Aesthetics and Politics of Logistics
Aesthetics and Politics of Logistics

Author: Hamed Khosravi

Publisher: Humboldt

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 9788899385682

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The architecture of logistics is profoundly political. It measures, maps, and modulates the terrain through its projection of power-relations onto the topography. It creates spatial networks that are constituted through the circulation of capital and calibrated to meet the requirements for security and risk management. Such a direct translation of risk factors and economic values into a spatial configuration inevitably produces a territory that is alienated from both the natural topography and forms of labor. The book is an inquiry into the nature of changing paradigms in logistics. It aims to offer a cross-disciplinary platform for an exchange of ideas among artists, architects, historians, philosophers, engineers, and planners. We believe that it is only through cultivating a common imaginary that we will be able to know, resist, and effectively work against and from within the logistical system that shapes our lives, territories, and cities.

Resiligence
Resiligence

Author: Nicola Canessa

Publisher: Actar D, Inc.

Published: 2021-05-28

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1638409587

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The Resili(g)ence publication is part of the outputs produced within the European project KAAU, Knowledge Alliance for Advanced Urbanism (www.ka-au.net), Erasmus + program, and consists of two volumes: the first Resili(g)ence Intelligent Cities / Resilient Landscapes offers reflections on the general framework and on the theme of resilience applied to intelligent cities and the landscape, while the second volume GOA Resili(g)ent City, analyses the case study of Genoa. RESILI(G)ENCE is a combined word, created by Manuel Gausa, merging the words resilience and intelligence. Intelligence is intended not only as the artificial but also as the human one, though undoubtedly today the world of BigData and OpenData can help the better understand of the city and its dynamics. Resilience, instead, is a term derived from the materials science and indicates the property that some materials have to maintain their structure or to regain its original shape after being subjected to crushing or deformation. The history of making the city of Genoa safe from floods is ancient history. And complex, very complex. It is the story of the wrong relationship between the river and the city, between nature and the urban and industrial development of the capital, between the flow of watercourses and their covering and cementing of the banks and beds of streams. It is perhaps one of the paradigmatic examples of the senselessness of man’s choices towards his environment. But it is also the story of the delays of politics and institutions, of bureaucracies, of the system of public works in our country: of an Italy more attentive to formal respect for rules than for the rules of nature. In the midst of this history there are the disasters, floods, the dead, the injured, the damage of the flooding of the Bisagno torrent, which with its 30 km cuts the city from north to south, in one of the most built up areas of Italy, to reach the sea in the Foce district.

The Aesthetics of Disappearance, New Edition
The Aesthetics of Disappearance, New Edition

Author: Paul Virilio

Publisher: Semiotext(e)

Published: 2009-04-10

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13:

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Focusing on the logistics of perception, this title introduces the author's understanding of 'picnolepsy' - the epileptic state of consciousness produced by speed, or rather, the consciousness invented by the subject through its very absence: the gaps, glitches, and speed bumps lacing through and defining it.

The Rule of Logistics
The Rule of Logistics

Author: Jesse LeCavalier

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2016-08-26

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 1452951535

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Every time you wheel a shopping cart through one of Walmart’s more than 10,000 stores worldwide, or swipe your credit card or purchase something online, you enter a mind-boggling logistical regime. Even if you’ve never shopped at Walmart, its logistics have probably affected your life. The Rule of Logistics makes sense of its spatial and architectural ramifications by analyzing the stores, distribution centers, databases, and inventory practices of the world’s largest corporation. The Rule of Logistics tells the story of Walmart’s buildings in the context of the corporation’s entire operation, itself characterized by an obsession with logistics. Beginning with the company’s founding in 1962, Jesse LeCavalier reveals how logistics—as a branch of knowledge, an area of work, and a collection of processes—takes shape and changes our built environment. Weaving together archival material with original drawings, LeCavalier shows how a diverse array of ideas, people, and things—military theory and chewing gum, Howard Dean and satellite networks, Hudson River School painters and real estate software, to name a few—are all connected through Walmart’s logistical operations and in turn are transforming how its buildings are conceptualized, located, built, and inhabited. A major new contribution to architectural history and theory, The Rule of Logistics helps us understand how retailing today is changing our bodies, brains, buildings, and cities and predicts what future forms architecture might take when shaped by systems that exceed its current capacities.

The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics
The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics

Author: Randy Martin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-02-11

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1317567803

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The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics offers a thorough examination of the complex relationship between art and politics, and the many forms and approaches the engagement between them can take. The contributors - a diverse assembly of artists, activists, scholars from around the world – discuss and demonstrate ways of making art and politics legible and salient in the world. As such the 32 chapters in this volume reflect on performing and visual arts; music, film and new media; as well as covering social practice, community-based work, conceptual, interventionist and movement affiliated forms. The Companion is divided into four distinct parts: Conceptual Cartographies Institutional Materialities Modalities of Practice Making Publics Randy Martin has assembled a collection that ensures that readers will come away with a wider view of what can count as art and politics; where they might find it; and how it moves in the world. The diversity of perspectives is at once challenging and fortifying to those who might dismiss political art on the one hand as not making sufficient difference and on the other to those embracing it but seeking a means to elaborate the significance that it can make in the world. The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics brings together a range of issues and approaches and encourages critical and creative thinking about how art is produced, perceived, and received.

