Art Technology And Nature

Since 1900, the connections between art and technology with nature have become increasingly inextricable. Through a selection of innovative readings by international scholars, this book presents the first investigation of the intersections between art, technology and nature in post-medieval times. Transdisciplinary in approach, this volume?s 14 essays explore art, technology and nature?s shifting constellations that are discernible at the micro level and as part of a larger chronological pattern. Included are subjects ranging from Renaissance wooden dolls, science in the Italian art academies, and artisanal epistemologies in the followers of Leonardo, to Surrealism and its precursors in Mannerist grotesques and the Wunderkammer, eighteenth-century plant printing, the climate and its artistic presentations from Constable to Olafur Eliasson, and the hermeneutics of bioart. In their comprehensive introduction, editors Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam and Jacob Wamberg trace the Kantian heritage of radically separating art and technology, and inserting both at a distance to nature, suggesting this was a transient chapter in history. Thus, they argue, the present renegotiation between art, technology and nature is reminiscent of the ancient and medieval periods, in which art and technology were categorized as aspects of a common area of cultivated products and their methods (the Latin ars, the Greek techne), an area moreover supposed to imitate the creative forces of nature.

An entertaining, instructive, diverse, and unusual book, Light and Dark: An Exploration in Science, Nature, Art and Technology encompasses a wide range of topics not normally found in one book. With more than 100 diagrams, graphs, and figures, the subjects discussed include the history of artificial lighting, eclipse cycles, light-sensitive eyeglasses, rainbows, art, bioluminescence, the clock setting at the South Pole, zebra stripe patterns, lighthouses, color perception, the harvest moon, and how information and speech can be conveyed by light from the sun or a laser. The book encourages readers to take a more careful look at many familiar phenomena, such as the variations in the duration of twilight through the year and the ability of human vision to misinterpret patterns of lines under certain conditions. It describes the anatomical peculiarities of four-eyed fish and explains how the Jewish calendar contrives to follow both solar and lunar cycles. It also presents the reasons why tortoise shell cats are almost always female. Readers are informed where they can see 19th century military equipment that could convey messages rapidly over vast differences.

These essays - written by specialists of different periods and various disciplines - reveal that the division between nature and art has been continually challenged and reassesed in Western thought. Nature and art, the essays suggest, are mutually constructed, defining and redifining themselves.

While never losing sight of the rational, cultured mind, Jung speaks for the natural mind, source of the evolutionary experience and accumulated wisdom of our species. Through his own example, Jung shows how healing our own living connection with Nature contributes to the whole.

This book returns geometry to its natural habitats: the arts, nature and technology. Throughout the book, geometry comes alive as a tool to unlock the understanding of our world. Assuming only familiarity with high school mathematics, the book invites the reader to discover geometry through examples from biology, astronomy, architecture, design, photography, drawing, engineering and more. Lavishly illustrated with over 1200 figures, all of the geometric results are carefully derived from scratch, with topics from differential, projective and non-Euclidean geometry, as well as kinematics, introduced as the need arises. The mathematical results contained in the book range from very basic facts to recent results, and mathematical proofs are included although not necessary for comprehension. With its wide range of geometric applications, this self-contained volume demonstrates the ubiquity of geometry in our world, and may serve as a source of inspiration for architects, artists, designers, engineers, and natural scientists. This new edition has been completely revised and updated, with new topics and many new illustrations.

The Nature of Technology will change the way you think about this fundamental subject forever. W. Brian Arthur's many years of thinking and writing about technology have culminated in a unique understanding of his subject. Here he examines the nature of technology itself: what is it and how does it evolve? Giving rare insights into the evolution of specific technologies and a new framework for thinking about others, every sentence points to some further truth and fascination. At a time when we are ever more reliant on technological solutions for the world's problems, it is extraordinary how little we actually understand the processes that lead to innovation and invention. Until now. This will be a landmark book that will define its subject, and inspire people to think about technology in depth for the very first time.

Philosophers, anthropologists, political thinkers and artists take a closer look at what the idea of beauty can mean to their disciplines, in an effort to redefine what beauty is and what it means to the design practice and art. The book focuses on the question of how the age-old notion of beauty can regain an importance appropriate to the 21st century.

This provocative and timely book argues that contemporary ideas and practices concerning nature and technology remain closely bound up with religious ways of thinking and acting. Using examples from North America, Europe and elsewhere, it reinterprets a range of 'secular' phenomena in terms of their conditioning by a complex series of transformations of the sacred in Western history. The contemporary practices of environmental politics, technological risk behaviour, alternative medicine, vegetarianism and ethical consumption take on new significance as sites of struggle between different sacral orderings. Nature, Technology and the Sacred introduces a radically new direction for today's critical discourse concerning nature and technology – one that reinstates it as a moment within the ongoing religious history of the West.