Invisible Terrain

In his debut collection, Some Trees (1956), the American poet John Ashbery poses a question that resonates across his oeuvre and much of modern art: 'How could he explain to them his prayer / that nature, not art, might usurp the canvas?' When Ashbery asks this strange question, he joins a host of transatlantic avant-gardists—from the Dadaists to the 1960s neo-avant-gardists and beyond—who have dreamed of turning art into nature, of creating art that would be 'valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape—not its picture—is aesthetically valid' (Clement Greenberg, 1939). Invisible Terrain reads Ashbery as a bold intermediary between avant-garde anti-mimeticism and the long western nature poetic tradition. In chronicling Ashbery's articulation of 'a completely new kind of realism' and his engagement with figures ranging from Wordsworth to Warhol, the book presents a broader case study of nature's dramatic transformation into a resolutely unnatural aesthetic resource in 20th-century art and literature. The story begins in the late 1940s with the Abstract Expressionist valorization of process, surface, and immediacy—summed up by Jackson Pollock's famous quip, 'I am Nature'—that so influenced the early New York School poets. It ends with 'Breezeway,' a poem about Hurricane Sandy. Along the way, the project documents Ashbery's strategies for literalizing the 'stream of consciousness' metaphor, his negotiation of pastoral and politics during the Vietnam War, and his investment in 'bad' nature poetry.

Invisible Digital helps us makes sense of something we cannot see by presenting an innovative approach to digital images and digital culture. At its heart is a novel method for exploring software used in the creation of moving images as markers of converging cultural, organizational and technological influences. The three main case studies of Invisible Digital are the animated feature Moana (2016) and the computer games No Man's Sky (2016) and Everything (2017). All three were created using procedural techniques: simulation software for Moana, and procedural content generation for No Man's Sky and Everything. Production culture disclosures associated with procedural techniques often emphasize the influences of automated systems and their algorithms, making them ideal for a study that interrogates digital processes. The approach of Invisible Digital is informed by relational theories and the concept of entanglement based on materialist perspectives, combined with insights from work that more explicitly interrogates algorithms and algorithmic culture. Aylish Wood employs the notion of assemblages to introduce the concept of material-cultural narratives. Using this conceptual framework, she draws out material-cultural narratives for each case study to demonstrate what they reveal about software and digital culture. These analyses of software provide a widely applicable method through which moving image studies can contribute more fully to the wider and growing debates about algorithmic culture.

With the invention of telecommunications technologies in the late nineteenth century, the radio-electric spectrum became a tool for rethinking the world in which we live. The emission of radio waves did away with physical distances, crossing borders and cultures and acting as a powerful catalyst for trade. Moreover, the radio spectrum is the invisible infrastructure on which our information and communication technologies have been built. The history of its scientific discovery and how it was gradually colonized by the media, the military complex, and activists and hackers is one of the most fascinating stories of the twentieth century. The future uses of the radio-electric spectrum in the twenty-first century and its new potential are being decided now, with the end of analogue TV broadcasting worldwide marking the most important transformation of uses in the radio-electric space in decades. This catalog sets out to examine these issues and shed a little light on the most intriguing stories about the radio-electric spectrum.

Air traffic controllers need advanced information and automated systems to provide a safe environment for everyone traveling by plane. One of the primary challenges in developing training for automated systems is to determine how much a trainee will need to know about the underlying technologies to use automation safely and efficiently. To ensure safety and success, task analysis techniques should be used as the basis of the design for training in automated systems in the aviation and aerospace industries. Automated Systems in the Aviation and Aerospace Industries is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the application of underlying technologies used to enforce automation safety and efficiency. While highlighting topics such as expert systems, text mining, and human-machine interface, this publication explores the concept of constructing navigation algorithms, based on the use of video information and the methods of the estimation of the availability and accuracy parameters of satellite navigation. This book is ideal for aviation professionals, researchers, and managers seeking current research on information technology used to reduce the risk involved in aviation.

The books that comprise the 'Casebooks in Criticism' series offer edited in-depth readings and critical notes and studies on the most important classic novels. This volume explores Ellison's 'Invisible Man'.

An account of how young people in Ghana's capital city adopt and adapt digital technology in the margins of the global economy. The urban youth frequenting the Internet cafés of Accra, Ghana, who are decidedly not members of their country's elite, use the Internet largely as a way to orchestrate encounters across distance and amass foreign ties—activities once limited to the wealthy, university-educated classes. The Internet, accessed on second-hand computers (castoffs from the United States and Europe), has become for these youths a means of enacting a more cosmopolitan self. In Invisible Users, Jenna Burrell offers a richly observed account of how these Internet enthusiasts have adopted, and adapted to their own priorities, a technological system that was not designed with them in mind. Burrell describes the material space of the urban Internet café and the virtual space of push and pull between young Ghanaians and the foreigners they encounter online; the region's famous 419 scam strategies and the rumors of “big gains” that fuel them; the influential role of churches and theories about how the supernatural operates through the network; and development rhetoric about digital technologies and the future viability of African Internet cafés in the region. Burrell, integrating concepts from science and technology studies and African studies with empirical findings from her own field work in Ghana, captures the interpretive flexibility of technology by users in the margins but also highlights how their invisibility puts limits on their full inclusion into a global network society.

In spite of the many historical studies of Irish Protestant migration to America in the eighteenth century, there is a noted lack of study in the transatlantic migration of Irish Protestants in the nineteenth century. The main hindrance in rectifying this gap has been finding a method with which to approach a very difficult historiographical problem. The Invisible Irish endeavours to fill this blank spot in the historical record. Rankin Sherling imaginatively uses the various bits of available data to sketch the first outline of the shape of Irish Presbyterian migration to America in the nineteenth century. Using the migration of Irish Presbyterian ministers as "tracers" of a larger migration, Sherling demonstrates that eighteenth-century migration of Protestants reveals much about the completely unknown nineteenth-century migration. An original and creative blueprint of Irish Presbyterian migration in the nineteenth century, The Invisible Irish calls into question many of the assumptions that the history of Irish migration to America is built upon.

Min Chen, Arie E. Kaufman and Roni Yage/ Volume graphics is concerned with graphics scenes defined in volume data types, where a model is specified by a mass of points instead of a collection of surfaces. The underlying mathematical definition of such a model is a set of scalar fields, which define the geometrical and physical properties of every point in three dimensional space. As true 3D representations, volume data types possess more descriptive power than surface data types, and are morphologically closer to many high-level modelling schemes in traditional surface graphics such as parametric surfaces, implicit surfaces and volume sweeping. The past decade has witnessed significant advances in volume visualisation, driven mainly by applications such as medical imaging and scientific computation. The work in this field has produced a number of volume rendering methods that enable 3D information in a volumetric dataset to be selectively rendered into 2D images. With modern computer hardware, such a process can easily be performed on an ordinary workstation. More importantly, volume-based rendering offers a consistent solution to the primary deficiencies of the traditional surface-based rendering, which include its inability to encapsulate the internal description of a model, and the difficulties in rendering amorphous phenomena. The emergence of volume-based techniques has not only broadened the extent of graphics applications, but also brought computer graphics closer to other scientific and engineering disciplines, including image processing, computer vision, finite element analysis and rapid prototyping.