The Velocity Manifesto


Book Description

Provides advice for business leaders on ways to meet the demands of the fast-paced digital age through new technology and business intelligence.




RETHINK Design Guide


Book Description

The world has changed. How will society emerge post-pandemic? Will we take the opportunity to reset the status quo? And, if so, what possibilities are there for architects to take the initiative in designing this new world? This innovative design guide draws together expert guidance on designing in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic for key architectural sectors: housing, workplace, civic and cultural, hospitality, education, infrastructure and civic placemaking. It provides design inspiration to architects on how they can respond to the challenges and opportunities of a post-pandemic environment and how architects ensure they are at the forefront of the best design in this new world. Looking at each sector in turn, it covers the challenges specific to each, and how delivering these designs might differ from the pre-pandemic world. As well as post-pandemic design, the vital issue of climate change will be threaded through each sector, with many cross-overs between designing for the climate emergency and designing for a world after a pandemic. Both seek to make the world a safer, happier and more resilient place. Written by set of contributing design experts, this book is for all architects, whether sole practitioners or working in a larger practice. As well as inspirational design guidance, it also provides client perspectives – crucial for understanding how clients are planning for the future too.




Digital Performance


Book Description

The historical roots, key practitioners, and artistic, theoretical, and technological trends in the incorporation of new media into the performing arts. The past decade has seen an extraordinarily intense period of experimentation with computer technology within the performing arts. Digital media has been increasingly incorporated into live theater and dance, and new forms of interactive performance have emerged in participatory installations, on CD-ROM, and on the Web. In Digital Performance, Steve Dixon traces the evolution of these practices, presents detailed accounts of key practitioners and performances, and analyzes the theoretical, artistic, and technological contexts of this form of new media art. Dixon finds precursors to today's digital performances in past forms of theatrical technology that range from the deus ex machina of classical Greek drama to Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk (concept of the total artwork), and draws parallels between contemporary work and the theories and practices of Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, Futurism, and multimedia pioneers of the twentieth century. For a theoretical perspective on digital performance, Dixon draws on the work of Philip Auslander, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and others. To document and analyze contemporary digital performance practice, Dixon considers changes in the representation of the body, space, and time. He considers virtual bodies, avatars, and digital doubles, as well as performances by artists including Stelarc, Robert Lepage, Merce Cunningham, Laurie Anderson, Blast Theory, and Eduardo Kac. He investigates new media's novel approaches to creating theatrical spectacle, including virtual reality and robot performance work, telematic performances in which remote locations are linked in real time, Webcams, and online drama communities, and considers the "extratemporal" illusion created by some technological theater works. Finally, he defines categories of interactivity, from navigational to participatory and collaborative. Dixon challenges dominant theoretical approaches to digital performance—including what he calls postmodernism's denial of the new—and offers a series of boldly original arguments in their place.




Deleuze and Futurism


Book Description

This book is an original exploration of Deleuze's dynamic philosophies of space, time and language, bringing Deleuze and futurism together for the first time. Helen Palmer investigates both the potential for creative novelty and the pitfalls of formalism within both futurist and Deleuzian linguistic practices. Through creative and rigorous analyses of Russian and Italian futurist manifestos, the 'futurist' aspects of Deleuze's language and thought are drawn out. The genre of the futurist manifesto is a literary and linguistic model which can be applied to Deleuze's work, not only at times when he writes explicitly in the style of a manifesto but also in his earlier writings such as Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969). The way in which avant-garde manifestos often attempt to perform and demand their aims simultaneously, and the problems which arise due to this, is an operation which can be perceived in Deleuze's writing. With a particular focus on Russian zaum, the book negotiates the philosophy behind futurist 'nonsense' language and how Deleuze propounds analogous goals in The Logic of Sense. This book critically engages with Deleuze's poetics, ultimately suggesting that multiple linguistic models operate synecdochically within his philosophy.




Brutality Garden


Book Description

In the late 1960s, Brazilian artists forged a watershed cultural movement known as Tropicalia. Music inspired by that movement is today enjoying considerable attention at home and abroad. Few new listeners, however, make the connection between this music and the circumstances surrounding its creation, the most violent and repressive days of the military regime that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. With key manifestations in theater, cinema, visual arts, literature, and especially popular music, Tropicalia dynamically articulated the conflicts and aspirations of a generation of young, urban Brazilians. Focusing on a group of musicians from Bahia, an impoverished state in northeastern Brazil noted for its vibrant Afro-Brazilian culture, Christopher Dunn reveals how artists including Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, and Tom Ze created this movement together with the musical and poetic vanguards of Sao Paulo, Brazil's most modern and industrialized city. He shows how the tropicalists selectively appropriated and parodied cultural practices from Brazil and abroad in order to expose the fissure between their nation's idealized image as a peaceful tropical "garden" and the daily brutality visited upon its citizens.




