Beyond The Image Machine

Beyond the Image Machine is an eloquent and stimulating argument for an alternative history of scientific and technological imaging systems. Drawing on a range of hitherto and marginalised examples from the world of visual representation and the work of key theorists and thinkers, such as Latour, de Certeau, McLuhan and Barthes, David Tomas offers a disarticulated and deviant view of the relationship between archaic and new representations, imaging technologies and media induced experience. Rejecting the possibility of absolute forms of knowledge, Tomas shows how new media technologies have changed the nature of established disciplines. The book develops Tomas's own theory of transcultural space and makes several original contributions to current debates on the culture of advanced technology.

This scholarly anthology presents a new framework for understanding early cinema through its usage outside the realm of entertainment. From its earliest origins until the beginning of the twentieth century, cinema provided widespread access to remote parts of the globe and immediate reports on important events. Reaching beyond the nickelodeon theatres, cinema became part of numerous institutions, from churches and schools to department stores and charitable organizations. Then, in 1915, the Supreme Court declared moviemaking a “busines, pure and simple,” entrenching the film industry’s role as a producer of “harmless entertainment.” In Beyond the Screen, contributors shed light on how pre-1915 cinema defined itself through institutional interconnections and publics interested in science, education, religious uplift, labor organizing, and more.

'Image Machine' examines the role of the photograph in Andy Warhol's art, its relationship to his portrait painting and his late paintings and prints, and his rigorous documentation of his social life.

When a community experiences a fracture in its communal life, what tools can be used to foster reconciliation? How can right relationship be restored when there is conflict in the Body of Christ? In Beyond Accompaniment, William Nordenbrock proposes the use of a process that is based in the theory of Appreciative Inquiry as a ministerial method to guide a community from brokenness to communion. His practical application of this process in his work with St. Agatha Catholic Church in Chicago? A community whose pastor had been accused and convicted of sexually abusing minors in the parish? Will be beneficial for communities experiencing conflict of any kind. Nordenbrock helps us focus on the positive aspects of our communities in order to discover that our redemption and reconciliation with God, won for us by Christ, is inseparable from the reconciliation and communion that Christians are to live with one another." William A. Nordenbrock, CPPS, is an ordained member of the Missionaries of the Precious Blood. He is on staff at the Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation in Chicago (pbmr.org). Nordenbrock has served his congregation in a number of administrative roles and is currently a member of their General Council. "

The Paper Time Machine is a book that will change the way you think about the past.It contains 130 historical black-and-white photographs, reconstructed in colour and introduced by Wolfgang Wild – creator and curator of the Retronaut website. The site has become a global phenomenon, collecting images that collapse the distance between the past and present and tear a hole in our map of time. The Paper Time Machine goes even further. Early photographic technology lacked a crucial ingredient – colour. As early as the invention of the medium, skilled artisans applied colour to photographs by hand, attempting to convey the vibrancy and immediacy of life in vivid detail. In most cases this was crude and unconvincing. Until now. The time-bending images in The Paper Time Machine have been painstakingly restored and rendered in full and accurate colour by Jordan Lloyd of Dynamichrome, a company that has taken the craft of colour reconstruction to a new level. Each element of every photograph has been researched and colour-checked for historical authenticity. Behold American child labourers from the early twentieth century, alongside the construction of the Statue of Liberty. Marvel at crisp photographs from the Crimean War in 1855, balanced with never-before-seen pictures from the Walt Disney archive. As the layers of colour build up, the effect is disorientingly real and the decades and centuries fall away. It is as though we are standing at the original photographer’s elbow. This is a landmark photographic book – a collection of historical ‘remixes’ that exist alongside the original photographs but draw out qualities, textures and details that have hitherto remained hidden. Let The Paper Time Machine transport you. It is as close to time travel as we are ever likely to get.

Machine vision systems offer great potential in a large number of areas of manufacturing industry and are used principally for Automated Visual Inspection and Robot Vision. This publication presents the state of the art in image processing. It discusses techniques which have been developed for designing machines for use in industrial inspection and robot control, putting the emphasis on software and algorithms. A comprehensive set of image processing subroutines, which together form the basic vocabulary for the versatile image processing language IIPL, is presented. This language has proved to be extremely effective, working as a design tool, in solving numerous practical inspection problems. The merging of this language with Prolog provides an even more powerful facility which retains the benefits of human and machine intelligence. The authors bring together the practical experience and the picture material from a leading industrial research laboratory and the mathematical foundations necessary to understand and apply concepts in image processing. Interactive Image Processing is a self-contained reference book that can also be used in graduate level courses in electrical engineering, computer science and physics.

This book is an edited collection of chapters based on the papers presented at the conference “Beyond AI: Artificial Dreams” held in Pilsen in November 2012. The aim of the conference was to question deep-rooted ideas of artificial intelligence and cast critical reflection on methods standing at its foundations. Artificial Dreams epitomize our controversial quest for non-biological intelligence and therefore the contributors of this book tried to fully exploit such a controversy in their respective chapters, which resulted in an interdisciplinary dialogue between experts from engineering, natural sciences and humanities. While pursuing the Artificial Dreams, it has become clear that it is still more and more difficult to draw a clear divide between human and machine. And therefore this book tries to portrait such an image of what lies beyond artificial intelligence: we can see the disappearing human-machine divide, a very important phenomenon of nowadays technological society, the phenomenon which is often uncritically praised, or hypocritically condemned. And so this phenomenon found its place in the subtitle of the whole volume as well as in the title of the chapter of Kevin Warwick, one of the keynote speakers at “Beyond AI: Artificial Dreams”.

Francois Albera is professor of film and cinema studies at UniversitT de Lausanne in Switzerland. Maria Tortajada is professor in the Department of History and Aesthetics of Film at the same university. --Book Jacket.