Synthetic Aesthetics

Author : Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 026201999X
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Synthetic Aesthetics written by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-02-28 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As synthetic biology transforms living matter into a medium for making, what is the role of design and its associated values?

Author : Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262321610
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Synthetic Aesthetics written by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-02-28 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As synthetic biology transforms living matter into a medium for making, what is the role of design and its associated values? Synthetic biology manipulates the stuff of life. For synthetic biologists, living matter is programmable material. In search of carbon-neutral fuels, sustainable manufacturing techniques, and innovative drugs, these researchers aim to redesign existing organisms and even construct completely novel biological entities. Some synthetic biologists see themselves as designers, inventing new products and applications. But if biology is viewed as a malleable, engineerable, designable medium, what is the role of design and how will its values apply? In this book, synthetic biologists, artists, designers, and social scientists investigate synthetic biology and design. After chapters that introduce the science and set the terms of the discussion, the book follows six boundary-crossing collaborations between artists and designers and synthetic biologists from around the world, helping us understand what it might mean to 'design nature.' These collaborations have resulted in biological computers that calculate form; speculative packaging that builds its own contents; algae that feeds on circuit boards; and a sampling of human cheeses. They raise intriguing questions about the scientific process, the delegation of creativity, our relationship to designed matter, and, the importance of critical engagement. Should these projects be considered art, design, synthetic biology, or something else altogether? Synthetic biology is driven by its potential; some of these projects are fictions, beyond the current capabilities of the technology. Yet even as fictions, they help illuminate, question, and even shape the future of the field.

Author : Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262534010
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Synthetic Aesthetics written by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-01-06 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As synthetic biology transforms living matter into a medium for making, what is the role of design and its associated values? Synthetic biology manipulates the stuff of life. For synthetic biologists, living matter is programmable material. In search of carbon-neutral fuels, sustainable manufacturing techniques, and innovative drugs, these researchers aim to redesign existing organisms and even construct completely novel biological entities. Some synthetic biologists see themselves as designers, inventing new products and applications. But if biology is viewed as a malleable, engineerable, designable medium, what is the role of design and how will its values apply? In this book, synthetic biologists, artists, designers, and social scientists investigate synthetic biology and design. After chapters that introduce the science and set the terms of the discussion, the book follows six boundary-crossing collaborations between artists and designers and synthetic biologists from around the world, helping us understand what it might mean to 'design nature.' These collaborations have resulted in biological computers that calculate form; speculative packaging that builds its own contents; algae that feeds on circuit boards; and a sampling of human cheeses. They raise intriguing questions about the scientific process, the delegation of creativity, our relationship to designed matter, and, the importance of critical engagement. Should these projects be considered art, design, synthetic biology, or something else altogether? Synthetic biology is driven by its potential; some of these projects are fictions, beyond the current capabilities of the technology. Yet even as fictions, they help illuminate, question, and even shape the future of the field.

Author : Carolyn L. Kane
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022600287X
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Chromatic Algorithms written by Carolyn L. Kane and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-08-13 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These days, we take for granted that our computer screens—and even our phones—will show us images in vibrant full color. Digital color is a fundamental part of how we use our devices, but we never give a thought to how it is produced or how it came about. Chromatic Algorithms reveals the fascinating history behind digital color, tracing it from the work of a few brilliant computer scientists and experimentally minded artists in the late 1960s and early ‘70s through to its appearance in commercial software in the early 1990s. Mixing philosophy of technology, aesthetics, and media analysis, Carolyn Kane shows how revolutionary the earliest computer-generated colors were—built with the massive postwar number-crunching machines, these first examples of “computer art” were so fantastic that artists and computer scientists regarded them as psychedelic, even revolutionary, harbingers of a better future for humans and machines. But, Kane shows, the explosive growth of personal computing and its accompanying need for off-the-shelf software led to standardization and the gradual closing of the experimental field in which computer artists had thrived. Even so, the gap between the bright, bold presence of color onscreen and the increasing abstraction of its underlying code continues to lure artists and designers from a wide range of fields, and Kane draws on their work to pose fascinating questions about the relationships among art, code, science, and media in the twenty-first century.

