Overview
Ranging from an examination of the politically-laden spectacle of George IV's visit to Edinburgh in 1822, as stage-managed by the celebrated novelist Sir Walter Scott, to an analysis of Google Earth's role in the construction of a new kind of political map, one no longer structured by boundary lines and coloured territories but instead through a politics of image resolution, the remarkable essays in this book present innovative ways of understanding visual phenomena in historical and contemporary culture. Writing on the Image brings together a series of Mark Dorrian's celebrated critical writings. Focusing on issues of elevated vision, spectacle, atmosphere, and the limits of aesthetic experience, Dorrian explores the politics of representation through a series of close readings of the ideological effects of images in their specific contexts. Seamlessly traversing sources from architecture, art, literature, history, geography and film, the essays gathered here exemplify Mark Dorrian's pioneering 'post-disciplinary' approach to architecture and visual culture. Featuring a foreword by Paul Carter, and an afterword by Ella Chmielewska, Writing on the Image opens with a sequence of four historically-oriented chapters that then lead on to considerations of key events in architectural, urban and visual culture over the past decade. Whether it be an eighteenth-century engraving that depicts a magnified drop of tap water as an alien planet swarming with monstrous creatures, an artwork showing a car with the silhouette of a building mounted on its roof, the covering up of a tapestry in the UN before a televised news conference, or a large-scale satellite image that is affixed to the basement floor of a public building, Dorrian shows how each artefact or event he examines is eloquent in its ability to problematise a larger set of relations beyond itself.
Full Product Details
Author: Professor Mark Dorrian (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint: I.B. Tauris
Volume: 18
Dimensions:
Width: 13.80cm
, Height: 3.30cm
, Length: 21.60cm
Weight: 0.485kg
ISBN: 9781784530389
ISBN 10: 1784530387
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 29 July 2015
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Reviews
Mark Dorrian takes in the surroundings that humans are making for themselves today with the keen and original sensitivity of a time-traveller new to the planet, who sees what others fail to see. Again and again in these remarkable analyses of territory and its uses, and of architecture and its transformations, Dorrian stretches our understanding, as he uncovers overlooked aspects of everyday life in the global scene. Writing on the Image unpacks surprising relations between technology and consciousness, between power interests and people. These essays are fresh, richly argued and combative - the effect is at once exciting and sobering. Marina Warner, CBE, FBA FRSL, Honorary Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford; With the eye of an architect, the pen of a poet, and the toolkit of a skilled critical urbanist, Dorrian brilliantly ranges over the terrain of a fully historified modernity and its representations - from enlightenment Edinburgh, eastwards and westwards, to the Googleplex and beyond. Out there on the high frontier of the spectacle. Iain Boal, UC Berkeley / Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities; In the spirit of the Adornian 'constellation', Dorrian here provides cultural readings that reveal as much about the ideology and social conventions materialised in urban artefacts and spectacle as about the more particular and fortuitous influences that have gone into their making and reception. Reflecting the author's special interests in elevated vision, cloud architecture and atmospheric politics, these essays are highly informative of the ways in which culture, both in the past and currently, animates its objects. Writing the Image offers uniquely valuable insights on the politics of representation in the city. Kate Soper, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, London Metropolitan University; This book of essays, written by one of our best contemporary critics, has a deeply persuasive and pleasurable splendour. The subtle weave and informed precision of its writing and thinking binds us to its subject matter - the 'unruliness of things' and the dilemmas of representation. Catherine Ingraham, Professor of Architectural History and Theory, Pratt Institute, NYC
Author Information
Mark Dorrian is the Forbes Chair in Architecture at Edinburgh College of Art. Previously, he was at Newcastle University, where he was responsible for the creation of new research led postgraduate programmes in architecture and related disciplines. With Adrian Hawker he is co-director of the art, architecture and urbanism atelier Metis.
