Tony Robbin: Shadows of Reality: The Fourth Dimension in Relativity, Cubism, and Modern Thought (2006)

“In this insightful book, which is a revisionist math history as well as a revisionist art history, Tony Robbin, well known for his innovative computer visualizations of hyperspace, investigates different models of the fourth dimension and how these are applied in art and physics. Robbin explores the distinction between the slicing, or Flatland, model and the projection, or shadow, model. He compares the history of these two models and their uses and misuses in popular discussions. Robbin breaks new ground with his original argument that Picasso used the projection model to invent cubism, and that Minkowski had four-dimensional projective geometry in mind when he structured special relativity. The discussion is brought to the present with an exposition of the projection model in the most creative ideas about space in contemporary mathematics such as twisters, quasicrystals, and quantum topology. Robbin clarifies these esoteric concepts with understandable drawings and diagrams.

Robbin proposes that the powerful role of projective geometry in the development of current mathematical ideas has been long overlooked and that our attachment to the slicing model is essentially a conceptual block that hinders progress in understanding contemporary models of spacetime. He offers a fascinating review of how projective ideas are the source of some of today’s most exciting developments in art, math, physics, and computer visualization.”

Publisher Yale University Press, 2006
ISBN 0300110391, 9780300110395
160 pages

Review (Tony Philips, Notices of the AMS, 2007)
Review (Amy Ione, Leonardo, 2006)

Author (with an Hypercube Android App and online references)
Publisher

PDF (some images missing)

Man Ray: Self Portrait (1963)

In this remarkable autobiography, Man Ray – painter, photographer, sculptor, film maker and writer – relates the story of his life, from his childhood determination to be an artist and his technical drawing classes in a Brooklyn high school, to the glamorous and heady days of Paris in the 1940s, when any trip to the city ‘was not complete until they had been “done” by Man Ray’s camera’.

Friend to everyone who was anyone, Ray tells everything he knows of artists, socialites and writers such as Matisse, Hemingway, Picasso and Joyce, not to mention Lee Miller, Nancy Cunard, Alberto Giacometti, Gertrude Stein, Dali, Max Ernst and many more, in this decadent account of the early twentieth-century cultural world.

Publisher Little, Brown and Company, Boston and Toronto, 1963
402 pages

PDF (58 MB, no OCR)

Sianne Ngai: Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012)

“The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime.

Ngai explores how each of these aesthetic categories expresses conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, exchange, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our playfulness and our sense of desperation. The interesting is tied to the circulation of discourse and inspires interest but also boredom. The cute’s involvement with consumption brings out feelings of tenderness and aggression simultaneously. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our complex relationship to performing, information, and commodities.

Through readings of Adorno, Schlegel, and Nietzsche alongside cultural artifacts ranging from Bob Perelman’s poetry to Ed Ruscha’s photography books to the situation comedy of Lucille Ball, Ngai shows how these everyday aesthetic categories also provide traction to classic problems in aesthetic theory. The zany, cute, and interesting are not postmodernity’s only meaningful aesthetic categories, Ngai argues, but the ones best suited for grasping the radical transformation of aesthetic experience and discourse under its conditions.”

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2012
ISBN 0674046587, 9780674046580
344 pages
via batshave

Reviews: Rebecca Ariel Porte (LA Review of Books, 2012), Paul Ardoin (Reviews in Cultural Theory, 2013), Jason Gladstone (Contemporary Literature, 2014), Pansy Duncan (Cultural Studies Review, 2014), Monica Westin (The Believer, 2012), Hua Hsu (Slate, 2012), Douglas Dowland (American Studies, 2014).
Commentary: Adam Jasper (Bookforum, 2013).
Interview with the author (Adam Jasper, Cabinet, 2011)

Publisher

PDF, PDF (14 MB, no OCR, Index missing, updated on 2019-6-23)