Imaginaries On Matter Tools Materials Origins

Imaginaries on Matter – Tools, Materials, Origins, promotes an innovative architectural research agenda that connects historical-cultural written research with digitally led material explorations. The common thread is the notion of the material imagination, disclosed in the reverie, or material daydream, which challenges overly pragmatic or unreflective material choices within current architectural practice. In bonding our imagination directly with matter while also confronting new technologies, this book promotes strategies by which architects' and builders' future relations with materials can stay rooted within the deeper concerns of cultural meaning. Imaginaries on Matter includes interviews with Aulets Arquitectes, Alibi Studio, Ensamble Studio, Geometria, Helen & Hard, KieranTimberlake, Supermanoeuvre, and Vandkunsten, as well as a postscript by David Leatherbarrow. Edited by Thomas Bo Jensen, Carolina Dayer, Jonathan Foote

Information matters to us. Whether recorded, recoded, or unregistered, information co-shapes our present and our becoming. This book advances new views on information and surveillance practices. Starting with a methodology for studying the liveliness of information, Kaufmann provides four empirical examples of making information matter: association, conversion, secrecy, and speculation. In so doing, she presents an original and comprehensive argument about the materiality of information and invites us to investigate, and to reflect about what matters. This is a go-to text for scholars and professionals working in the fields of surveillance, data studies, and the digitization of specific societal sectors.

In November 2015, ADA brought together eight artists and writers in post-quake Otautahi Christchurch, for a ‘book sprint’, the collaborative writing of a book over the course of five days. The result, A Transitional Imaginary, juxtaposes and interweaves its authors’ perspectives on the effects of the devastating series of earthquakes that began in 2010. Guided by the notion of ‘the digital’ in its broadest sense, this book offers a multiple view of the transitional city, attuned to the technologies, networks and virtualities that have always ordered our world.

In The Anarchy of Black Religion, J. Kameron Carter examines the deeper philosophical, theological, and religious history that animates our times to advance a new approach to understanding religion. Drawing on the black radical tradition and black feminism, Carter explores the modern invention of religion as central to settler colonial racial technologies wherein antiblackness is a founding and guiding religious principle of the modern world. He therefore sets black religion apart from modern religion, even as it tries to include and enclose it. Carter calls this approach the black study of religion. Black religion emerges not as doctrinal, confessional, or denominational but as a set of poetic and artistic strategies for improvisatory living and gathering. Potentiating non-exclusionary belonging, black religion is anarchic, mystical, and experimental: it reveals alternative relationalities and visions of matter that can counter capitalism’s extractive, individualistic, and imperialist ideology. By enacting a black study of religion, Carter elucidates the violence of religion as the violence of modern life while also opening an alternate praxis of the sacred.

How does historical reality interrelate with fiction? And how much are readers themselves involved in the workings of fictional literature? With innovative interpretations of various well-known texts, Nourit Melcer-Padon introduces the use of literary masks and illustrates literature's engagement of its readers' ethical judgement. She promotes a new perception of literary theory and of connections between thinkers such as Iser, Castoriadis, Sartre, Jung and Neumann. The book offers a unique view on the role of the community in post-existentialist modern cultural reality by emphasizing the importance of ritual practices in literature as a cultural manifestation.

This companion provides a definitive and cutting-edge guide to the study of imaginary and virtual worlds across a range of media, including literature, television, film, and games. From the Star Trek universe, Thomas More’s classic Utopia, and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Arda, to elaborate, user-created game worlds like Minecraft, contributors present interdisciplinary perspectives on authorship, world structure/design, and narrative. The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds offers new approaches to imaginary worlds as an art form and cultural phenomenon, explorations of the technical and creative dimensions of world-building, and studies of specific worlds and worldbuilders.

This book comprehensively examines architecture, urban planning, and civic perception in three modern cities as they transform into national capitals through an entangled, transnational process that involves an imaginative geography based on embellished memories of classical Athens. Schinkel’s classicist architecture in Berlin, especially the principle of tectonics at its core, came to be adopted effectively at faraway cities in East Asia, merging with the notion of national polity as Imperial Japan sought to reinvent Tokyo and mutating into an inevitable reflection of modern civilization upon reaching colonial Seoul, all of which give reason to ruminate over the phantasmagoria of modernity.