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The gesture of pointing is the perfect embodiment of photography’s function as a visual document: an injunction to look at this. In this textual and visual essay, artist Joan Fontcuberta takes the index finger as his point of departure for an insightful and irreverent consideration of photography’s relation to indexicality. He refutes, as well as draws on, Roland(...)
Against Barthes: The eye and the index
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The gesture of pointing is the perfect embodiment of photography’s function as a visual document: an injunction to look at this. In this textual and visual essay, artist Joan Fontcuberta takes the index finger as his point of departure for an insightful and irreverent consideration of photography’s relation to indexicality. He refutes, as well as draws on, Roland Barthes’s suggestion that every photograph tells us ‘'this has been'’ (‘ça a été’), reckoning with the inconvenient multiplicity of thises in any given image. If a photograph constitutes such a statement – as made explicit in images that include a pointing finger – does the camera witness reality or performance? These existential issues are further complicated by the emergence of post-photography and generative AI. In this typically engaging and iconoclastic essay, Fontcuberta destabilises our ideas about the authority and authoriality of images, drawing on psychoanalysis, semiotics, and his own autobiography. His text is interleaved between two compelling visual essays formed of images from the archive of Mexican tabloid Alerta from the 1960s to 1980s, in which the pointing index finger forms a haunting and often humorous through-line.
Theory of Photography
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The world is marked by deepening conflicts—between democracies and autocracies, woke and populist identity politics, rich and poor, continued environmental exploitation and harsh complications like climate change. In "The monadic age," Ingo Niermann argues that, stirred by rapid developments in automation and AI, these manifold crises are about to culminate in a new(...)
The monadic age: Notes on the coming social order
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The world is marked by deepening conflicts—between democracies and autocracies, woke and populist identity politics, rich and poor, continued environmental exploitation and harsh complications like climate change. In "The monadic age," Ingo Niermann argues that, stirred by rapid developments in automation and AI, these manifold crises are about to culminate in a new paradigm of self-sufficiency—monadism—that overturns the liberal era and forces a reinvention of all social parameters. Today, two major post-liberal dispositions are unfolding. On the one side, people envision a harmonious community of all human and nonhuman beings (multi-species kinship, a rainbow of identities). On the other side, people isolate themselves within their own identities and belongings (filter bubbles, safe spaces, gated communities, charter cities, prepping). Monadism recognizes that these two seemingly contradictory dispositions stem from a similar understanding of the world: one is more optimistic, the other more pessimistic, but ultimately they’re interdependent. Before seeking harmony, we humans, a highly dominant species, must first of all restrain ourselves from coercive interactions with our environment. And to protect ourselves sufficiently from our environment, we must minimize its abuse.
Critical Theory
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We see notebooks everywhere we go. But where did these indispensable implements come from? How did they revolutionize our lives? And how can using a notebook help change the way you think? In this wide-ranging history, Roland Allen reveals how the notebook became our most dependable and versatile tool for creative thinking. He tells the notebook stories of Leonardo and(...)
The notebook: A history of thinking on paper
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We see notebooks everywhere we go. But where did these indispensable implements come from? How did they revolutionize our lives? And how can using a notebook help change the way you think? In this wide-ranging history, Roland Allen reveals how the notebook became our most dependable and versatile tool for creative thinking. He tells the notebook stories of Leonardo and Frida Kahlo, Isaac Newton and Marie Curie, and writers from Chaucer to Henry James; shows how Darwin developed his theory of evolution in tiny pocket books and Agatha Christie plotted a hundred murders in scrappy exercise books; and introduces a host of cooks, kings, sailors, fishermen, musicians, engineers, politicians, adventurers, and mathematicians, all of whom used their notebooks as a space to think—and in doing so, shaped the modern world. In an age of AI and digital overload, the humble notebook is more relevant than ever. Allen shows how bullet points can combat ADHD, journals can ease PTSD, and patient diaries soften the trauma of reawakening from coma. The everyday act of moving a pen across paper, he finds, can have profound consequences, changing the way we think and feel: making us more creative, more productive—and maybe even happier.
