Coverscaping: Discovering Album Aesthetics
Postdoctoral fellow Øyvind Vågnes and professor Asbjørn Grønstad's book Coverscaping: Discovering Album Aesthetics focuses on the semiotics, poetics, and rhetoric of album covers. The book is based on research undertaken wihtin the Nomadikon project, and concerns how record sleeves may represent a visual genre in its own right.
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Coverscaping focuses on the semiotics, poetics, and rhetoric of album covers. Working from the assumption that record sleeves may represent a visual genre in its own right, the essays engage in various ways with what one might call the pictorial component of recorded music. The contributors run the whole gamut from close readings of individual covers to more theoretical or philosophical explorations of the aesthetic nature and artistic value of album covers. Coverscaping aims to carve out a makeshift analytical space from which to re-appraise the ever mutable relation between the visual and the auditory, thus contributing to a keener appreciation of the challenges which define the art and craft of the genre.
Øyvind Vågnes is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen.
Asbjørn Grønstad is Professor of Visual Culture in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen.
Coverscaping - Discovering Album Aesthetics - København - Museum Tusculanums Forlag - Københavns Universitet - 2010 - ISBN: 978-87-635-0774-5
The Bergen Center of Visual Culture - Nomadicon