You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
"TransUrbanism is urbanism plus transformation. TransUrbanism is urbanism plus globalization. The city is no longer a clearly localizable spatial unit, but has transformed into an "urban field," a collection of activities instead of a material structure. Cities today are in a state of continuous decomposition, but are also continually reorganizing and rearranging themselves, expanding and shrinking." "TransUrbanism is a design strategy that allows cities to organize themselves as complex systems, where small local structures incorporate global flows."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Among students at universities and colleges of higher education, as well as in the written press, one can ascertain a growing interest in media theory. There is a conveyor belt of books about new media, but what seems to be missing is knowledge and understanding of the classical media theories of Ernst Cassirer, Susanne Langer, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Claude Shannon, Gregory Bateson, Vil»m Flusser, Friedrich Kittler, and many others. In Understanding Media Theory, the ideas of these theoreticians and philosophers are explained and applied in a clear and accessible way--not by discussing the writers one by one, but by using real examples and analyzing them on the basis of concepts de...
The rise of a prominent auditory culture, reveals the degree to which sound art is lending definition to the 21st Century. And yet sound art still lacks related literature to compliment, and expand, the realm of practice. Background Noise sets out an historical overview, while at the same time shaping that history according to what sound art reveals - the dynamics of art to operate spatially, through media of reproduction and broadcast, and in relation to the intensities of communication and its contextual framework
The archive has of late proven to be a powerful metaphor: history is viewed as an archive of facts from which one can draw at will; our bodies have become a genetic archive since being digitally opened up in the human genome project; our language is an archive of meanings that can be unlocked using philological tools; and the unconscious is an archive of the traumatic experiences that mold our identity. More and more artists and architects are developing software systems in which data is automatically organized into complex knowledge systems, a process in which the user is only one of the determining factors. Databases, software and archives increasingly form the inspiration for artistic interventions. Information Is Alive considers the artistic potential of these couplings via a selection of essays, interviews and projects by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, philosopher Brian Massumi, writer Sadie Plant, paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, artists Margarete Jahrmann, Lev Manovich, Michael Saup, Jeffrey Shaw, Stahl Stenslie and others. Published on the occasion of the third Dutch Electronic Art Festival (DEAF03).
Philosophers, anthropologists, political thinkers and artists take a closer look at what the idea of beauty can mean to their disciplines, in an effort to redefine what beauty is and what it means to the design practice and art. The book focuses on the question of how the age-old notion of beauty can regain an importance appropriate to the 21st century.
As a multimedia artist, Dick Raaymakers (born 1930) embraces a diversity of genres and styles, from sound animations for films to "action music," never-ending vocal textures, electro-acoustic tableaux vivants and music theatre works. Raaijmakers dovetails disciplines such as the visual arts, film, literature and theatre with the universe of music.
Summary: It is crucial to understand that our progression through the twentieth century towards our contemporary global Crystal Palace (Peter Sloterdijk) of purity and transparency has been constantly accompanied by an almost physical desire for the pure, not just Mondrian's crystalline structures, but also the addictive taste of white sugar and white bread. This book investigates this urge for the pure, but also advocates a much deeper need for the impure, not to reinstate a new organicism, one more back-to-nature movement, but to trace that progression to a point where all modernist values reverse, where technology becomes an agent for the impure and the imperfect. Technology, long an agent for homogeneity and purity, is now turning into one for heterogeneity and global contingency.
"Interaction is a defining characteristic of every living being. Bodies and objects build connections, from networks, and then through interaction, achieve organization, structure, memory and heredity, the only selection criterion for interaction is whether it works, that is, whether it is operational." "Interactivity is on the one hand a method of bringing something into being - a form, a structure, an organization, a body, an institute, a work of art - and on the other hand a way of dealing with it."--BOOK JACKET.
Diasporic Agencies addresses the neglected subject of how architecture and urban design can respond to the consequences of increasing migration. Arguing that diasporic inhabitations can only be understood as the co-production of space, subjectivity and politics, the book explores questions of difference, belonging and movement in the city. Through focusing on a series of examples, it reveals how diasporas produce new types of spaces and develop new subjectivities in the contemporary European metropolis. It explores the way in which geo-politics affects individual lives and how national and regional borders inscribe themselves onto diasporic bodies. The book claims that the multiple belonging...
An investigation of the “occurrent arts” through the concepts of the “semblance” and “lived abstraction.” Events are always passing; to experience an event is to experience the passing. But how do we perceive an experience that encompasses the just-was and the is-about-to-be as much as what is actually present? In Semblance and Event, Brian Massumi, drawing on the work of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and others, develops the concept of “semblance” as a way to approach this question. It is, he argues, a question of abstraction, not as the opposite of the concrete but as a dimension of it: “lived abstraction.” A semblance is a lived abstraction. Ma...