Download or read book Refractions written by Makoto Fujimura and published by NavPress. This book was released on 2024-08-06 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Embark on a profound journey through the depths of human emotion and spirituality in the updated anniversary edition of Refractions by renowned artist Makoto Fujimura. This timeless collection of reflective essays invites you to explore themes of grief, loss, tragedy, and disruption through the eyes of an artist’s soul. Originally conceived in the shadow of the fallen twin towers of the World Trade Center, near where Fujimura’s New York art studio stood, this anniversary edition includes new essays unpacking the author’s further insights into his concepts of culture care and a theology of making. Refractions carries the weight of history and the urgency of the moment, illuminating beauty, healing, and hope. A gift for any artist or supporter of the arts, Refractions connects faith, art, and life, offering insight into healing with the wisdom and perspective of a leading contemporary artist and follower of Jesus, making beauty from ashes, and the gospel as a message as breathtaking and intricate as the lives it touches. In a world marred by violence and despair, Fujimura guides you toward a deep understanding of life’s intricate tapestry, where beauty emerges from unexpected places, and healing finds its roots in the goodness of God and human resilience.

Download or read book Frictionlessness written by Jakko Kemper and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-12-14 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frictionlessness provides an examination of the environmentally destructive digital design philosophy of "frictionlessness" and the critical significance of a technological aesthetic of imperfection. If there is one thing that defines digital consumer technologies today, it is that they are designed to feel frictionless. From smart technologies to cloud computing, from from one-click shopping to the promise of seamless streaming-digital technology is framed to host ever-faster operations while receding increasingly into the background of perception. The environmental costs of this fetishization of frictionlessness are enormous and unevenly distributed; the frictionless experience of the end user tends to be supported by opaque networks of exploited labor and extracted resources that disproportionately impact the Global South. This situation marks an urgent need for alternate, less destructive aesthetic relations to technology. As such, this book examines imperfection, as an aesthetic concept that highlights existential conditions of finitude and fragility, as a particularly powerful counterweight to the dominant digital design philosophy of frictionlessness. While frictionlessness aims to draw the user's perception away from the exploitative and destructive conditions of digital production, imperfection forms an aesthetic source of friction that alerts users to the fragile nature of technology and the finite resources on which it relies. These arguments are elaborated through a close reading of three technological objects-a video game that was programmed to expire, an audiovisual performance that laments the fate of disused technology and a collection of music albums that dramatize a techno-cultural logic of relentless consumerism. Together, these case studies underline the value of technological aesthetics of imperfection and point to the need for a renewed ethics of care in relation to technology.

Download or read book The Ghost of Madame Curie written by James Piazza and published by James Piazza. This book was released on 2022-06-29 with total page 1716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Piazza is a Western New York-based archivist and music historian. He developed a series of multimedia presentations on experimental music, ambient sound, archival techniques for digital audio, and lectures on personal media servers for large file libraries. His primary goal is to create a greater public understanding and awareness of 20th century music and sound. Piazza founded Innerspace Labs as an independent music archive chiefly communicating with the public via The Innerspace Connection music blog. He manages a library of over 300,000 soundworks focusing on ambient and experimental recordings. This book comprises the first 12 years of our publications showcasing highlights of the Archive, as well as select previously unpublished works.

Download or read book The Politics of Post 9 11 Music Sound Trauma and the Music Industry in the Time of Terror written by Brian Flota and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-24 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seeking to extend discussions of 9/11 music beyond the acts typically associated with the September 11th attacks”U2, Toby Keith, The Dixie Chicks, Bruce Springsteen”this collection interrogates the politics of a variety of post-9/11 music scenes. Contributors add an aural dimension to what has been a visual conceptualization of this important moment in US history by articulating the role that lesser-known contemporary musicians have played”or have refused to play”in constructing a politics of protest in direct response to the trauma inflicted that day. Encouraging new conceptualizations of what constitutes 'political music,' The Politics of Post-9/11 Music covers topics as diverse as the rise of Internet music distribution, Christian punk rock, rap music in the Obama era, and nostalgia for 1960s political activism.

