Drawing Analogies

By exploring diagrams, diagramming and the diagrammatic across a range of disciplinary traditions and arts-led practices, this open access book addresses the gap between diagrams being a widely recognised mode of visual representation, whilst their status within arts and art education being minimal.

Informed by Charles Sanders Peirce’s understanding of a diagram as an analogy of relations, Drawing Analogies draws on its authors’ creative use of diagrams as artists, educators and arts researchers, and on fields of inquiry that bring the arts into alignment with other disciplines – most notably anthropology, critical theory, pedagogy, philosophy, psychology, semiotics and the physical and life sciences. This range of disciplines is evident in the artists and writers discussed, such as Gregory Bateson, Black Quantum Futurism, Salvador Dali, Phillipe Descola, Aristotle, Hilma af Klint, Rosalind E. Krauss, Yayoi Kusama, Louis Hjelmslev, Susanne Leeb, Jacques Lacan, Pauline Oliveros, and George Widener.

While the authors approach diagramming as both a technical and poetic activity, their emphasis is on creative, embodied and exploratory modes of diagramming practices, which are capable of engendering new forms, thoughts and experiences. By taking an artistic approach to diagrams and diagramming, by incorporating diagramming as a method of enquiry within chapters, and by exploring their interdisciplinary and multi-perspectival potentials, Drawing Analogies proposes giving new life to the art of diagramming and widening the arena of artistic practice and creative research.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by University College London.