literalists
Johns, Jasper (15 May 1930) Reference library
The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art
...extensive reading of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1961 . Through Cage, Johns met Merce Cunningham and for many years worked with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; he designed costumes and on one occasion designed a set based on Duchamp's Large Glass . Johns had incorporated plaster casts in his earliest paintings, and in 1958 he began to make sculptures of everyday objects, such as lightbulbs and torches. Fashioned in actual size, these sculptures at first glance appeared to be castings, although they were not. The sculptures thus raised...
structural principles Reference library
Rowland J. Mainstone
The Oxford Companion to Architecture
...the acceleration that it would produce. Varignon and Bernouilli then laid the foundations for modern static analysis by formulating in 1717 and 1725 the related principles of virtual work and the triangle of forces. Application of these principles to actual built structures still called for much simplified, idealized models. After a false start in 1712 by La Hire, Couplet in 1730 successfully modelled the hinging deformation of a masonry arch about to collapse and its thrust on its supporting piers, and thereby arrived at a better estimate of the width...
Sculpture Reference library
The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art
...sculpture was the dominant strain for the last quarter of the 19th century and was carried over into the early 20th century with offshoots as dissimilar as works reminiscent of Auguste Rodin ( 1840–1917 ) and a virtual school of “cowboy and Indian” themes, executed with a French-influenced technique. Frederic Remington , Cyrus Dallin , Charles M. Russell and Hermon Atkins MacNeil ( 1866–1947 ) captured a nostalgia for the American frontier in their bronzes and implied that a unique facet of the nation's life had been lost forever. The genteel...
Conservation and restoration Reference library
The Grove Encyclopedia of Materials and Techniques in Art
...actual preservation. This arises from the fact that the keeping of conservation records is a relatively modern activity, which is still far from universally normal. Many of the ‘conservators’ of former years were very secretive about their materials and methods and never committed anything to paper: the only record is often the objects themselves. Thus it is important to analyse adhesives, consolidants and fillers and to add this information to the modern conservation record. There has recently been an upsurge of interest in old methods of conservation, and...
Virtual Reality Reference library
Michael Heim
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2 ed.)
...potential as an art form, virtual reality will necessarily explore degrees of realism and of verisimilitude. What complicates the issue is the broad spread of disciplines from which virtual reality draws its sustenance: virtual reality combines art with technology, psychology with computer science, and electrical engineering with metaphysics. Another related problem is how to bridge the gap between the great expectations raised by the virtual reality concept and the actual achievements of research. The most widely available virtual reality systems in the early...
Augmented Reality Reference library
Horea Avram
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2 ed.)
...projects, the work is concerned with immersivity, depth of field, and the “perfect” illusion: the virtual objects are rendered tridimensionally, image’s flatness is replaced by profoundness, and immersion substitutes arm’s-length visual experience. The viewer seems to be literally inside the convergent space, among the objects and images (real and virtual), and not in a detached, “cinematic” mode of perception. Another type of AR use is projective solutions (through spatial displays): the actual site of the work is used as a projection surface, therefore...
Ecphrasis Reference library
John Hollander
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2 ed.)
...in notional ecphrasis still operate in actual ones (e.g., notions of centrality and peripherality in describing an image; ways in which texts construct virtual scanning processes ad hoc only to their own occasions; and the devices by which temporality, in a text’s unfolding over time, is figuratively made to deal with spatiality). Then, too, the impulse to produce poetic vividness that would stand in for an absent image is in some ways not too far from constructing a sort of verbal screen between a viewer’s eye and the picture or sculpture in question. W....
Computer Art Reference library
Timothy Binkley
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2 ed.)
...like realities than representations because we can reach into them and change them. Simulation is superseding mimesis as the paradigm of representation because computers change the process of articulation from actual to virtual specification. The second main feature of computer art is its interactivity. The raison d’être of the computer is to compute, so the numbers delineating virtual existence are eminently pliable. With the right interface, one can move virtual objects in virtual space and manipulate them in myriad ways, even metamorphosing them into their...
Cyberspace Reference library
Michael Heim
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2 ed.)
...From the viewpoint of phenomenology, cyberspace can mimic or resemble actual physical buildings, or it can support more dimensions than any actual physical topography. With a sufficient bandwidth of sensory stimuli, cyberspace can also generate virtual realities or fully immersive environments. As dataspace, however, cyberspace is not a universal simulator but a vast space for high-speed travel. Cyberspace is not itself a virtual reality, but it is the void in which virtual entities can appear. The image of the data highway through cyberspace has...
Imagination Reference library
Wolfgang Iser, Susan L. Feagin, and Julia Jansen
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2 ed.)
...which the intensity of “simulacra” makes impossible the distinction between the actual and the virtual, or the real and the fictional, with far-reaching and alarming political consequences. This view also blurs the distinction between images and imagining, which is central to Husserl’s account. Husserl distinguishes between imagination and “image consciousness ( Bildbewusstsein ),” that is, between imagining something and being aware of something as an image. Not foreseeing the kinds of problems Baudrillard identifies as critical for our time, Husserl still...
