This intimate account of how ideas get turned into artwork—including dance performance, film, sound installation, sculpture, and painting—looks at how the material thinking that art embodies produces new understandings about individuals, their histories, and the cultures they inhabit. Discussing the philosophy of signs (images, text, and their interaction), the psychology of visual perception, and the overarching notion of mythopoeic place-making, this intellectually wide-ranging and anecdotally narrated primer provides a fresh perspective to the concept of inventing. All active practitioners in the (...) fields of performance, media, film, museum, painting, sculpture, and cultural studies will benefit from this look at how artists participate in the conceptual invention of their world. (shrink)

In this remarkable and often dazzling book, Paul Carter explores the conditions for sociability in a globalized future. He argues that we make many assumptions about communication but overlook barriers to understanding between strangers as well as the importance of improvisation in overcoming these obstacles to meeting. While disciplines such as sociology, legal studies, psychology, political theory, and even urban planning treat meeting as a good in its own right, they fail to provide a model of what makes meeting possible (...) and worth pursuing: a yearning for encounter. The volume's central narrative-between Northern cultural philosophers and Australian societies-traverses the troubled history of misinterpretation that is characteristic of colonial cross-cultural encounter. As he brings the literature of Indigenous and non-Indigenous anthropological research into dialogue with Western approaches of conceptualizing sociability, Carter makes a startling discovery: that meeting may not be desirable and, if it is, its primary objective may be to negotiate a future of non-meeting. To explain the phenomenon of encounter, Carter performs it in differing scales, spaces, languages, tropes, and forms of knowledge, staging in the very language of the book what he calls "passages." In widely varying contexts, these passages posit the disjunction of Greco-Roman and Indigenous languages, codes, theatrics of power, social systems, and visions of community. In an era of new forms of technosocialization, Carter offers novel ways of presenting the philosophical dimensions of waiting, meeting, and non-meeting. (shrink)

Foregrounding the extent to which 'place' remains resistant to the politics and poetics of 'network culture', this essay approaches place as a boundary ecology rather than as an instance of cultural invariance. It calls on readers to think about attempts to actively recycle cultural 'debris' or 'waste' through an ethics of passage instead of the kind of instrumentalist statics that prevents the development of an ontology of mobility. Con-tending that such a capacity to inhabit passage is compromised by the eschatological (...) language used to communicate the implications of environmental disaster, as well as by languages of consultation that empty place of any creative power to incubate alternatives – events, modes of relation –, the essay stresses the mythopoetic techniques that produce places as knots or nodal points within a network of passage. The designer's task is to create the hinge mechanisms that render such boundary ecologies inhabitable imaginatively, and by materialising the nexus between creativity and change to alter our position vis-a-vis our ethical responsibilities as citizens of a shared biosphere. (shrink)