Download or read book The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine written by Horst Bredekamp and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bredekamp (art history, Humboldt U.) explains the sources of pictures of the Baroque era and offers insights on the relationships between art, science, and scholarship in early modern Europe, in this analysis of the Kunstkammer, displays of art and oddities amassed by wealthy Europeans during the 16th to the 18th centuries. He combines analysis of images with interpretation of texts in a new account of the development of aesthetics and natural history of the period. Includes bandw photos. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book The Artificial and the Natural written by Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays - written by specialists of different periods and various disciplines - reveal that the division between nature and art has been continually challenged and reassesed in Western thought. Nature and art, the essays suggest, are mutually constructed, defining and redifining themselves.

Download or read book Arthur Dove written by Rachael Z. DeLue and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-03-16 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arthur Dove, often credited as America’s first abstract painter, created dynamic and evocative images inspired by his surroundings, from the farmland of upstate New York to the North Shore of Long Island. But his interests were not limited to nature. Challenging earlier accounts that view him as simply a landscape painter, Arthur Dove: Always Connect reveals for the first time the artist’s intense engagement with language, the nature of social interaction, and scientific and technological advances. Rachael Z. DeLue rejects the traditional assumption that Dove can only be understood in terms of his nature paintings and association with photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz and his circle. Instead, she uncovers deep and complex connections between Dove’s work and his world, including avant-garde literature, popular music, meteorology, mathematics, aviation, and World War II. Arthur Dove also offers the first sustained account of Dove’s Dadaesque multimedia projects and the first explorations of his animal imagery and the role of humor in his art. Beautifully illustrated with works from all periods of Dove’s career, this book presents a new vision of one of America’s most innovative and captivating artists—and reimagines how the story of modern art in the United States might be told.

Download or read book Power and Time written by Dan Edelstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time is the backdrop of historical inquiry, yet it is much more than a featureless setting for events. Different temporalities interact dynamically; sometimes they coexist tensely, sometimes they clash violently. In this innovative volume, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley challenge how we interpret history by focusing on the nexus of two concepts—“power” and “time”—as they manifest in a wide variety of case studies. Analyzing history, culture, politics, technology, law, art, and science, this engaging book shows how power is constituted through the shaping of temporal regimes in historically specific ways. Power and Time includes seventeen essays on human rights; sovereignty; Islamic, European, Chinese, and Indian history; slavery; capitalism; revolution; the Supreme Court; the Anthropocene; and even the Manson Family. Power and Time will be an agenda-setting volume, highlighting the work of some of the world’s most respected and original contemporary historians and posing fundamental questions for the craft of history.

Download or read book Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest written by D. Graham Burnett and published by American Philosophical Society. This book was released on 2005 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1629, the natural philosopher René Descartes enticed a young artisan to undertake a secretive project, one that promised to revolutionize early modern astronomy. Descartes believed he had conceived a new kind of telescope lens, shaped by the light of reason itself, & surpassing anything ever to come from the hands of the glass-working craftsmen of the era. These novel lenses would never be touched by human hands -- they would be cut by an elaborate machine, a self-regulating & automatic device. This study traces the inception, development, & finally the collapse of this ambitious enterprise, which absorbed the energies & attentions of a broad range of 17th-century savants, including Huygens, Wren, Hevelius, Hooke, & even Newton. Illus.

