Diffusive Geometries


Book Description

Architecture primarily serves as a way to create and control the environment around us. Unlike natural weather, climate conditions in architecture are often static and binary, with no diffusion in between. As a result, sensory experiences that are directly accessible outdoors, like atmospheric quality, diffusiveness, and flow, are completely excluded from the indoors. The climate is discretized in space into strict self-contained, functional units, where wetness is kept in wet spaces yet other areas are completely dry. Many of these weather experiences have certain architectural qualities. This project uses vapor as a medium to create the experience of micro-climates and weather conditions from the outside, and bring them back inside architecture as tectonic elements that modulate visibility, create cooling gradients, and produce spatial patterns in a controlled manner. The three main elements are: point – vapor vertex ring, line – vapor tornado, plane – vapor wall. The focused and diffused conditions of vapor enable both localized and global conditions with soft boundaries. Imagine a future where architects not only sculpt their ideal space but also control the weather inside: one corner feels like the Saharan Desert, while the other behaves like the Amazon rainforest. In one corner, an early morning mist greets the contemplative mind, and in the center space, a focused tornado vapor attracts a gathering crowd. The interior space no longer acts like static and binary units—with clear boundaries like rain for shower, snow for fridge, or sun for light—but like dynamic, diffused, and phenomenal experiences.




Science Meets Art


Book Description

This book explores collaboration between artists and scientists and examines the ways in which scientific data and research findings can be communicated, translated and transformed using the techniques of contemporary art and information technology. Contemporary art forms—including installation, sculpture, painting, computer-based art, Internet art and interactive electronic artworks—are able to provide new and creative outlets, with expanded audiences, for scientific research. The book, which features 75 illustrations of works created as a result of art–science collaboration between scientists and artists, is important in the field because it presents a thorough account of the collaboration through the eyes of a leading creative practitioner and a leading cultural theorist. It contains a wide range of in-detail examples of successful collaborative works that illustrate the breadth and depth of contemporary interdisciplinary creative-research approaches.




Earth Sound Earth Signal


Book Description

Earth Sound Earth Signal is a study of energies in aesthetics and the arts, from the birth of modern communications in the nineteenth century to the global transmissions of the present day. Grounded in the Aeolian sphere music that Henry David Thoreau heard blowing in telegraph lines and in the Aelectrosonic sounds of natural radio that Thomas Watson heard in telephone lines, the book moves through the histories of science, media, music, and the arts to the 1960s, when the composer Alvin Lucier worked with the ""natural electromagnetic sounds"" present from ""brainwaves to outer.




The Human Journalist


Book Description

Willis examines the many orientations and perspectives of reporters that gather and present the news of the day. Debunking the notion that there are limited perspectives journalists may use, Willis examines up to 15 different orientations that reporters bring to their work. These perspectives run the gamut, from the traditional approach of distancing oneself completely from events and people involved to becoming part of the story's fabric to ascertain the story's true essence. Willis also suggests that, for many stories, it is wholly appropriate for journalists to feel what a non-professional would experience at such an event, and to allow those emotions to fuel the reporting and writing of the story. Several examples are discussed in detail, including the coverage of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.




Little Boat


Book Description

New poems from a National Book Award winner




Robotics in Practice


Book Description

THE REAL THING by Isaac Asimov Back in 1939, when I was still a teenager, I began to write (and publish) a series of stories about robots which, for the first time in science fiction, were pictured as having been deliberately engineered to do their job safely. They were not intended to be creaky Gothic menaces, nor outlets for mawkish sentiment. They were simply well-designed machines. Beginning in 1942, I crystallized this notion in what I called 'The Three Laws of Robotics' and, in 1950, nine of my robot stories were collected into a book, I, Robot. I did not at that time seriously believe that I would live to see robots in action and robotics becoming a booming industry .... Yet here we are, better yet, I am alive to see it. But then, why shouldn't they be with us? Robots fulfil an important role in industry. They do simple and repetitive jobs more steadily, more reliably, and more uncomplainingly than a human being could - or should. Does a robot displace a human being? Certainly, but he does so at a job that, simply because a robot can do it, is beneath the dignity of a human being; a job that is no more than mindless drudgery. Better and more human jobs can be found for human beings - and should.




Hand to Earth


Book Description

This beautifully produced, highly praised and readable retrospective survey of Andy Goldsworthy's early work covers the fourteen years between 1976 and 1990. It embraces not only photographs of his ephemeral works, but also his earliest permanent sculptures constructed of stone and earth, as well as drawings for monumental sculpture projects in the landscape. The combination of superlative illustrations and incisive texts makes it the most authoritative and comprehensive publication available on the artist's early work.




Behind the Veil


Book Description

Searching for something beyond his ordinary life a young man explores the mystic teachings of India. He soon falls into the world of the occult and witchcraft and faces a terrifying struggle to save his soul.




"The Noble Buyer"


Book Description

"This book about the collector of modern art, John Quinn, was published in conjunction with a major exhibition at the Hirschorn Museum and Sculpture Gardens in 1978. Quinn was a New York attorney and among the foremost of modern art patrons. He amassed a large collection, including more than fifty paintings by Pablo Picasso, sculpture by Contantin Brancusi and numerous examples of the most important post-Impressionists, Cubists, Fauves, etc. Full catalog entries."--Publisher's description.




Keene on Chess


Book Description

A complete step-by-step course which shows you how to play and deepen your understanding of chess.