Surface and Apparition: The Immateriality of Modern Surface

Description

Surface is one of the most intensely debated topics in recent arts, humanities and social science scholarship. The changing technologies which manufacture the actual and virtual surfaces of today are radically altering our perception of thresholds and borders. In contrast to the responses to preceding industrial revolutions, contemporary concerns with surface seem preoccupied with its function of mediation or passage, rather than with that of separation or boundary. In Surface and Apparition, each chapter explores a different meaning and function of the material and immaterial qualities of 'surface'. Case studies include various surfaces from computer screens, 'artisanal' engines and glass architecture to gauzy veils, the planetary surface of supply chain capitalism, and spatial embodiment in street markets. International scholars of design, architecture, film, media, fine art, fashion, textiles, silversmithing, woodworking and archival practices account for how the material and the immaterial draw attention to each other in both their everyday and artistic practice. Each chapter addresses particular systems (from the human body to manually operated tools and machines); materials (for instance cloth, wood and light); modes of attention, movement and engagement. 'Surface' therefore functions in this book as a multidisciplinary method for attending to critical issues concerning human creative and technological endeavours.

Yeseung Lee is Lecturer for Design Cultures at De Montfort University, UK.

We live, increasingly, in an age of surfaces - navigating our lives more and more via flat screens and fleeting appearances. Surface and Apparition provides a timely historical and theoretical viewpoint on this condition, through a series of inventive case studies. The book usefully challenges the stereotype of superficiality, showing that surfaces properly attended to can yield narratives of temporal and haptic subtlety. The volume is excitingly diverse in its contents, with respect to time period and geographical space, ranging from technology to hand craft. Nonetheless mounts a clear, powerful argument in favor of surface as an expressive, sensitive register of history. -- Glenn Adamson, Yale Center for British Art, USA This is a truly remarkable and enjoyable, multidisciplinary investigation of surface. The details, insights, and theoretical explorations catch the imagination and open up important new avenues for thought and practice. The subtlety and nuance of this collection, each chapter providing unique haeccaties - those specific qualities that mark something as uniquely 'it' - that stay with the reader long after reading. This is an important work - for the student and scholar, but also for the inquisitive, the curious, and the reader who has always felt there must be something more to what meets the eye, the touch, the feel. -- Timothy Carroll, University College London, UK Surface and Apparition: The Immateriality of Modern Surface provides a coruscating assembly of reflections and arguments on the idea of the surface. The reader will come away astonished and invigorated by the density and depth of the ways in which different kinds of surface are brought to thought by the essays in Yeseung Lee's volume -- Steven Connor, University of Cambridge, UK 'Surface is now our becoming' suggests Yeseung Lee in her introduction to this dazzlingly tactile exploration of surface by the collection of eminent makers and thinkers she has assembled for Surface and Apparition: The Immateriality of Modern Surface. Ground-breaking and provocative, the texts in this volume understand surface as both material and immaterial, concerned with transition and constant modification rather than with separation and boundaries. In our current climate where contact, transmission and diffusion are paramount concerns, this volume is both prophetic and essential reading -- Jonathan Faiers, University of Southampton, UK In a dozen wide-ranging and provocative essays, representing as many distinct disciplinary perspectives, Surface and Apparition opens out onto the ways in which surfaces - from those of glass containers to the Earth itself - mediate multifaceted material and social dynamics. It shows that surfaces do more than contain or conceal; they are mutable ecologies encompassing multitudes, combinatory and often unstable processes composed as much of desire and thwarted intention as materials, means and design. -- Sandy Isenstadt, University of Delaware, USA