Tag: Bodies

Free Download Wilma Scheschonk, "Energetic Bodies: Sciences and Aesthetics of Strength and Strain "
English | ISBN: 3110767066 | 2022 | 208 pages | PDF | 5 MB
Throughout the fin de siècle, "energy" was a buzzword that was used far beyond the boundaries of the sciences to negotiate the formative scope as well as limits of Western modernity. The human body was positioned at the center of the visualization of this enigmatic drive of all movement in discourses on labor and economics, physical culture, sport, art, and literature. It was through the body that this all-pervading and conditioning physical principle as well as its perceptual qualities were to be made tangible. This volume is dedicated to these "energetic bodies." The transdisciplinary individual contributions trace body scenarios of force and energy over the course of history from 1800 to the peak phase around 1900 and up to the present.

Free Download Horea Avram, "Moving Images, Mobile Bodies"
English | ISBN: 1527511081 | 2018 | 256 pages | PDF | 2 MB
The book comprises a series of contributions by international scholars and practitioners from different backgrounds researching in the fields of contemporary visual culture and performance studies. This collection addresses the issue of corporeality as a discursive field (which asks for a poetics), and the possible ways in which technology affects and is affected by the body in the context of recent artistic and theoretical developments. The common denominator of the contributions here is their focus on the relationship between body and image expressed as the connection between reality and fiction, presence and absence, private and public, physical and virtual. The essays cover a wide range of topics within a framework that integrates and emphasises recent artistic practices and current academic debates in the fields of performance studies, visual arts, new aesthetics, perception theories, phenomenology, and media theory. The book addresses these recent trends by articulating issues including the relationship between immediate experience and mediated image; performing the image; the body as fictional territory; performative idioms and technological expression; corporeality, presence and memory; interactivity as a catalyst for multimediality and remediation; visuality, performativity and expanded spectatorship; and the tensions between public space and intimacy in (social) media environments. The main strength of this volume is the fact that it provides the reader with a fresh, insightful and transdiciplinary perspective on the bodyimage relationship, an issue widely debated today, especially in the context of global artistic and technological transformations.

Free Download Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on the Edge By Petra Kuppers
2003 | 192 Pages | ISBN: 0415302382 | PDF | 37 MB
Disability and Contemporary Performance presents a remarkable challenge to existing assumptions about disability and artistic practice. In particular, it explores where cultural knowledge about disability leaves off, and the lived experience of difference begins. Petra Kuppers, herself an award-winning artist and theorist, investigates the ways in which disabled performers challenge, change and work with current stereotypes through their work. She explores freak show fantasies and ‘medical theatre’ as well as live art, webwork, theatre, dance, photography and installations, to cast an entirely new light on contemporary identity politics and aesthetics. This is an outstanding exploration of some of the most pressing issues in performance, cultural and disability studies today, written by a leading practitioner and critic.

Free Download James Clarke, "The Cinema of James Cameron: Bodies in Heroic Motion (Directors’ Cuts)"
English | ISBN: 0231169760, 0231169779 | 2014 | EPUB | 224 pages | 2 MB
This timely volume explores the massively popular cinema of writer-director James Cameron. It couches Cameron’s films within the evolving generic traditions of science fiction, melodrama, and the cinema of spectacle. The book also considers Cameron’s engagement with the aesthetic of visual effects and the ‘now’ technology of performance-capture which is arguably moving a certain kind of event-movie cinema from photography to something more akin to painting. This book is explicit in presenting Cameron as an authentic auteur, and each chapter is dedicated to a single film in his body of work, from The Terminator to Avatar. Space is also given to discussion of Strange Days as well as his short films and documentary works.

Free Download Bodies in Suspense: Time and Affect in Cinema By Alanna Michael Thain
2017 | 328 Pages | ISBN: 0816692955 | PDF | 13 MB
Bodies in Suspense presents a powerful new way to think through postdigital cinema and the affective turn in critical theory. According to Alanna Thain, suspense films allow us to experience the relation between two bodies: that of the film and that of the viewer. Through the "time machine" of suspense, film form, gender, genre, and spectatorship are revealed in innovative and different ways. These films not only engage us directly in ethical concerns, but also provide a key for understanding corporeal power in the digital era.Offering a new framework for understanding cinematic suspense, Bodies in Suspense argues that the "body in time" enables us to experience the temporal dimension of the body directly. This is the first book to link two contemporary frames of analysis: questions of cinematic temporality and contemporary affect theory. Thain conducts close readings of influential suspense films by Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Christian Marclay, Rian Johnson, and Lou Ye, and sets forth a compelling new theory of cinema, reading for the productivity of the "crime of time" that stages the duplicity of cinematic bodies. Through these films that foreground doubled characters and looping, Thain explores Gilles Deleuze’s claim that "the direct time-image is the phantom which has always haunted cinema."A vital new addition to film theory, corporeality and affect theory, feminist theory, and the philosophy of time-and one of the first books to explore David Lynch’s Hollywood trilogy-Bodies in Suspense asks us to pay attention, above all, to the ways in which the condition of spectatorship creates a doubling sensation with important philosophical repercussions.

Free Download Fluid Bodies and Bodily Fluids in Premodern Europe: Bodies, Blood, and Tears in Literature, Theology, and Art By Anne M. Scott (editor), Michael David Barbezat (editor)
2019 | 203 Pages | ISBN: 1641892382 | PDF | 21 MB
This interdisciplinary collection of essays, containing chapters from specialists in history, art history, medical history, and literature, examines how the intimately familiar language of the body served as a convenient medium through which to imagine and describe transformations of the larger world, both for the better and also for the worse. Its individual contributors demonstrate the myriad ways in which rethinking the human body was one way to approach rethinking the social, political, and religious realities of the world from the Middle Ages until the early modern period.

Free Download Michael Sappol, "A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America"
English | ISBN: 0691118752 | 2004 | 448 pages | PDF | 61 MB
A Traffic of Dead Bodies enters the sphere of bodysnatching medical students, dissection-room pranks, and anatomical fantasy. It shows how nineteenth-century American physicians used anatomy to develop a vital professional identity, while claiming authority over the living and the dead. It also introduces the middle-class women and men, working people, unorthodox healers, cultural radicals, entrepreneurs, and health reformers who resisted and exploited anatomy to articulate their own social identities and visions.

Free Download Peter N. Stearns, "Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West"
English | 1997 | pages: 331 | ISBN: 0814780695, 0814798241 | PDF | 7,5 mb
A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History

Free Download Michel Serres, "The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies "
English | ISBN: 1474299644 | 2016 | 368 pages | PDF | 3 MB
Marginalized by the scientific age the lessons of the senses have been overtaken by the dominance of language and the information revolution. With The Five Senses Serres traces a topology of human perception, writing against the Cartesian tradition and in praise of empiricism, he demonstrates repeatedly, and lyrically, the sterility of systems of knowledge divorced from bodily experience. The fragile empirical world, long resistant to our attempts to contain and catalog it, is disappearing beneath the relentless accumulations of late capitalist society and information technology. Data has replaced sensory pleasure, we are less interested in the taste of a fine wine than in the description on the bottle’s label. What are we, and what do we really know, when we have forgotten that our senses can describe a taste more accurately than language ever could?

Free Download Laila Shereen Sakr, "Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives"
English | ISBN: 1503630994 | 2023 | 194 pages | PDF | 14 MB
Arabic Glitch explores an alternative origin story of twenty-first century technological innovation in digital politics―one centered on the Middle East and the 2011 Arab uprisings. Developed from an archive of social media data collected over the decades following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, this book interrogates how the logic of programming technology influences and shapes social movements.