Download or read book Entropy and Art written by Rudolf Arnheim and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010-08-02 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essay is an attempt to reconcile the disturbing contradiction between the striving for order in nature and in man and the principle of entropy implicit in the second law of thermodynamics - between the tendency toward greater organization and the general trend of the material universe toward death and disorder.

Download or read book Toward a Psychology of Art written by Rudolf Arnheim and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010-08-13 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychology.

Download or read book Restricted Data written by Alex Wellerstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024-04-23 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full history of US nuclear secrecy, from its origins in the late 1930s to our post–Cold War present. The American atomic bomb was born in secrecy. From the moment scientists first conceived of its possibility to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and beyond, there were efforts to control the spread of nuclear information and the newly discovered scientific facts that made such powerful weapons possible. The totalizing scientific secrecy that the atomic bomb appeared to demand was new, unusual, and very nearly unprecedented. It was foreign to American science and American democracy—and potentially incompatible with both. From the beginning, this secrecy was controversial, and it was always contested. The atomic bomb was not merely the application of science to war, but the result of decades of investment in scientific education, infrastructure, and global collaboration. If secrecy became the norm, how would science survive? Drawing on troves of declassified files, including records released by the government for the first time through the author’s efforts, Restricted Data traces the complex evolution of the US nuclear secrecy regime from the first whisper of the atomic bomb through the mounting tensions of the Cold War and into the early twenty-first century. A compelling history of powerful ideas at war, it tells a story that feels distinctly American: rich, sprawling, and built on the conflict between high-minded idealism and ugly, fearful power.

Download or read book Art and Visual Perception Second Edition written by Rudolf Arnheim and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-11-08 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 50-year-old classic, which was revised and expanded in 1974. Explains how the eye organizes visual material according to psychological laws.

Download or read book Film as Art written by Rudolf Arnheim and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1957 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “More than half a century since its initial publication, this deceptively compact book remains among the most incisive analyses of the formal and perceptual dynamics of cinema. No one who cares about film can afford to remain ignorant of its insights and wisdom. As digital technology fundamentally alters motion pictures, the lessons of Film as Art commend themselves as excellent insurance against reinventing the wheel in the new media landscape and hailing it as progress.”—Edward Dimendberg author of Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity “After more than eight decades, Rudolph Arnheim's small book of film theory remains one of the essential works in defining film art, understanding film less as reproducing the world than as opening up new possibilities for formal play and unexpected imagery. Anyone serious about film, whether scholar, filmmaker or simply a lover of cinema, must take Arnheim seriously.”—Tom Gunning, author of The Films of Fritz Lang and D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film “An aesthetic theory based on the formal ‘limitations’ of the medium, Arnheim’s Film as Art always provokes students in an age of few limits and less formality, and they argue and engage this classic text with unparalleled passion. Written in the wake of sound’s transformation of the cinema, Arnheim’s essays are not only central to understanding a major historical moment in theoretical debates about what constitutes the ‘essence’ of film, but also are a must read for anyone seeking a lucid, detailed, and rigorous argument about how works of art emerge from expressive constraint as much as expressive freedom.”—Vivian Sobchack, author of Carnal Thoughts

Download or read book Unflattening written by Nick Sousanis and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-20 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unflattening is an experiment in visual thinking. Nick Sousanis defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge.

Download or read book Parables of Sun Light written by Rudolf Arnheim and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many years Rudolf Arnheim, known as the leading psychologist of art, has been keeping notebooks in which to jot down observations, ideas, questions, and even (after a stay in Japan for a year) poems in the haiku pattern. Some of these notes found their way into his books—known and prized the world over—such as Art and Visual Perception, Visual Thinking, and The Power of the Center (see list below). Now he has selected, from the remaining riches of his notebooks, the items in this volume. The book will be a joy to ramble through for all lovers of Arnheim's work, and indeed for anyone who shares Arnheim's contagious interest in the order that lies behind art, nature, and human life. It is a seedbed of ideas and observations in his special fields of psychology and the arts. "I have avoided mere images and I have avoided mere thoughts," says Arnheim in the Introduction, "but whenever an episode observed or a striking sentence read yielded a piece of insight I had not met before, I wrote it down and preserved it." There are also glimpses of his personal life—his wife, his cats, his students, his neighbors and colleagues. He is always concrete, in the manner that has become his trademark, often witty, and sometimes a bit wicked. In the blend of life and thought caught in these jottings, psychology and the arts are of course prominent. But philosophy, religion, and the natural sciences add to the medley of topics—always addressed in a way to sharpen the senses of the reader who, sharing Arnheim's cue from Dylan Thomas, may accompany him through "the parables of sun light and the legends of the green chapels and the twice told fields of childhood." All of Rudolf Arnheim's books have been published by the University of California Press.

