Download or read book The Genealogy of Aesthetics written by Ekbert Faas and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-08-15 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description

Download or read book From Point to Pixel written by Meredith Hoy and published by Dartmouth College Press. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fiercely ambitious study, Meredith Anne Hoy seeks to reestablish the very definitions of digital art and aesthetics in art history. She begins by problematizing the notion of digital aesthetics, tracing the nineteenth- and twentieth-century movements that sought to break art down into its constituent elements, which in many ways predicted and paved the way for our acceptance of digital art. Through a series of case studies, Hoy questions the separation between analog and digital art and finds that while there may be sensual and experiential differences, they fall within the same technological categories. She also discusses computational art, in which the sole act of creation is the building of a self-generating algorithm. The medium isn't the message - what really matters is the degree to which the viewer can sense a creative hand in the art.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics written by Jerrold Levinson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-27 with total page 844 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics' has assembled 48 brand-new essays, making this a comprehensive guide available to the theory, application, history, and future of the field.

Download or read book Genealogy and Aesthetics written by Dominic Paterson and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Genealogy of Aesthetics written by and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Foucault s Philosophy of Art written by Joseph J. Tanke and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2009-08-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers the first complete examination of Foucault's reflections on visual art, leading to new readings of his major texts.

Download or read book Nietzsche Aesthetics and Modernity written by Matthew Rampley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nietzsche, Aesthetics and Modernity analyzes Nietzsche's response to the aesthetic tradition, tracing in particular the complex relationship between the work and thought of Nietzsche, Kant, and Hegel. Focusing in particular on the critical role of negation and sublimity in Nietzsche's account of art, it explores his confrontation with modernity and his attempt to posit a revitalized artistic practice as the counter-movement to modern nihilism. It also highlights the extent to which Nietzsche counters the culture of his own time with a dialectical notion of aesthetic interpretation and practice.