Download or read book Glossary of Morphology written by Federico Vercellone and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a significant novelty in the scientific and editorial landscape. Morphology is both an ancient and a new discipline that rests on Goethe's heritage and re-forms it in the present through the concepts of form and image. The latter are to be understood as structural elements of a new cultural grammar able to make the late modern world intelligible. In particular, compared to the original Goethean project, but also to C.P. Snow's idea of unifying the “two cultures”, the fields of morphological culture that are the object of this glossary have profoundly changed. The ever-increasing importance of the image as a polysemic form has made the two concepts absolutely transitive, so to speak. This is concomitant with the emergence of a culture that revolves around the image, attracting the verbal logos into its orbit. Incidentally, even the hermeneutic relationship between past and present relies more and more on the image, causing deep changes in cultural environments. Form and image are not just bridging concepts, as in the field of ancient morphology, but real transitive concepts that define the state of a culture. From the Internet to smartphones, television, advertising, etc., we are witnessing – as Horst Bredekamp observes – an immense mass of images that fill our time and affect the most diverse areas of our culture. The ancient connection between science and art recalled by Goethe emerges with unusual evidence thanks to intersecting patterns and expressive forms that are sometimes shared by different forms of knowledge. Creating a glossary and a culture of these intersections is the task of morphology, which thus enters into the boundaries between aesthetics, art, design, advertising, and sciences (from mathematics to computer science, to physics, and to biology), in order to provide the founding elements of a grammar and a syntax of the image. The latter, in its formal quality, both expressive and symbolic, is a fundamental element in the unification of the various kinds of knowledge, which in turn come to be configured, in this regard, also as styles of vision. The glossary is subdivided into contiguous sections, within a complex framework of cross-references. In addition to the two curators, the book features the collaboration of a team of scholars from the individual disciplines appearing in the glossary.

Download or read book Moebius Anthropology written by Don Handelman and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-10-07 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Don Handelman’s groundbreaking work in anthropology is showcased in this collection of his most powerful essays, edited by Matan Shapiro and Jackie Feldman. The book looks at the intellectual and spiritual roots of Handelman’s initiation into anthropology; his work on ritual and on “bureaucratic logic”; analyses of cosmology; and innovative essays on Anthropology and Deleuzian thinking. Handelman reconsiders his theory of the forming of form and how this relates to a new theory of the dynamics of time. This will be the definitive collection of articles by one of the most important anthropologists of the late 20th Century.

Download or read book Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice written by Jodi Cranston and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From celebrated gardens in private villas to the paintings and sculptures that adorned palace interiors, Venetians in the sixteenth century conceived of their marine city as dotted with actual and imaginary green spaces. This volume examines how and why this pastoral vision of Venice developed. Drawing on a variety of primary sources ranging from visual art to literary texts, performances, and urban plans, Jodi Cranston shows how Venetians lived the pastoral in urban Venice. She describes how they created green spaces and enacted pastoral situations through poetic conversations and theatrical performances in lagoon gardens; discusses the island utopias found, invented, and mapped in distant seas; and explores the visual art that facilitated the experience of inhabiting verdant landscapes. Though the greening of Venice was relatively short lived, Cranston shows how the phenomenon had a lasting impact on how other cities, including Paris and London, developed their self-images and how later writers and artists understood and adapted the pastoral mode. Incorporating approaches from eco-criticism and anthropology, Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice greatly informs our understanding of the origins and development of the pastoral in art history and literature as well as the culture of sixteenth-century Venice. It will appeal to scholars and enthusiasts of sixteenth-century history and culture, the history of urban landscapes, and Italian art.

Download or read book Curious Exotica Ink on Paper written by Andrea Zittlau and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-01-14 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethnographic museums have been fundamentally reshaped during recent decades, acknowledging contemporary cultural practices, recognising aesthetic expressions and encouraging the active involvement of indigenous participants in all processes of museum creation and administration. Despite these efforts, however, this book reveals how the institution of the museum as such continues to be haunted by its previous, restrictive ideas of the other while talking about the self. It investigates the ethnographic object and its performance in museum displays, departing from notions of haunting as expressed by Jacques Derrida and Avery Gordon to think about presence and absence and the tension between object and text. The book argues that the tension between satisfying and dissatisfying informational needs is essential to the museum context, and that the objects on display have to be arranged in familiar patterns to be recognisable as material knowledge. As such, the ethnographic museum can be nothing else but a monument to its own history, and the ethnographic object remains trapped by the limitations of its category that is inseparable from the museum setting.

