Think Tank Aesthetics

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Think Tank Aesthetics

Author : Pamela M. Lee
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262043521
Total Pages : 375 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (62 download)

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Book Synopsis Think Tank Aesthetics by : Pamela M. Lee

Download or read book Think Tank Aesthetics written by Pamela M. Lee and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the approaches and methods of think tanks—including systems theory, operational research, and cybernetics—paved the way for a peculiar genre of midcentury modernism. In Think Tank Aesthetics, Pamela Lee traces the complex encounters between Cold War think tanks and the art of that era. Lee shows how the approaches and methods of think tanks—including systems theory, operations research, and cybernetics—paved the way for a peculiar genre of midcentury modernism and set the terms for contemporary neoliberalism. Lee casts these shadowy institutions as sites of radical creativity and interdisciplinary practice in the service of defense strategy. Describing the distinctive aesthetics that emerged from such institutions as the RAND Corporation, she maps the multiple and overlapping networks that connected nuclear strategists, mathematicians, economists, anthropologists, artists, designers, and art historians. Lee recounts, among other things, the decades-long colloquy between Albert Wohlstetter, a RAND analyst, and his former professor, the famous art historian Meyer Schapiro; the anthropologist Margaret Mead's deployment of innovative visual aids that recall midcentury abstract art; and the combination of cybernetics and modernist design in an “Opsroom” for the short-lived socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1970s Chile (and its restaging many years later as a work of art). Lee suggests that we think of these connections less as disciplinary border crossings than as colonization of the specific interests of arts by the approaches and methods of the sciences. Hearing the echoes of think tank aesthetics in today's pursuit of the interdisciplinary and in academia's science-infused justification of the humanities, Lee wonders what territory has been ceded in a laboratory approach to the arts.

Think Tank Aesthetics

Author : Pamela M. Lee
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262357038
Total Pages : 375 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (623 download)

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Book Synopsis Think Tank Aesthetics by : Pamela M. Lee

The Aesthetics of Wine

Author : Douglas Burnham
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 111832384X
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (183 download)

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Book Synopsis The Aesthetics of Wine by : Douglas Burnham

Download or read book The Aesthetics of Wine written by Douglas Burnham and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-06-04 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Aesthetics of Wine shows that discussing wine within the framework of aesthetics both benefits our understanding of wine as a phenomenon, while also challenging some of the basic assumptions of the tradition of aesthetics. Analyzes the appreciation of wine as an aesthetic practice. Tackles prejudices against bodily senses, showing how they distort traditional aesthetic theory Represents the beginnings of a reformulation of general aesthetics

TECHNOCRATS OF THE IMAGINATION;ART, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL AVANT-GARDE

Author : JOHN BECK; RYAN BISHOP.
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781478090052
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (9 download)

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Book Synopsis TECHNOCRATS OF THE IMAGINATION;ART, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL AVANT-GARDE by : JOHN BECK; RYAN BISHOP.

Download or read book TECHNOCRATS OF THE IMAGINATION;ART, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL AVANT-GARDE written by JOHN BECK; RYAN BISHOP. and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "TECHNOCRATS OF THE IMAGINATION traces the rise of collaborative art and technology labs in the U.S. from WWII to the present. Ryan Bishop and John Beck reveal the intertwined histories of the avant-garde art movement and the military-industrial complex, showing how radical pedagogical practices traveled from Germany's Bauhaus movement to the U.S. art world and interacted with government-funded military research and development in university laboratories. During the 1960s both media labs and studio labs leaned heavily on methods of interdisciplinary collaboration and the power of American modernity to model new modes of social organization. The book's chapters take up MIT's Center for Art, Science, and Technology, Bell Labs's E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) Salon, and Los Angeles Museum of Art's Art + Technology Program. Their interconnected history illuminates how much of contemporary media culture and aesthetics depends on the historical relationship between military, corporate, and university actors. In light of revived interest in Black Mountain College and other 1960s art and technology labs, this book draws important connections between the contemporary art world and the militarized lab model of research that has dominated the sciences since the 1950s. The authors situate the rise of collaborative art and technology projects in the 1960s within John Dewey's ideology of scientific democracy, showing how leading thinkers from the Bauhaus movement in Germany immigrated to the U.S. and brought with them a Deweyan model for collaborative and interdisciplinary art and technology research. Over the course of the decade, the U.S. government increased funding to scientific research at university and private laboratories. Beck and Bishop investigate how various art and technology projects incorporated the collaborative and innovative interdisciplinarity of the avant-garde art movement with the corporate funding structure driven by the U.S. government's military and technoscientific interests. Finally, the authors consider the legacy of 1960s art and technology projects. During the 1970s and 80s, defense R&D funding was less motivated by a Cold War corporate state, and was instead restructured according to an entrepreneurial and neoliberal model. At the same time, funding in the art world also became increasingly financialized and globalized. Today's art and technology work happens collaboratively not because of an intellectual commitment to interdisciplinarity, but because of the precarity of the contemporary labor market. This book will interest students and scholars in art history and theory, media studies, history of technology, American studies, cultural studies, and critical university studies"--

