Robert Rosen: Essays on Life Itself (1999)

“In this collection of twenty-two essays, Rosen takes to task the central objective of the natural sciences, calling into question the attempt to create objectivity in a subjective world. The book opens with an exploration of the interaction between biology and physics, unpacking Schrödinger´s famous text What Is Life? and revealing the shortcomings of the notion that artificial intelligence can truly replicate life.

He also refutes the thesis that mathematical models of reality can be reflected entirely in algorithms, that is, are of a purely syntactical character. He argues that it is the noncomputable, nonformalizable nature of biology that makes organisms complex, and that these systems are generic, whereas those systems described by reductionistic reasoning are simple and rare.

An intriguing enigma links all of the essays: ‘How can science explain the unpredictable?'”

Publisher Columbia University Press, 1999
Complexity in Ecological Systems series
ISBN 023110510X, 9780231105101
x+360 pages

Reviews: Bruce J. West (Quarterly Review of Biology, 2001), Donald C. Mikulecky (c1999).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (removed on 2019-10-30 upon request from Judith Rosen)

Jack Burnham: The Structure of Art (1971/1973)

Jack Burnham was a writer on art and technology, curator of the 1970 Software show, and one of the main forces behind the emergence of systems art in the 1960s. In his second book, The Structure of Art, Burnham “developed one of the first systematic methods for applying structural analysis to the interpretation of individual artworks as well as to the canon of western art history itself.”

Publisher George Braziller, New York, 1971
Revised edition, 1973
ISBN 0807605956, 9780807605950
195 pages

WorldCat

PDF (69 MB, no OCR)
PDF (19 MB, OCR’d version via Marcell Mars, added on 2015-4-16)
PDF (83 MB, no OCR, added on 2023-8-4)

communication +1, 3(1): Afterlives of Systems (2014)

“Under the impression of today’s global crisis and the rise of ecological thinking, confronted with smart, ubiquitous technosystems and the impression of interconnectedness, there appears a new urge to excavate the remnants of the past. The articles of this issue suggest that in order to understand present technologies, we need to account the systems thinking that fostered their emergence, and that we cannot gain insight into the afterlives of systems without exploring their technologies.

The nine contributions ask how these debates and affective states survive and live on in today’s discussions of media ecologies, environmentalism, object-oriented philosophies, computer simulations, performative art, and communication technologies. In this sense, they take the renaissance of systems thinking in the late 20th and early 21st Century as an effect of various system crisis and explore new media technologies as stabilizing ‘cures’ against the dystopian future scenarios that emerged after World War II. The articles of this issue suggest that in order to understand present technologies, we need to account the systems thinking that fostered their emergence, and that we cannot gain insight into the afterlives of systems without exploring their technologies.”

With contributions by Etienne Benson, Rafico Ruiz, Katja Rothe, Niklas Schrape, Christoph Neubert and Serjoscha Wiemer, Sebastian Vehlken, Bruce Clarke, Jan Mueggenburg, and You Nakai.

Edited by Christina Vagt and Florian Sprenger
Publisher University of Massachusetts Amherst, September 2014
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
c231 pages

PDF articles
single PDF (4 MB)