Florian Dombois

Two important essays on Étienne-Jules Marey published for the first time in English alongside his breathtaking images of moving air and smoke. Featuring more than one hundred and fifty photographs and images, Movements of Air reprints the breathtaking pictures of Étienne-Jules Marey—images captured between 1899 and 1901 during his scientific experiments with moving air and smoke—and complements them with essays by Georges Didi-Huberman and Laurent Mannoni. Mannoni begins by reflecting on Marey’s experimental approach. As the founder of the “graphic method,” Marey was also the developer of an aerodynamic wind tunnel. His experiments’ photographs of fluid motion introduced a whole world of movements and turbulences, and fluids, and influenced generations of scientists and artists alike. Didi-Huberman expands on the philosophical debates surrounding these aesthetically and technically instructive images. Even though Marey’s main interest was graphic information, Didi-Huberman shows us how the flow of all things drew this ingenious experimenter to a photographic practice that creates drags, streaks, expansions, and visual dances. Marey’s wind tunnel photographs were also themselves causes of turbulence in the history of images. The artists Dombois and Oeschger explore these “graphical” vortices of the last 120 years, providing at the end of the book a collage from historical and contemporary material interlaced with their own image-making in Dombois’s wind tunnel at the Zurich University of the Arts.

Art & Crisis is a theoretical publication on educational processes and what it means to teach and learn fine arts in a city such as Zurich. It brings together contributions from 2017 MFA students, their professors at Zurich University of the Arts and guest writers.

The 21st century is unthinkable without its past of unrestricted scaling in almost any way of life. A key driver of technological progress is mankind's ability to imagine things at a larger, or smaller, scale; processes at higher, or slower, speed, or to virtually apply more or less energy to something. This ability has been evident ever since we began to produce and represent art, yet it gained an entirely different dimension with the onset of industrialisation in the 19th century. This new book collects essays by fourteen artists, designers, engineers, and scholars. They discuss the significance of scaling for their respective discipline and field of research. The initial point of a trans-disciplinary symposium at Zurich University of the Arts in 2015, on which the contributions in this book are based, was the camera. It combines fast and slow motion, and film speed - already three dimensions of scaling. The possibility to copy and print taken images adds a fourth one, replication, making this apparatus that seems to merely depict our world appear to be something of a much larger scale: a machine to produce thought and imagination.