This Will Not Be Generative


Book Description

This Will Not Be Generative attends to the semiotics of ecological writings via Caribbean literary studies and black critical theory. Closely reading texts by Donna Haraway, Monique Allewaert, and Lisa Wells, it exposes how the language of tentacles and tendrils, an assumptive 'we,' and redemptive sympathy or 'care' disguises extraction from black people and blackness. This often speculative rhetoric, abetted by fantasies of white communion with indigenous groups, contrasts with the horror semiotics of the films Get Out (2017) and Midsommar (2019), which unmask the antagonistic relationship between white survival 'at the end of the world' and blackness as compost.




Colonial Phantoms


Book Description

Using a blend of historical and literary analysis, Colonial Phantoms reveals how Western discourses have ghosted—miscategorized or erased—the Dominican Republic since the nineteenth century despite its central place in the architecture of the Americas. Through a variety of Dominican cultural texts, from literature to public monuments to musical performance, it illuminates the Dominican quest for legibility and resistance.




We Will Not Cancel Us


Book Description

Cancel culture addresses real harm...and sometimes causes more. It’s time to think this through. “Cancel” or “call-out” culture is a source of much tension and debate in American society. The infamous “Harper’s Letter,” signed by public intellectuals of both the left and right, sought to settle the matter and only caused greater division. Originating as a way for marginalized and disempowered people to take down more powerful abusers, often with the help of social media, cancel culture is seen by some as having gone “too far.” Adrienne maree brown, a respected cultural voice and a professional mediator, reframes the discussion for us, in a way that points to possible ways beyond the impasse. Most critiques of cancel culture come from outside the milieus that produce it, sometimes from even from its targets. Brown explores the question from a Black, queer, and feminist viewpoint that gently asks, how well does this practice serve us? Does it prefigure the sort of world we want to live in? And, if it doesn’t, how do we seek accountability and redress for harm in a way that reflects our values?




Generative Deep Learning


Book Description

Generative modeling is one of the hottest topics in AI. It’s now possible to teach a machine to excel at human endeavors such as painting, writing, and composing music. With this practical book, machine-learning engineers and data scientists will discover how to re-create some of the most impressive examples of generative deep learning models, such as variational autoencoders,generative adversarial networks (GANs), encoder-decoder models and world models. Author David Foster demonstrates the inner workings of each technique, starting with the basics of deep learning before advancing to some of the most cutting-edge algorithms in the field. Through tips and tricks, you’ll understand how to make your models learn more efficiently and become more creative. Discover how variational autoencoders can change facial expressions in photos Build practical GAN examples from scratch, including CycleGAN for style transfer and MuseGAN for music generation Create recurrent generative models for text generation and learn how to improve the models using attention Understand how generative models can help agents to accomplish tasks within a reinforcement learning setting Explore the architecture of the Transformer (BERT, GPT-2) and image generation models such as ProGAN and StyleGAN




The Birth of Sense


Book Description

In The Birth of Sense, Don Beith proposes a new concept of generative passivity, the idea that our organic, psychological, and social activities take time to develop into sense. More than being a limit, passivity marks out the way in which organisms, persons, and interbodily systems take time in order to manifest a coherent sense. Beith situates his argument within contemporary debates about evolution, developmental biology, scientific causal explanations, psychology, postmodernism, social constructivism, and critical race theory. Drawing on empirical studies and phenomenological reflections, Beith argues that in nature, novel meaning emerges prior to any type of constituting activity or deterministic plan. The Birth of Sense is an original phenomenological investigation in the style of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and it demonstrates that the French philosopher’s works cohere around the notion that life is radically expressive. While Merleau-Ponty’s early works are widely interpreted as arguing for the primacy of human consciousness, Beith argues that a pivotal redefinition of passivity is already under way here, and extends throughout Merleau-Ponty’s corpus. This work introduces new concepts in contemporary philosophy to interrogate how organic development involves spontaneous expression, how personhood emerges from this bodily growth, and how our interpersonal human life remains rooted in, and often thwarted by, domains of bodily expressivity.




Learning as a Generative Activity


Book Description

During the past twenty-five years, researchers have made impressive advances in pinpointing effective learning strategies (namely, activities the learner engages in during learning that are intended to improve learning). In Learning as a Generative Activity: Eight Learning Strategies that Promote Understanding, Logan Fiorella and Richard E. Mayer share eight evidence-based learning strategies that promote understanding: summarizing, mapping, drawing, imagining, self-testing, self-explaining, teaching, and enacting. Each chapter describes and exemplifies a learning strategy, examines the underlying cognitive theory, evaluates strategy effectiveness by analyzing the latest research, pinpoints boundary conditions, and explores practical implications and future directions. Each learning strategy targets generative learning, in which learners actively make sense out of the material so they can apply their learning to new situations. This concise, accessible introduction to learning strategies will benefit students, researchers, and practitioners in educational psychology, as well as general readers interested in the important twenty-first-century skill of regulating one's own learning.




Generative Art


Book Description

Summary Generative Art presents both the technique and the beauty of algorithmic art. The book includes high-quality examples of generative art, along with the specific programmatic steps author and artist Matt Pearson followed to create each unique piece using the Processing programming language. About the Technology Artists have always explored new media, and computer-based artists are no exception. Generative art, a technique where the artist creates print or onscreen images by using computer algorithms, finds the artistic intersection of programming, computer graphics, and individual expression. The book includes a tutorial on Processing, an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions. About the Book Generative Art presents both the techniques and the beauty of algorithmic art. In it, you'll find dozens of high-quality examples of generative art, along with the specific steps the author followed to create each unique piece using the Processing programming language. The book includes concise tutorials for each of the technical components required to create the book's images, and it offers countless suggestions for how you can combine and reuse the various techniques to create your own works. Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book. What's Inside The principles of algorithmic art A Processing language tutorial Using organic, pseudo-random, emergent, and fractal processes ========================================​========= Table of Contents Part 1 Creative Coding Generative Art: In Theory and Practice Processing: A Programming Language for ArtistsPart 2 Randomness and Noise The Wrong Way to Draw A Line The Wrong Way to Draw a Circle Adding Dimensions Part 3 Complexity Emergence Autonomy Fractals




Generative Programming


Book Description




Convivial Toolbox


Book Description

The generative design research approach brings people served by design directly into the design process. First book on groundbreaking topic.




Still Life with Rhetoric


Book Description

Winner of the 2016 CCCC Advancement of Knowledge Award and the 2016 CCCC Research Impact Award In Still Life with Rhetoric, Laurie Gries forges connections among new materialism, actor network theory, and rhetoric to explore how images become rhetorically active in a digitally networked, global environment. Rather than study how an already-materialized “visual text” functions within a specific context, Gries investigates how images often circulate and transform across media, genre, and location at viral rates. A four-part case study of Shepard Fairey’s now iconic Obama Hope image elucidates how images reassemble collective life as they actualize in different versions, enter into various relations, and spark a firework of activity across the globe. While intent on tracking the rhetorical life of a single, multiple image, Still Life with Rhetoric is most concerned with studying rhetoric in motion. To account for an image’s widespread circulation and emergent activities, Gries introduces iconographic tracking—a digital research method for tracing an image’s divergent rhetorical becomings. Yet Gries also articulates a dynamic set of theoretical principles for studying rhetoric as a distributed, generative, and unforeseeable event that is applicable beyond the study of visual rhetoric. With an eye toward futurity—the strands of time beyond a thing’s initial moment of production and delivery—Still Life with Rhetoric intends to be taken up by those interested in visual rhetoric, research methods, and theory.