mtuters's no-tag [50 articles]

Abstract

From the RFID tags now embedded in everything from soda cans to the family pet, to smart buildings that subtly adapt to the changing flow of visitors, to gestural interfaces like the ones seen in Minority Report, computing no longer looks much like it used to. Increasingly invisible but present everywhere in our lives, it has moved off the desktop and out into everyday life–affecting almost every one of us, whether we're entirely aware of ...

Abstract

In this interview, Paul Virilio talks at length about his life and numerous published works ranging from Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology to the recently translated Polar Inertia. Considering important theoretical themes and questions relating to post- and 'hyper'- modernism, poststructuralism, modernity and postmodernity, Virilio discusses his often controversial views on the cultural writings of Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and Baudrillard. In so doing, Virilio not only clarifies many of his architectural, political and cultural concepts such as 'military space', ...

Abstract

The author turns his attention to sex and the reasons why we are driven constantly to analyze and discuss it. An iconoclastic explanation of modern sexual history. ...

Abstract

`This is an ambitious, original, and complex treatment of key aspects of contemporary capitalism. It makes a major contribution because it profoundly destabilizes the scholarship on globalization, the so-called new economy, information technology, distinct contemporary business cultures and practices' <B><I>- Saskia Sassen, author of </I>Globalization and its Discontents </B><P><B></B></P><P>`Nigel Thrift offers us the sort of cultural analysis of global capitalism that has long been needed - one that emphasizes the innovative energy of global capitalism. The book avoids stale ...

Abstract

<p> A major work by one of the more innovative thinkers of our time, <i>Politics of Nature</i> does nothing less than establish the conceptual context for political ecology--transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: "Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks." Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of reality, is ...

Abstract

Is the Internet a vast arena of unrestricted communication and freely exchanged information or a regulated, highly structured virtual bureaucracy? In <i>Protocol</i>, Alexander Galloway argues that the founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom, and that the controlling power lies in the technical protocols that make network connections (and disconnections) possible. He does this by treating the computer as a textual medium that is based on a technological language, code. Code, he argues, can be subject to the same ...

Abstract

Digital media and network technologies are now part of everyday life. The Internet has become the backbone of communication, commerce, and media; the ubiquitous mobile phone connects us with others as it removes us from any stable sense of location. _Networked Publics_ examines the ways that the social and cultural shifts created by these technologies have transformed our relationships to (and definitions of) place, culture, politics, and infrastructure. Four chapters—each by an interdisciplinary team of scholars using collaborative software—provide a synoptic overview along with illustrative case studies. The chapter on ...

Abstract

Locative media has been attacked for being too eager to appeal to commercial interests as well as for its reliance on Cartesian mapping systems. If these critiques are well founded, however, they are also nostalgic, invoking a notion of art as autonomous from the circuits of mass communication technologies, which the authors argue no longer holds true. This essay begins with a survey of the development of locative media, how it has distanced itself from net art and how it has ...

Abstract

<I>aRt&D</I> considers changes in art practice due to media, to that new branch of art making known primarily as electronic art. Use of radio and video came first, about 25 years ago, but over the last 10 years digital media and network technology have reigned. This new discipline embraces a heterogeneous collection of artistic, technological, and scientific disciplines and is also characterized by inter- and trans-disciplinary collaborations. Electronic art proved a troublesome fit for existing art institutions, necessitating the founding of ...

Abstract

Sebastiano Brandolini describes the work of Antonio Citterio who, despite a low-key personal presence on the Italian architectural scene and an architecture of quiet restraint, has gained an enviable international reputation for his elegant and lsquoimpeccably well-madersquo buildings. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. ...

Abstract

This paper aims to enrich our understanding of the history and substance of cybernetics. It reviews the work of three British cyberneticians - W. Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask - paying attention particularly to the materiality of their practice - the strange and fascinating devices and systems that were at the heart of their work - and to the worldly projects they pursued - scientific, technological, artistic, organizational, political and spiritual. Connections are drawn between cybernetics and recent theoretical ...