Download or read book The Cylinder written by Helmut Müller-Sievers and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-03-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cylinder investigates the surprising proliferation of cylindrical objects in the nineteenth century, such as steam engines, phonographs, panoramas, rotary printing presses, silos, safety locks, and many more. Examining this phenomenon through the lens of kinematics, the science of forcing motion, Helmut Müller-Sievers provides a new view of the history of mechanics and of the culture of the industrial revolution, including its literature, that focuses on the metaphysics and aesthetics of motion. Müller-Sievers explores how nineteenth-century prose falls in with the specific rhythm of cylindrical machinery, re-imagines the curvature of cylindrical spaces, and conjoins narrative progress and reflection in a single stylistic motion. Illuminating the intersection of engineering, culture, and literature, he argues for a concept of culture that includes an epoch’s relation to the motion of its machines.

Download or read book Computers Visualization and History written by David J Staley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-16 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This visionary and thoroughly accessible book examines how digital environments and virtual reality have altered the ways historians think and communicate ideas and how the new language of visualization transforms our understanding of the past. Drawing on familiar graphic models--maps, flow charts, museum displays, films--the author shows how images can often convey ideas and information more efficiently and accurately than words. With emerging digital technology, these images will become more sophisticated, manipulable, and multidimensional, and provide historians with new tools and environments to construct historical narratives. Moving beyond the traditional book based on linear narrative, digital scholarship based on visualization and hypertext will offer multiple perspectives, dimensions, and experiences that transform the ways historians work and people imagine and learn about history. This second edition of Computers, Visualization, and History features expanded coverage of such topics as sequential narratives, 3-D modeling, simulation, and video games, as well as our theoretical understanding of space and immersive experience. The author has also added "Guidelines for Visual Composition in History" for history and social studies teachers who wish to use technology for student assignments. Also new to the second edition is a web link feature that users of the digital edition can use to enhance visualization within the text.

Download or read book A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema written by Jennifer M. Bean and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2002-11-21 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema marks a new era of feminist film scholarship. The twenty essays collected here demonstrate how feminist historiographies at once alter and enrich ongoing debates over visuality and identification, authorship, stardom, and nationalist ideologies in cinema and media studies. Drawing extensively on archival research, the collection yields startling accounts of women's multiple roles as early producers, directors, writers, stars, and viewers. It also engages urgent questions about cinema's capacity for presenting a stable visual field, often at the expense of racially, sexually, or class-marked bodies. While fostering new ways of thinking about film history, A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema illuminates the many questions that the concept of "early cinema" itself raises about the relation of gender to modernism, representation, and technologies of the body. The contributors bring a number of disciplinary frameworks to bear, including not only film studies but also postcolonial studies, dance scholarship, literary analysis, philosophies of the body, and theories regarding modernism and postmodernism. Reflecting the stimulating diversity of early cinematic styles, technologies, and narrative forms, essays address a range of topics—from the dangerous sexuality of the urban flâneuse to the childlike femininity exemplified by Mary Pickford, from the Shanghai film industry to Italian diva films—looking along the way at birth-control sensation films, French crime serials, "war actualities," and the stylistic influence of art deco. Recurring throughout the volume is the protean figure of the New Woman, alternately garbed as childish tomboy, athletic star, enigmatic vamp, languid diva, working girl, kinetic flapper, and primitive exotic. Contributors. Constance Balides, Jennifer M. Bean, Kristine Butler, Mary Ann Doane, Lucy Fischer, Jane Gaines, Amelie Hastie, Sumiko Higashi, Lori Landay, Anne Morey, Diane Negra, Catherine Russell, Siobhan B. Somerville, Shelley Stamp, Gaylyn Studlar, Angela Dalle Vacche, Radha Vatsal, Kristen Whissel, Patricia White, Zhang Zhen

Download or read book Remain written by Ioana B. Jucan and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engaging with remains and remainders of media cultures As new, as current, as now—this is primarily our understanding of technologies and their mediating of our social constructions. But past media and past practices continue to haunt and inflect our present social and technical arrangements. To trace this haunting, two performance theorists and a media theorist engage in this volume with remains and remainders of media cultures through the lenses of theatre and performance studies and of media archaeology. They address the temporalities and materialities of remain(s), the production of obsolescence in relation to the live body, and considerations of cultural memory as well as of infrastructure and the natural history of media culture.