War and Cinema
War and Cinema

Author: Paul Virilio

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2020-05-05

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 1789604796

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Reveals the convergence of perception and destruction in the parallel technologies of warfare and cinema.

Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities
Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities

Author: Olivier Coutard

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2024-04-12

Total Pages: 483

ISBN-13: 1800889151

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Contributing towards a thriving research area, this comprehensive Handbook presents a broad discussion of infrastructure as social phenomena. It compiles diverse perspectives to delineate the current ‘infrastructural turn’ and assess policy and research challenges relating to contemporary forms of infrastructural development.

Settling the Boom
Settling the Boom

Author: Mary E. Thomas

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2023-02-28

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1452968411

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Examines how settler colonial and sexist infrastructures and narratives order a resource boom Over the past decade, new oil plays have unsettled U.S. energy landscapes and imaginaries. Settling the Boom studies how the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the northern Great Plains are contained through the extension of settler temporalities, reassertions of heteropatriarchy, and the tethering of life to the volatility of oil and its cruel optimisms. This collection reveals the results of sustained research in Williston, North Dakota, the epicenter of the “Bakken Boom.” While the boom brought a rapid influx of capital and workers, the book questions simple timelines of before and after. Instead, Settling the Boom demonstrates how the unsettling forces of an oil play resolve through normative narratives and material and affective infrastructures that support settler colonialism’s violent extension and its gendered orders of time and space. Considering a wide range of evidence, from urban and regional policy, interviews with city officials, media, photography, and film, these essays analyze the ongoing material, aesthetic, and narrative ways of life and land in the Bakken. Contributors: Morgan Adamson, Macalester College; Kai Bosworth, Virginia Commonwealth U; Thomas S. Davis, Ohio State U; Jessica Lehman, Durham U.

Aesthetics Equals Politics
Aesthetics Equals Politics

Author: Mark Foster Gage

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-04-16

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0262351463

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How aesthetics—understood as a more encompassing framework for human activity—might become the primary discourse for political and social engagement. These essays make the case for a reignited understanding of aesthetics—one that casts aesthetics not as illusory, subjective, or superficial, but as a more encompassing framework for human activity. Such an aesthetics, the contributors suggest, could become the primary discourse for political and social engagement. Departing from the “critical” stance of twentieth-century artists and theorists who embraced a counter-aesthetic framework for political engagement, this book documents how a broader understanding of aesthetics can offer insights into our relationships not only with objects, spaces, environments, and ecologies, but also with each other and the political structures in which we are all enmeshed. The contributors—philosophers, media theorists, artists, curators, writers and architects including such notable figures as Jacques Rancière, Graham Harman, and Elaine Scarry—build a compelling framework for a new aesthetic discourse. The book opens with a conversation in which Rancière tells the volume's editor, Mark Foster Gage, that the aesthetic is “about the experience of a common world.” The essays following discuss such topics as the perception of reality; abstraction in ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics as the “first philosophy”; Afrofuturism; Xenofeminism; philosophical realism; the productive force of alienation; and the unbearable lightness of current creative discourse. Contributors Mark Foster Gage, Jacques Rancière, Elaine Scarry, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Ferda Kolatan, Adam Fure, Michael Young, Nettrice R. Gaskins, Roger Rothman, Diann Bauer, Matt Shaw, Albena Yaneva, Brett Mommersteeg, Lydia Kallipoliti, Ariane Lourie Harrison, Rhett Russo, Peggy Deamer, Caroline Picard Matt Shaw, Managing Editor

The Deadly Life of Logistics
The Deadly Life of Logistics

Author: Deborah Cowen

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2014-09-01

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1452943192

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In a world in which global trade is at risk, where warehouses and airports, shipping lanes and seaports try to guard against the likes of Al Qaeda and Somali pirates, and natural disaster can disrupt the flow of goods, even our “stuff” has a political life. The high stakes of logistics are not surprising, Deborah Cowen reveals, if we understand its genesis in war. In The Deadly Life of Logistics, Cowen traces the art and science of logistics over the last sixty years, from the battlefield to the boardroom and back again. Focusing on choke points such as national borders, zones of piracy, blockades, and cities, she tracks contemporary efforts to keep goods circulating and brings to light the collective violence these efforts produce. She investigates how the old military art of logistics played a critical role in the making of the global economic order—not simply the globalization of production, but the invention of the supply chain and the reorganization of national economies into transnational systems. While reshaping the world of production and distribution, logistics is also actively reconfiguring global maps of security and citizenship, a phenomenon Cowen charts through the rise of supply chain security, with its challenge to long-standing notions of state sovereignty and border management. Though the object of corporate and governmental logistical efforts is commodity supply, The Deadly Life of Logistics demonstrates that they are deeply political—and, considered in the context of the long history of logistics, deeply indebted to the practice of war.