BodyWorld


Book Description

From the astonishing imagination of the author of "Bottomless Belly Button" comes a darkly fantastical graphic novel about a small town, a lowlife botanist, and a mysterious plant with strange powers.




Gunther Von Hagens' Body Worlds


Book Description

Catalog of Gunther von Hagen's exhibition of human bodies preserved by "plastination"and presented as "natural art" (p. 13). Work also includes a short history of anatomy and essays on ethical perspectives.




Mind, Body, World


Book Description

Cognitive science arose in the 1950s when it became apparent that a number of disciplines, including psychology, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy, were fragmenting. Perhaps owing to the field's immediate origins in cybernetics, as well as to the foundational assumption that cognition is information processing, cognitive science initially seemed more unified than psychology. However, as a result of differing interpretations of the foundational assumption and dramatically divergent views of the meaning of the term information processing, three separate schools emerged: classical cognitive science, connectionist cognitive science, and embodied cognitive science. Examples, cases, and research findings taken from the wide range of phenomena studied by cognitive scientists effectively explain and explore the relationship among the three perspectives. Intended to introduce both graduate and senior undergraduate students to the foundations of cognitive science, Mind, Body, World addresses a number of questions currently being asked by those practicing in the field: What are the core assumptions of the three different schools? What are the relationships between these different sets of core assumptions? Is there only one cognitive science, or are there many different cognitive sciences? Giving the schools equal treatment and displaying a broad and deep understanding of the field, Dawson highlights the fundamental tensions and lines of fragmentation that exist among the schools and provides a refreshing and unifying framework for students of cognitive science.




Body-worlds


Book Description

This volume includes a study of drawings found in Opicinus's journal, Biblioteca apostolica vaticana MS Vat. Lat. 6435 and others in Biblioteca apostolica vaticana MS Pal. lat. 1993.




Performer Training for Actors and Athletes


Book Description

What goes on in the body and mind of an endurance athlete at the limits of performance? How do they relate to the world around and prepare for the task ahead? Offering a refreshing perspective on training in the cross-lighting of aesthetic and athletic processes, this book focuses on the learning, mastery and creative adaptation of technique in performance. From traditional and physical actors to runners, boxers and other sports practitioners, it is about performers: their bodies, trainings and experiences. It interrogates what it means to prepare and train as a performer in the early 21st century. Writing from extensive experience in physical theatre and long-distance running, the author combines insights from both disciplines along with theatre history, sports science and perspectives like embodied cognition and affective science. From the kind of thoughts that go through the mind of an actor or a runner, to the economy and aesthetic of their movement and to how they feel about it, this book sheds light on the performing body and its capacities for action. Topics covered include attentional focus and distraction, affordances and equipment, 'choking' and stage fright, physiological regulation and effort perception, pacing and play, optimal flow and creative improvisation, and intentionality and automaticity in expert performance. The volume presents an informative and thought-provoking account accessible to readers interested in theatre, dance, performance, running, athletics, and sport.




A Heart in a Body in the World


Book Description

“This is one for the ages.” —Gayle Forman, author of the #1 bestseller If I Stay “A book everyone should read right now.” —The New York Times Book Review “A vital and heartbreaking story that brings together the #MeToo movement, the effects of gun violence, and the struggle of building oneself up again after crisis.” —Elle “Equal parts heartbreaking and hopeful.” —BookPage A Printz Honor Book Each step in Annabelle’s 2,700-mile cross-country run brings her closer to facing a trauma from her past in National Book Award finalist Deb Caletti’s novel about the heart, all the ways it breaks, and its journey to healing. Because sometimes against our will, against all odds, we go forward. Then… Annabelle’s life wasn’t perfect, but it was full—full of friends, family, love. And a boy…whose attention Annabelle found flattering and unsettling all at once. Until that attention intensified. Now… Annabelle is running. Running from the pain and the tragedy from the past year. With only Grandpa Ed and the journal she fills with words she can’t speak out loud, Annabelle runs from Seattle to Washington, DC and toward a destination she doesn’t understand but is determined to reach. With every beat of her heart, every stride of her feet, Annabelle steps closer to healing—and the strength she discovers within herself to let love and hope back into her life. Annabelle’s journey is the ultimate testament to the human heart, and how it goes on after being broken.