Slow Culture and the American Dream


Book Description

Is the USA hospitable to the slow movement? The land of fast food, get-rich-quick schemes, and 24/7 news feeds? In Slow Culture and the American Dream: A Slow and Curvy Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century, Mary Caputi argues that the slow movement has much to teach the United States at this moment in time. Although slow philosophy is in many ways opposite to the prevalent American Dream, the current cultural setting demands that we heed its teachings. The climate crisis should make us rethink our fast-paced, ever-accelerating lifestyle so that we can lighten our carbon footprint and decelerate--if not reverse-- the damage done to the planet. Equally important, however, is the movement’s mandate that we slow down and savor life, focusing on quality, beauty, and calm rather than quantity and speed. Slow Food, Cittaslow (slow cities), slow fashion, slow travel, and slow parenting are examples of a philosophy that seeks to shift our focus away from “progress” as currently understood and revalue quality-of-life issues. Drawing deeply on her involvement with Slow Food and Cittaslow, the author advocates mainstreaming the philosophy of slow and thus reprioritizing the American Dream in ways that sustain the planet and teach Americans to develop a more refined aesthetic principle.




Reversing the Cult of Speed in Higher Education


Book Description

A collection of essays written by arts and humanities scholars across disciplines, this book argues that higher education has been compromised by its uncritical acceptance of our culture’s standards of productivity, busyness, and speed. Inspired by the Slow Movement, contributors explain how and why university culture has come to value productivity over contemplation and rapidity over slowness. Chapter authors argue that the arts and humanities offer a cogent critique of fast culture in higher education, and reframe the discussion of the value of their fields by emphasizing the dialectic between speed and slowness.




Fast Forward


Book Description

Life in the modernist era not only moved, it sped. As automobiles, airplanes, and high-speed industrial machinery proliferated at the turn of the twentieth century, a fascination with speed influenced artists—from Moscow to Manhattan—working in a variety of media. Russian avant-garde literary, visual, and cinematic artists were among those striving to elevate the ordinary physical concept of speed into a source of inspiration and generate new possibilities for everyday existence. Although modernism arrived somewhat late in Russia, the increased tempo of life at the start of the twentieth century provided Russia’s avant-garde artists with an infusion of creative dynamism and crucial momentum for revolutionary experimentation. In Fast Forward Tim Harte presents a detailed examination of the images and concepts of speed that permeated Russian modernist poetry, visual arts, and cinema. His study illustrates how a wide variety of experimental artistic tendencies of the day—such as “rayism” in poetry and painting, the effort to create a “transrational” language (zaum’) in verse, and movements seemingly as divergent as neo-primitivism and constructivism—all relied on notions of speed or dynamism to create at least part of their effects. Fast Forward reveals how the Russian avant-garde’s race to establish a new artistic and social reality over a twenty-year span reflected an ambitious metaphysical vision that corresponded closely to the nation’s rapidly changing social parameters. The embrace of speed after the 1917 Revolution, however, paradoxically hastened the movement’s demise. By the late 1920s, under a variety of historical pressures, avant-garde artistic forms morphed into those more compatible with the political agenda of the Russian state. Experimentation became politically suspect and abstractionism gave way to orthodox realism, ultimately ushering in the socialist realism and aesthetic conformism of the Stalin years.




Lean Software Development in Action


Book Description

This book illustrates how goal-oriented, automated measurement can be used to create Lean organizations and to facilitate the development of Lean software, while also demonstrating the practical implementation of Lean software development by combining tried and trusted tools. In order to be successful, a Lean orientation of software development has to go hand in hand with a company’s overall business strategy. To achieve this, two interrelated aspects require special attention: measurement and experience management. In this book, Janes and Succi provide the necessary knowledge to establish “Lean software company thinking,” while also exploiting the latest approaches to software measurement. A comprehensive, company-wide measurement approach is exactly what companies need in order to align their activities to the demands of their stakeholders, to their business strategy, etc. With the automatic, non-invasive measurement approach proposed in this book, even small and medium-sized enterprises that do not have the resources to introduce heavyweight processes will be able to make their software development processes considerably more Lean. The book is divided into three parts. Part I, “Motivation for Lean Software Development,” explains just what “Lean Production” means, why it can be advantageous to apply Lean concepts to software engineering, and which existing approaches are best suited to achieving this. Part II, “The Pillars of Lean Software Development,” presents the tools needed to achieve Lean software development: Non-invasive Measurement, the Goal Question Metric approach, and the Experience Factory. Finally, Part III, “Lean Software Development in Action,” shows how different tools can be combined to enable Lean Thinking in software development. The book primarily addresses the needs of all those working in the field of software engineering who want to understand how to establish an efficient and effective software development process. This group includes developers, managers, and students pursuing an M.Sc. degree in software engineering.




Modernist Parasites


Book Description

Modernist Parasites: Bioethics, Dependency, and Literature, Post-1900 analyzes biological and social parasites in the political, scientific, and literary imagination. With the rise of Darwinism, eugenics, and parasitology in the late nineteenth century, Sebastian Williams posits that the “parasite” came to be humanity’s ultimate other—a dangerous antagonist. But many authors such as Isaac Rosenberg, John Steinbeck, Franz Kafka, Clarice Lispector, Nella Larsen, and George Orwell reconsider parasitism. Ultimately, parasites inherently depend on others for their survival, illustrating the limits of ethical models that privilege the discrete individual above interdependent communities.