Abstract

<div>This ambitious book by one of the most original and provocative thinkers in science studies offers a sophisticated new understanding of the nature of scientific, mathematical, and engineering practice and the production of scientific knowledge.<br><br>Andrew Pickering offers a new approach to the unpredictable nature of change in science, taking into account the extraordinary number of factors--social, technological, conceptual, and natural--that interact to affect the creation of scientific knowledge. In his view, machines, instruments, facts, theories, conceptual and mathematical structures, disciplined practices, ...

Abstract

The notion that our society, its education system and its intellectual life, is characterized by a split between two cultures--the arts or humanities on one hand, and the sciences on the other--has a long history. The reissue of The Two Cultures and its successor piece, A Second Look (in which Snow responded to the controversy four years later) has a new introduction by Stefan Collini, charting the history and context of the debate, its implications and its afterlife. ...

Abstract

WHAT DOES “TOTAL DESIGN” mean today? What does it mean, let’s say, after postmodernism? Not so long ago, the expression was part of the basic vocabulary of architects, teachers, and critics. Yet it is remarkably absent from contemporary debates and seems to play no role in schools today. What happened? ...

Abstract

Felicity D. Scott presents a detailed and extensively illustrated reconsideration of the early trajectory of the Ant Farm collective, including its architecture, inflatables, performance, multimedia, and video work. Drawing together archival material on their extended fields of practice, Living Archive 7: Ant Farm features the first full-color publication of the complete Ant Farm Timeline, as well as Allegorical Time Warp: The Media Fallout (1969) and an archival dossier on Ant Farm's Truckstop Network (1970-1972). On Exhibition: Ant Farm: Radical Hardware, Columbia University, New York, Spring 2008. ...

Abstract

Device Art is a concept for re-examining art-science-technology relationships both from a contemporary and historical perspective in order to foreground a new aspect of media art. The term "Device Art" may sound obscure, or even self-contradictory, but it is a conscious choice. The concept is a logical extension of a change in the notion of art that already started in the early 20th century with art movements such as Dada and Surrealism. More recently, interactive art has redefined forms of art ...

Abstract

The utopian sixties inspired revolutionary and alternative ways to live, love, and entertain—and equally radical spaces to do it in. Stimulated by the psychedelic drug culture, rebel designers and architects distorted space to create womblike coves and isolation chambers, forging a spatial vocabulary that still reverberates today. At the same time, the tune-in-turn-on-drop-out message lured youths into far-flung communes, often under the roofs of brightly painted geodesic domes draped and tie-dyed fabric. Idealistic and anarchic enclaves with names like Drop City and Morning Star redefined the concept of community, ...

Abstract

**Shortlisted for the 2008 Bruno Zevi Award presented by International Committee of Architectural Critics (CICA). and Winner, Trade Illustrated Category, 2007 AAUP Book, Journal, and Jacket Show.** Amid the cultural and political ferment of 1960s France, a group of avant- garde architects, artists, writers, theorists, and critics known as "spatial urbanists" envisioned a series of urban utopias, phantom cities of a possible future. The utopian "spatial" city most often took the form of a massive grid or mesh suspended above the ground, all of its parts (and inhabitants) circulating ...

Abstract

This reader in Whitechapel's Documents of Contemporary Art series investigates the interchange between art and design. Since the the Pop and Minimalist eras—as the work of artists ranging from Andy Warhol to Dan Graham demonstrates—the traditional boundaries between art and architectural, graphic, and product design have dissolved in critically significant ways. _Design and Art_ traces the rise of the "design-art" phenomenon through the writings of critics and practitioners active in both fields. The texts include writings by Paul Rand, Hal Foster, Miwon Kwon, and others that set the parameters ...

