J.H. Kocman: Autorské knihy a papíry / Artists’ Books and Papers (1997) [Czech/English]
Filed under book | Tags: · artists book, conceptual art, mail art
Together with Jiří Valoch and Dalibor Chatrný, J.H. Kocman (1947) counts among the leading protagonists of Czech conceptual art whose life and work are closely linked with Brno. He is best known for his artists’ publishing and mail art.
Catalogue for an exhibition at Galerie Rudolfinum. Text by Jiří Valoch.
Edited by Zuzana Fořtová
Publisher Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, 1997
ISBN 809021942X
47 pages
via JHKocman.cz
Steve Joshua Heims: The Cybernetics Group (1991)
Filed under book | Tags: · computing, cybernetics, history of computing, history of science, history of technology, information theory, machine, technology
“This is the engaging story of a moment of transformation in the human sciences, a detailed account of a remarkable group of people who met regularly from 1946 to 1953 to explore the possibility of using scientific ideas that had emerged in the war years (cybernetics, information theory, computer theory) as a basis for interdisciplinary alliances. The Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, as they came to be called, included such luminaries as Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts, Kurt Lewin, F. S. C. Northrop, Molly Harrower, and Lawrence Kubie, who thought and argued together about such topics as insanity, vision, circular causality, language, the brain as a digital machine, and how to make wise decisions.
Heims, who met and talked with many of the participants, portrays them not only as thinkers but as human beings. His account examines how the conduct and content of research are shaped by the society in which it occurs and how the spirit of the times, in this case a mixture of postwar confidence and cold-war paranoia, affected the thinking of the cybernetics group. He uses the meetings to explore the strong influence elite groups can have in establishing connections and agendas for research and provides a firsthand took at the emergence of paradigms that were to become central to the new fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science.
In his joint biography of John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, Heims offered a challenging interpretation of the development of recent American science and technology. Here, in this group portrait of an important generation of American intellectuals, Heims extends that interpretation to a broader canvas, in the process paying special attention to the two iconoclastic figures, Warren McCulloch and Gregory Bateson, whose ideas on the nature of the mind/brain and on holism are enjoying renewal today.”
Paperback edition appeared under the title Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America: The Cybernetics Group (1946–1953) in 1993.
Publisher MIT Press, 1991
ISBN 0262082004, 9780262082006
xii+334 pages
Reviews: N. Katherine Hayles (Hist Human Sciences, 1992), R.V. Jones (New Scientist, 1992), Carlos A. Martínez-Vela (2001).
PDF (3 MB, updated on 2018-7-25)
Comment (1)Nathan Brown, Petar Milat (eds.): Poiesis (2017)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, literary criticism, literary theory, literature, poetry
A volume based on a three-day symposium of the same title held at MaMa, Zagreb, in 2015.
Contributions by Thomas Schestag, Branka Arsić, David Wills, Jed Rasula, Marie Gil, Alexi Kukuljevic, Amanda Holmes, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Julie Beth Napolin, Aaron Schuster, Dee Morris & Stephen Voyce, and Nathan Brown.
Publisher Multimedijalni institut, Zagreb, and Centre for Expanded Poetics (Concordia University), Montréal, 2017
ISBN 9789537372132
234+xxxiii pages
PDF
See also Angela Rawlings’ book Si Tu (2017).