Esther Leslie: Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (2005)

Synthetic Worlds considers the remarkable alliance between chemistry and art, taking us from the late eighteenth century to the period immediately following the Second World War. Esther Leslie offers fascinating new insights into the place of the material object and the significance of the natural, the organic, the inorganic and the synthesized in this poetics of science.

Through its dazzling innovations, which began in the nineteenth century, chemistry has granted new colours and surfaces, new substances, coatings and textures to the world. Often they are the result of accidents or the by-products of pollution. Chemistry has also invented simulants and surrogates for naturally occurring materials. Sometimes these developments confounded earlier alchemical and Romantic philosophies of science and nature, but, at other times, dynamic theories of chemical action combined with the emergent chemistry textbook orthodoxy. For example, the colour wheels of Goethe and Philipp Otto Runge, Hegelian theories of a spirit that inhabits dyes and ‘drives’ materials, and Romantic ideas of the weddings of substances influenced the experiments that boosted the successful German chemical industry after the 1840s. In turn, chemistry’s discoveries seeped back into philosophy and art.

Esther Leslie’s Synthetic Worlds considers this and other startling affinities between chemistry, industry, aesthetics and art. Themes include the impact of artificial imitations and synthetics, the location of value, the mutability of substance, chemical fragility and artistic technique, the poetics of the inorganic and pollution, Bauhaus-influenced modulation and patina in art practice, and nationalist narratives of chemical breakthrough.

Publisher Reaktion Books, 2005
Art, Industry and Industrial Studies series
ISBN 1861892489, 9781861892485
280 pages

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continent. journal, Issue 2.4 (2013)

continent. maps a topology of unstable confluences and ranges across new thinking, traversing interstices and alternate directions in culture, theory, politics and art.

continent. exists as a platform for thinking through media. text, image, video, sound and new forms of publishing online are presented as reflections on and challenges to contemporary conditions in politics, media studies, art, film and philosophical thought.

Contributors to this issue: Alexander R. Galloway, Peter Burleigh, Isaac Linder, Nico Jenkins, Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, A. Staley Groves, Eileen A. Joy, Bernhard Garnicnig, Paul Thomas and Tim Morton

Edited by Paul Boshears, Jamie Allen, Nico Jenkins
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
ISSN 2159-9920

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Sešit pro umění, teorii a příbuzné zóny (2007–) [Czech]

“Sešit pro umění, teorii a příbuzné zóny je periodikum zaměřující se na současné vizuální umění v širším kulturním a teoretickém kontextu. Cílem Sešitu je kultivovat domácí reflexi umění tištěním odborných textů z oblasti humanitních a společenských věd, které tematizují současnou situaci umění a živé kultury u nás i v zahraničí. Sešit z principu není metodologicky vymezen; rozhodujícími měřítky jsou kvalita, podnětnost a relevance pro reflexi současného vizuálního umění.”

Edited by Václav Magid
Editorial board: Claire Bishop, Claudia Joles, Tomáš Pospiszyl, Jiří Ševčík, Martin Škabraha
ISSN 1802-8918

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Issue 1-2 (2007, single PDF, texts by Patricie C. Phillips and Peter Bürger are missing)
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