A Culture Of Light

A Culture Of Light
Author: Frances Guerin
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2000
Genre:
ISBN: 1452906718

A groundbreaking exploration of German expressionist cinema and technology.

Light Perspectives

Light Perspectives
Author: Aksel Karcher
Publisher: Actarbirkhauser
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2009
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9783981321616

This book endeavours to identify terms and standards defining qualities in architectural lighting. It uses this identification to promote communication and aid dialogue between designers and engineers, building owners and planners, professionals and laymen. Its 21 chapters are arranged in three sections covering the actual qualities of light, the relationship between light and space and, finally, the dimension of light in relation to culture. In each chapter, paired terms explore the design dimensions of light. Using texts, photos, computer graphics and drawings, the team of authors investigates each pair of terms. They begin with the original cultural and historical context, move onto didactic material on perception, lighting design and lighting technology and conclude with case studies in virtual architectural situations.

Blindness in a Culture of Light

Blindness in a Culture of Light
Author: Eleftheria A. Bernidaki-Aldous
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1990
Genre: Drama
ISBN:

Originally presented as the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--Johns Hopkins University.

Pedal Culture

Pedal Culture
Author: Ronald Light
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 129
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1493060805

Pedal Culture is a themed exploration of guitar effects pedals as cultural artifacts, derived from a 2017 design exhibition at San Francisco State University curated by the author. An anthropological quest, understanding how effects stompboxes allow for quasi-supernatural power transference from on high to guitarists is just one of the many themes Ronald Light explores. Exhibits showcase symbolic associations in the branding of sonic effects with cultural touchstones from popular arts and culture: material manifestations of noir literature, retro-futuristic cinema, and Japanese anime; graphic metaphors for female pudenda; explicit reference to murder and mayhem; and all too obvious associations to guacamole and chips. The curatorial tone of Pedal Culture employs an irreverent sensibility expressed in a whimsical and ironic attitude toward its subject. In the expansive (and expensive) world of guitar gear, this richly photographed volume fuses form, content, and aesthetics. This is Pedal Culture!

The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science

The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science
Author: Seb Falk
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2020-11-17
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1324002948

Named a Best Book of 2020 by The Telegraph, The Times, and BBC History Magazine An illuminating guide to the scientific and technological achievements of the Middle Ages through the life of a crusading astronomer-monk. "Falk’s bubbling curiosity and strong sense of storytelling always swept me along. By the end, The Light Ages didn’t just broaden my conception of science; even as I scrolled away on my Kindle, it felt like I was sitting alongside Westwyk at St. Albans abbey, leafing through dusty manuscripts by candlelight." —Alex Orlando, Discover Soaring Gothic cathedrals, violent crusades, the Black Death: these are the dramatic forces that shaped the medieval era. But the so-called Dark Ages also gave us the first universities, eyeglasses, and mechanical clocks. As medieval thinkers sought to understand the world around them, from the passing of the seasons to the stars in the sky, they came to develop a vibrant scientific culture. In The Light Ages, Cambridge science historian Seb Falk takes us on a tour of medieval science through the eyes of one fourteenth-century monk, John of Westwyk. Born in a rural manor, educated in England’s grandest monastery, and then exiled to a clifftop priory, Westwyk was an intrepid crusader, inventor, and astrologer. From multiplying Roman numerals to navigating by the stars, curing disease, and telling time with an ancient astrolabe, we learn emerging science alongside Westwyk and travel with him through the length and breadth of England and beyond its shores. On our way, we encounter a remarkable cast of characters: the clock-building English abbot with leprosy, the French craftsman-turned-spy, and the Persian polymath who founded the world’s most advanced observatory. The Light Ages offers a gripping story of the struggles and successes of an ordinary man in a precarious world and conjures a vivid picture of medieval life as we have never seen it before. An enlightening history that argues that these times weren’t so dark after all, The Light Ages shows how medieval ideas continue to color how we see the world today.

Travelling Light

Travelling Light
Author: Peter Osborne
Publisher:
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2000
Genre: Photography
ISBN:

A study of the close and continuous relationship between two of modern culture's central phenomena: the photographic image and travel. Contributing to the growing literature of travel and its representations, the book argues that from the beginnings, photography has played a constitutive role in the formation of travel - comparable in importance to its part in the potrayal of social idenity. It shows how, in turn, travel has shaped the use and language of all types of photographuc production.