Making Art Work

Author : W. Patrick Mccray
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262359502
Total Pages : 383 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (623 download)

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Book Synopsis Making Art Work by : W. Patrick Mccray

Download or read book Making Art Work written by W. Patrick Mccray and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The creative collaborations of engineers, artists, scientists, and curators over the past fifty years. Artwork as opposed to experiment? Engineer versus artist? We often see two different cultural realms separated by impervious walls. But some fifty years ago, the borders between technology and art began to be breached. In this book, W. Patrick McCray shows how in this era, artists eagerly collaborated with engineers and scientists to explore new technologies and create visually and sonically compelling multimedia works. This art emerged from corporate laboratories, artists' studios, publishing houses, art galleries, and university campuses. Many of the biggest stars of the art world--Robert Rauschenberg, Yvonne Rainer, Andy Warhol, Carolee Schneemann, and John Cage--participated, but the technologists who contributed essential expertise and aesthetic input often went unrecognized.

Nervous Systems

Author : Johanna Gosse
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 1478022051
Total Pages : 189 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Nervous Systems by : Johanna Gosse

Download or read book Nervous Systems written by Johanna Gosse and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to Nervous Systems reassess contemporary artists' and critics' engagement with social, political, biological, and other systems as a set of complex and relational parts: an approach commonly known as systems thinking. Demonstrating the continuing relevance of systems aesthetics within contemporary art, the contributors highlight the ways that artists adopt systems thinking to address political, social, and ecological anxieties. They cover a wide range of artists and topics, from the performances of the Argentinian collective the Rosario Group and the grid drawings of Charles Gaines to the video art of Singaporean artist Charles Lim and the mapping of global logistics infrastructures by contemporary artists like Hito Steyerl and Christoph Büchel. Together, the essays offer an expanded understanding of systems aesthetics in ways that affirm its importance beyond technological applications detached from cultural contexts. Contributors. Cristina Albu, Amanda Boetzkes, Brianne Cohen, Kris Cohen, Jaimey Hamilton Faris, Christine Filippone, Johanna Gosse, Francis Halsall, Judith Rodenbeck, Dawna Schuld, Luke Skrebowski, Timothy Stott, John Tyson

Small Scale, Big Change

Author : Andres Lepik
Publisher : The Museum of Modern Art
ISBN 13 : 0870707841
Total Pages : 141 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (77 download)

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Book Synopsis Small Scale, Big Change by : Andres Lepik

Download or read book Small Scale, Big Change written by Andres Lepik and published by The Museum of Modern Art. This book was released on 2010 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published to accompany the exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 28 Sept. 2010-3 Jan. 2011.

A Rasa Reader

Author : Sheldon Pollock
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231540698
Total Pages : 469 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis A Rasa Reader by : Sheldon Pollock

