Though his works evoke 60s Op art, Swiss-born artist Philippe Decrauzat's first reference is more likely to be the film Tron than Bridget Riley. Decrauzat works in a variety of media--wall painting, shaped canvases, sculpture, installations and works on paper, all of which evidence flat chromatics and complex geometric compositions. Stating, "I am not trying to build up a new theory about ideological issues regarding the historical content of abstraction. I am strongly involved in investigating the status of the image, in other words, indebted to practices trying to outline the critical tools developed by Conceptual and Op art," Decrauzat clues us in to how his seemingly simple mix of appropriated imagery and techniques works. This is Decrauzat's first monograph and includes an essay by critic and curator Bob Nickas.

Hitchcock and Contemporary Art introduces readers to the fascinating and diverse range of artistic practices devoted to Alfred Hitchcock's films. His works have the capacity to activate sophisticated engagements with Hitchcock's films and cinema more generally, tackling issues of time and space, memory and history, and sound and image.

We delight in using our eyes, particularly when puzzling over pictures. Art and illusionists is a celebration of pictures and the multiple modes of manipulating them to produce illusory worlds on flat surfaces. This has proved fascinating to humankind since the dawning of depiction. Art and illusionists is also a celebration of the ways we see pictures, and of our ability to distil meaning from arrays of contours and colours. Pictures are not only a source of fascination for artists, who produce them, but also for scientists, who analyse the perceptual effects they induce. Illusions provide the glue to cement the art and science of vision. Painters plumb the art of observation itself whereas scientists peer into the processes of perception. Both visual artists and scientists have produced patterns that perplex our perceptions and present us with puzzles that we are pleased to peruse. Art and illusionists presents these two poles of pictorial representation as well as presenting novel ‘perceptual portraits’ of the artists and scientists who have augmented the art of illusion. The reader can experience the paradoxes of pictures as well as producing their own by using the stereoscopic glasses enclosed and the transparent overlay for making dynamic moiré patterns.

Noise has become a model of cultural and theoretical thinking over the last two decades. Following Hegarty's influential 2007 book, Noise/Music, Annihilating Noise discusses in sixteen essays how noise offers a way of thinking about critical resistance, disruptive creativity and a complex yet enticing way of understanding the unexpected, the dissonant, the unfamiliar. It presents noise as a negativity with no fixed identity that can only be defined in connection and opposition to meaning and order. This book reaches beyond experimental music and considers noise as an idea and practice within a wide range of frameworks including social, ecological, and philosophical perspectives. It introduces the ways in which the disruptive implications of noise impact our ways of thinking, acting, and organizing in the world, and applies it to 21st-century concerns and today's technological ecology.

The revised and extended BMW Art Guide by Independent Collectors presents 304 private collections of contemporary art accessible to the public—featuring large and small, famous and the relatively unknown. Succinct portraits of the collections with countless color illustrations take the reader to 51 countries, often to regions or urban districts that are off-the-beaten-path. This practical guide is a collaborative publication stemming from the partnership between BMW and Independent Collectors, the international online platform for collectors of contemporary art. To date, neither the Internet nor any book has ever contained a comparable assembly of international private collections, including several that have opened their doors to art lovers and connoisseurs for the first time.

Tiré du site Internet des Presses du réel: "Steven Parrino is born in 1958, New York City. He died on a motorcycle in Brooklyn in 2005."