Download or read book Nationalism and the Israeli State written by Don Handelman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-11 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National festivals. Military parades. Patriotic memorials. Such public events and tributes naturally bring to mind the idea of nationalism. But what is the cultural logic behind them? How does a country such as Israel facilitate state-related public events as enactments of nationalism? To answer these questions, renowned anthropologist Don Handelman unpacks the meaning of national ritual and symbol in Israel today. He argues that public events mirror social order, a mirror that reflects to its participants and audiences the message that the designers of such events wish to communicate. Handelman considers the meaning of Holocaust and military memorialism, and he investigates the role of holiday celebrations, especially how they affect young children first learning about their country. Analyzing state ceremonies such as Holocaust Remembrance Day for the war dead, and Independence Day, he notes the absence of minorities and examines their significance in the promotion of a national identity. He also looks at how Israel exports powerful symbols of statehood. Throughout, Handelman develops his theory of bureaucratic logic as the driving force behind expressions of nationalism in the modern state. He argues that bureaucratic logic has a much wider cachet than simply functioning as a way of thinking only about bureaucratic institutions. The logic is crucial to how these institutions function, but more so, it is a dominant force in forming modern state social order. Bureaucratic logic is used incessantly to invent and to modify all kinds of systems of classification that often have profound consequences for individuals and for groups, and that are ritualized powerfully through a host of state-related public events.

Download or read book The Agency of Things in Medieval and Early Modern Art written by Grażyna Jurkowlaniec and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-22 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the late medieval and early modern periods from the perspective of objects. While the agency of things has been studied in anthropology and archaeology, it is an innovative approach for art historical investigations. Each contributor takes as a point of departure active things: objects that were collected, exchanged, held in hand, carried on a body, assembled, cared for or pawned. Through a series of case studies set in various geographic locations, this volume examines a rich variety of systems throughout Europe and beyond. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781315401867, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Download or read book Blood Milk Ink Gold written by Rebecca Zorach and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most people would be hard pressed to name a famous artist from Renaissance France. Yet sixteenth-century French kings believed they were the heirs of imperial Rome and commissioned a magnificent array of visual arts to secure their hopes of political ascendancy with images of overflowing abundance. With a wide-ranging yet richly detailed interdisciplinary approach, Rebecca Zorach examines the visual culture of the French Renaissance, where depictions of sacrifice, luxury, fertility, violence, metamorphosis, and sexual excess are central. Zorach looks at the cultural, political, and individual roles that played out in these artistic themes and how, eventually, these aesthetics of exuberant abundance disintegrated amidst perceptions of decadent excess. Throughout the book, abundance and excess flow in liquids-blood, milk, ink, and gold-that highlight the materiality of objects and the human body, and explore the value (and values) accorded to them. The arts of the lavish royal court at Fontainebleau and in urban centers are here explored in a vibrant tableau that illuminates our own contemporary relationship to excess and desire. From marvelous works by Francois Clouet to oversexed ornamental prints to Benvenuto Cellini's golden saltcellar fashioned for Francis I, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold covers an astounding range of subjects with precision and panache, producing the most lucid, well-rounded portrait of the cultural politics of the French Renaissance to date.

Download or read book Miniature Monuments written by Helmut Puff and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-09-23 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Miniature Monuments: Modeling German History offers a series of essays on small-scale models of bombed out cities. Created between 1946 and the present, these plastic renderings of places provide eerie glimpses of destruction and devastation resulting of the air war. This study thus permits fresh angles on post-war responses to the compounded losses of WW II, and it does so through considering these “miniature monuments‎” (of, among others, Frankfurt, Munich, Schwetzingen, Heilbronn and Hiroshima) in a deep cultural history that interlaces the sixteenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries. Three-dimensional renderings in diminutive size have rarely been subjected to rigorous theoretical reflection. Conventionally, models, whether of ruins or intact spaces, have been assumed to be “easily legible”; that is, they have been assumed to be vehicles of the authentic. Yet rubble and other models should be theorized as complex simulacra of abstract realities and catalysts of memories. Miniature Monuments thus tackles a haunting paradox: building ruins. The book elucidates how utterly contingent processes of crumbling and collapse (the English words for the Latin ruina) came to command such great interest in modern Europe that tremendous efforts were taken to uncover, render, and, most of all, recreate ruins.