Download or read book A Rasa Reader written by Sheldon Pollock and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the early years of the Common Era to 1700, Indian intellectuals explored with unparalleled subtlety the place of emotion in art. Their investigations led to the deconstruction of art's formal structures and broader inquiries into the pleasure of tragic tales. Rasa, or taste, was the word they chose to describe art's aesthetics, and their passionate effort to pin down these phenomena became its own remarkable act of creation. This book is the first in any language to follow the evolution of rasa from its origins in dramaturgical thought—a concept for the stage—to its flourishing in literary thought—a concept for the page. A Rasa Reader incorporates primary texts by every significant thinker on classical Indian aesthetics, many never translated before. The arrangement of the selections captures the intellectual dynamism that has powered this debate for centuries. Headnotes explain the meaning and significance of each text, a comprehensive introduction summarizes major threads in intellectual-historical terms, and critical endnotes and an extensive bibliography add further depth to the selections. The Sanskrit theory of emotion in art is one of the most sophisticated in the ancient world, a precursor of the work being done today by critics and philosophers of aesthetics. A Rasa Reader's conceptual detail, historical precision, and clarity will appeal to any scholar interested in a full portrait of global intellectual development. A Rasa Reader is the inaugural book in the Historical Sourcebooks in Classical Indian Thought series, edited by Sheldon Pollock. These text-based books guide readers through the most important forms of classical Indian thought, from epistemology, rhetoric, and hermeneutics to astral science, yoga, and medicine. Each volume provides fresh translations of key works, headnotes to contextualize selections, a comprehensive analysis of major lines of development within the discipline, and exegetical and text-critical endnotes, as well as a bibliography. Designed for comparativists and interested general readers, Historical Sourcebooks is also a great resource for advanced scholars seeking authoritative commentary on challenging works.

The New Sultan

Author : Soner Cagaptay
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1786722364
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (867 download)

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Book Synopsis The New Sultan by : Soner Cagaptay

Download or read book The New Sultan written by Soner Cagaptay and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-04-30 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world of rising tensions between Russia and the United States, the Middle East and Europe, Sunnis and Shiites, Islamism and liberalism, Turkey is at the epicentre. And at the heart of Turkey is its right-wing populist president, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an. Since 2002, Erdo?an has consolidated his hold on domestic politics while using military and diplomatic means to solidify Turkey as a regional power. His crackdown has been brutal and consistent - scores of journalists arrested, academics officially banned from leaving the country, university deans fired and many of the highest-ranking military officers arrested. In some senses, the nefarious and failed 2016 coup has given Erdo?an the licence to make good on his repeated promise to bring order and stability under a 'strongman'. Here, leading Turkish expert Soner Cagaptay will look at Erdo?an's roots in Turkish history, what he believes in and how he has cemented his rule, as well as what this means for the world. The book will also unpick the 'threats' Erdogan has worked to combat - from the liberal Turks to the Gulen movement, from coup plotters to Kurdish nationalists - all of which have culminated in the crisis of modern Turkey.

The Buddha in the Machine

Author : R. John Williams
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300194471
Total Pages : 367 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis The Buddha in the Machine by : R. John Williams

Download or read book The Buddha in the Machine written by R. John Williams and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-24 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The writers and artists described in this book are joined by a desire to embrace 'Eastern' aesthetics as a means of redeeming 'Western' technoculture. The assumption they all share is that at the core of modern Western culture there lies an originary and all-encompassing philosophical error - and that Asian art offers a way out of that awful matrix. That desire, this book attempts to demonstrate, has informed Anglo- and even Asian-American debates about technology and art since the late nineteenth century and continues to skew our responses to our own technocultural environment.

Network Aesthetics

Author : Patrick Jagoda
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022634665X
Total Pages : 329 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (263 download)

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Book Synopsis Network Aesthetics by : Patrick Jagoda

Download or read book Network Aesthetics written by Patrick Jagoda and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term “network” is now applied to everything from the Internet to terrorist-cell systems. But the word’s ubiquity has also made it a cliché, a concept at once recognizable yet hard to explain. Network Aesthetics, in exploring how popular culture mediates our experience with interconnected life, reveals the network’s role as a way for people to construct and manage their world—and their view of themselves. Each chapter considers how popular media and artistic forms make sense of decentralized network metaphors and infrastructures. Patrick Jagoda first examines narratives from the 1990s and 2000s, including the novel Underworld, the film Syriana, and the television series The Wire, all of which play with network forms to promote reflection on domestic crisis and imperial decline in contemporary America. Jagoda then looks at digital media that are interactive, nonlinear, and dependent on connected audiences to show how recent approaches, such as those in the videogame Journey, open up space for participatory and improvisational thought. Contributing to fields as diverse as literary criticism, digital studies, media theory, and American studies, Network Aesthetics brilliantly demonstrates that, in today’s world, networks are something that can not only be known, but also felt, inhabited, and, crucially, transformed.

