Product Description: Drawing a Hypothesis is an exciting reader on the ontology of forms of visualizations and on the development of the diagrammatic view and its use in contemporary art, science and theory. In an intense process of exchange with artists and scientists, Nikolaus Gansterer reveals drawing as a media of research enabling the emergence of new narratives and ideas by tracing the speculative potential of diagrams...read more

The seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza-generally known as Benedict (or Bento) de Spinoza-spent the most intense years of his short life writing. A keen draughtsman, he also carried with him a sketchbook. After his sudden death, his friends rescued letters, manuscripts, notes, but apparently didn't find a sketchbook. Or, if they did, it was subsequently lost. For years, John Berger has imagined Bento's sketchbook being found, not knowing what he hoped to find in it, but wanting to reread his words while being able to look at the things Bento had seen with his own eyes. When one day a friend gave John a blank sketchbook he began to draw: not like a seventeenth-century Dutch amateur, nor to try and illustrate Bento's thoughts, but drawing, in Spinoza's company, from life today, and telling stories and asking questions. A book of images and words, Bento's Sketchbook is an exploration of the practice of drawing, about where and to what it leads. It is, too, a beautiful, clear-sighted meditation on how we perceive, and seek to explain, our ever-changing relationship with the world around us.

Product Description: The works in The Drawing Book, by artists, architects, sculptors, scientists, filmmakers and thinkers of all descriptions, attest to the versatility and immediacy of drawing. From first thoughts to finely wrought, elaborate artworks, from the lightest sketch in pencil to bold, gallery-wall installations, the medium is shown as an essential vehicle for creativity...read more

Product Description: The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State R^ constitutes a genealogy of the academic, confraternal, and guild practices of artists in Florence, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. It examines the institution's everyday practices, for which its daily transactions, expenses, sources of income, and seemingly inconsequential rulings provides an index, along with its official statutes, public mandates, and "extraordinary" proceedings, many of which have remained unpublished until now...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In this brilliant essay, Jacques Derrida explores issues of vision, blindness, self-representation, and their relation to drawing, while offering detailed readings of an extraordinary collection of images. Selected by Derrida from the prints and drawings department of the Louvre, the works depict blindness--fictional, historical, and biblical...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)