Download or read book From Point to Pixel written by Meredith Anne Hoy and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics by Meredith Anne Hoy Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric University of California, Berkeley Professor Whitney Davis, Co-chair Professor Jeffrey Skoller, Co-chair When we say, in response to a still or moving picture, that it has a digital "look" about it, what exactly do we mean? How can the slick, color-saturated photographs of Jeff Wall and Andreas Gursky signal digitality, while the flattened, pixelated lanscapes of video games such as Super Mario Brothers convey ostensibly the same characteristic of "being digital," but in a completely different manner? In my dissertation, From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics, I argue for a definition of a "digital method" that can be articulated without reference to the technicalities of contemporary hardware and software. I allow, however, the possibility that this digital method can acquire new characteristics when it is performed by computational technology. I therefore treat the artworks covered in my dissertation as sensuous artifacts that are subject to change based on the constraints and affordances of the tools used in their making. But insofar as it describes a series of technological operations, the word digital often references the tool used to make the art but does not help a viewer/user relate to the art as a sensorially apprehensible artifact. Consequently, I gather together artworks that disclose visible evidence of their digital construction in order to identify the perceptible characteristics of digitally processed artifacts. I foreground not the hidden operations of computers--the intricacies of binary code and programming languages--but rather the surface qualities of digital graphics. While acknowledging that internal processes govern the aesthetic properties of these surfaces, I investigate the extent to which it is possible to encounter digitality at the level of the interface. Taking into account that the sensuous object will be informed by an underlying conceptual and technological framework or genotype, I set out to discover whether certain phenotypic aspects of digitality will be inherently accessible at a phenomenological level. Much of the best scholarship in media studies has offered cogent analyses of the political, social, and economic formations that emerge alongside digital technologies. These readings of "networked culture" focus on the systems of power/knowledge that arise from the Web 2.0 and a globalized world economy. Although this research proves invaluable to the understanding of a culture shaped by ubiquitous computing, a well-developed methodology for interpreting the role of digital technology in art practice must also situate digital artifacts in a specifically art historical and theoretical context. When do digital artifacts overcome their dubious status as mere demonstrations of technical novelty, and become artworks worthy of serious consideration? What is the importance of digital technology as an artistic medium, and how do affordances and constraints and technical parameters of digital processing influence the sensible configurations of computationally generated artifacts? Despite its foundation in immaterial electronic pulses, digital technology produces material effects on culture and communication. The assessment of digital images is often based on their "reality quotient"--The degree to which they accurately reproduce the optical and haptic conditions of external world. The fascination in digital cultural studies with virtual reality, second life, and other such practices supports this view, and also leans dangerously towards the notion that progress in art is achieved by producing ever more sophisticated techniques for rendering illusions of spatial depth. This concentration on the immersive capacities of digital graphics runs the risk of assuming a teleological progression in art towards "accurate" spatialization and virtualization. But this is not a tenable model for art historical investigation, given that the evaluation of art objects based on culturally determined signifiers of naturalism is exclusionary of alternate visual models and historical traditions. It is therefore imperative to consider depictions that exhibit visible evidence of digital construction--digital aesthetic characteristics--independently of the virtualizing capability of computational technology. My dissertation examines a subset of digital image-making practices that suppress virtualization in order to examine the structural principles undergirding digital graphics. In parsing these often abstract, highly formalized pictorial strategies, I conclude that they convey a different aesthetic and architectonic sensibility than analog depictions. Over the course of five chapters, my argument moves between theoretical analysis and case studies of artworks produced both with and without the aid of computers. Chapter One outlines the theoretical models used to differentiate digital and analog properties, and illustrates how and why art historical discourse has accorded value to artworks based on analog principles, such as fineness of color, texture, and line. It argues that discrete, particulate digital artifacts are constructed according to different principles than analog artifacts, which are relatively smooth and continuous with no absolute division between parts. My review of the formal characteristics of digital systems sets the stage for my argument that an observable model of digital facture--a digital method--preexists electronic, binary computers and that this digital process results in a digital aesthetic. Understanding this aesthetic is useful for theorizing the genealogy of contemporary computational graphics. Additionally, it provides for alternate theorizations of artifacts that have not traditionally found a secure place in the artistic canon, and it affords a new interpretive schema with which to examine artists and artworks whose position in the art historical demands renegotiation. In my second chapter, I support the claims of the preceding chapter by evaluating the extent to which the work of several modernist painters, including Paul Cezanne, Georges Seurat, and Paul Klee, exhibits constitutive features of a digital system. I use my findings to argue that understanding these artists' roles as experimenters with a digital method adds a new dimension to the theoretical, aesthetic, and historical significance of their work. The following two chapters provide comparisons between artists who apply a digital method without electronic computation and artists whose digital aesthetic is computationally driven. Chapter 3 attempts to recuperate the value and relevance of Op-Artist Victor Vasarely. Through an inspection of his writings and his algorithmic painting practices, I trace Vasarely's lifelong goal to develop a programmable visual language, and demonstrate how, without ever touching a computer, he was attempting in his practice to adopt a visual model of a digital system. In the second half of the chapter, I introduce the example of Marius Watz's computationally-generated homage to Vasarely's work in order to ascertain whether the use of a computer alters the visible qualities of Vasarely's plastic language. In Chapter 4, I examine Casey Reas's fraught and often contradictory response to the legacy of conceptual art in programming-based practices. Through a comparison between Reas and Sol LeWitt, I maintain that Reas occupies an oscillatory position with respect to the values traditionally attached to analog aesthetics, such as immediacy and uniqueness/irreproducibility. By mobilizing algorithmically encoded instructions to automate artistic production, Reas reinforces the turn away from the cult of the artist achieved in conceptual art. But at the same time, Reas's fascination with handmadeness and organicism preserves a link to analog aesthetic principles. Finally, my conclusion shifts away from direct comparison between computationally and non-computationally digital art, and instead assays the discursive resonances between Jason Salavon's software-based computational "paintings" and the increasingly widespread use of information visualization as primary mode of mapping the vast amounts of data produced by the mechanisms of the "culture industry". The works under consideration in my dissertation cohere around questions and problems related to painting. Part of the difficulty in defining "digital art" as a singular medium or genre is that the range of artifacts potentially contained under the rubric of digital art is massive and therefore resistant to canonization. A concentration on painting initially allowed me to refine my analytic method. However, the broader rationale behind this constraint grows out of the fact that the screen-based computational pictorialization analogizes painting. I contend that painting, despite, or perhaps due to its status as a two-dimensional mode of depiction, is deeply concerned with spatial and material architectonics. Painting is invested not only in the problem of how to graphically render volume and depth, but also the dynamic spatial relationship between bodies and concrete objects. Similarly, digital rendering must cope with the question of how to present the relationship between objects and spaces in two, three, or multiple dimensions. My goal is to discover whether the technical parameters of computation affect the way pictures are constructed, the kinds of subjects for which computers have the greatest representational facility, and by extension, the way digital pictures--the graphical index of digital technesis--will ultimately look. Overall, my dissertation offers a methodology for speaking about and contextualizing digital practices within the history of art and visual culture. While programming literacy is important for many scholars, producers, and users of digital hardware and software, if artifacts made.

