Art, the Sublime, and Movement: Spaced Out

Description

This book is a critical interdisciplinary approach to the study of contemporary visual culture and image studies, exploring ideas about space and place and ultimately contributing to the debates about being human in the digital age. The upward and downward pull seem in a constant contest for humanity’s attention. Both forces are powerful in the effects and affects they invoke. When tracing this iconological history, Amanda du Preez’s starts in the early nineteenth century, moving into the twentieth century and then spanning the whole century up to contemporary twentieth-first century screen culture and space travels. Du Preez parses the intersecting pathways between Heaven and Earth, up and down, flying and falling through the concept of being “spaced out.” The idea of being “spaced out” is applied as a metaphor to trace the visual history of sublime encounters that displace Earth, gravity, locality, belonging, home, real life and embodiment. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, media and cultural studies, phenomenology, digital culture, mobility studies, and urban studies. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents List of Figures List of Tables Acknowledgements 1 Introduction Spaced Out Sublimely Spaced Out Iconology of Spaced Outness Plotting Visual Pathways Walking on Thin Air Walking on the Moon PART 1 Walking on Thin Air 2 Balancing Act The Tightrope Walker A Self-Overcoming Bridge of Art Counter Reality and Counterbalance Going Over and Under Sublimely Suspended Sanity Hanging in the Balance Audience Transformed Wired 3 Into the Void Reaching the Edge of the World Mountains Real and Imaginary Inventing the Modern Subject Inner Landscape Falling into the Abyss Discovering Verticality The Falling Man Leaping into the Void 4 Running-As-If Nature Eclipsed American Technological Sublime Annihilation of Space and Time Forerunners Running-As-If-Your Life-Depends-On-It Creating Flow Traversing Hyperspace Extreme Adventurer Place Hacking PART 2 Walking on the Moon 5 Up in the Air Mobility on a Global Scale Do We All End Up in the Same Place? Places without Place Ecstasy of Speed Cocoon of Self-Banishment The View from Above Global Operators Homesick Without Gravity 6 In Vain Cyberspace Cybernaut Mirroring Black Mirrors Selfienaut Mirror > Window> Screen Into the Mirror-Screen Mirror Selfie in Nature 7 Approaching the Unknown Post-Earth Astronauts Encounters Where on Earth? Falling Down or Up? Overview Effect Terra Incognita Index