Download or read book Mars by 1980 written by David Stubbs and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2018-07-31 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Electronic music is now ubiquitous, from mainstream pop hits to the furthest reaches of the avant garde. But how did we get here? In Mars by 1980, David Stubbs charts the evolution of synthesised tones, from the earliest mechanical experiments in the late nineteenth century, through the musique concrete of the Futurists and radical composers such as Pierre Schaeffer and Karl Stockhausen, to the gradual absorption of electronic instrumentation into the mainstream, be it through the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, grandiose prog rock or the DIY approach of electronica, house and techno.Stubbs tells a tale of mavericks and future dreamers, malfunctioning devices and sonic mayhem. But above all, he describes an essential story of authenticity: is this music? Mars by 1980 is the definitive account that answers this question.

Download or read book William Basinski drone ambient musician written by Stone Blue Editors and published by SBE Media. This book was released on 2015-09-11 with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The next title in the “Music You Should Hear Series” is a profile of drone/ambient musician William Basinski. His work as a musician, composer, remixer, and producer is a marriage of opposites: classical/populist; ephemeral/timeless; Eastern/Western (both in terms of the United States, and the wider world); inspired/crafted, ambient/overwhelming. Basinski's music - largely focused on aged recordings made with archaic technology - is an extended meditation on longing and decay, bursting forth into an infinite state of eternal grace.

Download or read book Media N Spring 2015 The Aesthetics of Erasure written by New Media Caucus and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2015-05-06 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against the backdrop of a longstanding practice of 'erasure' both in artistic and critical work, co-guest editors Paul Benzon and Sarah Sweeney take up challenging questions related to the aesthetics of erasure today in the digital era. They investigate new meanings and the relevance of said practice within twenty-first century contemporary contexts typically defined by digital knowledge production, preservation, and sharing. Contributing authors give expression to five sites of inquiry mapped by the editors within the expansive practice of erasure - Power, Capital, Signal and Noise, Technology and Archive. Pat Badani, Editor-in-Chief.

Download or read book The Logic of Filtering written by Melle Jan Kromhout and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the very beginnings of sound recording, engineers have strived to reproduce the original sound as purely as possible and overcome the noise that technology leaves in recordings. However, this desire denies the fact that technologically mediated sound is always shaped and filtered by themany channels it travels through as it is recorded and reproduced. The noise that each medium inscribes on recorded sound is not just inescapable - it is fundamental to the sonic contours that characterize recorded music. But how exactly do media technologies shape sound and music? And how have theychanged what we listen for in music over time?In The Logic of Filtering, author Melle Jan Kromhout develops an extensive media archaeological analysis of the 'noise of sound media' that covers all the disturbances, distortions, and interferences that media add to the sounds they reproduce. Combining theoretical, historical, and technicalperspectives on sound media, Kromhout sketches a broad history of the problem of noise in sound recording as he traces the ideal of sonic purity back to nineteenth-century acoustics, examines analog and digital technologies, and analyzes the relationship between noise and temporality. In thoroughlyrevising our understanding of how sound media impact the sonorous qualities of music, this book offers a fresh perspective on the interactions between music, media, and listeners.

Download or read book Annihilating Noise written by Paul Hegarty and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noise has become a model of cultural and theoretical thinking over the last two decades. Following Hegarty's influential 2007 book, Noise/Music, Annihilating Noise discusses in sixteen essays how noise offers a way of thinking about critical resistance, disruptive creativity and a complex yet enticing way of understanding the unexpected, the dissonant, the unfamiliar. It presents noise as a negativity with no fixed identity that can only be defined in connection and opposition to meaning and order. This book reaches beyond experimental music and considers noise as an idea and practice within a wide range of frameworks including social, ecological, and philosophical perspectives. It introduces the ways in which the disruptive implications of noise impact our ways of thinking, acting, and organizing in the world, and applies it to 21st-century concerns and today's technological ecology.

