Tag: Art

News

Translating Vitalities: A Website

New website ahoy! Translating Vitalities is a collective of artists, anthropologists, medical and healing practitioners, historians, and other humanists and non-humanists who regularly come together in the service of making collaborative work to understand lifeworlds and their translations and transformations. We now have a website that will archive and share work that grows from the project, and you can find us here: https://translatingvitalities.com/. Continue reading Translating Vitalities: A Website

Carla Nappi
Podcasts

Textures of Mourning: An Interview

Reginald Jackson’s inspiring new book takes a transdisciplinary approach to rethinking how we read, how we pay attention, and why that matters deeply in shaping how we understand the past, live in the present, and imagine possible futures. Textures of Mourning: Calligraphy, Mortality, and The Tale of Genji Scrolls (University of Michigan Press, 2018) explores the relationship between reading, dying, and mourning across three central texts: the Heian … Continue reading Textures of Mourning: An Interview

Carla Nappi
Podcasts

Biological Relatives: An Interview

Sarah Franklin’s new book is an exceptionally rich, focused yet wide-ranging, insightful account of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and the worlds that it creates and inhabits. Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship (Duke University Press, 2013) treats IVF as a looking-glass in which can see not only ourselves, but also transformations in modern notions of biology, technology, and kinship. In addition to a … Continue reading Biological Relatives: An Interview

Carla Nappi
Podcasts

Wicked Intelligence: An Interview

The pages of Matthew C. Hunter’s wonderful new book are full of paper fish, comets, sleepy-eyed gazes, drunk ants, and a cast full of fascinating (and sometimes hilarious) members of the experimental community of Restoration London. Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (University of Chicago Press, 2013) maps the visual traces of drawing, collecting, and building practices between 1650 and 1720 to … Continue reading Wicked Intelligence: An Interview

Carla Nappi
Podcasts

Courtly Visions: An Interview

In pre-modern Japan, Ise monogatari (also known as the Ise Stories or Tales of Ise) was considered to be one of the three most important works of literature in the Japanese language. Joshua S. Mostow’s new book focuses on the reception and appropriation of these stories from the twelfth through seventeenth centuries.  Paying special attention to the relationship of image and text in these works, Courtly Visions: The Ise Stories and the Politics of Cultural … Continue reading Courtly Visions: An Interview

Carla Nappi
Podcasts

Imperial Illusions: An Interview

Kristina Kleutghen’s beautiful new book offers a fascinating window into the culture of illusion in China in the eighteenth century and beyond. Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in the Qing Palaces (University of Washington Press, 2015) guides readers into the scenic illusions of the Qing dynasty, focusing on pictorial illusions and the technologies that helped create and contextualize them in high Qing palaces, and especially under the … Continue reading Imperial Illusions: An Interview

Carla Nappi
Podcasts

Beautiful Data: An Interview

The second half of the twentieth century saw a radical transformation in approaches to recording and displaying information. Orit Halpern’s new book traces the emergence of the “communicative objectivity” that resulted from this shift and produced new forms of observation, rationality, and economy. Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke University Press, 2014) beautifully accomplishes this by creating a dialogue between fields that don’t … Continue reading Beautiful Data: An Interview

Carla Nappi
Podcasts

Van Gogh on Demand: An Interview

Reading Winnie Wong’s new book on image production in Dafen village will likely change the way you think about copying, China, and the relationship between them. Based on fieldwork that included artist interviews, studio visits, and participant observation alongside local officials, bosses, interpreters, foreign artists, buyers, and traders, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes readers into the production of images … Continue reading Van Gogh on Demand: An Interview

Carla Nappi
Podcasts

Inventing Exoticism: An Interview

Benjamin Schmidt’s beautiful new book argues that a new form of exoticism emerged in the Netherlands between the mid-1660s and the early 1730s, thanks to a series of successful products in a broad range of media that used both text and image to engage with the non-European world. Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) takes readers into the Dutch … Continue reading Inventing Exoticism: An Interview

Carla Nappi
Podcasts

Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Interview

Janet Gyatso’s new book is a masterfully researched, compellingly written, and gorgeously illustrated history of medicine in early modern Tibet that looks carefully at the relationships between medicine and religion in this context. Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet (Columbia University Press, 2015) looks carefully at the “double movements” of medicine and religion from the twelfth through seventeenth centuries: … Continue reading Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Interview

Carla Nappi