Download or read book Aesthetics written by Bence Nanay and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that explores the nature of art, beauty, and taste. It doesn't just consider traditional artistic experiences such as artworks in a museum or an opera performance, but also everyday experiences such as autumn leaves in the park, or even just the light of the setting sun falling on the kitchen table. It is also about your experience when you choose the shirt you're going to wear today or when you wonder whether you should put more pepper in the soup. Aesthetics is everywhere. It is one of the most important aspects of our life. In this Very Short Introduction Bence Nanay introduces the field of aesthetics, considering both Western and non-Western aesthetic traditions, and exploring why it is sometimes misunderstood or considered to be too elitist - by artists, musicians, and even philosophers. As Nanay shows, so-called 'high art' has no more claims on aesthetics than sitcoms, tattoos, or punk rock. In fact, the scope of aesthetics extends far wider than that of art, high or low, including much of what we care about in life. It is not the job of aesthetics to tell you which artworks are good and which ones are bad. It is not the job of aesthetics to tell you what experiences are worth having. If an experience is worth having for you, it thereby becomes the subject of aesthetics. This realisation is important, because thinking about aesthetics in this inclusive way opens up new ways of understanding old questions about the social aspect of our aesthetic engagements, and the importance of aesthetic values for our own self. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Download or read book Materializing New Media written by Anna Munster and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2011-11-15 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A significant contribution to investigations of the social and cultural impact of new media and digital technologies

Download or read book A Genealogy of Cyborgothic written by Dongshin Yi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his provocative and timely study of posthumanism, Dongshin Yi adopts an imaginary/imaginative approach to exploring the transformative power of the cyborg, a strategy that introduces balance to the current discourses dominated by the practicalities of technoscience and the dictates of anthropocentrism. Proposing the term "cyborgothic" to characterize a new genre that may emerge from gothic literature and science fiction, Yi introduces mothering as an aesthetic and ethical practice that can enable a posthumanist relationship between human and non-human beings. Yi examines the cyborg's literary manifestations in novels, including The Mysteries of Udolpho, Frankenstein, Dracula, Arrowsmith, and He, She and It, alongside philosophical and critical texts such as Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment, John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism and System of Logic, William James's essays on pragmatism, ethical treaties on otherness and things, feminist writings on motherhood, and recent studies of posthumanism. Arguing humans imagine the cyborg in ways that are seriously limited by fear of the unknown and current understandings of science and technology, Yi identifies in gothic literature a practice of the beautiful that extends the operation of sensibility, heightened by gothic manifestations or situations, to surrounding objects and people so that new feelings flow in and attenuate fear. In science fiction, which demonstrates how society has accommodated science, Yi locates ethical corrections to the anthropocentric trajectory that such accommodation has taken. Thus, A Genealogy of Cyborgothic imagines a new literary genre that helps envision a cyborg-friendly, non-anthropocentric posthuman society. Encoded with gothic literature's aesthetic embrace of fear and science fiction's ethical criticism of anthropocentrism, the cyborgothic retains the prospective nature of these genres and develops mothering as an aesthetico-ethical practice that both humans and cyborgs should perform.

Download or read book Nietzsche s On the Genealogy of Morals written by Christa Davis Acampora and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2006 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes essays that were commissioned for the volume, this collection showcases definitive works that have shaped Nietzsche studies alongside new works of interest to students and experts alike. Suitable for the classroom and advanced research, it provides an introduction, annotated bibliography, and index.

