Op Art

Este libro es un riguroso y documentado estudio del desarrollo de las tendencias abstracto geométricas en España entre 1957-1969. La década de los sesenta marcó la recuperación de la geometría a escala mundial, con la generalización del arte óptico y cinético, del minimal, etc. Este despegue se produjo, igualmente en España, donde, a partir de 1957, a la par del auge del informalismo, comenzó a surgir una nueva generación de artistas decidida a experimentar con la geometría y a apostar por la razón y el análisis. Menos conocidas y reconocidas que el informalismo, las tendencias abstracto-geométricas son una parte fundamental del legado artístico de los años sesenta. En la presente obra dichas tendencias, hasta ahora muy descuidadas por la historiografía artística, son analizadas a partir de diferentes ejes temáticos que incluyen los procesos histórico-artísticos, la fortuna crítica y el debate estético en la época y el análisis plástico. La autora reconstruye y analiza los diferentes movimientos geométricos existentes en España, como el arte normativo, el arte concreto, el arte cinético y óptico, etc. Sacando a la luz artistas, movimientos y documentos de la época la autora consigue mostrar una nueva fisonomía del devenir de las artes españolas en los sesenta.

"Our visual relationships with architectural propositions are highly mediated by representations, and the image-technologies used to construct them. The context in which these propositions are explored and tested is conceptually framed by image-technologies, such as computer-based design and visualisation software. However, much of the knowledge that underpins how architecture is represented is derived directly from concepts and techniques indebted to Renaissance pictorial art. For example, linear perspective’s influence upon how architectural space is constructed in computer-based environments today remains relatively unchallenged, whilst other creative disciplines apply alternative non-perspectival means of representing space. Further, the re–emerging interest in surface effects throughout the 1990s has—in no small part—materialised as a direct result of increasingly powerful computer processors in combination with the seamless transfer of information between the computer–based design and visualisation software that is used to conceive complex geometrical forms, and the fabrication technologies applied to manufacture these complex geometries as built architectural forms. These fabrication technologies have allowed for the relatively cheap application of images onto almost any material and surface of a built form, with little to no consideration of the broader History of Visuality upon which these image–technologies are ultimately indebted.

In order to reveal potential insights concerning how emerging image–technologies might affect the conception and experience of spatial effects in Architecture, it is necessary to better understand how space was represented and incorporated within pictures through the lens of older relations between space and image in the History of Western Art. This thesis presents a history of concepts and techniques that outline how viewers have engaged with pictures when displayed in space, how space was represented within the image’s composition (space in images) and, finally, how the space in which the image was displayed itself was subsumed within the composition of the image (space within images). This thesis makes a significant and original contribution to the discipline of Architecture by opening up issues of contemporary image-technology, exploring their impact on the tripartite relationship between images in space and space in/within images. This thesis both historicises and speculates on the changing relationship between pictures and viewers in Western Visual Culture; in terms of the dynamic interchange between static and moving images, and stationary and moving viewers. That is to say, it is both reflective and projective in attempting to provide a lens through which to suggest relevant techniques that could be applied in the conceptual and technical application of pictures on the interior and exterior surfaces of architecture today.

Methodologically, this thesis primarily uses historical resources in order to instrumentally explore contemporary problems in Visual Culture and Architecture in parallel to the construction of a series of design–based research demonstrations and analytical diagrams constructed by the author. Significantly, the design–based research demonstrations and analytical diagrams aim to make explicit the conceptual and technical implications of the space–image relation in Architecture that are rarely manifest in a clear, illustrative form by authorities in the field. These analytical diagrams provide a clear visual explanation of complex space–image concepts that reveal original insights into what is at stake when old concepts in Western Art are brought to bear on new problems in Architecture today. The combination of scholarly research, diagrammatic analysis and design–based research demonstration provides a more holistic and productive method through which to discuss, assess and reveal new knowledge concerning the space–image relation. Importantly, this dissertation does not set out to provide an authoritative account of how viewers have historically engaged with images in Art and Architecture, rather it aims to seek out critical moments of transition in the History of Visuality, and reflect upon them through designerly activity.

This thesis discusses four core issues through a series of case studies and design–based research demonstrations. Firstly, this thesis outlines concepts and techniques used in pictorial composition in the late medieval period. This discussion provides a series of original organisational concepts and generative techniques through which to include co-existent viewpoints within one picture: the capacity of a pictorial composition, such as Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Sala della Pace mural (1338–40), to include a series of different viewpoints that address specific scenes within the image’s overall composition. Secondly, this thesis outlines and assesses key methods of prescribing viewpoint through the application of perspective-based compositional structures in a series of case-study paintings exemplary of Renaissance pictorialism. Thirdly, this thesis outlines and assesses centralised viewpoint and immersive pictorial compositions in Art and Western Visual Culture through the formation of a genealogical connection between the nineteenth-century panorama, Apple’s Quicktime Virtual Reality panorama and Image-Objects in the 1980s, and Jeffrey Shaw’s ‘mixed-reality’ installations of the 1990s. Finally, this thesis outlines and assesses how viewpoint is affected by pictorial compositions that do not represent space, that is, compositions that are non-representational."