Download or read book The Last Days of Roger Federer written by Geoff Dyer and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Esquire's best books of spring 2022 An extended meditation on late style and last works from "one of our greatest living critics" (Kathryn Schulz, New York). When artists and athletes age, what happens to their work? Does it ripen or rot? Achieve a new serenity or succumb to an escalating torment? As our bodies decay, how do we keep on? In this beguiling meditation, Geoff Dyer sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last works of writers, painters, footballers, musicians, and tennis stars who’ve mattered to him throughout his life. With a playful charm and penetrating intelligence, he recounts Friedrich Nietzsche’s breakdown in Turin, Bob Dylan’s reinventions of old songs, J. M. W. Turner’s paintings of abstracted light, John Coltrane’s cosmic melodies, Bjorn Borg’s defeats, and Beethoven’s final quartets—and considers the intensifications and modifications of experience that come when an ending is within sight. Throughout, he stresses the accomplishments of uncouth geniuses who defied convention, and went on doing so even when their beautiful youths were over. Ranging from Burning Man and the Doors to the nineteenth-century Alps and back, Dyer’s book on last things is also a book about how to go on living with art and beauty—and on the entrancing effect and sudden illumination that an Art Pepper solo or Annie Dillard reflection can engender in even the most jaded and ironic sensibilities. Praised by Steve Martin for his “hilarious tics” and by Tom Bissell as “perhaps the most bafflingly great prose writer at work in the English language today,” Dyer has now blended criticism, memoir, and humorous banter of the most serious kind into something entirely new. The Last Days of Roger Federer is a summation of Dyer’s passions, and the perfect introduction to his sly and joyous work.

Download or read book September 11 in Popular Culture written by Sara E. Quay and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-09-14 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an exploration of the comprehensive impact of the events of September 11, 2001, on every aspect of American culture and society. On Thanksgiving day after September 11, 2001, comic strip creators directed readers to donate money in their artwork, generating $50,000 in relief funds. The world's largest radio network, Clear Channel, sent a memo to all of its affiliated stations recommending 150 songs that should be eliminated from airplay because of assumptions that their lyrics would be perceived as offensive in light of the events of 9/11. On the first anniversary of September 11th, choirs around the world performed Mozart's Requiem at 8:46 am in each time zone, the time of the first attack on the World Trade Center. These examples are just three of the ways the world—but especially the United States—responded to the events of September 11, 2001. Each chapter in this book contains a chronological overview of the sea of changes in everyday life, literature, entertainment, news and media, and visual culture after September 11. Shorter essays focus on specific books, TV shows, songs, and films.

Download or read book Water Creativity and Meaning written by Liz Roberts and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time of great turmoil and crisis, environmentally, socially and politically, water has emerged as a topic of huge global concern. Moreover, many argue that what is needed in order to change our relationship with the environment is a cultural paradigm shift. To this end, this volume brings together diverse approaches to exploring human relationships with the watery world and the other living things that rely upon it. Through exploring multiple creative ways of engaging with water and people, the volume adds to the current zeitgeist of writing about water by expanding the discussion about this vital substance and how, as humans, we relate to it. Chapters focus on creative explorations and explorations of creativity in relation to developing these understandings, including concepts such as hydrocitizenship and responses to drought and flooding. Drawing on the in-depth research and experience of arts practitioners including participatory artists, as well as academics from a variety of fields including geography, anthropology, health studies and environmental humanities, the book provides a rich and multidisciplinary perspective on water and creative ways of engaging and understanding human–water relationships. It represents a valuable source and inspiration for academics, arts practitioners and those involved in environmental policy and governance.

Download or read book Retromania written by Simon Reynolds and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2011-07-19 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011 We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups . . . But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of culturalecological catastrophe where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted? Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have indeed reached a tipping point, and that although earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity—the Renaissance with its admiration for Roman and Greek classicism, the Gothic movement's invocations of medievalism—never has there been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past. Retromania is the first book to examine the retro industry and ask the question: Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own?

