Charles Harrison, Paul Wood (eds.): Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (1992) [English, French]
Filed under book | Tags: · 1900s, abstract art, abstraction, aesthetics, art, art history, art theory, autonomy, avant-garde, beauty, capitalism, colour, communism, conceptual art, constructivism, cubism, dada, expressionism, formalism, futurism, happening, impressionism, institutional critique, language, machine, marxism, minimal art, modernism, postmodern, poststructuralism, productivism, psychoanalysis, realism, representation, revolution, romanticism, socialism, structuralism, surrealism, symbolism

“This volume provides comprehensive representation of the theories, which underpinned developments in the visual arts during the twentieth century. As well as writings by artists, the anthology includes texts by critics, philosophers, politicians and literary figures. The content is structured into eight broadly chronological sections, starting with the legacy of symbolism and concluding with contemporary debates about the postmodern.”
Publisher Blackwell, 1992
Reprinted 1999
ISBN 0631165754, 978-0631165750
1220 pages
Review: Patricia Railing (Art Book, 2004).
Art in Theory 1900-1990 (English, 1992, 13 MB, updated on 2015-9-5)
Art en théorie 1900-1990 (French, 1997, 24 MB, added on 2016-6-26)
Miller Medina, Jessica Eden: Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile (2006)
Filed under paper, thesis | Tags: · 1970s, chile, cybernetics, cybersyn, machine, networks, socialism
Abstract
This article presents a history of ‘Project Cybersyn’, an early computer network developed in Chile during the socialist presidency of Salvador Allende (1970–1973) to regulate the growing social property area and manage the transition of Chile’s economy from capitalism to socialism. Under the guidance of British cybernetician Stafford Beer, often lauded as the ‘ father of management cybernetics ’, an interdisciplinary Chilean team designed cybernetic models of factories within the nationalised sector and created a network for the rapid transmission of economic data between the government and the factory floor. The article describes the construction of this unorthodox system, examines how its structure reflected the socialist ideology of the Allende government, and documents the contributions of this technology to the Allende administration.
Published in Journal of Latin American Studies 38, pp. 571–606, Cambridge University Press, 2006
PDF
Related: Eden Medina: Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (2011)
Related: The State Machine: Politics, Ideology, and Computation in Chile, 1964-1973 (Dissertation thesis, by Medina and Eden, 2005, PDF)
Paul Shepheard: Artificial Love: A Story of Machines and Architecture (2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, machine

“According to Paul Shepheard, architecture is the rearranging of the world for human purposes. Sculpture, machines, and landscapes are all architecture-every bit as much as buildings are. In his writings, Shepheard examines old assumptions about architecture and replaces the critical theory of the academic with the active theory of the architect-citizen enamored of the world around him.
Artificial Love weaves together three stories about architecture into one. The first, about machines as architecture, leads to speculations about technology and the human condition and to the assertion that machines are the sculptures of today. The second story is about the ways that architecture reflects the tribal and personal desires of those who make it. In the West, ideas of community, multiculturalism, and globalization compete furiously, leaving architecture to exist as it always has, as the past in the present. The third story features individual people experiencing their lives in the context of architecture. Here, Shepheard borrows the rhetorical device of Shakespeare’s seven ages of man to propose that each person’s life imitates the accumulating history of the human species. Shepheard’s version of the history of humans is a technological one, in which machines become sculpture and sculpture becomes architecture. For Shepheard, our machines do not separate us from nature. Rather, our technology is our nature, and we cannot but be in harmony with nature. The change that we have wrought in the world, he says, is a wonderful and powerful thing.”
Publisher MIT Press, 2003
ISBN 0262692856, 9780262692854
296 pages
Keywords and phrases
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PDF (updated on 2013-7-29)
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