Comprehending Cinema is a collection of in-depth interviews and panoramic essays that model a generalist approach to modern audiovisual media, prioritizing remarkable cinematic accomplishments that can get lost within our overwhelming modern mediascape. It offers a reading adventure dedicated to opening the door to exciting new kinds of film experience.
Brown Bodies, White Babies focuses on the practice of cross-racial gestational surrogacy, in which a woman - through in-vitro fertilization using the sperm and egg of intended parents or donors - carries a pregnancy for intended parents of a different race. Focusing on the racial differences between parents and surrogates, this book is interested in how reproductive technologies intersect with race, particularly when brown bodies produce white babies. While the potential of reproductive technologies is far from pre-determined, the ways in which these technologies are currently deployed often serve the interests of dominant groups, through the creation of white, middle-class, heteronormative families. Laura Harrison, providing an important understanding of the work of women of color as surrogates, connects this labor to the history of racialized reproduction in the United States. Cross-racial surrogacy is one end of a continuum in which dominant groups rely on the reproductive potential of nonwhite women, whose own reproductive desires have been historically thwarted and even demonized. Brown Bodies, White Babies provides am interdisciplinary analysis that includes legal cases of contested surrogacy, historical examples of surrogacy as a form of racialized reproductive labor, the role of genetics in the assisted reproduction industry, and the recent turn toward reproductive tourism. Joining the ongoing feminist debates surrounding reproduction, motherhood, race, and the body, Brown Bodies, White Babies ultimately critiques the new potentials for parenthood that put the very contours of kinship into question.
The Intermediality of Contemporary Visual Arts explores a range of topics within the field. The volume delves into the realm of intermediality within the visual arts. Each chapter explores a different aspect; from the evolution of Intermedial Studies over the past decades to the shifts in print typography and the emergence of “cut-ups” within a context of resistance against conventions, the concept of Visual Music and its relation to pioneering filmmaking, visual representations of intimacy as they evolve from painting to other visual formats like comics, film, and television, and finally the transmedial potential of cultural symbols in virtual reality, all of which involve greater multimodal and emotional elements that enhance audience immersion. The volume closes by highlighting the need for a comprehensive approach to visual art education and pedagogical methods that foster creativity, emphasizing the intermedial aspects present in contemporary visual arts.
The love story between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy—in their own words The English novelist and screenwriter Christopher Isherwood was already famous as the author of Goodbye to Berlin when he met Don Bachardy, a California teenager, on the beach in Santa Monica in 1952. Within a year, they began to live together as an openly gay couple, defying convention in the closeted world of Hollywood. Isherwood was forty-eight; Bachardy was eighteen. The Animals is the testimony in letters to their extraordinary partnership, which lasted until Isherwood's death in 1986—despite the thirty year age gap, affairs and jealousy (on both sides), the pressures of increasing celebrity, and the disdain of twentieth-century America for love between two men. The letters reveal the private world of the Animals: Isherwood was "Dobbin," a stubborn old workhorse; Bachardy was the rash, playful "Kitty." Isherwood had a gift for creating a safe and separate domestic milieu, necessary for a gay man in midtwentieth-century America. He drew Bachardy into his semi-secret realm, nourished Bachardy's talent as a painter, and launched him into the artistic career that was first to threaten and eventually to secure their life together. The letters also tell of public achievements—the critical acclaim for A Single Man, the commercial success of Cabaret—and the bohemian whirl of friendships in Los Angeles, London, and New York with such stars as Truman Capote, Julie Harris, David Hockney, Vanessa Redgrave, Gore Vidal, and Tennessee Williams. Bold, transgressive, and playful, The Animals articulates the devotion, in tenderness and in storms, between two uniquely original spirits.
This title demystifies the topic for investors, business executives, and anyone interested in how molecule-sized machines and processes can transform our lives. Along with dispelling common myths, it covers nanotechnology's origins, how it will affect various industries, and the limitations it can overcome. This handy book also presents numerous applications such as scratch-proof glass, corrosion resistant paints, stain-free clothing, glare-reducing eyeglass coatings, drug delivery systems, medical diagnostic tools, burn and wound dressings, sugar-cube-sized computers, mini-portable power generators, even longer-lasting tennis balls, and more. Nanotechnology is the science of matter at the scale of one-billionth of a meter or 1/75,000th the size of a human hair Written in the accessible, humorous For Dummies style, this book demystifies nanotechnology for investors, business people, and anyone else interested in how molecule-sized machines and processes will soon transform our lives Investment in nanotechnology is exploding, with $3.7 billion in nanotechnology R&D spending authorized by the U.S. government in 2003 and international investment reported at over $2 billion
Nanotechnology has the potential to revolutionize the agricultural and food industry with new tools for the molecular treatment of diseases, rapid disease detection, enhancing the ability of plants to absorb nutrients etc. Nanotechnology combines solid state physics, chemistry, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, biochemistry and biophysics, and materials science. It is a highly interdisciplinary area meaning that it involves ideas integrated from many traditional discipline. Nanotechnology (NT) is the production and use of materials with purposely engineered features close to the atomic or molecular scale. NT deals with putting things together atom by atom and with structures so small they are invisible to the naked eye. It provides the ability to create materials, devices and systems with fundamentally new functions and properties. The promise of NT is enormous. It has implications for almost every type of manufacturing process and product. Nanomaterials have extremely small size which having at least one dimension 100 nm or less. Nanomaterials can be nanoscale in one dimension (e.g. surface films), two dimensions (e.g. strands or fibres), or three dimensions (e.g. particles). They can exist in single, fused, aggregated or agglomerated forms with spherical, tubular, and irregular shapes. Common types of nanomaterials include nanotubes, dendrimers, quantum dots and fullerenes. Nanoparticle research is currently an area of intense scientific research, due to a wide variety of potential applications in biomedical, optical, and electronic fields. Nanoparticles are of great scientific interest as they are effectively a bridge between bulk materials and atomic or molecular structures. A bulk material should have constant physical properties regardless of its size, but at the nano-scale this is often not the case. This book introduces the reader to the world of nanotechnology by giving them in-depth details of different aspects of the field.
