OF SPACES IN-BETWEEN

New Book: The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes

by Patrick Keiller (Verso, 2013)

Essays by the iconic British filmmaker on the relationship between film, cities and landscape

“Robinson believed that, if he looked at it hard enough, he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the molecular basis of historical events, and in this way he hoped to see into the future.”

In his sequence of films, Patrick Keiller retraces the hidden story of the places where we live, the cities and landscapes of our everyday lives. Referencing writers such as Benjamin and Lefebvre, this collection follows his career since the late 1970s, exploring themes including the surrealist perception of the city; the relationship of architecture and film; how cities change over time, and how films represent this; as well as accounts of cross-country journeys involving historical figures, unexpected ideas and an urgent portrait of post-crash Britain.

http://www.versobooks.com/books/1504-the-view-from-the-train

New Book: Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture, Edited by: Mark Dorrian, Frederic Pousin. IB TAURIS 2013.

The view from above, or the “birds-eye” view, has become so ingrained in contemporary visual culture that it is now hard to imagine our world without it. It has risen to pre-eminence as a way of seeing, but important questions about its effects and meanings remain unexplored. More powerfully than any other visual modality, this image of “everywhere” supports our idea of a world-view, yet it is one that continues to be transformed as technologies are invented and refined. This innovative volume, edited by Mark Dorrian and Frederic Pousin, offers an unprecedented range of discussions on the aerial view, covering topics that range from sixteenth-century Roman maps, to the Luftwaffe’s aerial survey of Warsaw, to Google Earth. Underpinned by a cross-disciplinary approach that draws together diverse and previously isolated material, this volume examines the politics and poetics of the aerial view in relation to architecture, art, film, literature, photography and urbanism and explores its role in areas such as aesthetics and epistemology. Structured through a series of detailed case studies, this book builds into a cultural history of the aerial imagination.

http://www.ibtauris.com/Books/The%20arts/Photography%20%20photographs/Seeing%20From%20Above%20A%20Cultural%20History%20of%20the%20Aerial%20View.aspx