The Revenge of the Real

The Revenge of the Real

Author: Benjamin Bratton

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2021-06-29

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1839762594

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The future of politics after the pandemic COVID-19 exposed the pre-existing conditions of the current global crisis. Many Western states failed to protect their populations, while others were able to suppress the virus only with sweeping social restrictions. In contrast, many Asian countries were able to make much more precise interventions. Everywhere, lockdown transformed everyday life, introducing an epidemiological view of society based on sensing, modeling, and filtering. What lessons are to be learned? The Revenge of the Real envisions a new positive biopolitics that recognizes that governance is literally a matter of life and death. We are grappling with multiple interconnected dilemmas—climate change, pandemics, the tensions between the individual and society—all of which have to be addressed on a planetary scale. Even when separated, we are still enmeshed. Can the world govern itself differently? What models and philosophies are needed? Bratton argues that instead of thinking of biotechnologies as something imposed on society, we must see them as essential to a politics of infrastructure, knowledge, and direct intervention. In this way, we can build a society based on a new rationality of inclusion, care, and prevention.


For America

For America

Author: Jeremiah William McCarthy

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2019-01-01

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0300244282

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Featuring paintings by American icons like Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, this book illustrates the ways American artists have viewed themselves, their peers, and their painted worlds over 200 years.


I Am Not this Body

I Am Not this Body

Author: Barbara Ess

Publisher:

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780893819361

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Barbara Ess makes subtly-toned photographs that are not so much reality as visionary versions of it. Blurry and distorted, they seem to coax their subjects from mysterious spaces. --Grace Glueck, "The New York Times" "Ess' images often have a dreamy subterranean quality--part wonder and part menace--as if culled directly from the subconscious." --Gregory Volk, "ARTnews" "I Am Not This Body" investigates primary, personal experience and relies upon the viewer's imagination and memories. Barbara Ess is renowned for her accomplished use of the pinhole camera and her effort to "photograph what cannot be photographed." Ess' is a conscious quest to explore what she calls "ambiguous perceptual boundaries: between people, between the self and the not self, between in here and out there." In her view, "reality... includes a perceiver, who has memories, thoughts, desires, emotions-- which] a normal camera tends to omit." The strange and affecting images she coaxes from this primitive camera manage to evoke the sublime and the impossible, the textures of desire and loss.


The Absent Image

The Absent Image

Author: Elina Gertsman

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2021-06-24

Total Pages: 599

ISBN-13: 0271089016

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Winner of the 2022 Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui—the fear of empty space—is thus often construed as a definitive feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures. Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world’s creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death. Innovative and challenging, this book will find its primary audience with students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages.


The Routledge Companion to African American Art History

The Routledge Companion to African American Art History

Author: Taylor & Francis Group

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-30

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 9780367553647

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This Companion authoritatively points to the main areas of enquiry within the subject of African American art history. This book will be of interest to graduate students, researchers and professors and may be used in African American art, visual culture, and culture classes.


Air-Conditioning in Modern American Architecture, 1890–1970

Air-Conditioning in Modern American Architecture, 1890–1970

Author: Joseph M. Siry

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2021-03-25

Total Pages: 764

ISBN-13: 0271089008

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Air-Conditioning in Modern American Architecture, 1890–1970, documents how architects made environmental technologies into resources that helped shape their spatial and formal aesthetic. In doing so, it sheds important new light on the ways in which mechanical engineering has been assimilated into the culture of architecture as one facet of its broader modernist project. Tracing the development and architectural integration of air-conditioning from its origins in the late nineteenth century to the advent of the environmental movement in the early 1970s, Joseph M. Siry shows how the incorporation of mechanical systems into modernism’s discourse of functionality profoundly shaped the work of some of the movement’s leading architects, such as Dankmar Adler, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Gordon Bunshaft, and Louis Kahn. For them, the modernist ideal of functionality was incompletely realized if it did not wholly assimilate heating, cooling, ventilating, and artificial lighting. Bridging the history of technology and the history of architecture, Siry discusses air-conditioning’s technical and social history and provides case studies of buildings by the master architects who brought this technology into the conceptual and formal project of modernism. A monumental work by a renowned expert in American modernist architecture, this book asks us to see canonical modernist buildings through a mechanical engineering–oriented lens. It will be especially valuable to scholars and students of architecture, modernism, the history of technology, and American history.