Abstract

For well over a hundred years certain artists have blurred the distinction between 'art' and 'design', creating works for which Alex Coles has coined the term 'DesignArt'. In a pioneering study of this dynamic area of art-making, he traces its course from the early twentieth century to the present day, when such works have become a dominant feature of the contemporary art scene and are pervasive in key international exhibitions and biennials. From Matisse's plush interior for Rockefeller's town house to the playful contemporary environments created by Jorge ...

Abstract

From his perch somewhere in Brooklyn, New York, essayist Daniel Harris launches a loquacious jeremiad against the way in which consumerism and its ideologies have insinuated themselves into our sense of self. _Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic_ is a critical examination of the everyday things that surround us--from washing machines to vitamin supplements, reproduction antiques to supermodels. Taking aim at cuteness, quaintness, coolness, the romantic, zaniness, the futuristic, deliciousness, the natural, glamorousness, and cleanness, he seeks to expose just how tangled is the web we have woven, his goal ...

Abstract

Summary In a recent Medical Hypotheses editorial, I suggested the name psychological neoteny (PN) to refer to the widely-observed phenomenon that adults in modernizing liberal democracies increasingly retain many of the attitudes and behaviors traditionally associated with youth. I further suggested that PN is a useful trait for both individuals and the culture in modernizing societies; because people need to be somewhat child-like in their psychology order to keep learning, developing and adapting to the rapid and accelerating pace of change. ...

Abstract

Using evolutionary, cognitive, and social psychology, this volume examines the issues raised by the question, "What makes some faces more attractive than others?" The authors challenge the views that beauty is simply in the "eye of the beholder," that it is idiosyncratic, and that it is nothing more than an artifact of culture and argue instead that there are a variety of biological, social, motivational, and developmental issues involved in facial attractiveness. By exploring attractiveness and preference from these various perspectives, this collection offers profound and unique insight ...

Abstract

Abstract  The theory of sexual selection suggests several possible explanations for the development of standards of physical attractiveness in humans. Asymmetry and departures from average proportions may be markers of the breakdown of developmental stability. Supernormal traits may present age- and sex-typical features in exaggerated form. Evidence from social psychology suggests that both average proportions and (in females) “neotenous” facial traits are indeed more attractive. Using facial photographs from three populations (United States, Brazil, Paraguayan Indians), rated by members of the same ...

Abstract

Inheriting the mantle of revolutionary biologist from Darwin, Watson, and Crick, Richard Dawkins forced an enormous change in the way we see ourselves and the world with the publication of _The Selfish Gene_. Suppose, instead of thinking about organisms using genes to reproduce themselves, as we had since Mendel's work was rediscovered, we turn it around and imagine that "our" genes build and maintain us in order to make more genes. That simple reversal seems to answer many puzzlers which had stumped scientists for years, and we ...

Abstract

In many ways, the 20th century has been the Age of Physics. **Out of Control** is an accessible and entertaining explanation of why the coming years will probably be the Age of Biology -- particularly evolution and ethology -- and what this will mean to most every aspect of our society. Kelly is an enthusiastic and well-informed guide who explains the promises and implications of this rapidly evolving revolution very well. ...

Abstract

A psychic voyage into the aesthetic unconscious of the consumer, examining the broad principles that govern the appearance of popular culture, from cuteness to quaintness, coolness to cleanness, the natural to the futuristic.. Why has the ring of the telephone become a beep? What ever happened to the bumpers and fenders of cars? Why do food commercials never mention hunger?In this encyclopedia of low-brow aesthetics, Daniel Harris concentrates on the nuances of non-art, the uses of the useless, the politics of product design and advertising. We learn how ...

Abstract

_OCTOBER: The First Decade _brings together a selection of some of the most important and representative texts, many from issues long out of print, that have appeared in one of the foremost journals in art criticism and theory. Contributors include Rosalind Krauss, Sergei Eisenstein, Peter Handke, Georges Didi Huberman, Mary Ann Doane, and Hans Haacke. Their essays are organized under the categories of the index, historical materialism, the critique of institutions, psychoanalysis, rhetoric, and the body. Annette Michelson is Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University. Rosalind Krauss ...