Literature and poetry
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Human obsolescence is imminent. The factories of the future will be dark, staffed by armies of tireless robots. The hospitals of the future will have fewer doctors, depending instead on cloud-based AI to diagnose patients and recommend treatments. The homes of the future will anticipate our wants and needs and provide all the entertainment, food, and distraction we could(...)
Automation and utopia: human flourishing in a world without work
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Human obsolescence is imminent. The factories of the future will be dark, staffed by armies of tireless robots. The hospitals of the future will have fewer doctors, depending instead on cloud-based AI to diagnose patients and recommend treatments. The homes of the future will anticipate our wants and needs and provide all the entertainment, food, and distraction we could ever desire. To many, this is a depressing prognosis, an image of civilization replaced by its machines. But what if an automated future is something to be welcomed rather than feared? Work is a source of misery and oppression for most people, so shouldn’t we do what we can to hasten its demise? Automation and Utopia makes the case for a world in which, free from need or want, we can spend our time inventing and playing games and exploring virtual realities that are more deeply engaging and absorbing than any we have experienced before, allowing us to achieve idealized forms of human flourishing. The idea that we should “give up” and retreat to the virtual may seem shocking, even distasteful. But John Danaher urges us to embrace the possibilities of this new existence. The rise of automating technologies presents a utopian moment for humankind, providing both the motive and the means to build a better future.
Architectural Theory
audio
These are They.
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1 online resource.
[Place of publication not identified] : Lateral Addition, 2019.
audio
[Place of publication not identified] : Lateral Addition, 2019.
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« Ce […] livre est parti d’une idée assez monstrueuse, mais, je pense, assez exaltante. J’ai choisi, à Paris, douze lieux, des rues, des places, des carrefours, liés à des souvenirs, à des événements ou à des moments importants de mon existence. Chaque mois, je décris deux de ces lieux ; une première fois, sur place (dans un café ou dans la rue même) je décris « ce que je(...)
Lieux
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« Ce […] livre est parti d’une idée assez monstrueuse, mais, je pense, assez exaltante. J’ai choisi, à Paris, douze lieux, des rues, des places, des carrefours, liés à des souvenirs, à des événements ou à des moments importants de mon existence. Chaque mois, je décris deux de ces lieux ; une première fois, sur place (dans un café ou dans la rue même) je décris « ce que je vois » de la manière la plus neutre possible, j’énumère les magasins, quelques détails d’architecture, quelques micro-événements (une voiture de pompiers qui passe, une dame qui attache son chien avant d’entrer dans une charcuterie, un déménagement, des affiches, des gens, etc.) ; une deuxième fois, n’importe où (chez moi, au café, au bureau) je décris le lieu de mémoire, j’évoque les souvenirs qui lui sont liés, les gens que j’y ai connus, etc. Chaque texte [...] est, une fois terminé, enfermé dans une enveloppe que je cachette à la cire. Au bout d’un an, j’aurai décrit chacun de mes lieux deux fois, une fois sur le mode du souvenir, une fois sur place en description réelle. Je recommence ainsi pendant douze ans [...]. J’ai commencé en janvier 1969 ; j’aurai fini en décembre 1980 ! j’ouvrirai alors les 288 enveloppes cachetées [...]. Je n’ai pas une idée très claire du résultat final, mais je pense qu’on y verra tout à la fois le vieillissement des lieux, le vieillissement de mon écriture, le vieillissement de mes souvenirs : le temps retrouvé se confond avec le temps perdu ; le temps s’accroche à ce projet, en constitue la structure et la contrainte ; le livre n’est plus restitution d’un temps passé, mais mesure du temps qui s’écoule ; le temps de l’écriture, qui était jusqu’à présent un temps pour rien, un temps mort, que l’on feignait d’ignorer ou que l’on ne restituait qu’arbitrairement (L’Emploi du temps), qui restait toujours à côté du livre (même chez Proust), deviendra ici l’axe essentiel. Je n’ai pas encore de titre pour ce projet ; ce pourrait être Loci Soli (ou Soli Loci) ou, plus simplement, "Lieux". »
Architectural Theory
books
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volumes <1-3, 5-15> ; 24 cm
Cambridge [England] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1978-<2019>
The Cambridge history of China / general editors, Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank.
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volumes <1-3, 5-15> ; 24 cm
books
Cambridge [England] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1978-<2019>