A book for readers of the 21st century who have learned--and demand--to interact with media that includes both ideas and imagery, Invisible Images contains 170 stunning photographs and drawings of Willis's own architectural projects, multimedia art, and symbols.

“A very fun, largely chronological journey through invisibility, beginning with myth and early magicians, ending with quantum physics.” —The New Yorker In this lively look at a timeless idea, Ball provides the first comprehensive history of our fascination with the unseen. This sweeping narrative moves from medieval spell books to the latest nanotechnology, from fairy tales to telecommunications, from camouflage to ghosts to the dawn of nuclear physics and the discovery of dark energy. Along the way, Invisible tells little-known stories about medieval priests who blamed their misdeeds on spirits; the Cock Lane ghost, which intrigued both Samuel Johnson and Charles Dickens; the attempts by Victorian scientist William Crookes to detect forces using tiny windmills; novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s belief that he was unseen when in his dressing gown; and military efforts to enlist magicians to hide tanks and ships during WWII. Bringing in such voices as Plato and Shakespeare, Ball provides not only a scientific history but a cultural one—showing how our simultaneous desire for and suspicion of the invisible has fueled invention and the imagination for centuries. In this unusual and clever book, Ball shows that our fantasies about being unseen—and seeing the unseen—reveal surprising truths about who we are. “Full of insights drawn from a broad survey of history, literature and philosophy; wherever the invisible is being contemplated, Ball is there to select the juiciest anecdotes . . . [He] is a lucid, witty and highly entertaining guide.” —The Globe and Mail “A tour-de-force history capped off with an animated discussion of H.G. Wells’s novel The Invisible Man.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

This illustrated book examines the Welsh Nonconformists' expression of religious and spiritual concepts in a visual form. It studies this subject within a broad cultural context that includes not only fine art but also architecture, preaching, hymnology and intangible manifestations such as visions. As such, the book presents an integrated study of various and related aspects of the Non-conformist imagination.

To what level are invisible stimuli processed by the brain in the absence of conscious awareness? It is widely accepted that simple visual properties of invisible stimuli are processed; however, the existence of higher-level unconscious processing (e.g., involving semantic or executive functions) remains a matter of debate. Several methodological factors may underlie the discrepancies found in the literature, such as different levels of conservativeness in the definition of “unconscious” or different dependent measures of unconscious processing. In this research topic, we are particularly interested in yet another factor: inherent differences in the amount of information let through by different suppression techniques. In the same conditions of well-controlled, conservatively established invisibility, can we show that some of the techniques in the “psychophysical magic” arsenal (e.g., masking, but also visual crowding, attentional blink, etc.) reliably lead to higher-level unconscious processing than others (e.g., interocular suppression)? Some authors have started investigating this question, using multiple techniques in similar settings . We argue that this approach should be extended and refined. Indeed, in order to delineate the frontiers of the unconscious mind using a contrastive method, one has to disentangle the limits attributable to unawareness itself, and those attributable to the technique inducing unawareness. The scope of this research topic is to provide a platform for scientists to contribute insights and further experiments addressing this fundamental question.

The book addresses the scientific debates on Rembrandt, Metsu, Vermeer, and Hoogstraten that are currently taking place in art history and cultural studies. These focus mainly on the representation of gender difference, the relationship between text and image, and the emotional discourse. They are also an appeal for art history as a form of cultural studies that analyses the semantic potential of art within discursive and social contemporary practices. Dutch painting of the seventeenth century reflects its relationship to visible reality. It deals with ambiguities and contradictions. As an avant-garde artistic media, it also contributes to the emergence of a subjectivity towards the modern “bourgeois”. It discards subject matter from its traditional fixation with iconology and evokes different imaginations and semantizations - aspects that have not been sufficiently taken into account in previous research. The book is to be understood as an appeal for art history as a form of cultural science that analyses the semantic potential of art within discursive and social contemporary practices, and, at the same time, demonstrates its relevance today. Works by Rembrandt, Metsu, Vermeer, Hoogstraten, and others serve as exemplary case studies for addressing current debates in art history and cultural studies, such as representation of gender difference, relationship between text and image, and emotional discourse.

Imaging of Biological Materials presents the four most important approaches to the imaging of biological structures: crystallography, non-crystallographic diffraction, optical microscopy, and electron microscopy.