Deleuze, Gilles Reference library
James Williams and Ronald Bogue
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2 ed.)
...and when we remember something, we leap from the present into a different temporal domain, that of a “virtual past” in which all past moments coexist. It is not memory that is within us, but we who are within the vast sea of memory. Since the passage from the actual present to the virtual past can afford no gap, argues Bergson, there must be a present moment of the past, and hence every actual present moment must have a coexisting double, a present virtual past. In modern cinema, according to Deleuze, certain directors create images in which the actual...
Lukács, György (1885–1971) Reference library
György Márkus
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2 ed.)
...in the homogenization, intensive stylization, and autonomization of the everyday schemes of communication. But precisely because of this forming, the perfect work of art—an objectivization in which all the opposition between the meaning-creating form and the experienceable content, between the subjective and the objective, disappears—constitutes a self-enclosed totality that in itself is elevated above, and insulated from, the actual, always heterogeneous, and contingent experiences both of the author and of the recipient. Lukács’s early aesthetics, one of...
Computing, Aesthetic Reference library
Edward A. Shanken
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2 ed.)
...with and potentially experiencing forms of telematically enhanced, collective consciousness. Several decades later, the tendency to abstract the concrete materiality of things into ephemeral information that Burnham, Ascott, and others identified in the 1960s is reflected and amplified in recent phenomena that equally challenge conventional technological, economic, and cultural constructs: open-source development and the gift economy, various forms of participatory culture including interactive art, social media, and multiuser virtual worlds (e.g.,...
Langer, Susanne Knauth (1895–1985) Reference library
Forest Hansen
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2 ed.)
...are engrossed in the work (the image, the virtual object), not diverted from it, and vice versa. One stated implication of this thesis set Langer apart from many previous aestheticians and art theorists (though it harmonized with the position of the New Critics of literary theory): that creative causes and responding effects are largely or wholly irrelevant in aesthetic theory. This is at odds as well with much present-day aesthetic (and especially literary) theory. But Langer makes an eloquent and persuasive case, and contemporary thinkers might well profit...
Perspective Reference library
Christopher S. Wood and Michael Kubovy
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2 ed.)
...will appear distorted and therefore correct. It has been argued that the discovery of perspective by Brunelleschi and Alberti, together with the writings of Piero, Leonardo, and Dürer, represented a singular moment when the fine arts made an actual contribution to the history of science. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many more artists and amateurs wrote treatises on perspective. Some of the most important were Jean Cousin’s “Livre de perspective” ( 1560 ), Daniele Barbaro’s “La pratica della perspettiva” ( 1569 ), and Giacomo da Vignola’s “Le...
Habit Reference library
Aron Vinegar
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2 ed.)
...or contracting and absorbing the world into us. Although habit is seen as absorptive and immediate—beyond or before reflection—it has also been seen as the primary mechanism that posits and produces a semipermeable boundary that would inaugurate our emergence from sensory immersion and immediate reaction, thus forging a crucial step toward abstract thought, generalization, virtuality, judgment, and the construction of a second autonomous nature. Habit is thus seen as the crucial threshold where the body might cease to be a foreign object and become imbricated...
Temporality Reference library
Espen Hammer
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2 ed.)
...through which the viewer is exposed to their recollections, often of highly affective-laden and consequential situations, yet also sometimes of fantasy or dream. Whatever present actuality one is exposed to is then suffused with these images to the point of being itself virtual. In Tarkovsky’s cinema there is thus no clear demarcation line between “subjective” and “objective” experience, dream and reality, fiction and documentarism, or even between past, present, and future. There are many challenges to such interrelationalist accounts of how works of art are...
Portraiture Reference library
Richard Brilliant and Ernst van Alphen
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2 ed.)
...in Greek art, and “Homer” himself may never have existed. The classical “Homer” can be differentiated from Dickens’s Fagin, who existed only in fictive time, but they do share many features of inventive characterization. More closely, perhaps, the fictive image of “Homer” resembles those actual personages whose participatory appearance in historical novels imparts an air of veracity, or authenticity, especially in the figures of Napoleon and the Russian generals in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace , Walter Scott’s medieval English kings and nobles, and Gore Vidal’s...
Image Theory Reference library
Sunil Manghani
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2 ed.)
...image-making into the classroom—not just in theory but in actual practice” (p. 158). He argues the making of images (from drawing and painting to video editing) ought to be practiced in the same seminar rooms where historical and interpretative work takes place. Otherwise, there will always remain a gulf between making and thinking about images; and at worst, “[image] theory will be able to consolidate the notion that study is sufficient to the understanding of images, and independent of actual making” (p. 159). Image Studies. In defining “image studies”...
