Download or read book Sublime Dreams of Living Machines written by Minsoo Kang and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-14 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the dawn of European civilization to the twentieth century, the automaton—better known today as the robot—has captured the Western imagination and provided a vital lens into the nature of humanity. Historian Minsoo Kang argues that to properly understand the human-as-machine and the human-as-fundamentally-different-from-machine, we must trace the origins of these ideas and examine how they were transformed by intellectual, cultural, and artistic appearances of the automaton throughout the history of the West. Kang tracks the first appearance of the automaton in ancient myths through the medieval and Renaissance periods, marks the proliferation of the automaton as a central intellectual concept in the Scientific Revolution and the subsequent backlash during the Enlightenment, and details appearances in Romantic literature and the introduction of the living machine in the Industrial Age. He concludes with a reflection on the destructive confrontation between humanity and machinery in the modern era and the reverberations of the humanity-machinery theme today. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines is an ambitious historical exploration and, at heart, an attempt to fully elucidate the rich and varied ways we have utilized our most uncanny creations to explore essential questions about ourselves.
Download or read book The Sublime Reader written by Robert R. Clewis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-29 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first English-language anthology to provide a compendium of primary source material on the sublime. The book takes a chronological approach, covering the earliest ancient traditions up through the early and late modern periods and into contemporary theory. It takes an inclusive, interdisciplinary approach to this key concept in aesthetics and criticism, representing voices and traditions that have often been excluded. As such, it will be of use and interest across the humanities and allied disciplines, from art criticism and literary theory, to gender and cultural studies and environmental philosophy. The anthology includes brief introductions to each selection, reading or discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, a bibliography and index – making it an ideal text for building a course around or for further study. The book's apparatus provides valuable context for exploring the history and contemporary views of the sublime.
Download or read book Machine written by Thomas Pringle and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2019-02-28 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the social consequences of machines Automation, animation, and ecosystems are terms of central media-philosophical concern in today’s society of humans and machines. This volume describes the social consequences of machines as a mediating concept for the animation of life and automation of technology. Bernard Stiegler’s automatic society illustrates how digital media networks establish a new proletariat of knowledge workers. Gertrud Koch offers the animation of the technical to account for the pathological relations that arise between people and their devices. And Thomas Pringle synthesizes how automation and animation explain the history of intellectual exchanges that led to the hybrid concept of the ecosystem, a term that blends computer and natural science. All three contributions analyse how categories of life and technology become mixed in governmental policies, economic exploitation and pathologies of everyday life thereby both curiously and critically advancing the term that underlies those new developments: ‘machine.’
Download or read book The Sublime Seneca written by Erik Gunderson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-26 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an extended meditation on ethics in literature across the Senecan corpus. There are two chapters on the Moral Letters, asking how one is to read philosophy or how one can write about being. Moving from the Letters to the Natural Questions and Dialogues, Professor Gunderson explores how authorship works at the level both of the work and of the world, the ethics of seeing, and the question of how one can give up on the here and now and behold instead some other, better ethical sphere. Seneca's tragedies offer words of caution: desire might well subvert reason at its most profound level (Phaedra), or humanity's painful separation from the sublime might be part of some cruel divine plan (The Madness of Hercules). The book concludes by considering what, if anything, we are to make of Seneca's efforts to enlighten us.
Download or read book Art the Sublime and Movement written by Amanda du Preez and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-01-31 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a critical interdisciplinary approach to the study of contemporary visual culture and image studies, exploring ideas about space and place and ultimately contributing to the debates about being human in the digital age. The upward and downward pull seem in a constant contest for humanity’s attention. Both forces are powerful in the effects and affects they invoke. When tracing this iconological history, Amanda du Preez starts in the early nineteenth century, moving into the twentieth century and then spanning the whole century up to contemporary twenty-first century screen culture and space travels. Du Preez parses the intersecting pathways between Heaven and Earth, up and down, flying and falling through the concept of being “spaced out”. The idea of being “spaced out” is applied as a metaphor to trace the visual history of sublime encounters that displace Earth, gravity, locality, belonging, home, real life, and embodiment. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, media and cultural studies, phenomenology, digital culture, mobility studies, and urban studies.
Download or read book The Machine that Sings written by Gordon A. Tapper and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining how Crane's corporeal aesthetic informs poems written across the span of his career, The Machine That Sings focuses on four texts in which Crane's preoccupation with the body reaches its apoge. Tapper treats Voyages, The Wine Merchant, and Possessions as a triptych of erotic poems in which Crane plays out alternative resolutions to the dialectic between purity and defilement, a conceptual dynamic which Tapper argues is central to both Crane's poetics of difficulty and his representations of homosexual desire. Tapper concentrates on the three sections of The Bridge, most concerned with recuperating animality: 'National Winter Garden,' 'The Dance,' and 'Cape Hatteras.'