Download or read book Louder Than Bombs written by Ed Vulliamy and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-04-08 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part memoir, part reportage, Louder Than Bombs is a story of music from the front lines. Ed Vulliamy, a decorated war correspondent and journalist, offers a testimony of his lifelong passion for music. Vulliamy’s reporting has taken him around the world to cover the Bosnian war, the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of Communism, the Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003 onward, narco violence in Mexico, and more, places where he confronted stories of violence, suffering, and injustice. Through it all, Vulliamy has turned to music not only as a reprieve but also as a means to understand and express the complicated emotions that follow. Describing the artists, songs, and concerts that most influenced him, Vulliamy brings together the two largest threads of his life—music and war. Louder Than Bombs covers some of the most important musical milestones of the past fifty years, from Jimi Hendrix playing “Machine Gun” at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 to the Bataclan in Paris under siege in 2015. Vulliamy was present for many of these historic moments, and with him as our guide, we see them afresh, along the way meeting musicians like B. B. King, Graham Nash, Patti Smith, Daniel Barenboim, Gustavo Dudamel, and Bob Dylan. Vulliamy peppers the book with short vignettes—which he dubs 7" singles—recounting some of his happiest memories from a lifetime with music. Whether he’s working as an extra in the Vienna State Opera’s production of Aida, buying blues records in Chicago, or drinking coffee with Joan Baez, music is never far from his mind. As Vulliamy discovers, when horror is unspeakable, when words seem to fail us, we can turn to music for expression and comfort, or for rage and pain. Poignant and sensitively told, Louder Than Bombs is an unforgettable record of a life bursting with music.

Download or read book The Disintegration Loops written by Stephen Cramer and published by . This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Disintegration Loops Stephen Cramer attempts to uncover the music within the world's dissolution and fragmentation, from Italian masters painting over the work of previous artists, to the innocence of childhood giving way to scars, to the description of badly stored tapes being looped and played over and over again until they begin to flake. In the last of the three, silence eats the music from the inside so that by the final loop, the listener hears not the soaring themes of the beginning, but an homage to loss and stillness. The book insists that music, and maybe even life itself, is made more dazzling and precious because it "falters/ & staggers/ forward. The broken/ melody limps & surges on."

Download or read book BBC Radiophonic Workshop s BBC Radiophonic Workshop A Retrospective written by William L. Weir and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-05-04 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1958, an anonymous group of overworked and under-budgeted BBC employees set out to make some new sounds for radio and TV. They ended up changing the course of 20th-century music. For millions of people, the work of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was the first electronic music they had ever heard. Sampling, loops, and the earliest synthesizers-long before audiences knew what they were-made up the groundbreaking scores for news programs, auto maintenance shows, and children's programming. They also produced the Doctor Who theme, one of the first electronic music masterpieces. The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and others borrowed from them. A generation of musicians raised on BBC programming-Aphex Twin, Portishead, and Prodigy among them-took these once-alien sounds and carried on the Workshop's legacy. Ignored for decades by music historians, the Workshop is now recognized as one of the most influential forebears of electronica, psychedelia, ambient music, and synth-pop.

Download or read book Elis and John Present the Holy Vible written by Elis James and published by Trapeze. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Elis James and John Robins' Show has become cult listening, and that cult has registered for charitable status, published quarterly accounts and been given a full blessing by the Archbishop of Broadcasting. It's official: Elis and John are a religion, and this book is their Holy Vible. Have you ever failed to Keep It Session? Is your new flatmate a complete coin? Have you ever eaten Space Raiders on the toilet and written 'Grief Is Living' in your journal? Then this book is for you. If not, don't worry, it won't be long before you're making up games, looking at Freddie, or facing your own personal farthing-gate. Our obsessions make us what we are, and though you may never have addressed a will to Brian May or cried watching Ronnie O' Sullivan make a 147, you'll have done something similar, and Elis and John are here to tell you that you're not weird, so come on in, and taste the vibe! Or should I say, READ the vibe!