Sherry Turkle: Simulation and Its Discontents (2009)

“Over the past twenty years, the technologies of simulation and visualization have changed our ways of looking at the world. In Simulation and Its Discontents, Sherry Turkle examines the now dominant medium of our working lives and finds that simulation has become its own sensibility. We hear it in Turkle’s description of architecture students who no longer design with a pencil, of science and engineering students who admit that computer models seem more “real” than experiments in physical laboratories.

Echoing architect Louis Kahn’s famous question, “What does a brick want?”, Turkle asks, “What does simulation want?” Simulations want, even demand, immersion, and the benefits are clear. Architects create buildings unimaginable before virtual design; scientists determine the structure of molecules by manipulating them in virtual space; physicians practice anatomy on digitized humans. But immersed in simulation, we are vulnerable. There are losses as well as gains. Older scientists describe a younger generation as “drunk with code.” Young scientists, engineers, and designers, full citizens of the virtual, scramble to capture their mentors’ tacit knowledge of buildings and bodies. From both sides of a generational divide, there is anxiety that in simulation, something important is slipping away.

Turkle’s examination of simulation over the past twenty years is followed by four in-depth investigations of contemporary simulation culture: space exploration, oceanography, architecture, and biology.”

With Additional Essays by William J. Clancey, Stefan Helmreich, Yanni A. Loukissas and Natasha Myers
Foreword by John Maeda
Publisher The MIT Press, 2009
ISBN 0262012707, 9780262012706
208 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-11-4)

Evan Selinger (ed.): Postphenomenology. A Critical Companion to Ihde (2006)

“Postphenomenology is the first book devoted exclusively to the interpretation and advancement of prominent phenomenologist Don Ihde’s landmark contributions to history, philosophy, sociology, science, sound studies, and technology studies. Ihde has made a direct and lasting impact on the study of technological experience across the disciplines and acquired an international following of diverse scholars along the way, many of whom contribute to Postphenomenology, including Albert Borgmann, who characterizes Ihde as being “among the most interesting and provocative contemporary American philosophers.” The contributors situate, assess, and apply Ihde’s philosophy with respect to the primary themes that his oeuvre emphasizes. They not only clarify Ihde’s work, but also make significant contributions to the philosophy of technology, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of science. A comprehensive response from Ihde concludes the volume.”

Publisher SUNY Press, 2006
ISBN 0791467872, 9780791467879
307 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2021-8-16)

Gayle Zachmann: Frameworks for Mallarmé: The Photo and the Graphic of an Interdisciplinary Aesthetic (2008)

Countering the conventional image of the deliberately obscure “ivory-tower poet,” Frameworks for Mallarmé presents Stéphane Mallarmé as a journalist and critic who was actively engaged with the sociocultural and technological shifts of his era. Gayle Zachmann introduces a writer whose aesthetic was profoundly shaped by contemporary innovations in print and visual culture, especially the nascent art of photography. She analyzes the preeminence of the visual in conjunction with Mallarmé’s quest for “scientific” language, and convincingly links the poet’s production to a nineteenth-century understanding of cognition that is articulated in terms of optical perception. The result is a distinctly modern recuperation of the Horatian doctrine of ut pictura poesis in Mallarmé’s poetry and his circumstantial writings.

Publisher SUNY Press, 2008
ISBN 079147593X, 9780791475935
209 pages

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PDF (updated on 2013-5-31)