Download or read book Inside the Machine written by Jon Stokes and published by No Starch Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Om hvordan mikroprocessorer fungerer, med undersøgelse af de nyeste mikroprocessorer fra Intel, IBM og Motorola.
Download or read book The Machine in the Garden written by Leo Marx and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-02-24 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over four decades, Leo Marx's work has focused on the relationship between technology and culture in 19th- and 20th-century America. His research helped to define--and continues to give depth to--the area of American studies concerned with the links between scientific and technological advances, and the way society and culture both determine these links. The Machine in the Garden fully examines the difference between the "pastoral" and "progressive" ideals which characterized early 19th-century American culture, and which ultimately evolved into the basis for much of the environmental and nuclear debates of contemporary society. This new edition is appearing in celebration of the 35th anniversary of Marx's classic text. It features a new afterword by the author on the process of writing this pioneering book, a work that all but founded the discipline now called American Studies.
Download or read book Novel Machines written by Joseph Drury and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-10 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eighteenth-century fiction is full of mechanical devices and contrivances: Robinson Crusoe uses his gun and compass to master his island and its inhabitants; Tristram Shandy's conception is interrupted by a question about a clock and he has his nose damaged at birth by a man-midwife's forceps; Ann Radcliffe's gothic heroines play musical instruments to soothe their troubled minds. In Novel Machines, however, Joseph Drury argues that the most important machine in any eighteenth-century novel is the narrative itself. Like other kinds of machine, a narrative is an artificial construction composed of different parts that combine to produce a sequence of causally linked actions. Like other machines, a narrative is designed to produce predictable effects and can therefore be put to certain uses. Such affinities had been apparent to critics since Aristotle, but they began to assume a particular urgency in the eighteenth century as authors sought to organize their narratives according to the new ideas about nature, art, and the human subject that emerged out of the Scientific Revolution. Reading works by Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Ann Radcliffe, Novel Machines tracks the consequences of the effort to transform the novel into an Enlightenment machine. On the one hand, the rationalization of the novel's narrative machinery helped establish its legitimacy, such that by the end of the century it could be celebrated as a modern 'invention' that provided valuable philosophical knowledge about human nature. On the other hand, conceptualizing the novel as a machine opened up a new line of attack for the period's moralists, whose polemics against the novel were often framed in the same terms used to reflect on the uses and effects of machines in other contexts. Eighteenth-century novelists responded by adapting the novel's narrative machinery, devising in the process some of the period's most characteristic and influential formal innovations.
Download or read book The Printing Machine written by and published by . This book was released on 1834 with total page 942 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book American Technological Sublime written by David E. Nye and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996-02-28 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Technological Sublime continues the exploration of the social construction of technology that David Nye began in his award-winning book Electrifying America. Here Nye examines the continuing appeal of the "technological sublime" (a term coined by Perry Miller) as a key to the nation's history, using as examples the natural sites, architectural forms, and technological achievements that ordinary people have valued intensely. Technology has long played a central role in the formation of Americans' sense of selfhood. From the first canal systems through the moon landing, Americans have, for better or worse, derived unity from the common feeling of awe inspired by large-scale applications of technological prowess. American Technological Sublime continues the exploration of the social construction of technology that David Nye began in his award-winning book Electrifying America. Here Nye examines the continuing appeal of the "technological sublime" (a term coined by Perry Miller) as a key to the nation's history, using as examples the natural sites, architectural forms, and technological achievements that ordinary people have valued intensely. American Technological Sublime is a study of the politics of perception in industrial society. Arranged chronologically, it suggests that the sublime itself has a history - that sublime experiences are emotional configurations that emerge from new social and technological conditions, and that each new configuration to some extent undermines and displaces the older versions. After giving a short history of the sublime as an aesthetic category, Nye describes the reemergence and democratization of the concept in the early nineteenth century as an expression of the American sense of specialness. What has filled the American public with wonder, awe, even terror? David Nye selects the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, the Erie Canal, the first transcontinental railroad, Eads Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge, the major international expositions, the Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909, the Empire State Building, and Boulder Dam. He then looks at the atom bomb tests and the Apollo mission as examples of the increasing ambivalence of the technological sublime in the postwar world. The festivities surrounding the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986 become a touchstone reflecting the transformation of the American experience of the sublime over two centuries. Nye concludes with a vision of the modern-day "consumer sublime" as manifested in the fantasy world of Las Vegas.
