Vivian Carol Sobchack: Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (2004)

“In these essays, Vivian Sobchack considers the key role our bodies play in making sense of today’s image-saturated culture. Emphasizing our corporeal rather than our intellectual engagements with film and other media, Carnal Thoughts shows how our experience always emerges through our senses and how our bodies are not just visible objects but also sense-making, visual subjects. Sobchack draws on both phenomenological philosophy and a broad range of popular sources to explore bodily experience in contemporary, moving-image culture. She examines how, through the conflation of cinema and surgery, we’ve all ‘had our eyes done’; why we are ‘moved’ by the movies; and the different ways in which we inhabit photographic, cinematic, and electronic space. Carnal Thoughts provides a lively and engaging challenge to the mind/body split by demonstrating that the process of ‘making sense’ requires an irreducible collaboration between our thoughts and our senses.”

Publisher University of California Press, 2004
ISBN 0520241290, 9780520241299
328 pages

Keywords and phrases
phenomenological, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, metonymy, irreal, Elaine Scarry, rience, catachresis, Roland Barthes, Martin Heidegger, Decalogue, cyborg, Aimee Mullins, Walter Benjamin, synecdoche, Street of Crocodiles, Million Man March, prosthetic leg, transform fictional, semiotic, Medium Cool

Publisher
Google books

PDF (updated on 2014-12-7)

Georg Flachbart, Peter Weibel (eds.): Disappearing Architecture: From Real to Virtual to Quantum (2005)

“The creation of new environments through the use of developments in Information Technology is significantly altering not only architecture itself but also the roles and tasks of the architects. Architecture can no longer be described in the terms we are familiar with since it no longer corresponds to the form of architecture as we know it: an inclusive and exclusive structure, clearly defined, with a single interior and a single exterior. For architects, the challenge of the future will increasingly lie in creatively coming to terms with hybrid environments, understanding and exploiting the design potential of digital spaces within the physical world, and redefining the role of architecture within a visually dominated culture. This volume presents a valuable and attractive contribution to the contemporary discussion on this subject.”

Publisher Springer, 2005
ISBN 3764372753, 9783764372750
272 pages

Key words and phrases
qubit, quantum computing, Mixed Reality, Utility Fog, Point Cloud, Smart Dust, autonomic computing, active world, Grid computing, computer-aided design, quantum mechanics, Virtools, multiverse, Monika Fleischmann, Wolfgang Strauss, peer-to-peer, Shor’s algorithm, LHC Computing Grid, quantum dots, Ubiquitous Computing

PDF (92 MB, updated on 2015-7-2)

John Neubauer (ed.): Cultural History After Foucault (1999)

“Both as historian and maker of culture, Foucault infused numerous disciplines of study with a new conceptual vocabulary and an agenda for future research. His ideas have called central assumptions in Western culture into question and altered the ways in which scholars and social scientists approach such issues as discourse theory, theory of knowledge, Eros, technologies of the Self and Other, punishment and prisons, and asylums and madness. The contributors to this volume indicate Foucault’s achievements and the suggestive power of his work, as well as his methodological weaknesses, historical inaccuracies, and ambiguities. Above all, they attempt to show how one can use Foucault to go beyond him in opening new approaches to cultural history. Though comprehensiveness was not attempted, their essays broach the major controversial aspects of Foucauldian cultural history–the position of the subject, the fusion of power and knowledge, sexuality, the historical structures and changes–and they explicitly analyze them with respect to antiquity, the Renaissance, and the nineteenth century. In this collection, Neubauer presents analyses by historians, literary scholars, and philosophers of the entire, transdis-ciplinary range of Foucault’s oeuvre, emphasizing the rich suggestiveness of its agenda. The breadth of the undertaking makes it suitable for seminars and graduate courses in numerous departments.”

Publisher Aldine Transaction, 1999
ISBN 0202305856, 9780202305851
246 pages

PDF (updated on 2016-12-23)