Download or read book After the End of Art written by Arthur C. Danto and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic and provocative account of how art changed irrevocably with pop art and why traditional aesthetics can’t make sense of contemporary art A classic of art criticism and philosophy, After the End of Art continues to generate heated debate for its radical and famous assertion that art ended in the 1960s. Arthur Danto, a philosopher who was also one of the leading art critics of his time, argues that traditional notions of aesthetics no longer apply to contemporary art and that we need a philosophy of art criticism that can deal with perhaps the most perplexing feature of current art: that everything is possible. An insightful and entertaining exploration of art’s most important aesthetic and philosophical issues conducted by an acute observer of contemporary art, After the End of Art argues that, with the eclipse of abstract expressionism, art deviated irrevocably from the narrative course that Vasari helped define for it in the Renaissance. Moreover, Danto makes the case for a new type of criticism that can help us understand art in a posthistorical age where, for example, an artist can produce a work in the style of Rembrandt to create a visual pun, and where traditional theories cannot explain the difference between Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box and the product found in the grocery store. After the End of Art addresses art history, pop art, “people’s art,” the future role of museums, and the critical contributions of Clement Greenberg, whose aesthetics-based criticism helped a previous generation make sense of modernism. Tracing art history from a mimetic tradition (the idea that art was a progressively more adequate representation of reality) through the modern era of manifestos (when art was defined by the artist’s philosophy), Danto shows that it wasn’t until the invention of pop art that the historical understanding of the means and ends of art was nullified. Even modernist art, which tried to break with the past by questioning the ways in which art was produced, hinged on a narrative.

Download or read book The Power of the Center written by Rudolf Arnheim and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1983-01-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tension between two systems for understanding and picturing space, the concentric and the Cartesian, is regarded by the author as the key to composition in painting, sculpture and architecture

Download or read book Two Essays on Entropy written by Rudolf Carnap and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-15 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

Download or read book Lumen Naturae written by Matilde Marcolli and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring common themes in modern art, mathematics, and science, including the concept of space, the notion of randomness, and the shape of the cosmos. This is a book about art—and a book about mathematics and physics. In Lumen Naturae (the title refers to a purely immanent, non-supernatural form of enlightenment), mathematical physicist Matilde Marcolli explores common themes in modern art and modern science—the concept of space, the notion of randomness, the shape of the cosmos, and other puzzles of the universe—while mapping convergences with the work of such artists as Paul Cezanne, Mark Rothko, Sol LeWitt, and Lee Krasner. Her account, focusing on questions she has investigated in her own scientific work, is illustrated by more than two hundred color images of artworks by modern and contemporary artists. Thus Marcolli finds in still life paintings broad and deep philosophical reflections on space and time, and connects notions of space in mathematics to works by Paul Klee, Salvador Dalí, and others. She considers the relation of entropy and art and how notions of entropy have been expressed by such artists as Hans Arp and Fernand Léger; and traces the evolution of randomness as a mode of artistic expression. She analyzes the relation between graphical illustration and scientific text, and offers her own watercolor-decorated mathematical notebooks. Throughout, she balances discussions of science with explorations of art, using one to inform the other. (She employs some formal notation, which can easily be skipped by general readers.) Marcolli is not simply explaining art to scientists and science to artists; she charts unexpected interdependencies that illuminate the universe.

Download or read book Entropic Philosophy written by Shannon M. Mussett and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-01-31 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now is a time of tremendous anxiety about the present and future state of the world. As the second law of thermodynamics states, entropy never decreases, time marches relentlessly forward, and closed systems inevitably break down. Entropy serves as a powerful metaphor capturing expressions of growing malaise and decline. Entropic Philosophy: Chaos, Breakdown, and Creation builds on the meaning of entropy from the Greek entropia, signifying “a turning toward” or “transformation.” Developing a philosophy of entropy, this book draws variously from anthropology, psychoanalysis, literature, art, and the history of philosophy. This approach opens pathways for reverence and care that are crucial in preventing fear, existential inertia, and despair.