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You

Author : Janelle Shane
Publisher : Voracious
ISBN 13 : 0316525235
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (165 download)

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Book Synopsis You Look Like a Thing and I Love You by : Janelle Shane

Download or read book You Look Like a Thing and I Love You written by Janelle Shane and published by Voracious. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As heard on NPR's "Science Friday," discover the book recommended by Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Daniel Pink, and Adam Grant: an "accessible, informative, and hilarious" introduction to the weird and wonderful world of artificial intelligence (Ryan North). "You look like a thing and I love you" is one of the best pickup lines ever . . . according to an artificial intelligence trained by scientist Janelle Shane, creator of the popular blog AI Weirdness. She creates silly AIs that learn how to name paint colors, create the best recipes, and even flirt (badly) with humans—all to understand the technology that governs so much of our daily lives. We rely on AI every day for recommendations, for translations, and to put cat ears on our selfie videos. We also trust AI with matters of life and death, on the road and in our hospitals. But how smart is AI really... and how does it solve problems, understand humans, and even drive self-driving cars? Shane delivers the answers to every AI question you've ever asked, and some you definitely haven't. Like, how can a computer design the perfect sandwich? What does robot-generated Harry Potter fan-fiction look like? And is the world's best Halloween costume really "Vampire Hog Bride"? In this smart, often hilarious introduction to the most interesting science of our time, Shane shows how these programs learn, fail, and adapt—and how they reflect the best and worst of humanity. You Look Like a Thing and I Love You is the perfect book for anyone curious about what the robots in our lives are thinking. "I can't think of a better way to learn about artificial intelligence, and I've never had so much fun along the way." —Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals

The Poem As Icon

Author : Margaret H. Freeman
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0190080418
Total Pages : 229 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (9 download)

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Book Synopsis The Poem As Icon by : Margaret H. Freeman

Download or read book The Poem As Icon written by Margaret H. Freeman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-04-10 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry is the most complex and intricate of human language used across all languages and cultures. Its relation to the worlds of human experience has perplexed writers and readers for centuries, as has the question of evaluation and judgment: what makes a poem "work" and endure. The Poem as Icon focuses on the art of poetry to explore its nature and function: not interpretation but experience; not what poetry means but what it does. Using both historic and contemporary approaches of embodied cognition from various disciplines, Margaret Freeman argues that a poem's success lies in its ability to become an icon of the felt "being" of reality. Freeman explains how the features of semblance, metaphor, schema, and affect work to make a poem an icon, with detailed examples from various poets. By analyzing the ways poetry provides insights into the workings of human cognition, Freeman claims that taste, beauty, and pleasure in the arts are simply products of the aesthetic faculty, and not the aesthetic faculty itself. The aesthetic faculty, she argues, should be understood as the science of human perception, and therefore constitutive of the cognitive processes of attention, imagination, memory, discrimination, expertise, and judgment.

The New Aesthetic and Art

Author : Scott Contreras-Koterbay
Publisher : Instituut Voor Netwerkcultuur
ISBN 13 : 9789492302083
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis The New Aesthetic and Art by : Scott Contreras-Koterbay

Download or read book The New Aesthetic and Art written by Scott Contreras-Koterbay and published by Instituut Voor Netwerkcultuur. This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New Aesthetic and Art: Constellations of the Postdigital is an interdisciplinary analysis focusing on new digital phenomena at the intersections of theory and contemporary art. Asserting the unique character of New Aesthetic objects, Contreras-Koterbay and Mirocha trace the origins of the New Aesthetic in visual arts, design, and software, find its presence resonating in various kinds of digital imagery, and track its agency in everyday effects of the intertwined physical world and the digital realm. Contreras-Koterbay and Mirocha bring to light an original perspective that identifies an autonomous quality in common digital objects and examples of art that are increasingly an important influence for today's culture and society.

