Facts Artefacts

The scholarly search on the art of the object is of enduring interest and enjoys a new renaissance in the last few years. This book mainly explores the art and craft of Islamic artefacts and presents to the reader a diverse range of approaches. Despite this variety, in which also artefacts of the pre-Islamic, period as well as 'orientalized' European artefacts of the modern era are included, there is an overarching theme - the linking of the interpretation of objects and their specific aesthetics to textual sources and the aim of setting them in historical and artistic context. In this impressive collection honouring the German scholar of Islamic art Jens Kroger on his 65th birthday, Avinoam Shalem and Annette Hagedorn bring together contributions from a highly distinguished group of scholars of Asiatic, Sasanian, Islamic as well as European art history. Unpublished artefacts and new interpretations are presented in this book.

In this impressive collection honouring the German scholar of Islamic art Jens Kröger on his 65th birthday, Avinoam Shalem and Annette Hagedorn bring together twenty-five contributions from a highly distinguished group of experts on Islamic art and specialists of central and south Asian art. Unpublished artefacts and new interpretations are presented in this book.

The perfect miscellany for every art lover - an essential and engaging collection of facts, figures, and findings about art, artists, and the art world, past and present This extraordinary compendium of compelling facts, figures, and findings gathers and distils obscure and fascinating information about art, artists, and the art world. Fun, surprising, and compelling, in this covetable book you will learn: - which artist's work is stolen most often (Picasso) - names of artists' pets: Fat Fat & Cous-Cous (Louise Nevelson's cats), Giotto and Goya (John Baldessari's dogs) - artist couples (Nancy Rubins and Chris Burden; Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely; Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst) - things artists collect: prosthetic arms and legs (Sophie Calle), glass eyes (Hiroshi Sugimoto) - odd jobs and side hustles: telephone marketer (Tomma Abts), crop duster (James Turrell) - artists who were rejected from art school (Francisco Goya, Auguste Rodin) ... and hundreds of other miscellaneous details. Thoughtfully and thoroughly researched, this intriguing book offers refreshing and surprising perspectives on the world of art. The five page-turning chapters cover: - Artists - Art School - Art Studio - Art Museum - Art World

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the IFIP WG 8.2 Working Conference on Information Systems and Organizations, IS&O 2014, held in Auckland, New Zealand, in December 2014. The 14 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 28 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: IS/IT implementation and appropriation; ethnographic account of IS use; structures and networks; health care IS, social media; and IS design.

What is the value of fictions, metaphors, figures and scenarios in adjudication? This book develops three models to help answer that question: inquiry, artefacts and imagination. Legal language, it is argued, contains artefacts – forms that signal their own artifice and call upon us to do things with them. To imagine, in turn, is to enter a distinctive epistemic frame where we temporarily suspend certain epistemic norms and commitments and participate actively along a spectrum of affective, sensory and kinesic involvement. The book argues that artefacts and related processes of imagination are valuable insofar as they enable inquiry in adjudication, ie the social (interactive and collective) process of making insight into what values, vulnerabilities and interests might be at stake in a case and in similar cases in the future. Artefacts of Legal Inquiry is structured in two parts, with the first offering an account of the three models of inquiry, artefacts and imagination, and the second examining four case studies (fictions, metaphors, figures and scenarios). Drawing on a broad range of theoretical traditions – including philosophy of imagination and emotion, the theory and history of rhetoric, and the cognitive humanities – this book offers an interdisciplinary defence of the importance of artefactual language and imagination in adjudication.

This monograph provides a new framework for modelling goals and functions of control systems. It demonstrates how to use means-end concepts and various aspects of action to describe the relations between the structure, dispositions, functions, and goals of technical systems and with human action. The author developed this approach as part of his research on Multilevel Flow Modelling (MFM). He based the framework on concepts of action and means-end analysis drawing on existing theories from several areas of study, including philosophical logic, semiotics, and phenomenological approaches to social science. Here, he applies it to three modeling situations related to the interaction of technical artefacts and humans. One involves the relation between designer and artefact, another the relation between technical artefact and its user, and the third the relation between a natural object and its user. All three are relevant for modelling complex automated processes interacting with human operators. The book also discusses challenges when applying the foundations for modelling of technical artefacts. Overall, it provides a cross disciplinary integration of several fields of knowledge. These disciplines include intelligent process control, human machine interaction, and process and automation design. As a result, researchers and graduate students in computer science, engineering, and philosophy of technology will find it a valuable resource.

This book presents an attempt to understand the nature of technical artefacts and the way they come into being. Its primary focus is the kind of technical artefacts designed and produced by modern engineering. In spite of their pervasive influence on human thinking and doing, and therefore on the modern human condition, a philosophical analysis of technical artefacts and engineering design is lacking. Among the questions addressed are: How do technical artefacts fit into the furniture of the universe? In what sense are they different from objects from the natural world, or from the social world? What kind of activity is engineering design and what does it mean to say that technical artefacts are the embodiment of a design? Does it make sense to consider technical artefacts to be morally good or bad by themselves because of the way they influence human life? The book advances the thesis that technical artefacts, conceived of as physical constructions with a technical function, have a dual nature; they are hybrid objects combining physical and intentional features. It proposes a theory of technical functions and technical artefact kinds that does justice to this dual nature, analyses engineering design from the dual nature point of view, and argues that technical artefacts, because of their dual nature, have inherent moral significance.