What is the impact of virtual models and realms in contemporary theatre, art and architecture?This volume explores the evolution of virtual models, their transformative spatial potential, and their capacity for world-making using a range of case studies drawn from global contemporary theatre, art and architecture practice.It draws upon a rich array of contemporary examples, including the Japanese artist collective Dumb Type, Chinese artist Lu Yang, US-Irani...

This edited volume of essays explores the far-reaching influence of two 20th-century design icons: the Bauhaus art school and the furniture company IKEA.The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 and disbanded in 1933, but in its short existence it served as a crucible for much of what came to be known as modernist design. It set out to transform daily life for the better by incorporating mass manufacturing techniques into the design of everything from single objects to buildings, putting in ...

The Model as Performance investigates the history and development of the scale model from the Renaissance to the present. Employing a scenographic perspective and a performative paradigm, it explores what the model can do and how it is used in theatre and architecture. The volume provides a comprehensive historical context and theoretical framework for theatre scholars, scenographers, artists and architects interested in the model's reality-producing capacity and its recent emerge...

During its impressive career over the last decades the term 'performative' has been attributed with many parallel meanings in the humanities, philosophy, arts, or economics. Empty Stages, Crowded Flats additionally applies the notion of the performative to the context of curating with the aim to unfold a potential that so far has been mostly unused. The book is following J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, and others in their belief in the performative capacity to transform reality with words and...

Addressing the collection, representation and exhibition of architecture and the built environment, this book explores current practices, historical precedents, theoretical issues and future possibilities arising from the meeting of a curatorial ‘subject’ and an architectural ‘object’.Striking a balance between theoretical investigations and case studies, the chapters cover a broad methodological as well as thematic range. Examining the influential role of architectural exhibitions...

An examination of subversive games like The Sims—games designed for political, aesthetic, and social critique.For many players, games are entertainment, diversion, relaxation, fantasy. But what if certain games were something more than this, providing not only outlets for entertainment but a means for creative expression, instruments for conceptual thinking, or tools for social change? In Critical Play, artist and game designer Mary Flanagan exami...

What is contemporary curatorial thought? Current discourse on the topic is heating up with a new cocktail of bold ideas and ethical imperatives. these include: cooperative curating, especially with artists; the reimagination of museums; curating as knowledge production; the historicization of exhibitionmaking; and commitment to extra-artworld participatory activism. Less obvious, but increasingly of concern, are issues such as rethinking spectatorship, engaging viewers as co-curators and t...

In a world increasingly dominated by the digital, the critical response to digital art generally ranges from hype to counterhype. Popular writing about specific artworks seldom goes beyond promoting a given piece and explaining how it operates, while scholars and critics remain unsure about how to interpret and evaluate them. This is where Roberto Simanowski intervenes, demonstrating how such critical work can be done.Digital Art and Meaning offers close readings of varied...

The award-winning, highly acclaimed Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as "social practice." In recent decades, the art gallery and the museum have become a place for participatory art, where an audience is encouraged to take part in the artwork. This has been heralded as a revolutionary practise that can promote new emancipatory social relations. What was it is really?In this fully updat...

What is computer art? Do the concepts we usually employ to talk about art, such as ‘meaning’, ‘form’ or ‘expression’ apply to computer art?A Philosophy of Computer Art is the first book to explore these questions. Dominic Lopes argues that computer art challenges some of the basic tenets of traditional ways of thinking about and making art and that to understand computer art we need to place particular emphasis on terms such as ‘interactivity’ and ‘user’.Drawing on...

As public interest in modern art continues to grow, as witnessed by the spectacular success of Tate Modern and the Bilbao Guggenheim, there is a real need for a book that will engage general readers, offering them not only information and ideas about modern art, but also explaining its contemporary relevance and history. This book achieves all this and focuses on interrogating the idea of 'modern' art by asking such questions as: What has made a work of art qualify as modern (or f...

Art in the twenty-first century has become a strange affair, even stranger than it was in the twentieth. The internet, new technologies, and social media have raided our visual universe with GIFs, photoshopping, and all manner of appropriation. Trolls, YouTubers, and Instagrammers are bequeathing us a set of practices and aesthetics that recall the precepts of the historical avant-gardes, playfully distorted in the weirdest, wildest, most uninhibited ways. So, how has the art we still find...