Andrea Gleiniger, Angelika Hilbeck, Jill Scott (eds.): Transdiscourse 1: Mediated Environments (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · agriculture, architecture, art and science, climate crisis, design, documentary film, eco art, ecology, energy, environment, permaculture, recycling
– Encourages critical reflections that shed light on how combinations of art, architecture, technology and science could directly impact urban societies and their rural alternative
– Discusses the know-how-transfer between the arts and the sciences is facilitated
Mediated Environments addresses the problem that society interprets our environment through conditioned and constructed representations of mainstream media and not in a transdisciplinary way with the help of artists, architects, filmmakers, cultural theorists and scientists. The writers who come from these various backgrounds all wish to give media artists, designers and writers a new role in relation to the pressing issues of urban and rural life: ones that can address the challenges of human psychology, recycling, agricultural production, climate chaos and energy conservation. The main aims were to focus on the potentials of creative work to raise public awareness and to find new discourses that can be shared within the areas of mediated architecture, eco art, experimental documentary film, eco-emergent design and art and science collaborations. The editors believe that a closer transdisciplinary working relationship could encourage a more tangible approach to these problems of the future.
Publisher Springer, 2011
Producer Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK)
ISBN 3709102871, 9783709102879
216 pages
Margret Kentgens-Craig: The Bauhaus and America: First Contacts, 1919-1936 (1999)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1920s, 1930s, architecture, art, avant-garde, bauhaus, design, education, history of architecture, united states
The Bauhaus school was founded in Weimar in 1919 by the German architect Walter Gropius, moved to Dessau in 1925 and to Berlin in 1932, and was dissolved in 1933 by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe under political duress. Although it existed for a mere fourteen years and boasted fewer than 1,300 students, its influence is felt throughout the world in numerous buildings, artworks, objects, concepts, and curricula.
After the Bauhaus’s closing in 1933, many of its protagonists moved to the United States, where their acceptance had to be cultivated. The key to understanding the American reception of the Bauhaus is to be found not in the émigré success stories or the famous 1938 Bauhaus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, but in the course of America’s early contact with the Bauhaus. In this book Margret Kentgens-Craig shows that the fame of the Bauhaus in America was the result not only of the inherent qualities of its concepts and products, but also of a unique congruence of cultural supply and demand, of a consistent flow of information, and of fine-tuned marketing. Thus the history of the American reception of the Bauhaus in the 1920s and 1930s foreshadows the patterns of fame-making that became typical of the post-World War II art world. The transfer of artistic, intellectual, and pedagogical concepts from one cultural context to another is a process of transformation and integration. In presenting a case study of this process, the book also provides fresh insights into the German-American cultural history of the period from 1919 to 1936.
Publisher MIT Press, 1999
ISBN 026211237X, 9780262112376
283 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-31)
Comment (0)Malcolm McCullough: Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand (1996)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, computer graphics, craft, design, industrial design
The love of making things need not be confined to the physical world —electronic form giving can also be a rewarding hands-on experience. In this investigation of the possibility of craft in the digital realm, Malcolm McCullough observes that the emergence of computation as a medium, rather than just a set of tools, suggests a growing correspondence between digital work and traditional craft.
Personal and conversational in tone, with examples and illustrations drawn from a variety of disciplines, Abstracting Craft shows that anyone who gives form with software, whether in architecture, painting, animating, modeling, simulating, or manufacturing, is practicing personal knowledge and producing visual artifacts that, although not material, are nevertheless products of the hands, eyes, and mind.
Chapter by chapter, McCullough builds a case for upholding humane traits and values during the formative stages of new practices in digital media. He covers the nature of hand-eye coordination; the working context of the image culture; aspects of tool usage and medium appreciation; uses and limitations of symbolic methods; issues in human-computer interaction; geometric constructions and abstract methods in design; the necessity of improvisation; and the personal worth of work.
For those new to computing, McCullough offers an inside view of what the technology is like, what the important technical issues are, and how creative computing fits within a larger intellectual history. Specialists in human-computer interaction will find an interesting case study of the anthropological and psychological issues that matter to designers. Artificial intelligence researchers will be reminded that much activity fails to fit articulable formalisms. Aesthetic theorists will find a curiously developed case of neostructuralism, and cultural critics will be asked to imagine a praxis in which technology no longer represents an authoritarian opposition. Finally, the unheralded legions of digital craftspersons will find a full-blown acknowledgment of their artistry and humanity.
Publisher MIT Press, 1996
Antipode Book Series
ISBN 0262133261, 9780262133265
309 pages
EPUB (updated on 2014-9-14)
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