Exploring the epistemological potential of meta- and inter-images Since the 1990s, when the question of the visual became central in various arts and humanities disciplines, images that refer to themselves as such or to other images have enjoyed an increasing interest. Meta- and Inter-Images in Contemporary Visual Art and Culture partakes in, enriches and updates these debates. It investigates what meta- and inter-images can make known about the visual, in its own terms, by its own means. Written by scholars in aesthetics, art history, and cultural, film, literary, media, and visual studies, the essays gathered here tackle meta- and inter-images in an array of creative artefacts, practices, and media. They unfold the epistemological potential of every meta- and inter-image discussed to raise questions such as: What are images? How do they work? By whom, to what purpose, to what effect and in what context/s are they used? How are they created and understood? And how do they challenge our (pre)conceptions of images and the ways we study them? Contributors Maaheen Ahmed (Université catholique de Louvain), Vangelis Athanassopoulos (Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne), Sotirios Bahtsetzis (Hellenic Open University), Concepción Cortés Zulueta (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), Mafalda Dâmaso (Goldsmiths, University of London), Elisabeth-Christine Gamer (University of Bern), Amanda Gluibizzi (Ohio State University), Stella Hockenhull (University of Wolverhampton), Anaël Lejeune (Université catholique de Louvain), Fabrice Leroy (University of Louisiana at Lafayette), Johanna Malt (King’s College London), Olga Moskatova (IKKM, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar), Magdalena Nowak (The Graduate School for Social Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences), Jorgelina Orfila (Texas Tech University), Fran Pheasant-Kelly (University of Wolverhampton), Raphaël Pirenne (School of Graphic Research, E.R.G. Brussels), Abigail Susik (Willamette University)

Stretching across the historical region of Mesopotamia, the Akkadian dynasty (ca. 2334-2154 BCE) created a territorial state of unprecedented scale in the ancient Near East by uniting the city-states of Sumer and Akkad and parts of Syria and Iran. To establish and, later, cement their authority over disparate peoples and places, the kings used art and visual culture to extraordinary effect. Exemplars of Kingship conveys the astonishing life of the art of the Akkadian kings by assessing ancient and modern responses to its dynamic forms and transformative ideologies of kingship. For nearly two thousand years after their reign, the Akkadian kings were remembered as exemplary rulers. Modern assessments of ancient memories of Akkadian kingship have concentrated on textual attestations of the kings' place in cultural memory. This book considers the contributions of images to memories of Akkadian kingship. Through close readings of the visuals that remain, Melissa Eppihimer discusses how Akkadian steles, statues, and cylinder seals became models for later rulers in Mesopotamia and beyond who wished to emulate or critique the Akkadian kings-and how these rulers and their contemporaries were reminded of the Akkadian past when they looked at images. Exemplars of Kingship is, therefore, a book about Akkadian art and its reception in antiquity, but it is also concerned with the modern reception of Akkadian art and kingship. It argues that modern responses have constrained our understanding of ancient responses. Through a wide range of examples drawn from almost two millennia, the book highlights the individual decisions that prompted continuity and change during the long history of Mesopotamia and its artistic traditions.

This book discusses how Chinese religion and philosophy were represented in printed works produced in the Dutch Republic between 1595 and 1700. By focusing on books, newspapers, learned journals, and pamphlets, Trude Dijkstra sheds new light on the cultural encounter between China and western Europe in the early modern period. Form, content, and material-technical aspects of different media in Dutch and French are analysed, providing novel insights into the ways in which readers could take note of Chinese religion and philosophy. This study thereby demonstrates that there was no singular image of China and its religion and philosophy, but rather a varied array of notions on the subject.

The chapters in this book consist of selected papers that were presented at the 3rd International Conference and Poster Exhibition on Semiotics and Visual Communication at the Cyprus University of Technology in November 2017. They investigate the theme of the third conference, “The Semiotics of Branding”, and look at branding and brand design as endorsing a reputation and inhabiting a status of almost mythical proportion that has triumphed over the past few decades. Emerging from its forerunner (corporate identity) to incorporate advertising, consumer lifestyles and attitudes, image-rights, market-research, customisation, global expansion, sound and semiotics, and “the consumer-as-the-brand”, the word “branding” currently appears to be bigger than its own umbrella definition. From tribal markers, such as totems, scarifications and tattoos, to emblems of power, language, fashion, architectural space, insignias of communal groups, heraldic devices, religious and political symbols, national flags and the like, a form of branding is at work that responds to the need to determine the presence and interaction of specific groups, persons or institutions through shared codes of meaning.

Art and Design in 1960s New York explores the mutual influence between fine art and graphic design in New York City during the long decade of the 1960s. Beginning with advertising's "creative revolution" and its relationship to pop artists, the book traces design and art's developing interest in responses to civic problems such as the proliferation of billboards, navigation through the city's streets and subways, and issues of deteriorating infrastructure. The strategies exploited by these artists and designers resulted in similar approaches to visual imagery and shared techniques for thinking about and responding to the city in which they lived.

This book offers a comprehensive reassessment of ekphrasis: the verbal representation of visual art. Ekphrasis has been traditionally regarded as a form of paragone (competition) between word and image. This interdisciplinary collection of essays seeks to complicate this critical paradigm and proposes a more reciprocal model of ekphrasis that involves an encounter or exchange between visual and textual cultures. This critical and theoretical shift demands a new form of ekphrastic poetics, which is less concerned with representational and institutional struggles, and more concerned with ideas of ethics, affect and intersubjectivity. Ekphrastic encounters brings together leading scholars working in the field of word-and-image studies and offers a fresh exploration of ekphrastic texts from the Renaissance to the present day. Taken together, the chapters establish a new set of theoretical frameworks for exploring the ekphrastic encounter.

In the midst of the climate crisis and the threat of the sixth extinction, we can no longer claim to be the masters of nature. Rather, we need to unlearn our species’ arrogance for the sake of all animals, human and non-human. Rethinking our being-in-the-world as Homo sapiens, this monograph argues, starts precisely from the way we relate to our closer companion species. The authors gathered here endeavour to find multiple exit strategies from the anthropocentric paradigms that have bound the human and social sciences. Part I investigates the unexplored margins of human history by re-reading historical events, literary texts, and scientific findings from an animal’s perspective, rather than a human’s. Part II explores different forms of human-animal relationships, putting the emphasis on the institutions, spaces, and discourses that frame our interactions with animals. Part III engages with processes of "translation" that aim to render animals’ experience and perception into human words and visual language.