Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1925–1929) is a prescient work of mixed media assemblage, made up of hundreds of images culled from antiquity to the Renaissance and arranged into startling juxtapositions. Warburg’s allusive atlas sought to illuminate the pains of his final years, after he had suffered a breakdown and been institutionalized. It continues to influence contemporary artists today, including Gerhard Richter and Mark Dion. In this illustrated exploration of Warburg and his great work, Georges Didi-Huberman leaps from Mnemosyne Atlas into a set of musings on the relation between suffering and knowledge in Western thought, and on the creative results of associative thinking. Deploying writing that delights in dramatic jump cuts reminiscent of Warburg’s idiosyncratic juxtapositions, and drawing on a set of sources that ranges from ancient Babylon to Walter Benjamin, Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science is rich in Didi-Huberman’s trademark combination of elan and insight.

This book illuminates a variety of the key themes and positions that are developed in the work of art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman, one of the most influential image-theorists of our time. Beginning with a translated exchange on the politics of images between Jacques Rancière and Georges Didi-Huberman, the volume further contains a translation of Didi-Huberman’s essay on Georges Bataille’s writings on art. The articles in this book explore the influence of Theodor Adorno and Aby Warburg on Didi-Huberman’s work, the relationship between ‘image’ and ‘people', his insights on witnessing and memory, the theme of phasmids and his reflections on aura, pathos and the imagination. Taken as a whole, the book will give readers an insight into the rich and expansive work of Didi-Huberman, beyond the books that are currently available in English. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History offers a broad survey of cutting-edge intersections between digital technologies and the study of art history, museum practices, and cultural heritage. The volume focuses not only on new computational tools that have been developed for the study of artworks and their histories but also debates the disciplinary opportunities and challenges that have emerged in response to the use of digital resources and methodologies. Chapters cover a wide range of technical and conceptual themes that define the current state of the field and outline strategies for future development. This book offers a timely perspective on trans-disciplinary developments that are reshaping art historical research, conservation, and teaching. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, historical theory, method and historiography, and research methods in education.

This book is about the way artists generate an endless chain of substitute objects for something they can never quite find. It explores the work involved in art with a focus upon finding, gathering, and assembling charged and auratic objects on the wall beside the work. The author employs the term Das Gegenwerk or the work towards the work. This concept avoids definitive closure and expands the notion of drafting and related practices to include qualitative research methods. The multi-mode transitional practices of Das Gegenwerk are devoid of any demand for a preconceived goal but instead hinge upon the provisional and indeterminate. As such, it is a far cry from the binary logic of the computer and the design cycle but is of interest to an audience engaged with both. Das Gegenwerk hinges on our capacity to respond to the outside rather than the inwardness often attributed to creative agency. A fundamental belief of the book is that by investigating and adapting the practices of expert practitioners, we can gain an understanding of high-level creativity. It is neither a recipe nor a linear or cyclic approach. Rather, artistic creation is an interweave of transitional multi-mode practices where the overriding emphasis is on the handling or habituation of transitional materials in physical place. The author addresses the urgent need to provide a balance between the promise of new technology and our capacity to both respond to and work with what the world bestows.

Philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman is one of the most innovative and influential critical thinkers writing today. This book is the first English-language study of his writing on images. An image is a form of representation, but what are the philosophical frameworks supporting it? The book considers how Didi-Huberman takes up this question repeatedly over the course of his career. Placing his project in relation to major historical and intellectual contexts, it shows not only how he modifies dominant disciplinary traditions, but also how the study of images is central to a new way of thinking about poststructuralist-inspired art history.

Georges Didi-Huberman is a philosopher of images whose work is overdue for attention from English-language readers. Since the publication of his first book in 1982, he has published 46 essays, mostly with the prestigious Editions de Minuit, on topics ranging from monographs on individual artists to critical excursions into political philosophy. He is recognised in France and elsewhere in Europe as one of the foremost philosophers of the image writing today. In Georges Didi-Huberman and Film, Alison Smith concentrates on how Didi-Huberman's work has been informed by cinema, especially in his major (and ongoing) recent work L'Oeil de l'Histoire (The Eye of History). The book traces the development of Didi-Huberman's visual thought towards a cinematic sensibility already inherent in his early work on images in relationship to each other. After exploring his increasingly political understanding of the vital role of cinematic montage, it traces his growing understanding of cinema as a medium for expressing a dynamic representation of peoples' memory and experience, and documents his engagement with contemporary filmmakers such as Laura Waddington and Vincent Dieutre.