In Vision, Space, Desire: Global Perspectives and Cultural Hybridity, distinguished thinkers from around the globe explore the ever-changing realities of contemporary art and discuss new strategies to frame the ways Native contemporary artists are regarded in the international art world. This book, which grew out of a symposium held by the National Museum of the American Indian in December 2005, features a lively exchange of ideas among Native and non-Native museum directors and curators, artists, critics, and scholars from around the world, and opens new possibilities in contemporary art practice and engagement.

This book looks at the inside deliberations that led to President George W Bush's space exploration initiative. The author team has been granted unprecedented access to senior policy makers as the plan was assembled during 2003 and 2004. Sietzen and Cowing will give exclusive details on the meetings between President George Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, and senior members of the White House staff as the planning process began. In addition Sietzen and Cowing will examine how policy was translated from paper into hardware designs including the first outline of the plan's new space vehicle and how the inspiration behind the architecture once used in the Apollo program was summoned back to guide 21st century space planners. Sietzen and Cowing will describe how the Columbia accident and the political outcry for a new central goal for the US space program gave rise to what would become the most far reaching change in US space policy in a generation. Readers will have the most comprehensive look available on what this new space vision will do for human exploration of the Solar System -- and how nearly everything NASA does will change as a result. New Moon Rising: The Making of America's Space Vision and the Remaking of NASA, by Frank Sietzen, Jr. and Keith L. Cowing, to be published July 2004. The team broke the story on the space plan in the pages of the Washington Times and in the United Press International wire service. Portions of the book were serialised in the Times in a multi-part background article called "Why Some Said the Moon: The Exclusive Inside Story of the Bush Space Vision" published in January 2004.

The glorious Space Age has come and gone. So what's next now? This book is a guide of future space transportation concepts. From Earth-to-Orbit to in-space transportation, you will sample what is being considered and get an easy-to -understand explanation of what spacecraft will do and how it will work.

Advances in technology allow us to see the invisible: fetal heartbeats, seismic activity, cell mutations, virtual space. Yet in an age when experience is so intensely mediated by visual records, the centuries-old realization that knowledge gained through sight is inherently fallible takes on troubling new dimensions. This book considers the ways in which seeing, over time, has become the foundation for knowing (or at least for what we think we know). A. Joan Saab examines the scientific and socially constructed aspects of seeing in order to delineate a genealogy of visuality from the Renaissance to the present, demonstrating that what we see and how we see it are often historically situated and culturally constructed. Through a series of linked case studies that highlight moments of seeming disconnect between seeing and believing—hoaxes, miracles, spirit paintings, manipulated photographs, and holograms, to name just a few—she interrogates the relationship between “visions” and visuality. This focus on the strange and the wonderful in understanding changing notions of visions and visual culture is a compelling entry point into the increasingly urgent topic of technologically enhanced representations of reality. Accessibly written and thoroughly enlightening, Objects of Vision is a concise history of the connections between seeing and knowing that will appeal to students and teachers of visual studies and sensory, social, and cultural history.

Spanning more than 2,500 years in the history of art, Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting demonstrates how the rise and diffusion of the science of optics in ancient Greece and the Mediterranean world correlated to pictorial illusion in the development of Western painting from Hellenistic Greece to the present. Using examples from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, David Summers argues that scene-painting (architectural backdrops) and shadow-painting (in which forms are modeled or shown as if in relation to a source of light) not only evolved in close association with geometric optics toward the end of the fifth century B.C.E., but also contributed substantially to the foundations of the new science. The spread of understanding of how light is transmitted, reflected, and refracted is evident in the works of artists such as Brunelleschi, van Eyck, Alberti, and Leonardo. The interplay between optics and painting that influenced the course of Western art, Summers says, persisted as a framework for the realism of Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Goya and continues today in modern photography and film.

A Harvard neurobiologist explains how vision works, citing the scientific origins of artistic genius and providing coverage of such topics as optical illusions and the correlation between learning disabilities and artistic skill.

This collection offers a response to the view that migration disrupts national heritage. Investigating the mediation provided by migrant art, it asks how we can rethink art history in a way that uproots its reliance on space and place as stable definitions of style. Beginning with an invaluable overview of migration studies terminology and concepts, Art and migration opens dialogues between academics of art history and migrations studies through a series of essays and interviews. It also re-evaluates the cultural understanding of borders and revisits the contours of the art world – a supposedly globalised community re-assessed here as structurally bordered by art market dynamics, career constraints, gatekeeping and patronage networks.