In this post, new reviews and detailed sequences of process sketches below. Extremely smart and insightful review of Unflattening in Canada’s Quill & Quire by Ian Daffern. He opens with the question, “Can comics inspire the next leap in the way we think about physics, philosophy, or even our everyday lives?” And closes by calling Unflattening “terrifically ambitious, and…
Over the last few weeks, Unflattening has received a great deal of kind attention from a wide range of outlets. Cory Doctorow’s feature on it in this article on Boing Boing introduced a lot of new eyes to the work. This bounced around the internet and was also picked up and reworked for features on Open…
Unflattening was featured in the New York Times Book Review! Writer Douglas Wolk said, “Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening is a genuine oddity, a philosophical treatise in comics form. ‘Flatness,’ for Sousanis’s purposes, is not the quality of abstraction that Clement Greenberg lauded in modern art, but the lamentable condition of the inhabitants of Edwin A. Abbott’s ‘Flatland’:…
Following up on my previous post, I’m sharing a second deleted scene that appeared in the dissertation but was cut from the published edition. Like that previous one, which dealt with my process of Spin/Weave/Cut, this too comes from Chapter 4: “Our Bodies in Motion,” which delves into thinking about drawing through our perception. On this page, I took up…
Unseen art – a deleted scene from Unflattening! I’ve been asked frequently how the published version of Unflattening differs from the dissertation. After I defended, I submitted the work to HUP and went up to Cambridge to work with my wonderful editor Sharmila Sen. We trimmed text throughout to tighten it up and keep a consistency of…
With thanks to the US and Canadian postal services, I was thrilled for my very own copy of Unflattening to arrive last week! It was nearly a year ago that I defended the dissertation, just after we welcomed our daughter into the world, and as she turns one and is starting to get up on her…
Unflattening has been released into the wild! Copies have surfaced – and I’m itching to see mine! Last week, it got its first review from Publishers Weekly and a Starred Review at that! A little excerpt: “Sousanis has made a profound contribution to the field of comics studies and to semiotics, epistemology, and the burgeoning study of visible thinking. Essential…
Welcome to my new site. While I’ve had this domain all along, it’s been bouncing to a blog for the past six years and it was finally time for an upgrade. This new home (courtesy of the good folks at Loudbaby.com – the architects behind the Detroit arts-mag I used to run) brings along my…
This Friday, November 7, I’m pleased to be giving a keynote session at the International Visual Literacy Association’s annual conference, held at the Toledo Museum of Art. As the organization puts it – “visual thinking is a form of critical thinking,” “the ability to derive meaning from images of everything that we see –…
This past week, the Chronicle of Higher Education kindly featured my dissertation work alongside Dani Spinosa’s publicly-blogged dissertation in-progress. I’m overwhelmed by and grateful for all the support and enthusiasm this article has generated. Writer Sydni Dunn provided an indepth look into some of the backstory of how this came to be and its significance…