The Aesthetics of Uncertainty

The Aesthetics of Uncertainty PDF Author: Janet Wolff
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231140967
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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The Aesthetics of Uncertainty

The Aesthetics of Uncertainty PDF Author: Janet Wolff
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231140967
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
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The Uncertain Art

The Uncertain Art PDF Author: Sherwin B. Nuland
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1588367231
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
“Life is short, and the Art so long; the occasion fleeting; experience fallacious; and judgment difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and the externals, cooperate.” –attributed to Hippocrates, c. 400 B.C.E. The award-winning author of How We Die and The Art of Aging, venerated physician Sherwin B. Nuland has now written his most thoughtful and engaging book. The Uncertain Art is a superb collection of essays about the vital mix of expertise, intuition, sound judgment, and pure chance that plays a part in a doctor’s practice and life. Drawing from history, the recent past, and his own life, Nuland weaves a tapestry of compelling stories in which doctors have had to make decisions in the face of uncertainty. Topics include the primitive (and sometimes illegal) procedures doctors once practiced with good intentions, such as grave robbing and prescribing cocaine as an anesthetic (which resulted in a physician becoming America’s first cocaine addict); the curious “cures” for irregularity touted by people from the ancient Egyptians to the cereal titan John Harvey Kellogg and bodybuilder Charles Atlas; and healers grappling with today’s complex moral and ethical quandaries, from cloning to gene therapy to the adoption of Eastern practices like acupuncture. Nuland also recounts his most dramatic experiences in a forty-year medical career: the time he was called out of the audience of a Broadway play to help a man having a heart attack (when no other doctor there would respond), and how he formed a profound friendship with an unforgettable–and doomed–heart patient. Behind these inspiring accounts always lie the mysteries of the human body and human nature, the manner in which the ill can will themselves back to health and the odd and essential interactions between a body’s own healing mechanisms and a doctor’s prescriptions. Riveting and wise, amusing and heartrending, The Uncertain Art is Sherwin Nuland’s best work, gems from a man who has spent his professional life acting in the face of ambiguity and sharing what he has learned.

Human Futures

Human Futures PDF Author: Andy Miah
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
The long-term future of humanity has become of particular concern to various governance bodies and scholarly institutions. This book combines scholarly essays, images, interviews, design products, artistic artefacts, and creative writing. It investigates the expectations and actualities of human future as they emerge within the social sphere.

In Praise of Nonsense

In Praise of Nonsense PDF Author: Ted Hiebert
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773587330
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
What is truth in the postmodern age? The artistic generation of the twentieth century has grown up immersed in the delirious imagination of postmodern thought, which insists upon the ultimate uncertainty of meaning and that there is no self-evident truth. In Praise of Nonsense explores the possibilities and parameters of a postmodern imagination freed from the philosophical responsibilities of fiction, fact, and replication of lived experience. Mobilizing an array of scholars and contemporary artists, this study examines postmodern thinking through the lenses of identity and visual culture. Speculative, critical, and always creative in its approach, In Praise of Nonsense focuses on theories of disappearance, irony, and nonsense, where the pleasures of the imaginary give rise to artistic inspiration. When truth is unhinged, so is falsity, and all artistic thinking is called into question. Ted Hiebert takes on the ambitious project of holding postmodernism accountable for its own conclusions while also considering how those conclusions might still be given philosophical and artistic form.

The Politics of Perception and the Aesthetics of Social Change

The Politics of Perception and the Aesthetics of Social Change PDF Author: Jason Miller
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231554095
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 125

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Book Description
In both politics and art in recent decades, there has been a dramatic shift in emphasis on representation of identity. Liberal ideals of universality and individuality have given way to a concern with the visibility and recognition of underrepresented groups. Modernist and postmodernist celebrations of disruption and subversion have been challenged by the view that representation is integral to social change. Despite this convergence, neither political nor aesthetic theory has given much attention to the increasingly central role of art in debates and struggles over cultural identity in the public sphere. Connecting Hegelian aesthetics with contemporary cultural politics, Jason Miller argues that both the aesthetic and political value of art are found in the reflexive self-awareness that artistic representation enables. The significance of art in modern life is that it shows us both the particular element in humanity as well as the human element in particularity. Just as Hegel asks us to acknowledge how different historical and cultural contexts produce radically different experiences of art, identity-based art calls on its audiences to situate themselves in relation to perspectives and experiences potentially quite remote—or even inaccessible—from their own. Miller offers a timely response to questions such as: How does contemporary art’s politics of perception contest liberal notions of deliberative politics? How does the cultural identity of the artist relate to the representations of cultural identity in their work? How do we understand and evaluate identity-based art aesthetically? Discussing a wide range of works of art and popular culture—from Antigone to Do the Right Thing and The Wire—this book develops a new conceptual framework for understanding the representation of cultural identity that affirms art’s capacity to effect social change.