Body and World


Book Description

Body and World is the definitive edition of a book that should now take its place as a major contribution to contemporary existential phenomenology. Samuel Todes goes beyond Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his description of how independent physical nature and experience are united in our bodily action. His account allows him to preserve the authority of experience while avoiding the tendency towards idealism that threatens both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Todes emphasizes the complex structure of the human body; front/back asymmetry, the need to balance in a gravitational field, and so forth; and the role that structure plays in producing the spatiotemporal field of experience and in making possible objective knowledge of the objects in it. He shows that perception involves nonconceptual, but nonetheless objective forms of judgment. One can think of Body and World as fleshing out Merleau-Ponty's project while presciently relating it to the current interest in embodiment, not only in philosophy but also in psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and anthropology. Todes's work opens new ways of thinking about problems such as the relation of perception to thought and the possibility of knowing an independent reality; problems that have occupied philosophers since Kant and still concern analytic and continental philosophy.




Performer Training Reconfigured


Book Description

Offering a radical re-evaluation of current approaches to performer training, this is a text that equips readers with a set of new ways of thinking about and ultimately 'doing' training. Stemming from his extensive practice and incorporating a review of prevailing methods and theories, Frank Camilleri focuses on how material circumstances shape and affect processes of training, devising, rehearsing and performing. Frank Camilleri puts forward the 'post-psychophysical' as a more extended form of psychophysical discussion and practice that emerged and dominated in the 20th century. The 'post-psychophysical' updates the concept of an integrated bodymind in various ways, such as the notion of a performer's bodyworld that incorporates technology and the material world. Offering invaluable introductions to a wide range of theories around which the book is structured – including postphenomenological, sociomaterial, affect and situated cognition – this volume provides readers with an enticing array of critical approaches to training and creative processes.




Anatomy Museum


Book Description

The wild success of the traveling Body Worlds exhibition is testimony to the powerful allure that human bodies can have when opened up for display in gallery spaces. But while anatomy museums have shown their visitors much about bodies, they themselves are something of an obscure phenomenon, with their incredible technological developments and complex uses of visual images and the flesh itself remaining largely under researched. This book investigates anatomy museums in Western settings, revealing how they have operated in the often passionate pursuit of knowledge that inspires both fascination and fear. Elizabeth Hallam explores these museums, past and present, showing how they display the human body—whether naked, stripped of skin, completely dissected, or rendered in the form of drawings, three-dimensional models, x-rays, or films. She identifies within anatomy museums a diverse array of related issues—from the representation of deceased bodies in art to the aesthetics of science, from body donation to techniques for preserving corpses and ritualized practices for disposing of the dead. Probing these matters through in-depth study, Anatomy Museum unearths a strange and compelling cultural history of the spaces human bodies are made to occupy when displayed after death.




Technologies of the Human Corpse


Book Description

“One of our greatest thinkers” on death presents a radical new approach to thinking about dying and the human corpse (Caitlin Doughty, mortician and bestselling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes). A fascinating exploration of the relationship between technology and the human corpse throughout history—from 19th-century embalming machines to 21st-century death-prevention technologies. Death and the dead body have never been more alive in the public imagination—not least because of current debates over modern medical technology that is deployed, it seems, expressly to keep human bodies from dying, blurring the boundary between alive and dead. In this book, John Troyer examines the relationship of the dead body with technology, both material and conceptual: the physical machines, political concepts, and sovereign institutions that humans use to classify, organize, repurpose, and transform the human corpse. Doing so, he asks readers to think about death, dying, and dead bodies in radically different ways. Troyer explains, for example, how technologies of the nineteenth century including embalming and photography, created our image of a dead body as quasi-atemporal, existing outside biological limits formerly enforced by decomposition. He describes the “Happy Death Movement” of the 1970s; the politics of HIV/AIDS corpse and the productive potential of the dead body; the provocations of the Body Worlds exhibits and their use of preserved dead bodies; the black market in human body parts; and the transformation of historic technologies of the human corpse into “death prevention technologies.” The consequences of total control over death and the dead body, Troyer argues, are not liberation but the abandonment of Homo sapiens as a concept and a species. In this unique work, Troyer forces us to consider the increasing overlap between politics, dying, and the dead body in both general and specifically personal terms.