Architecture and the Forest Aesthetic

Author : Jana VanderGoot
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317562992
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (175 download)

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Book Synopsis Architecture and the Forest Aesthetic by : Jana VanderGoot

Download or read book Architecture and the Forest Aesthetic written by Jana VanderGoot and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-22 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite population trends toward urbanization, the forest continues to have a strong appeal to the human imagination, and the human preference for forest over many other types of terrain is well documented. This book re-imagines architecture and urbanism by allowing the forest to be a prominent consideration in the language of design, thus recognizing the forest as essential rather than just incidental to human well-being. In Architecture and the Forest Aesthetic, forest is a large-scale urban construct that is far more extensive and nuanced than trees and shrubbery. The forest aesthetic opens designers to the forest as a model for an urban architecture of permeable floors, protective canopies, connected food chains, beneficial decomposition, and resilient ecologies. Much can be learned about these features of the forest from the natural sciences; however, when they are given due consideration technically and metaphorically in the design of urban habitat, the places in which humans live become living forests. What is present here in Architecture and the Forest Aesthetic is both a review of many ingenious ways in which the forest aesthetic has already been expressed in design and urbanism, and an encouragement to further use the forest aesthetic in design language and design outcomes. Case study projects featured include the Chilotan building craft of Southern Chile, the yaki sugi of Japan, the Biltmore Forest in the Southeastern United States, the Australian capital city Canberra, Bosco Verticale in Milan, Italy, the Beijing Olympic Forest Park in China, and more.

Neuroaesthetics

Author : Martin Skov
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351842854
Total Pages : 493 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (518 download)

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Book Synopsis Neuroaesthetics by : Martin Skov

Download or read book Neuroaesthetics written by Martin Skov and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The beginning of psychological aesthetics is normally traced back to the publication of Gustav Theodor Fechner's seminal book "Vorschule der Aesthetik" in 1876. Following in the footsteps of this rich tradition, editors Martin Skov and Oshin Vartanian view neuroaesthetics - the emerging field of inquiry concerned with uncovering the ways in which aesthetic behavior is caused by brain processes - as a natural extension of Fechner's 'empirical spirit' to understand the link between the objective and subjective worlds inherent in aesthetic experience. The editors had two specific aims for this book. The first was to highlight the diversity of approaches that are underway under the banner of neuroaesthetics.Currently, this topic is being investigated from experimental, evolutionary, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging perspectives to tackle problems in the visual arts, literature, music, and film. Its quintessentially interdisciplinary nature has functioned as a breeding ground for generating and testing hypotheses in multiple domains. The second goal was more integrative and involved distilling some of the key features common to these diverse strands of work. The book presents a possible framework for neuroaesthetics by highlighting what the contributors consider to be its defining features and offering a working definition of neuroaesthetics that captures these features. "Neuroaesthetics" will provide an empirical and theoretical framework to motivate further work in this area. Ultimately, the hope is that puzzles in aesthetics can be solved through insights from biology, but that the contribution can be truly bidirectional.

Object to Be Destroyed

Author : Pamela M. Lee
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262621564
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (215 download)

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Book Synopsis Object to Be Destroyed by : Pamela M. Lee

Download or read book Object to Be Destroyed written by Pamela M. Lee and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2001-08-24 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first critical account of Matta-Clark's work, Pamela M. Lee considers it in the context of the art of the 1970s—particularly site-specific, conceptual, and minimalist practices—and its confrontation with issues of community, property, the alienation of urban space, the "right to the city," and the ideologies of progress that have defined modern building programs. Although highly regarded during his short life—and honored by artists and architects today—the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-78) has been largely ignored within the history of art. Matta-Clark is best remembered for site-specific projects known as "building cuts." Sculptural transformations of architecture produced through direct cuts into buildings scheduled for demolition, these works now exist only as sculptural fragments, photographs, and film and video documentations. Matta-Clark is also remembered as a catalytic force in the creation of SoHo in the early 1970s. Through loft activities, site projects at the exhibition space 112 Greene Street, and his work at the restaurant Food, he participated in the production of a new social and artistic space. Have art historians written so little about Matta-Clark's work because of its ephemerality, or, as Pamela M. Lee argues, because of its historiographic, political, and social dimensions? What did the activity of carving up a building-in anticipation of its destruction—suggest about the conditions of art making, architecture, and urbanism in the 1970s? What was one to make of the paradox attendant on its making—that the production of the object was contingent upon its ruination? How do these projects address the very writing of history, a history that imagines itself building toward an ideal work in the service of progress? In this first critical account of Matta-Clark's work, Lee considers it in the context of the art of the 1970s—particularly site-specific, conceptual, and minimalist practices—and its confrontation with issues of community, property, the alienation of urban space, the "right to the city," and the ideologies of progress that have defined modern building programs.