Lynn Thorndike: A History of Magic and Experimental Science, Vols. 1-2 (1923)

Lynn Thorndike’s History of Magic and Experimental Science, in 8 volumes, is the premier reference work for the history of magic in the West. The first 2 volumes cover late antiquity through the 13th century. These are strong volumes, copiously researched and well-indexed, and a major source for work on the period.

The aim of the complette set is to treat the history of magic and experimental science and their relations to Christian thought down to the Seventeenth Century. The first two volumes deal with the first thirteen centuries of our era, with special emphasis upon the 12th and 13th centuries. Magic is understood under the broadest sense of the work, as including all occult arts and sciences, superstitions and folklore. The author believes that magic and experimental science have been connected in their development, and within these pages will attempt to prove the same.

Publisher Columbia University Press, 1923
ISBN 0231087942, 9780231087940 (Vol 1); 0231087950, 9780231087957 (Vol 2)
888 pages (Vol 1), 1054 pages (Vol 2)

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Jacques Khalip, Robert Mitchell (eds.): Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media (2011)

“It has become a commonplace that “images” were central to the twentieth century and that their role will be even more powerful in the twenty-first. But what is an image and what can an image be? Releasing the Image understands images as something beyond mere representations of things. Releasing images from that function, it shows them to be self-referential and self-generative, and in this way capable of producing forms of engagement beyond spectatorship and subjectivity. This understanding of images owes much to phenomenology—the work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty—and to Gilles Deleuze’s post-phenomenological work. The essays included here cover historical periods from the Romantic era to the present and address a range of topics, from Cézanne’s painting, to images in poetry, to contemporary audiovisual art. They reveal the aesthetic, ethical, and political stakes of the project of releasing images and provoke new ways of engaging with embodiment, agency, history, and technology.”

With contributions by Peter Geimer, Jean-Luc Marion, Giorgio Agamben, Mark B.N. Hansen, Vivian Sobchack, Timothy Murray, Cesare Casarino, Kenneth Surin, Forest Pyle, Kevin McLaughlin, Bernard Stiegler

Publisher Stanford University Press, 2011
ISBN 0804761388, 9780804761383
304 pages

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Grover, Debatty, Evans, Garcia, Thumb: New Art/Science Affinites (2011)

The Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University and the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry have co-published “New Art/Science Affinities,” a 190-page book on contemporary artists that was written and designed in one week by four authors (Andrea Grover, Régine Debatty, Claire Evans and Pablo Garcia) and two designers (Luke Bulman and Jessica Young of Thumb).

“New Art/Science Affinities,” which focuses on artists working at the intersection of art, science and technology, was produced by a collaborative authoring process known as a “book sprint.” Derived from “code sprinting,” a method in which software developers gather in a single room to work intensely on an open source project for a certain period of time, the term book sprint describes the quick, collective writing of a topical book.

The book includes meditations, interviews, diagrams, letters and manifestos on maker culture, hacking, artist research, distributed creativity, and technological and speculative design. Chapters include Program Art or Be Programmed, Subvert! Citizen Science, Artists in White Coats and Latex Gloves, The Maker Moment and The Overview Effect.

Sixty international artists and art collaboratives are featured, including Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Atelier Van Lieshout, Brandon Ballengée, Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.), Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, The Institute for Figuring, Aaron Koblin, Machine Project, Openframeworks, C.E.B. Reas, Philip Ross, Tomás Saraceno, SymbioticA, Jer Thorp, and Marius Watz.

The authors collectively wrote and designed the book during seven, 10-14 hour-days in February 2011 at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. During their sessions they held conversations with CMU faculty, staff and students from the STUDIO, Miller Gallery, College of Fine Arts, Robotics Institute, Machine Learning Department and BXA Intercollege Degree Program.

“The book sprint method was adopted in order to understand this very moment in art, science and technology hybrid practices, and to mirror the ways Internet culture and networked communication have accelerated creative collaborations, expanded methodologies, and given artists greater agency to work fluidly across disciplines,” says lead author Andrea Grover.

The publication is part of Grover’s Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Research Fellowship at CMU’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and Miller Gallery. “Intimate Science,” an exhibition that will be the product of Grover’s research, will take place in early 2012 at the Miller Gallery.

Published by Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University + CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, October 2011
ISBN 0977205347
190 pages
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License

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