Rendering Nature

We exist at a moment during which the entangled challenges facing the human and natural worlds confront us at every turn, whether at the most basic level of survival—health, sustenance, shelter—or in relation to our comfort-driven desires. As demand for resources both necessary and unnecessary increases, understanding how nature and culture are interconnected matters more than ever. Bridging the fields of environmental history and American studies, Rendering Nature examines the surprising interconnections between nature and culture in distinct places, times, and contexts over the course of American history. Divided into four themes—animals, bodies, places, and politics—the essays span a diverse array of locations and periods: from antebellum slave society to atomic testing sites, from gorillas in Central Africa to river runners in the Grand Canyon, from white sun-tanning enthusiasts to Japanese American incarcerees, from taxidermists at the 1893 World's Fair to tents on Wall Street in 2011. Together they offer new perspectives and conceptual tools that can help us better understand the historical realities and current paradoxes of our environmental predicament. Contributors: Thomas G. Andrews, Connie Y. Chiang, Catherine Cocks, Annie Gilbert Coleman, Finis Dunaway, John Herron, Andrew Kirk, Frieda Knobloch, Susan A. Miller, Brett Mizelle, Marguerite S. Shaffer, Phoebe S. K. Young.

Mediating Nature considers how technology acts as a mediating device in the construction and circulation of images that inform how we see and know nature. Scholarship in environmental communication has focused almost exclusively on verbal rather than visual rhetoric, and this book engages ecocritical and ecocompositional inquiry to shift focus onto the making of images. Contributors to this dynamic collection focus their efforts on the intersections of digital media and environmental/ecological thinking. Part of the book’s larger argument is that analysis of mediations of nature must develop more critical tools of analysis toward the very mediating technologies that produce such media. That is, to truly understand mediations of nature, one needs to understand the creation and production of those mediations, right down to the algorithms, circuit boards, and power sources that drive mediating technologies. Ultimately, Mediating Nature contends that ecological literacy and environmental politics are inseparable from digital literacies and visual rhetorics. The book will be of interest to scholars and students working in the fields of Ecocriticism, Ecocomposition, Media Ecology, Visual Rehtoric, and Digital Literacy Studies.

Arthur L. Guptill's classic Rendering in Pen and Ink has long been regarded as the most comprehensive book ever published on the subject of ink drawing. This is a book designed to delight and instruct anyone who draws with pen and ink, from the professional artist to the amateur and hobbyist. It is of particular interest to architects, interior designers, landscape architects, industrial designers, illustrators, and renderers. Contents include a review of materials and tools of rendering; handling the pen and building tones; value studies; kinds of outline and their uses; drawing objects in light and shade; handling groups of objects; basic principles of composition; using photographs, study of the work of well-known artists; on-the-spot sketching; representing trees and other landscape features; drawing architectural details; methods of architectural rendering; examination of outstanding examples of architectural rendering; solving perspective and other rendering problems; handling interiors and their accessories; and finally, special methods of working with pen including its use in combination with other media. The book is profusely illustrated with over 300 drawings that include the work of famous illustrators and renderers of architectural subjects such as Rockwell Kent, Charles Dana Gibson, James Montgomery Flagg, Willy Pogany, Reginald Birch, Harry Clarke, Edward Penfield, Joseph Clement Coll, F.L. Griggs, Samuel V. Chamberlain, Louis C. Rosenberg, John Floyd Yewell, Chester B. Price, Robert Lockwood, Ernest C. Peixotto, Harry C. Wilkinson, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, and Birch Burdette Long. Best of all, Arthur Guptill enriches the text with drawings of his own.

What are living bodies made of? Protein modelers tell us that our cells are composed of millions of proteins, intricately folded molecular structures on the scale of nanoparticles. Proteins twist and wriggle as they carry out the activities that keep cells alive. Figuring out how to make these unruly substances visible, tangible, and workable is a challenging task, one that is not readily automated, even by the fastest computers. Natasha Myers explores what protein modelers must do to render three-dimensional, atomic-resolution models of these lively materials. Rendering Life Molecular shows that protein models are not just informed by scientific data: model building entangles a modeler’s entire sensorium, and modelers must learn to feel their way through the data in order to interpret molecular forms. Myers takes us into protein modeling laboratories and classrooms, tracking how gesture, affect, imagination, and intuition shape practices of objectivity. Asking, ‘What is life becoming in modelers' hands?’ she tunes into the ways they animate molecules through their moving bodies and other media. In the process she amplifies an otherwise muted liveliness inflecting mechanistic accounts of the stuff of life.