Author : Esther Leslie
Publisher : Reaktion Books
ISBN 13 : 1861895542
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Synthetic Worlds written by Esther Leslie and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2006-01-16 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This revealing study considers the remarkable alliance between chemistry and art from the late eighteenth century to the period immediately following the Second World War. Synthetic Worlds offers fascinating new insights into the place of the material object and the significance of the natural, the organic, and the inorganic in Western aesthetics. Esther Leslie considers how radical innovations in chemistry confounded earlier alchemical and Romantic philosophies of science and nature while profoundly influencing the theories that developed in their wake. She also explores how advances in chemical engineering provided visual artists with new colors, surfaces, coatings, and textures, thus dramatically recasting the way painters approached their work. Ranging from Goethe to Hegel, Blake to the Bauhaus, Synthetic Worlds ultimately considers the astonishing affinities between chemistry and aesthetics more generally. As in science, progress in the arts is always assured, because the impulse to discover is as immutable and timeless as the drive to create.

Author : Sophia Roosth
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022644046X
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Synthetic written by Sophia Roosth and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-03 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the final years of the twentieth century, emigres from mechanical and electrical engineering and computer science resolved that if the aim of biology was to understand life, then making life would yield better theories than experimentation. Sophia Roosth, a cultural anthropologist, takes us into the world of these self-named synthetic biologists who, she shows, advocate not experiment but manufacture, not reduction but construction, not analysis but synthesis. Roosth reveals how synthetic biologists make new living things in order to understand better how life works. What we see through her careful questioning is that the biological features, theories, and limits they fasten upon are determined circularly by their own experimental tactics. This is a story of broad interest, because the active, interested making of the synthetic biologists is endemic to the sciences of our time."

Author : Julia Friedman
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 0810126176
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism written by Julia Friedman and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism sheds light on the oeuvre of Alexei Remizov (1877-1957), a great modernist eccentric who has remained largely unknown to Western audiences. Although his original prose garnered him early acclaim and has since entered the Russian literary canon, Remizov's artistic capacity was fully realized only after his experimentation with words and images culminated in a writing process that relies as much on drawing as it does on language. --

Author : Sianne Ngai
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780674088122
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Our Aesthetic Categories written by Sianne Ngai and published by . This book was released on 2015-10-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture, dominating the look of its art and commodities as well as our ways of speaking about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this study Ngai offers an aesthetic theory for the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism.

Author : Paul A. Fishwick
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262562375
Total Pages : 477 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Aesthetic Computing written by Paul A. Fishwick and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The application of the theory and practice of art to computer science: how aesthetics and art can play a role in computing disciplines.

Author : John Sharp
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262029073
Total Pages : 157 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Works of Game written by John Sharp and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-03-06 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the relationship between games and art that examines the ways that both gamemakers and artists create game-based artworks. Games and art have intersected at least since the early twentieth century, as can be seen in the Surrealists' use of Exquisite Corpse and other games, Duchamp's obsession with Chess, and Fluxus event scores and boxes—to name just a few examples. Over the past fifteen years, the synthesis of art and games has clouded for both artists and gamemakers. Contemporary art has drawn on the tool set of videogames, but has not considered them a cultural form with its own conceptual, formal, and experiential affordances. For their part, game developers and players focus on the innate properties of games and the experiences they provide, giving little attention to what it means to create and evaluate fine art. In Works of Game, John Sharp bridges this gap, offering a formal aesthetics of games that encompasses the commonalities and the differences between games and art. Sharp describes three communities of practice and offers case studies for each. “Game Art,” which includes such artists as Julian Oliver, Cory Arcangel, and JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) treats videogames as a form of popular culture from which can be borrowed subject matter, tools, and processes. “Artgames,” created by gamemakers including Jason Rohrer, Brenda Romero, and Jonathan Blow, explore territory usually occupied by poetry, painting, literature, or film. Finally, “Artists' Games”—with artists including Blast Theory, Mary Flanagan, and the collaboration of Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman—represents a more synthetic conception of games as an artistic medium. The work of these gamemakers, Sharp suggests, shows that it is possible to create game-based artworks that satisfy the aesthetic and critical values of both the contemporary art and game communities.