You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Plant Contract argues that visual and performance art can help change our perception of the vegetal world, and can return us to nature and thought. Via an investigation into the wasteland, robotany, feminist plants, and nature rights, this phytology-love story investigates how contemporary art is mediating the effects of plant-blindness, caused by human disassociation from the natural world. It is also a gesture of respect for the genius of vegetal life, where new science proves plants can learn, communicate, remember, make decisions, and associate. Art is a litmus test for how climate change affects human perception. This book responds to that test by expressing plant-philosophy to a wider public, through an interrogation of plant-art.
Essays, conversations, selected texts, and a rich collection of thought-provoking artworks celebrate a revolution in bio art. Expertly designed by Omnivore and printed on special papers, including chlorophyll cover and crush citrus and crush cocoa pages. The texts and artworks in Symbionts provoke a necessary conversation about our species and its relation to the planet. Are we merely “mammalian weeds,” as evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis put it? Or are we partners in producing and maintaining the biosphere, as she also suggested? Symbionts reflects on a recent revolution in bio art that departs from the late-1990s code-oriented experiments to embrace entanglement and symbiosis (“w...
In the face of climate change, the destruction of biodiversity or genetic experimentation, Bio Art appears as a form that is most directly grappling with the problems of the »Anthropocene«. It develops many different approaches and explores a variety of mediums, often related to scientific research, creating art that uses plants, insects, mammals, bacteria, bird songs, forest sounds, or genetic modification. Bio Art's uniqueness comes from incorporating, rather than just representing the living in a diverse range of artworks. In discussing such works from various world regions and time periods, the contributors address the divide between human and non-human animals, between »culture« and »nature«.
The first reader in critical plant studies, exploring a rapidly growing multidisciplinary field—the intersection of philosophy with plant science and the visual arts. In recent years, philosophy and art have testified to how anthropocentrism has culturally impoverished our world, leading to the wide destruction of habitats and ecosystems. In this book, Giovanni Aloi and Michael Marder show that the field of critical plant studies can make an important contribution, offering a slew of possibilities for scientific research, local traditions, Indigenous knowledge, history, geography, anthropology, philosophy, and aesthetics to intersect, inform one another, and lead interdisciplinary and tran...
Winner of the 2019 Outstanding Academic Titles award in Choice, a publishing unit of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Why Look at Plants? proposes a thought-provoking and fascinating look into the emerging cultural politics of plant-presence in contemporary art. Through the original contributions of artists, scholars, and curators who have creatively engaged with the ultimate otherness of plants in their work, this volume maps and problematizes new intra-active, agential interconnectedness involving human-non-human biosystems central to artistic and philosophical discourses of the Anthropocene. Plant’s fixity, perceived passivity, and resilient silence have relegated the vegetal world to the cultural background of human civilization. However, the recent emergence of plants in the gallery space constitutes a wake-up-call to reappraise this relationship at a time of deep ecological and ontological crisis. Why Look at Plants? challenges readers’ pre-established notions through a diverse gathering of insights, stories, experiences, perspectives, and arguments encompassing multiple disciplines, media, and methodologies.
Designing with living materials: thoughts on the paradigm shift and an overview of the state of research What is “Bioprotopia”? It is a vision of a world with buildings that grow, self-heal and create virtuous cycles where waste from one process feeds another. A vision where the spaces that we inhabit are attuned to both the human occupants and non-human microbial ecologies. This is the first book to ground the concept of biotechnology in the built environment in tangible, large-scale prototypes. With rich visuals, it presents materials and processes that bring to life the many possibilities of shaping the built environment with micro-organisms. In addition to considering scientific and technical challenges, the book also discusses the need for a shift in thinking and culture to realise this vision. First comprehensive publication on the state of research Demonstrates the use of renewable materials in design Illustrative, scientific documentation for design professions and researchers
This volume provides a state-of-the-art overview of the field of more-than-human studies, bringing together contemporary and essential content from leading authors across the discipline. With attention to the intellectual history of the field, its developments and extensions, its applications and its significance to contemporary society, it presents empirical studies and theoretical work covering long-established disciplines, as well as new writing on art, history, politics, planning, architecture, research methodology and ethics. An elaboration of the various dimensions of more-than-human studies, The Routledge International Handbook of More-than-Human Studies constitutes essential reading for anyone studying or researching in this field.
During the last 30 years, Advanced Architecture has consolidated an interactive and informational logic that differs from that of Modernity and Postmodernity. This logic is threefold; it is modulated through three coexisting protocols -modes of action- whose peaks of intensity occur in three different decades: Conformative Protocols (1990-2000), Distributive Protocols (2000-2010) and Expansive Protocols (2010-2020). This work proposes a threefold cultural narrative whose interactive and informational logic differs from that of modernity and postmodernity. It positions three different ethos by critically approaching the architectural side of a cultural mutation that has been affecting the Wes...
This book focuses on the intelligent technologies that are transforming creative practices and industries. The future of creative work will be more complicated than “the robots will take our jobs.” The workplace is becoming increasingly hybridized, with human and computational labor complementing each other. Some economic roles for the former will no doubt fade over time, while new roles are created to produce artificial intelligence (AI)-related technologies and implementations for productivity. New tools for the generation and personalization of content across platforms will be as ubiquitous as the automation of repetitive tasks in content creation workflows. Cultural conceptions of wh...