Download or read book The Radical Use of Chance in 20th Century Art written by Denis Lejeune and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2012-01 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To many, chance and art are antagonistic terms. But a number of 20th century artists have turned this notion on its head by attempting to create artworks based on randomness. Among those, three in particular articulated a well-argued and thorough theory of the radical use of chance in art: André Breton (writer), John Cage (composer) and François Morellet (visual artist). The implications of such a move away from established aesthetics are far-reaching, as much in conceptual as in practical terms, as this book hopes to make clear. Of paramount importance in this coincidentia oppositorum is the suggested possibility of a correlation between the artistic use of chance and a system of thought itself organised around chance. Indeed placing randomness at the centre of one’s art may have deeper philosophical consequences than just on the aesthetical level.

Download or read book Stem Cell Banking written by Dusko Ilic and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-05-05 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book exemplifies experience across the globe in banking of cord blood, mesenchymal, embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells for clinical use from the United States, Canada, the European Union, Switzerland and Japan to Iran, India and Serbia. The concerns are similar regardless of stem cell type or origin. Implementing core values and common standards depend often on specific circumstances of political and economic setting, which makes flexibility as important as systematic planning. Banking of stem cells is not just building a repository and storing samples. The planning, design, construction and maintenance involve multiple skilled professionals. Stem cell banks are points where technology and medicine converge with ethics, laws and regulations. If properly designed and organized, their utilization will have a broad impact not only on the scientific community and medical professionals but also on the general public.

Download or read book Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance written by Herbert Molderings and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-31 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marcel Duchamp is often viewed as an "artist-engineer-scientist," a kind of rationalist who relied heavily on the ideas of the French mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré. Yet a complete portrait of Duchamp and his multiple influences draws a different picture. In his 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-1914), a work that uses chance as an artistic medium, we see how far Duchamp subverted scientism in favor of a radical individualistic aesthetic and experimental vision. Unlike the Dadaists, Duchamp did more than dismiss or negate the authority of science. He pushed scientific rationalism to the point where its claims broke down and alternative truths were allowed to emerge. With humor and irony, Duchamp undertook a method of artistic research, reflection, and visual thought that focused less on beauty than on the notion of the "possible." He became a passionate advocate of the power of invention and thinking things that had never been thought before. The 3 Standard Stoppages is the ultimate realization of the play between chance and dimension, visibility and invisibility, high and low art, and art and anti-art. Situating Duchamp firmly within the literature and philosophy of his time, Herbert Molderings recaptures the spirit of a frequently misread artist-and his thrilling aesthetic of chance.

Download or read book Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles written by James Elkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-11-23 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With bracing clarity, James Elkins explores why images are taken to be more intricate and hard to describe in the twentieth century than they had been in any previous century. Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? uses three models to understand the kinds of complex meaning that pictures are thought to possess: the affinity between the meanings of paintings and jigsaw-puzzles; the contemporary interest in ambiguity and 'levels of meaning'; and the penchant many have to interpret pictures by finding images hidden within them. Elkins explores a wide variety of examples, from the figures hidden in Renaissance paintings to Salvador Dali's paranoiac meditations on Millet's Angelus, from Persian miniature paintings to jigsaw-puzzles. He also examines some of the most vexed works in history, including Watteau's "meaningless" paintings, Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling, and Leonardo's Last Supper.

Download or read book Becoming Animal written by Claus Carstensen and published by Hatje Cantz Verlag. This book was released on 2018-06 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brutally and forcefully, Becoming Animal connects the animalization of art history to the use of negatively charged animal metaphors in contemporary, everyday rhetoric. Unlike animals, humans are painfully conscious of their own existence and mortality. Becoming Animal explores this fact through works by Francisco de Goya, Albert Oehlen, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Matias Faldbakken and others.

Download or read book Biological Resource Centres Underpinning the Future of Life Sciences and Biotechnology written by OECD and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2001-05-22 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biotechnology and the genomics revolution are changing our world’s scientific-technological and socio-economic framework. A new type of raw material – one invisible to the naked eye – will become the essential ingredient of the life sciences and ...

Download or read book Mathematics as a Modeling System written by Marcel Danesi and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Serendipity, inference, and abduction present opportunities for solutions to the puzzles appealing to humans, mathematicians included. When successful, these intuitive semiosic leaps find pattern, even when the pattern may not be explained beyond the frame of the puzzle. In foregrounding abduction, Danesi and Bockarova refresh ancient queries about any distinctions between discovery and invention. The abductive process cannot be taught in a prescriptive fashion, as it resists reduction to the simpler linear logics of our ordinary pedagogies. The authors' semiotic perspective integrates recognized patterns of conceptual learning styles with the pervasive patterns in both living and inert realms, revealed through Fibonacci, Zipf, and fractals, and the cognitive power in diagrams, schemes, and graphs. The authors consider how it is that modeling seems to be tied to symbolism, metaphor, and optical processing. This volume will refresh practitioners from both pure and applied realms of mathematics, as well as other semioticians, pedagogues, and scholars generally." -- Myrdene Anderson

Download or read book Faces in the Clouds written by Stewart Elliott Guthrie and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-04-06 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion is universal human culture. No phenomenon is more widely shared or more intensely studied, yet there is no agreement on what religion is. Now, in Faces in the Clouds, anthropologist Stewart Guthrie provides a provocative definition of religion in a bold and persuasive new theory. Guthrie says religion can best be understood as systematic anthropomorphism--that is, the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things and events. Many writers see anthropomorphism as common or even universal in religion, but few think it is central. To Guthrie, however, it is fundamental. Religion, he writes, consists of seeing the world as humanlike. As Guthrie shows, people find a wide range of humanlike beings plausible: Gods, spirits, abominable snowmen, HAL the computer, Chiquita Banana. We find messages in random events such as earthquakes, weather, and traffic accidents. We say a fire "rages," a storm "wreaks vengeance," and waters "lie still." Guthrie says that our tendency to find human characteristics in the nonhuman world stems from a deep-seated perceptual strategy: in the face of pervasive (if mostly unconscious) uncertainty about what we see, we bet on the most meaningful interpretation we can. If we are in the woods and see a dark shape that might be a bear or a boulder, for example, it is good policy to think it is a bear. If we are mistaken, we lose little, and if we are right, we gain much. So, Guthrie writes, in scanning the world we always look for what most concerns us--livings things, and especially, human ones. Even animals watch for human attributes, as when birds avoid scarecrows. In short, we all follow the principle--better safe than sorry. Marshalling a wealth of evidence from anthropology, cognitive science, philosophy, theology, advertising, literature, art, and animal behavior, Guthrie offers a fascinating array of examples to show how this perceptual strategy pervades secular life and how it characterizes religious experience. Challenging the very foundations of religion, Faces in the Clouds forces us to take a new look at this fundamental element of human life.