Anthony Dunne: Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design (1999/2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · design, electromagnetism, industrial design, radio, semiotics, technology
“As our everyday social and cultural experiences are increasingly mediated by electronic products—from ‘intelligent’ toasters to iPods—it is the design of these products that shapes our experience of the ‘electrosphere’ in which we live. Designers of electronic products, writes Anthony Dunne in Hertzian Tales, must begin to think more broadly about the aesthetic role of electronic products in everyday life. Industrial design has the potential to enrich our daily lives—to improve the quality of our relationship to the artificial environment of technology, and even, argues Dunne, to be subverted for socially beneficial ends.
The cultural speculations and conceptual design proposals in Hertzian Tales are not utopian visions or blueprints; instead, they embody a critique of present-day practices, ‘mixing criticism with optimism.’ Six essays explore design approaches for developing the aesthetic potential of electronic products outside a commercial context—considering such topics as the post-optimal object and the aesthetics of user-unfriendliness—and five proposals offer commentary in the form of objects, videos, and images. These include ‘Electroclimates,’ animations on an LCD screen that register changes in radio frequency; ‘When Objects Dream…,’ consumer products that “dream” in electromagnetic waves; ‘Thief of Affection,’ which steals radio signals from cardiac pacemakers; ‘Tuneable Cities,’ which uses the car as it drives through overlapping radio environments as an interface of hertzian and physical space; and the ‘Faraday Chair: Negative Radio,’ enclosed in a transparent but radio-opaque shield.
Very little has changed in the world of design since Hertzian Tales was first published by the Royal College of Art in 1999, writes Dunne in his preface to this MIT Press edition: ‘Design is not engaging with the social, cultural, and ethical implications of the technologies it makes so sexy and consumable.’ His project and proposals challenge it to do so.”
Publisher MIT Press, 2005
ISBN 0262042320, 9780262042321
174 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-11-19)
Comment (0)David Norman Rodowick: Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, digital culture, film theory, new media, philosophy, philosophy of history, postmodernism, poststructuralism, semiotics, utopia
In Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media D. N. Rodowick applies the concept of “the figural” to a variety of philosophical and aesthetic issues. Inspired by the aesthetic philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard, the figural defines a semiotic regime where the distinction between linguistic and plastic representation breaks down. This opposition, which has been the philosophical foundation of aesthetics since the eighteenth century, has been explicitly challenged by the new electronic, televisual, and digital media. Rodowick—one of the foremost film theorists writing today—contemplates this challenge, describing and critiquing the new regime of signs and new ways of thinking that such media have inaugurated.
To fully comprehend the emergence of the figural requires a genealogical critique of the aesthetic, Rodowick claims. Seeking allies in this effort to deconstruct the opposition of word and image and to create new concepts for comprehending the figural, he journeys through a range of philosophical writings: Thierry Kuntzel and Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier on film theory; Jacques Derrida on the deconstruction of the aesthetic; Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin on the historical image as a utopian force in photography and film; and Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault on the emergence of the figural as both a semiotic regime and a new stratagem of power coincident with the appearance of digital phenomena and of societies of control.
Scholars of philosophy, film theory, cultural criticism, new media, and art history will be interested in the original and sophisticated insights found in this book.
Publisher Duke University Press, 2001
Post-Contemporary Interventions series
ISBN 0822327228, 9780822327226
276 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-14)
Comment (1)James V. Wertsch: Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind (1985)
Filed under book | Tags: · consciousness, culture, genetics, intersubjectivity, mind, semiotics, social science
In a book of intellectual breadth, James Wertsch not only offers a synthesis and critique of all Vygotsky’s major ideas, but also presents a program for using Vygotskian theory as a guide to contemporary research in the social sciences and humanities. He draws extensively on all Vygotsky’s works, both in Russian and in English, as well as on his own studies in the Soviet Union with colleagues and students of Vygotsky.
Vygotsky’s writings are an enormously rich source of ideas for those who seek an account of the mind as it relates to the social and physical world. Wertsch explores three central themes that run through Vygotsky’s work: his insistence on using genetic, or developmental, analysis; his claim that higher mental functioning in the individual has social origins; and his beliefs about the role of tools and signs in human social and psychological activity Wertsch demonstrates how the notion of semiotic mediation is essential to understanding Vygotsky’s unique contribution to the study of human consciousness.
In the last four chapters Wertsch extends Vygotsky’s claims in light of recent research in linguistics, semiotics, and literary theory. The focus on semiotic phenomena, especially human language, enables him to integrate findings from the wide variety of disciplines with which Vygotsky was concerned Wertsch shows how Vygotsky’s approach provides a principled way to link the various strands of human science that seem more isolated than ever today.
Publisher Harvard University Press, 1985
ISBN 0674943511, 9780674943513
Length 262 pages
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