About France and the Visual Arts since 1945:
Taking on the myth of France's creative exhaustion following World War II, this collection of essays brings together an international team of scholars, whose research offers English readers a rich and complex overview of the place of France and French artists in the visual arts since 1945.
Addressing a wide range of artistic practices, spanning over seven decades, and using different methodologies, their contributions cover ground charted and unknown. They introduce greater depth and specificity to familiar artists and movements, such as Lettrism, Situationist International or Nouveau Réalisme, while bringing to the fore lesser known artists and groups, including GRAPUS, the Sociological Art Collective, and Nicolas Schöffer.
Collectively, they stress the political dimensions and social ambitions of the art produced in France at the time, deconstruct the traditional geography of the French art world, and highlight the multiculturalism of the French art scene that resulted from its colonial past and the constant flux of artistic travels and migrations.
Ultimately, the book contributes to a story of postwar art in which France can be inscribed not as a main or sub chapter, but rather as a vector in the wider constellation of modern and contemporary art.

This article proposes the
term “perceptual abstraction” to describe the methods of artists who take bodily contingency as their medium. It focuses
on the low-frequency drone work of an anonymous figure called Eleh. Like others
in the Minimalist tradition, Eleh follows
a processual ethic that begins from a minimum of structural elements and asks how they might reshape one another over time. What sets Eleh apart, however, is its singular focus on frequencies within, and sometimes beyond, the lowest reaches of human hearing. These tones play strangely on the sensorium because they can evade cochlear audition even while haunting
other registers. This is bass as an agent of bodily mystification, and in Eleh’s hands it becomes a sonic strategy for modulating felt space and fleshy thought. If Eleh diverges from most Minimalists in these ways, then
Paul Jasen is an instructor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University. He holds a PhD in Cultural Mediations and is currently completing a book on bass, bodies, and the materiality of sonic experience. paul.jasen@carleton.ca
16 The Senses & Society DOI: 10.2752/174589314X13834112760967
liner notes and cover art point to another, more like-minded body of work. Might Op(tical) Art – with its interest in “charging fields” and rhythmically unraveling retinal perception – share at least as much with Eleh, at the level of affective strategy? If so, could we posit an alternate, transversal lineage of artistic practices defined not by form or tradition, but by a desire to confound perception, by whatever aesthetic and sensory routes?

This is an essay for the catalogue of BR's exhibition in Japan (2018). Her consistent exploration of the mechanism of perception (as a continuous process of durational unfolding) is interpreted through the philosophy of Henri Bergson and his theory of freedom. Negative criticism BR received from modernist critics such as Thomas Hess and Michael Fried (especially from their vision of "freedom") is challenged through Bergsonian concept of freedom which allows one to interpret BR's paintings in a new light.

Op Art is, more than anything, retinal queerness. It cheerfully and lustily fucks up straight-laced desire. Instead of straight lines it introduces pulsating force fields, pure visual attractors, vibrating planes and energy formations. We get liberated, free-flowing deluges of desire, dancing a mathematical gavotte in a retinal no-mans-land. The effect is druggy. We trip and freak out, constantly oscillating between desire and exhaustion, ecstasy and triviality. Op Art offers the ultimate ambience: where else can we find such a strange link between visual didactics and hallucinatory sexiness, such a heady brew of mathematical logic and orgiastic visuality? 

The means of conception and construction of architectural form has never before been so open to radical figurative and procedural transformation, fuelled by the emergence of new computer-mediated design and fabrication technologies. It appeared that almost anything was possible at the turn of the new millennium, however the emerging techno-determinist approach to architectural design – in some circles –exclusively denied the human body as an agent in design conception, continuing the prevailing traditions of western occularcentricism. The formal and spatial character of architecture was effectively reduced in the nineteen-nineties to questions of surface and flatness. However, a series of contemporary architectural projects by architects Elenberg Fraser, Herzog & De Meuron, and locally in Brisbane, M3 Architects, began to question this monocular trajectory, choosing instead to mine the field of Art in search of optical effects that engaged directly with the observer on a cognitive level. In this chapter, I will demonstrate that these new conceptions of surface affect can be understood as a historical emancipation from the dictatorial constraints of local vernacular traditions such as those effecting climatic screening and compositional fenestration in the architecture of South-East Queensland. I will demonstrate how contemporary surface disturbance projects draw upon concepts of composition and optics borrowed from the de stijl art movement of the 1960’s, and James Turrell’s manipulations of cognitive indeterminacy in the 1980’s. This chapter therefore speculates that such projects proffer a dramatically different conception of surface than that that is purported by sup-tropical traditions that apparently prevail in South-East Queensland architecture.

The the lobby restoration of Edward Larrabee Barnes' El Monte Apartments in San Juan, Puerto Rico entailed unprecedented efforts in identifying and validating a decorative feature of the recent past manufactured in France en the late 1950's.

https://soundeagle.wordpress.com/2017/09/28/optical-illusions/

SoundEagle would like to invite all and sundry to contemplate the following queries:
👁‍ Is seeing always believing? ❇️
👁‍🗨 Is viewing invariably perceiving? ✳️
👀 How robust is the human vision? ❇️
😵 How tricky is optical illusion? ✳️

This post is a lengthy and multifaceted showcase of 👁‍ Optical Illusions 👁‍🗨❇️😵✳️👀 in their various forms and manifestations.

Our visual relationships with architectural propositions are highly mediated by representations, and the image-technologies used to construct them. The context in which these propositions are explored and tested is conceptually framed by image-technologies, such ...