Art, Technology and Nature


Book Description

Are art and technology coming into a closer relationship with nature? Through a selection of innovative readings by international scholars, this book argues that since 1900 we have experienced a renewed negotiation of the convergent triangle of art, technology and nature, analysing its shifting constellations in post-medieval times. Through this negotiation, art becomes truly complementary to technology in understanding nature’s agencies and may gain an important role in adjusting technology’s present utilitarian hegemony.




"Art, Technology and Nature "


Book Description

Since 1900, the connections between art and technology with nature have become increasingly inextricable. Through a selection of innovative readings by international scholars, this book presents the first investigation of the intersections between art, technology and nature in post-medieval times. Transdisciplinary in approach, this volume?s 14 essays explore art, technology and nature?s shifting constellations that are discernible at the micro level and as part of a larger chronological pattern. Included are subjects ranging from Renaissance wooden dolls, science in the Italian art academies, and artisanal epistemologies in the followers of Leonardo, to Surrealism and its precursors in Mannerist grotesques and the Wunderkammer, eighteenth-century plant printing, the climate and its artistic presentations from Constable to Olafur Eliasson, and the hermeneutics of bioart. In their comprehensive introduction, editors Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam and Jacob Wamberg trace the Kantian heritage of radically separating art and technology, and inserting both at a distance to nature, suggesting this was a transient chapter in history. Thus, they argue, the present renegotiation between art, technology and nature is reminiscent of the ancient and medieval periods, in which art and technology were categorized as aspects of a common area of cultivated products and their methods (the Latin ars, the Greek techne), an area moreover supposed to imitate the creative forces of nature.




The Artificial and the Natural


Book Description

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.




Geometry and its Applications in Arts, Nature and Technology


Book Description

This book returns geometry to its natural habitats: the arts, nature and technology. Throughout the book, geometry comes alive as a tool to unlock the understanding of our world. Assuming only familiarity with high school mathematics, the book invites the reader to discover geometry through examples from biology, astronomy, architecture, design, photography, drawing, engineering and more. Lavishly illustrated with over 1200 figures, all of the geometric results are carefully derived from scratch, with topics from differential, projective and non-Euclidean geometry, as well as kinematics, introduced as the need arises. The mathematical results contained in the book range from very basic facts to recent results, and mathematical proofs are included although not necessary for comprehension. With its wide range of geometric applications, this self-contained volume demonstrates the ubiquity of geometry in our world, and may serve as a source of inspiration for architects, artists, designers, engineers, and natural scientists. This new edition has been completely revised and updated, with new topics and many new illustrations.




Strange Tools


Book Description

A philosopher makes the case for thinking of works of art as tools for investigating ourselves In his new book, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, the philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë raises a number of profound questions: What is art? Why do we value art as we do? What does art reveal about our nature? Drawing on philosophy, art history, and cognitive science, and making provocative use of examples from all three of these fields, Noë offers new answers to such questions. He also shows why recent efforts to frame questions about art in terms of neuroscience and evolutionary biology alone have been and will continue to be unsuccessful.




Nature, Technology and the Sacred


Book Description

This provocative and timely book argues that contemporary ideas and practices concerning nature and technology remain closely bound up with religious ways of thinking and acting. Using examples from North America, Europe and elsewhere, it reinterprets a range of 'secular' phenomena in terms of their conditioning by a complex series of transformations of the sacred in Western history. The contemporary practices of environmental politics, technological risk behaviour, alternative medicine, vegetarianism and ethical consumption take on new significance as sites of struggle between different sacral orderings. Nature, Technology and the Sacred introduces a radically new direction for today's critical discourse concerning nature and technology – one that reinstates it as a moment within the ongoing religious history of the West.




Technology, Design and the Arts - Opportunities and Challenges


Book Description

This open access book details the relationship between the artist and their created works, using tools such as information technology, computer environments, and interactive devices, for a range of information sources and application domains. This has produced new kinds of created works which can be viewed, explored, and interacted with, either as an installation or via a virtual environment such as the Internet. These processes generate new dimensions of understanding and experience for both the artist and the public’s relationships with the works that are produced. This has raised a variety of interdisciplinary opportunities and issues, and these are examined. The symbiotic relationship between artistic works and the cultural context in which they are produced is reviewed. Technology can provide continuity by making traditional methods and techniques more efficient and effective. It can also provide discontinuity by opening up new perspectives and paradigms. This can generate new ideas, and produce a greater understanding of artistic processes and how they are implemented in practice. Tools have been used from the earliest times to create and modify artistic works. For example, naturally occurring pigments have been used for cave paintings. What has been created provides insight into the cultural context and social environment at the time of creation. There is an interplay between the goal of the creator, the selection and use of appropriate tools, and the materials and representations chosen. Technology, Design and the Arts - Opportunities and Challenges is relevant for artists and technologists and those engaged in interdisciplinary research and development at the boundaries between these disciplines.




Design in Nature


Book Description

In this groundbreaking book, Adrian Bejan takes the recurring patterns in nature—trees, tributaries, air passages, neural networks, and lightning bolts—and reveals how a single principle of physics, the constructal law, accounts for the evolution of these and many other designs in our world. Everything—from biological life to inanimate systems—generates shape and structure and evolves in a sequence of ever-improving designs in order to facilitate flow. River basins, cardiovascular systems, and bolts of lightning are very efficient flow systems to move a current—of water, blood, or electricity. Likewise, the more complex architecture of animals evolve to cover greater distance per unit of useful energy, or increase their flow across the land. Such designs also appear in human organizations, like the hierarchical “flowcharts” or reporting structures in corporations and political bodies. All are governed by the same principle, known as the constructal law, and configure and reconfigure themselves over time to flow more efficiently. Written in an easy style that achieves clarity without sacrificing complexity, Design in Nature is a paradigm-shifting book that will fundamentally transform our understanding of the world around us.




Diffusive Spreading in Nature, Technology and Society


Book Description

What do the movements of molecules and the migration of humans have in common? How does the functionality of our brain tissue resemble the flow of traffic in New York City? How can understanding the spread of ideas, rumors, and languages help us tackle the spread a pandemic? This book provides an illuminating look into these seemingly disparate topics by exploring and expertly communicating the fundamental laws that govern the spreading and diffusion of objects. A collection of leading scientists in disciplines as diverse as epidemiology, linguistics, mathematics, and physics discuss various spreading phenomena relevant to their own fields, revealing astonishing similarities and correlations between the objects of study—be they people, particles, or pandemics. This updated and expanded second edition of an award-winning book introduces timely coverage of a subject with the greatest societal impact in recent memory—the global fight against COVID-19. Winner of the 2019 Literature Prize of the German Chemical Industry Fund and brainchild of the international and long-running Diffusion Fundamentals conference series, this book targets an interdisciplinary readership, featuring an introductory chapter that sets the stage for the topics discussed throughout. Each chapter provides ample opportunity to whet the appetite of those readers seeking a more in-depth treatment, making the book also useful as supplementary reading in appropriate courses dealing with complex systems, mass transfer, and network theory.




To Save Everything, Click Here


Book Description

The award-winning author of The Net Delusion shows how the radical transparency we've become accustomed to online may threaten the spirit of real-life democracy