Abstract

From the synchronised camera/machine-guns on the biplanes of World War One to the laser satellites of Star Wars, the technologies of cinema and warfare have developed a fatal interdependence. Hiroshima marked one conclusion of this process in the nuclear 'flash' which penetrated the city's darkest recesses, etching the images of its victims on the walls. Since the disappearance of direct vision in battle and the replacement of one-to-one combat by the remote and murderous son et lumiere of trench warfare, military strategy has been dominated by the struggle ...

Abstract

What must the United States do to remain the global superpower-and stop alienating the rest of the world? The author of _The Paradox of American Power_ has one clear answer: soft power. Joseph Nye coined the term "soft power" in the late 1980s. It is now used frequently--and often incorrectly--by political leaders, editorial writers, and academics around the world. So what is soft power? Soft power lies in the ability to attract and persuade. Whereas hard power--the ability to coerce--grows out of a country's military or economic might, soft ...

Abstract

Little Boy examines the culture of postwar Japan through its arts and popular visual media. Focusing on the youth-driven phenomenon of otaku (roughly translated as 'geek culture' or 'pop cult fanaticism'), Takashi Murakami and a notable group of contributors explore the complex historical influences that shape Japanese contemporary art and its distinct graphic languages. The book's title, Little Boy, is a reference to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, thus clearly locating the birth of these new cultural forms in the trauma and generational aftershock of ...

Abstract

BradyGames' _Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life_, by Chris Kohler, is a unique book that gives readers an entertaining and authoritative look at the indelible influence the video gaming, particularly, Japanese gaming, has had on the world._Power-Up_ is the first English-language work of its kind to examine the reasons behind the success of Japanese video games, rather than focusing on the history of video games. Just some of the features readers will find in this book include: * Profiles of some of the ...

Abstract

Initially developed in Japan by Nintendo as a computer game, Pokémon swept the globe in the late 1990s. Based on a narrative in which a group of children capture, train, and do battle with over a hundred imaginary creatures, Pokémon quickly diversified into an array of popular products including comic books, a TV show, movies, trading cards, stickers, toys, and clothing. Pokémon eventually became the top grossing children's product of all time. Yet the phenomenon fizzled as quickly as it had ...

Abstract

<P>"Jenkins is one of us: a geek, a fan, a popcult packrat. He's also an incisive and unflinching critic. His affection for the subject and sharp eye for 'what it all means' are an unbeatable combination. This is fascinating, engrossing and enlightening reading." <BR>—Cory Doctorow, author of <I>Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town</I> and co-editor of <I>Boing Boing</I></P> <P>Henry Jenkins' pioneering work in the early 1990s promoted the idea that fans are among the most active, creative, critically engaged, and ...

Abstract

Björn Kurtén's compelling novel gives the reader a detailed picture of life 35,000 years ago in Western Europe. One of the world's leading scholars of Ice Age fauna, Kurtén fuses extraordinary knowledge and imagination in this vivid evocation of our deepest past. This novel illuminates the lives of the humans who left us magnificent paintings in the caves of France and Spain. ...

Abstract

Determining the evolutionary relationships between fossil hominid groups such as Neanderthals and modern humans has been a question of enduring interest in human evolutionary genetics. Here we present a new method for addressing whether archaic human groups contributed to the modern gene pool (called ancient admixture), using the patterns of variation in contemporary human populations. Our method improves on previous work by explicitly accounting for recent population history before performing the analyses. Using sequence data from the Environmental Genome Project, we ...

Abstract

A classic study of the Japanese psyche, a starting point for a true understanding Japanese behavior.... <P>The discovery that a major concept of human feeling -- easily expressed in everyday Japanese -- totally resisted translation into a Western language led Dr. Takeo Doi to explore and define an area of the psyche which has previously received little attention. The resulting essay, The Anatomy of Dependence, is one of the most penetrating analyses of the Japanese mind ever written, as ...