Nathan Brown: The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics (2017)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, fabrication, literary criticism, literary theory, literature, materialism, materials science, nanotechnology, ontology, philosophy, poetics, poetry, technē
“Poetry, or poiēsis, has long been understood as a practice of making. But how are experiments in the making of poetic forms related to formal making in science and engineering? The Limits of Fabrication takes up this question in the context of recent developments in nanoscale materials science, investigating concepts and ideologies of form at stake in new approaches to material construction. Tracing the direct pertinence of fields crucial to the new materials science (nanotechnology, biotechnology, crystallography, and geodesic design) in the work of Shanxing Wang, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, and Ronald Johnson back to the midcentury development of Charles Olson’s ‘objectist’ poetics, Nathan Brown carves out a tradition of constructivist, nonorganic poetics that has developed in conversation with science and engineering.
While proposing a new approach to the relation of technē (craft, skill) and poiēsis (making, forming), this book also intervenes in philosophical debates concerning the concept of the object, the distinction between organic and inorganic matter, theories of self-organization, and the relation between ‘design’ and ‘nature’. Engaging with Heidegger, Agamben, Whitehead, Stiegler, and Nancy, Brown shows that materials science and materialist poetics offer crucial resources for thinking through the direction of contemporary materialist philosophy.”
Publisher Fordham University Press, New York, 2017
ISBN 9780823272990, 0823272990
xi+296 pages
via Memory of the World
Review: Tom Eyers (boundary2, 2017).
PDF (26 MB)
Comment (0)Taeyoon Choi: Poetic Computation Reader (2017)
Filed under book | Tags: · code, computation, computing, pedagogy, poetics, software, technology
This online book discusses code as a form of poetry and aesthetic while raising ethical questions associated with it. It is based on Taeyoon Choi’s lectures at the School for Poetic Computation, an independent school he co-founded in New York City.
Edited by Hannah Son
Designed by HAWRAF
Published 2017
Dennis Tenen: Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (2017)
Filed under book | Tags: · book, computation, human-computer interaction, language, literary theory, literature, media, media theory, poetics, software, text, theory, translation
“This book challenges the ways we read, write, store, and retrieve information in the digital age. Computers—from electronic books to smart phones—play an active role in our social lives. Our technological choices thus entail theoretical and political commitments. Dennis Tenen takes up today’s strange enmeshing of humans, texts, and machines to argue that our most ingrained intuitions about texts are profoundly alienated from the physical contexts of their intellectual production. Drawing on a range of primary sources from both literary theory and software engineering, he makes a case for a more transparent practice of human–computer interaction. Plain Text is thus a rallying call, a frame of mind as much as a file format. It reminds us, ultimately, that our devices also encode specific modes of governance and control that must remain available to interpretation.”
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2017
ISBN 9781503601802, 1503601803
x+268 pages
Reviews: N. Katherine Hayles (Critical Inquiry, 2017), Jan Baetens (Leonardo, 2017), James Edward Draney (LARB, 2017), Maisie Ridgway (Textual Practice, 2018).
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