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Invisibility Studies explores current changes in the relationship between what we consider visible and what invisible in different areas of contemporary culture. Contributions trace how these changes make their marks on various cultural fields and investigate the cultural significance of these developments, such as transparency and privacy in urban architecture and the silent invasion of surveillance technologies into everyday life. The book contends that when it comes to the changing relationship of the visible and the invisible, the connection between seeing and not being seen is an exchange conditioned by physical and social settings that create certain possibilities for visibility and visuality, yet exclude others. The richness and complexity of this cultural framework means that no single discipline or interdisciplinary approach could capture it single-handedly. Invisibility Studies begins this conversation by bringing together scholars across the fields of architectural history and theory, art, film and literature, philosophy, cultural theory and contemporary anthropology as well as featuring work by a collective of artists.
List of contents
Contents: Henriette Steiner/Kristin Veel: Negotiating (In)Visibilities in Contemporary Culture: A Short Introduction - Charles Lock: Glass Glimpsed: In, On, Through and Beyond - Slavko Kacunko: Mirroring the Invisible - Mechtild Widrich: 'I'll Be Your Mirror': Transparency, Voyeurism and Glass Architecture - Lorens Holm: Transparency: Effable and Ineffable - Bernd Nicolai: Mendelsohn and Libeskind: A Hidden History - Jewish Identity, the Void, Architectural Metaphors and Traces through Twentieth-Century Berlin - Henrik Reeh: Urban Bottles and Green Glass: Display and Transparencies in Post-Industrial Tuborg - Mark Vacher: Spaces of Difference, Different Spaces: A Study of Urban Transformations in an Old Paint Factory - Dora Osborne: Negotiating (In)Visibilities in German Memory Culture - Jane Rendell: Surface Encounters: On Being Centred, Decentred and Recentred by the Works of Do-Ho Suh - Claus Bech-Danielsen: The Secret Suburb: Second Lives in Second Homes - Annie Ring: Cool Critique Versus Hot Spectatorship: Jelinek/Haneke's Voyeur around Vienna, a Return - Devika Sharma: Visions of Punishment: On Susan Crile's Abu Ghraib Drawings - Susanne Wigorts Yngvesson: To See the World as It Appears: Vision, the Gaze and the Camera as Technological Eye - David Murakami Wood: Vanishing Surveillance: Ghost-Hunting in the Ubiquitous Surveillance Society - Nanna Bonde Thylstrup: The Invisibilities of Internet Censorship - Henriette Steiner/Kristin Veel: Visible in Theory: Perceived Visibility as Symbolic Form - A Photo-Expedition into a Contemporary Urban Environment.
About the author
Henriette Steiner is Associate Professor in Landscape Architecture and Planning at the University of Copenhagen. She is the author of The Emergence of a Modern City: Golden Age Copenhagen 1800-1850 (2014) and co-editor of Memory Culture and the Contemporary City: Building Sites (2009) and Rumlig Kultur/Spatial Culture (2012).
Kristin Veel is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. She is the author of Narrative Negotiations: Information Structures in Literary Fiction (2009) and co-editor of the collected volume The Cultural Life of Crises and Catastrophes (2012).