Download or read book Sublime Visions written by Susanne Stacher and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the eighteenth century the Alps became the subject of a new view of nature, which crystallized in the sublime. Oscillating between fear and fascination, this sensual experience triggered a thrilling borderline experience: travelers ventured to the mountain world full of longing and projected a variety of different dreams onto the "wild nature" that had yet to be explored. To what extent has the sublime influenced architecture in the Alps, from the early days of tourism to the present? Prompted by this question, the author analyzes Alpine architecture in its historical context and offers a critical assessment of contemporary tourism. This is a book that inspires us to reflect on the future of building in the Alps and on our relationship with nature.
Download or read book The Golden Avant garde written by Raphael Sassower and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A philosopher and an artist place the phenomenon of avant garde in different perspectives. They wonder how avant garde artists navigate the cultural, financial and technological challenges in past and present. They draw the conclusion that artists have become adept at manipulating the same forces that they seek to exaggerate and articulate in their work.
Download or read book The Human Machine written by Despina Kakoudaki and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 882 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Experience Machines written by Mark Silcox and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-07-17 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his classic work Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick asked his readers to imagine being permanently plugged into a 'machine that would give you any experience you desired'. He speculated that, in spite of the many obvious attractions of such a prospect, most people would choose against passing the rest of their lives under the influence of this type of invention. Nozick thought (and many have since agreed) that this simple thought experiment had profound implications for how we think about ethics, political justice, and the significance of technology in our everyday lives. Nozick’s argument was made in 1974, about a decade before the personal computer revolution in Europe and North America. Since then, opportunities for the citizens of industrialized societies to experience virtual worlds and simulated environments have multiplied to an extent that no philosopher could have predicted. The authors in this volume re-evaluate the merits of Nozick’s argument, and use it as a jumping–off point for the philosophical examination of subsequent developments in culture and technology, including a variety of experience-altering cybernetic technologies such as computer games, social media networks, HCI devices, and neuro-prostheses.
Download or read book Gothic Machine written by David J. Jones and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gothic Machine is a ground-breaking exploration of relations between Gothic literature, pre-cinematic media such as magic lanterns, phantasmagoria and dioramas and the first films 1670-1910. Starting with the earliest projections of horror images, continuing through the development of Gothic fiction and drama and closing with the first Frankenstein film, this study is a fascinating and pioneering evaluation of relations between these different media. As early as 1800, the Marquis de Sade identified Gothic novels such as The Monk and The Mysteries of Udolpho as ‘phantasmagoria’. This work explores the reasons why and, amongst the other mysteries broached en route is the reason that our first view of Dracula on English soil is described by Bram Stoker as a ‘diorama’. That doyen of tales of terror, Sheridan Le Fanu is revealed to be a literary magic lanternist, as is Robert Louis Stevenson. Symbolist visions of spectral automated chanteuses and demonic panoramas are discussed as are the darkest fantasies of J-K Huysmans and the earliest film-makers. This study, which moves between detailed study of the work of specific showmen and artists in relation to media histories and, elsewhere, much wider and more general surveys of cultural expression of these processes, is driven by historicist thought throughout. The author’s argument is audacious and bold, challenging critical orthodoxies on spectrality and the envisioning of ghosts. As the cultural detective who re-discovered the setting of E.G. Robertson’s convent Phantasmagoria, Dr. Jones is in a unique position to explore the performative aspects of this famous spectacle. The author explores five key periods in Germany, Britain, France and America over the designated span. Finally, the widely-ranging discussion crosses the line between pre-cinematic shows and cinema proper revealing how the new technology itself became a haunted, Gothic medium.
Download or read book A Brief Illustrated History of Machines and Mechanisms written by Emilio Bautista Paz and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-08-02 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Machines have always gone hand-in-hand with the cultural development of m- kind throughout time. A book on the history of machines is nothing more than a specific way of bringing light to human events as a whole in order to highlight some significant milestones in the progress of knowledge by a complementary persp- tive into a general historical overview. This book is the result of common efforts and interests by several scholars, teachers, and students on subjects that are connected with the theory of machines and mechanisms. In fact, in this book there is a certain teaching aim in addition to a general historical view that is more addressed to the achievements by “homo faber” than to those by “homo sapiens”, since the proposed history survey has been developed with an engineering approach. The brevity of the text added to the fact that the authors are probably not com- tent to tackle historical studies with the necessary rigor, means the content of the book is inevitably incomplete, but it nevertheless attempts to fulfil three basic aims: First, it is hoped that this book may provide a stimulus to promote interest in the study of technical history within a mechanical engineering context. Few are the co- tries where anything significant is done in this area, which means there is a general lack of knowledge of this common cultural heritage.