Download or read book Chaos Imagined written by Martin Meisel and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stories we tell in our attempt to make sense of the world—our myths and religion, literature and philosophy, science and art—are the comforting vehicles we use to transmit ideas of order. But beneath the quest for order lies the uneasy dread of fundamental disorder. True chaos is hard to imagine and even harder to represent. In this book, Martin Meisel considers the long effort to conjure, depict, and rationalize extreme disorder, with all the passion, excitement, and compromises the act provokes. Meisel builds a rough history from major social, psychological, and cosmological turning points in the imagining of chaos. He uses examples from literature, philosophy, painting, graphic art, science, linguistics, music, and film, particularly exploring the remarkable shift in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from conceiving of chaos as disruptive to celebrating its liberating and energizing potential. Discussions of Sophocles, Plato, Lucretius, Calderon, Milton, Haydn, Blake, Faraday, Chekhov, Faulkner, Wells, and Beckett, among others, are matched with incisive readings of art by Brueghel, Rubens, Goya, Turner, Dix, Dada, and the futurists. Meisel addresses the revolution in mapping energy and entropy and the manifold effect of thermodynamics. He then uses this chaotic frame to elaborate on purpose, mortality, meaning, and mind.

Download or read book The Entropy of Capitalism written by Robert Biel and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-10-14 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the context of the ecological crisis of the twenty-first century, the book integrates Marxism and systems theory to reveal finance capital and the ‘war on terror’ as complementary responses of a capitalism reduced to parasitising upon symptoms of chaos.

Download or read book Generative Art written by Matt Pearson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-06-29 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Summary Generative Art presents both the technique and the beauty of algorithmic art. The book includes high-quality examples of generative art, along with the specific programmatic steps author and artist Matt Pearson followed to create each unique piece using the Processing programming language. About the Technology Artists have always explored new media, and computer-based artists are no exception. Generative art, a technique where the artist creates print or onscreen images by using computer algorithms, finds the artistic intersection of programming, computer graphics, and individual expression. The book includes a tutorial on Processing, an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions. About the Book Generative Art presents both the techniques and the beauty of algorithmic art. In it, you'll find dozens of high-quality examples of generative art, along with the specific steps the author followed to create each unique piece using the Processing programming language. The book includes concise tutorials for each of the technical components required to create the book's images, and it offers countless suggestions for how you can combine and reuse the various techniques to create your own works. Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book. What's Inside The principles of algorithmic art A Processing language tutorial Using organic, pseudo-random, emergent, and fractal processes ========================================​========= Table of Contents Part 1 Creative Coding Generative Art: In Theory and Practice Processing: A Programming Language for ArtistsPart 2 Randomness and Noise The Wrong Way to Draw A Line The Wrong Way to Draw a Circle Adding Dimensions Part 3 Complexity Emergence Autonomy Fractals

Download or read book Entropy written by Estill Pollock and published by Broadstone Books. This book was released on 2021-08-15 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. Entropy is a term most commonly associated with a state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty, and by one sociological definition is the natural decay of structure (such as law, organization, and convention) in a social system. It might well be said, then, that we are living in an age of entropy, and who better than a poet to address this state, since poets both before and since Yeats have long documented things falling apart, centers no longer holding. Estill Pollock's new poetry collection by this title (his first to be published in the US) is a worthy addition to the poetry of entropy, and he wastes no time getting to it: his opening lines, Asides to Walt Whitman..., are full of images of war and pestilence, the stink of babies three days dead / In Sudan, the boy staring back at the camera / His belly like a poisoned pup's. Thus from the outset we encounter poems that are both steeped in literary tradition (where Byron and Bob Dylan appear back to back) and passionately responsive to current events and human tragedy. And it is the former, the literary mastery, that keeps the latter from overwhelming us and making this a grim undertaking. Rather, it is a dazzling excursion into the delights of language, by a poet equally adept at description (as in the poignant Visitor Hours watching an old friend descending into dementia) and at invention (see Strata, a modern myth of a secret within secret, of an alien ship discovered beneath an archeological dig, its hull a silk persuasion of stars / and strategies cut from deeper dark.) In his poetry, Pollock confronts the chaos of entropy and creates order out of the fragments of a broken world--at least for a time, however long it may last. Near the end, in the appropriately titled What no longer holds he concedes I could not outrun the patience of graves // I have borrowed your heartbeat to tell you this.

Download or read book TEMPORALITIES written by Kate Bretkelly-Chalmers and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time, Duration and Change in Contemporary Art presents a major study of time as a key aesthetic dimension of recent art practices. This book explores different aspects of time across a broad range of artistic media and draws on recent movements in philosophy, science, and technology to show how artists generate temporal experiences that resist the standardized time of modernity: Olafur Eliasson?s melting icebergs produce fragile temporal ecologies; Marina Abramovi??s performances test the durations of the human body; Christian Marclay?s The Clock conflates past and present chronologies. This book examines alternative frameworks of time, duration, and change in prominent philosophical, scientific, and technological traditions, including physics, psychology, phenomenology, neuroscience, media theory, and selected environmental sciences. It suggests that art makes a crucial contribution to these discourses not by?visualizing? time, but by entangling viewers in different sensory, material, and imaginary temporalities.