The Uncertain Image

The Uncertain Image PDF Author: Ulrik Ekman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429787979
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
Citizens of networked societies are almost incessantly accompanied by ecologies of images. These ecologies of still and moving images present a paradox of uncertainties emerging along with certainties. Images appear more certain as the technical capacities that render them visible increase. At the same time, images are touched by more uncertainty as their numbers, manipulabilities, and contingencies multiply. With the emergence of big data, the image is becoming a dominant vehicle for the construction and presentation of the truth of data. Images present themselves as so many promises of the certainty, predictability, and intelligibility offered by data. The focus of this book is twofold. It analyses the kinds of images appearing today, showing how they are marked by a return to modern photographic emphases on high resolution, clarity, and realistic representation. Secondly, it discusses the ways in which the uncertainty of images is increasingly underscored within such reiterated emphases on allegedly certain visual truths. This often involves renewed encounters with noise, grain, glitch, blur, vagueness, and indistinctness. This book provides the reader with an intriguing transdisciplinary investigation of the uncertainly certain relation between the cultural imagination and the techno-aesthetic regime of big data and ubiquitous computing. This book was originally published as a special issue of Digital Creativity.

Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty

Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty PDF Author: Deborah R. Coen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226111784
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty traces the vital and varied roles of science through the story of three generations of the eminent Exner family, whose members included Nobel Prize–winning biologist Karl Frisch, the teachers of Freud and of physicist Erwin Schrödinger, artists of the Vienna Secession, and a leader of Vienna’s women’s movement. Training her critical eye on the Exners through the rise and fall of Austrian liberalism and into the rise of the Third Reich, Deborah R. Coen demonstrates the interdependence of the family’s scientific and domestic lives, exploring the ways in which public notions of rationality, objectivity, and autonomy were formed in the private sphere. Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty presents the story of the Exners as a microcosm of the larger achievements and tragedies of Austrian political and scientific life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Aesthetics of Survival

The Aesthetics of Survival PDF Author: George Rochberg
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472025112
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
A revised paperback edition of composer George Rochberg's landmark essays "Rochberg presents the rare spectacle of a composer who has made his peace with tradition while maintaining a strikingly individual profile. . . . [H]e succeeds in transforming the sublime concepts of traditional music into contemporary language." ---Washington Post "An indispensable book for anyone who wishes to understand the sad and curious fate of music in the twentieth century." ---Atlantic Monthly "The writings of George Rochberg stand as a pinnacle from which our past and future can be viewed." ---Kansas City Star As a composer, George Rochberg has played a leading role in bringing about a transformation of contemporary music through a reassessment of its relation to tonality, melody, and harmony. In The Aesthetics of Survival, the author addresses the legacy of modernism in music and its related effect on the cultural milieu, particularly its overemphasis on the abstract, rationalist thinking embraced by contemporary science, technology, and philosophy. Rochberg argues for the renewal of holistic values in order to ensure the survival of music as a humanly expressive art. A renowned composer, thinker, and teacher, George Rochberg has been honored with innumerable awards, including, most recently, an Alfred I. du Pont Award for Outstanding Conductors and Composers, and an André and Clara Mertens Contemporary Composer Award. He lives in Pennsylvania.

The Uncertainty Mindset

The Uncertainty Mindset PDF Author: Vaughn Tan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231551878
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Innovation is how businesses stay ahead of the competition and adapt to market conditions that change in unpredictable and uncertain ways. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, high-end cuisine underwent a profound transformation. Once an industry that prioritized consistency and reliability, it turned into one where constant change was a competitive necessity. A top restaurant’s reputation and success have become so closely bound up with its ability to innovate that a new organizational form, the culinary research and development team, has emerged. The best of these R&D teams continually expand the frontiers of food—they invent a constant stream of new dishes, new cooking processes and methods, and even new ways of experiencing food. How do they achieve this nonstop novelty? And what can culinary research and development teach us about how organizations innovate? Vaughn Tan opens up the black box of elite culinary R&D to provide essential insights. Drawing on years of unprecedented access to the best and most influential culinary R&D teams in the world, he reveals how they exemplify what he calls the uncertainty mindset. Such a mindset intentionally incorporates uncertainty into organization design rather than simply trying to reduce risk. It changes how organizations hire, set goals, and motivate team members and leads organizations to work in highly unconventional ways. A revelatory look at the R&D kitchen, The Uncertainty Mindset upends conventional wisdom about how to organize for innovation and offers practical insights for businesses trying to become innovative and adaptable.

The Aesthetic Imperative

The Aesthetic Imperative PDF Author: Peter Sloterdijk
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074569988X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
In this wide-ranging book, renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk examines art in all its rich and varied forms: from music to architecture, light to movement, and design to typography. Moving between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, his analyses span the centuries, from ancient civilizations to contemporary Hollywood. With great verve and insight he considers the key issues that have faced thinkers from Aristotle to Adorno, looking at art in its relation to ethics, metaphysics, society, politics, anthropology and the subject. Sloterdijk explores a variety of topics, from the Greco-Roman invention of postcards to the rise of the capitalist art market, from the black boxes and white cubes of modernism to the growth of museums and memorial culture. In doing so, he extends his characteristic method of defamiliarization to transform the way we look at works of art and artistic movements. His bold and original approach leads us away from the well-trodden paths of conventional art history to develop a theory of aesthetics which rejects strict categorization, emphasizing instead the crucial importance of individual subjectivity as a counter to the latent dangers of collective culture. This sustained reflection, at once playful, serious and provocative, goes to the very heart of Sloterdijk’s enduring philosophical preoccupation with the aesthetic. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and aesthetics and will appeal to anyone interested in culture and the arts more generally.