Sharing the Light

Sharing the Light
Author: Lisa Raphals
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 1998-07-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 143841689X

Sharing the Light explores historical and philosophical shifts in the depiction of women and virtue in the early centuries of the Chinese state. These changes had far-reaching effects on both the treatment of women in Chinese society and on the formation of Chinese philosophical discourse on ethics, cosmology, epistemology, and self-cultivation. Warring States and Han dynasty narratives frequently represented women as intellectually adroit, politically astute, and ethically virtuous; these histories, discourses, and life stories portray women as active participants within their own society, not inert victims of it. The women depicted resembled sages, ministers, and generals as the mainstays and destroyers of dynasties. These stories emphasized that sagacity, intellect, strategy, and statecraft were virtues proper to women, an emphasis that effectively disappeared from later collections and instruction texts by and for women. During the same period, there were also important changes in the understanding of two polarities that delineated what now is called gender. Han correlative cosmology included a range of hierarchical analogies between yin and yang and men and women, and the understanding of yin and yang shifted from complementarity toward hierarchy. Similarly, the doctrine of separate spheres (inner and outer, nei-wai) shifted from a notion of appropriate distinction between men and women toward physical, social, and intellectual separation and isolation.

In a Different Light

In a Different Light
Author: Nayland Blake
Publisher:
Total Pages: 351
Release: 1995
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780872863002

"In a Different Light documents a landmark exhibition at the University Art Museum, and features curatorial essays, over 100 reproductions of all the artwork in the exhibition, and a selection of fiction, personal essays, rants, and image-text projects on the power of visual culture. This book explores the resonances of gay, lesbian and queer experience in American culture, particularly in the past thirty years." "In a Different Light engages a range of queer issues, aesthetic concerns, and formal styles. Instead of inquiring "What does lesbian or gay art look like?" the curators ask: "How are queer artists looking at the world?" This is the first time that a major American museum has considered this important subject in a broad cross-generational context. The inclusion of literary work in the context of this exhibition catalog brings into focus the relationships between artists and writers in lesbian and gay culture, the interaction of genres and media in these representations, and the impact of visual culture - the arts, popular iconography, advertising, and style - on the formation of identity."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Territory of Light

Territory of Light
Author: Yuko Tsushima
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2019-02-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374718660

From one of the most significant contemporary Japanese writers, a haunting, dazzling novel of loss and rebirth “Yuko Tsushima is one of the most important Japanese writers of her generation.” —Foumiko Kometani, The New York Times I was puzzled by how I had changed. But I could no longer go back . . . It is spring. A young woman, left by her husband, starts a new life in a Tokyo apartment. Territory of Light follows her over the course of a year, as she struggles to bring up her two-year-old daughter alone. Her new home is filled with light streaming through the windows, so bright she has to squint, but she finds herself plummeting deeper into darkness, becoming unstable, untethered. As the months come and go and the seasons turn, she must confront what she has lost and what she will become. At once tender and lacerating, luminous and unsettling, Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light is a novel of abandonment, desire, and transformation. It was originally published in twelve parts in the Japanese literary monthly Gunzo, between 1978 and 1979, each chapter marking the months in real time. It won the inaugural Noma Literary Prize.

Bright Light City

Bright Light City
Author: Larry Gragg
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2013-04-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0700619038

When Elvis crooned "Bright light city . . . gonna set my soul on fire," he voiced and embraced the siren call of a glittering urban utopia that continues to mesmerize millions. Call it Sin City or Lost Wages, Las Vegas definitely deserves its rapturous "Viva!" Larry Gragg, however, invites readers to view Las Vegas in an entirely new way. While countless other authors have focused on its history or gaming industry or entertainment ties, Gragg considers how popular culture has depicted the city and its powerful allure over its first century. Drawing on hundreds of films, television programs, novels, and articles, Gragg identifies changing trends in the city's portraits. Until the 1940s, boosters promoted it as the "last frontier town," a place where prospectors and cowboys enjoyed liquor, women, and wide-open gambling. Then in the early 1950s commentators increasingly characterized Las Vegas as a sophisticated resort city in the desert, and ever since then journalists, filmmakers, and novelists have depicted a city largely built by organized crime and featuring non-stop entertainment, gambling, luxury, and, of course, beautiful-and available-women. In Gragg's narrative, these images form a kaleidoscope of lights, sounds, characters, and ultimately amazement about this neon oasis. In these pages, readers will meet gangsters like Bugsy Siegel, Tony Spilotro, and Lefty Rosenthal, as well as Las Vegas's most popular entertainers: Elvis Presley, Sinatra's Rat Pack, Liberace, and Wayne Newton, not to mention the Folies Bergere showgirls. And Gragg's skillful interweaving of fictional and journalistic accounts of organized crime shows just how mutually reinforcing they have become over the years. Vegas will always make people's eyes light up as bright as the Strip, witness the new TV show Vegas or the recent film The Hangover. For everyone entranced by its glitter and glamour, Bright Light City is a must read boasting color photos and bursting with insider details: an eclectic blend of stories, people, sights, and sounds that together make up this desert city's extraordinary appeal.