way. This sort of reaction was not uncommon - on a screen that might have featured nothing more than minute-long dips of a running horse or a moving train, what modern viewers might see as a pale shadow of the explosive, full-colour blockbusters of 1995. This work recounts the enchantment of the early years of film, a trajectory which began with the "magic lantern" in the 17th century and progressed rapidly from 1893 to 1913, when the modern motion picture was born. It offers an account of the haphazard process which was the birth of American film. Including more than 150 drawings and photographs of the earliest devices of cinematic prehistory - colourful names like the thaumotrope, the phenakistiscope, the stroboscope, the Wheel of Life - the book leads readers along the winding path of missteps and innovation that led to the filmmaking technology we know today. In his pictorial essay, the author shows readers how these early gadgets actually worked and describes the shortcomings that led inventors to try, try again. He chronicles the early use of film as vaudeville sideshow, where it ran alongside contortionists, strongmen, performing animals and jugglers. He documents an age when the sheer spectacle of moving images precluded any notion of plot development or drama. The text goes on to describe fledgling dramatic efforts, ranging (without much variation of treatment) from prize-fights to Passion plays, which brought audiences back to the theatres in record numbers after they became bored with clips like "Moving Train". It takes a look at the nickelodeon theatres - the rise of venues with names like Nickolette, Dreamland, Theatorium, and Bijou Dream - the first places where cinema was the feature presentation.

"An intelligent and readable approach to the digitization of images.... A useful overview of a critical subject."— New York Times Book ReviewEnhanced? Or faked? Today the very idea of photographic veracity is being radically challenged by the emerging technology of digital image manipulation and synthesis: photographs can now be altered at will in ways that are virtually undetectable, and photorealistic synthesized images are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from actual photographs.Continuing William Mitchell's investigations of how we understand, reason about, and use images, The Reconfigured Eye provides the first systematic, critical analysis of the digital imaging revolution. It describes the technology of the digital image in detail and looks closely at how it is changing the way we explore ideas, at its aesthetic potential, and at the ethical questions it raises.

Manipulation of the photograph is as old as photography itself: it has been used in political propaganda, and has also embodied or enlivened satire, publicity and commercial art; it has created evocations of the "brave new world" of the future, and surrealist and fantastic visions. Photomontages were made by, among others, the Dadaists, Heartfield, Lissitzky, Rodchenko and Max Ernst, and many of them are reproduced here for the first time in this newly revised and updated edition. 203 illus.

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What does it mean to write "This is not a pipe" across a bluntly literal painting of a pipe? René Magritte's famous canvas provides the starting point for a delightful homage by the French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault. Much better known for his incisive and mordant explorations of power and social exclusion, Foucault here assumes a more playful stance. By exploring the nuances and ambiguities of Magritte's visual critique of language, he finds the painter less removed than previously thought from the pioneers of modern abstraction—"confronting them and within a common system, a figure at once opposed and complementary."

Foucault's brief but extraordinarily rich essay offers a startling, highly provocative view of a painter whose influence and popularity continue to grow unchecked. This is Not a Pipe also throws a new, piquantly dancing light on Foucault himself.

In Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity.

Inverting conventional approaches, Crary considers the problem of visuality not through the study of art works and images, but by analyzing the historical construction of the observer. He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of "subjective vision" were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision.

Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually labeled as "realist," were in fact based on abstract models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s.

Nineteenth-century British culture frequently represented the eye as the preeminent organ of truth. These essays explore the relationship between the verbal and the visual in the Victorian imagination. They range broadly over topics that include the relationship of optical devices to the visual imagination, the role of photography in changing the conception of evidence and truth, the changing partnership between illustrator and novelist, and the ways in which literary texts represent the visual. Together they begin to construct a history of seeing in the Victorian period.

"[Mitchell] undertakes to explore the nature of images by comparing them with words, or, more precisely, by looking at them from the viewpoint of verbal language. . . . The most lucid exposition of the subject I have ever read."—Rudolf Arnheim, Times Literary Supplement

Imagologies: Media Philosophy is no ordinary book. Provocative, irritating and stimulating, this is a work to be engaged, questioned and pondered. As the web of telecommunications technology spreads across the globe, the site of economic development, social change, and political struggle shifts to the realm of media and communications. In this remarkable book, Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinen challenge readers to rethink politics, economics, education, religion, architecture, and even thinking itself.
When the world is wired, nothing remains the same. To explore the new electronic frontier with Taylor and Saarinen is to see the world anew. A revolutionary period needs a revolutionary book. Get a head start of the 21st Century: Read Imagologies: Media Philosophy

A Village Voice Best Book of the Year, this seminal work presents new models of vision and examines modern theories of seeing in the context of contemporary critical practice.

With contributions by: Norman Bryson Jonathan Crary Martin Jay Rosalind Krauss Jacqueline Rose

Discussions in Contemporary Culture is an award-winning series co-published with the Dia Center for the Arts in New York City. These volumes offer rich and timely discourses on a broad range of cultural issues and critical theory. The collection covers topics from urban planning to popular culture and literature, and continually attracts a wide and dedicated readership.

Book by Gaur, Albertine, Sassoon, Rosemary

John Berger’s seminal text on how to look at art

John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and the most influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the Sunday Times critic commented: "This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures." By now he has.

"The influence of the series and the book . . . was enormous . . . It opened up for general attention to areas of cultural study that are now commonplace." —Geoff Dyer

"Berger has the ability to cut right through the mystification of the professional art critics . . . He is a liberator of images: and once we have allowed the paintings to work on us directly, we are in a much better position to make a meaningful evaluation." —Peter Fuller, Arts Review