Download or read book Foucault s Philosophy of Art written by Joseph J. Tanke and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foucault's Philosophy of Art: A Genealogy of Modernity tells the story of how art shed the tasks with which it had traditionally been charged in order to become modern. Joseph J. Tanke offers the first complete examination of Michel Foucault's reflections on visual art, tracing his thought as it engages with the work of visual artists from the seventeenth century to the contemporary period. The book offers a concise and accessible introduction to Foucault's frequently anthologized, but rarely understood, analyses of Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas and René Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe. On the basis of unpublished lecture courses and several un-translated analyses of visual art, Tanke reveals the uniquely genealogical character of Foucault's writings on visual culture, allowing for new readings of his major texts in the context of contemporary Continental philosophy, aesthetic and cultural theory. Ultimately Tanke demonstrates how Foucault provides philosophy and contemporary criticism with the means for determining a conception of modern art.

Download or read book Political Aesthetics written by Arundhati Virmani and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-09-07 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political Aesthetics highlights the complex and ambiguous connections of aesthetics with social, cultural and political experiences in contemporary societies. If today aesthetics seems a rather overused term, mixing a variety of historical realities and complex personal states of being, its relevance as a connecting agent between individual, state and society is stronger than ever. The actual context of political and economic crisis generates new relations between official imposed aesthetics and the resistance and critiques they trigger. Considered beyond the poles of power and protest, the book examines how traditional or innovative artistic practices may acquire unexpected capacities of subversion. It nourishes the current debate around the new political stakes of aesthetics as an inviolable right of ordinary citizens, an essential element of empowerment and agency in a democratic every day. It will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, political culture and political aesthetics, as well as critical sociology and history. It will also be useful for some broad courses in media studies, cultural studies, and sociology.

Download or read book The Sovereignty of Art written by Christoph Menke and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Christoph Menke attempts to explain art's sovereign power to subvert reason without falling into an error common to Adorno's negative dialectics and Derrida's deconstruction.

Download or read book Everyday Aesthetics written by Katya Mandoki and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Katya Mandoki advances in this book the thesis that it is not only possible but crucial to open up the field of aesthetics (traditionally confined to the study of art and beauty) toward the richness and complexity of everyday life. She argues that in every process of communication, whether face to face or through the media, fashion, and political propaganda, there is always an excess beyond the informative and functional value of a message. This excess is the aesthetic. Following Huizinga's view of play as an ingredient of any social environment, Mandoki explores how various cultural practices are in fact forms of playing since, for the author, aesthetics and play are Siamese twins. One of the unique contributions of this book is the elaboration and application of a semiotic model for the simultaneous analysis of social interactions in the four registers, namely visual, auditory, verbal and body language, to detect the aesthetic strategies deployed in specific situations. She argues that since the presentation of the self is targeted towards participants' sensibilities, aesthetics plays a key role in these modes of exchange. Consequently, the author updates important debates in this field to clear the way for a socio-aesthetic inquiry through contexts such as the family, school, medical, artistic or religious traditions from which social identities emerge.

Download or read book Transgression and the Aesthetics of Evil written by Taran Kang and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2021-11-01 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we perceive evil? How do we represent evil? In Transgression and the Aesthetics of Evil, Taran Kang examines the entanglements of aesthetics and morality. Investigating conceptions and images of evil, Kang identifies a fateful moment of transformation in the eighteenth century that continues to reverberate to the present day. Transgression, once allocated the central place in the constitution of evil, undergoes a startling revaluation in the Enlightenment and its aftermath, one that needs to be understood in relation to emergent ideas in the arts. Taran Kang engages with the writings of Edmund Burke, the Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Hannah Arendt, among others, as he questions recent calls to "de-aestheticize" evil and insists on a historically informed appreciation of evil’s aesthetic dimensions. Chapters consider the figure of the "evil genius," the paradoxical appeal of the grotesque and the disgusting, and the moral status of spectators who behold scenes of suffering and acts of transgression. In grappling with these issues, Transgression and the Aesthetics of Evil questions the feasibility and desirability of insulating the moral from the aesthetic.