Bodyline, a visual essay on the human body, approaches its subject in a spirit both playful and seriously experimental. Organised by themes in turn figurative and abstract, organic and mechanical, immaterial and ultra-material, Bodyline contains not one predictable image of the body. Instead it uses diffracted views to conjure seven alternative visions of the flesh in the age of meta-mechanical reproduction, reconstructing the human physique by means of synthetic images, clothing patterns and technical blueprints. As such, Bodyline is as much about perception and delineation as it is about the body. Drawn from work of the AA's Diploma Unit 5 under the guidance of George L-Legendre and Lluís Viu Rebés, the book is divided into three chapters loosely based on Robert Hughes's Nothing if Not Critical. Here, though, the original categories are reversed: 'Ancestors' explores the latest paradigms of virtual bodies, the computer-generated meshes of the gaming industry, which are also the most figurative; 'Moderns', which constitutes the book's central exploration, features twentieth-century micro-narratives of pattern and garment in which the body is already all but unrecognisable; and 'Contemporaries' celebrates the reflections of self-portraiture through the projective networks of Mongean geometry. The seven images of the body contained in this book - Ectopic Birth (Nazila Maghzian), How Tall Am I? (Sharon Givony), Vital Points (Eiichi Matsuda), Inside Out (Kun-Min Kim), Growth and Decay (Lawrence Ler), Tiny Deaths (Carolin Hinne) and 10 Years After (Ema Bonifacic) - are accompanied by concise, literary (rather than academic) texts. Indeed, Bodyline is intended for architects, architecture and design students, product designers, fashion designers, art lovers, structural engineers and anyone else interested in the visual arts