[PDF] The Aesthetics Of Artifice eBook

Author : Marie Lathers
Publisher : AMS Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 36,56 MB
Release : 1992-12
Category :
ISBN : 9780404614935

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Drawing on feminist and psychoanalytic theory, this study exposes the ideological foundations of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's L'Eve Future, a late 19th-century revision of the Genesis story. Villier's future Eve, who owes her life to man's manipulation of sculptural techniques, photography, and film, symbolizes the complex conjunction of literature, art, technology, and the feminine in the late 19th century. The novel thus charts modernity's restructuring of traditional aesthetics to accommodate the age of mechanical reproduction. The female body becomes the locus of this manifesto of technology, producing a discourse on artificiality and and the feminine which Lathers's study exposes in detail. It also relates this monstrous tale to other versions of woman's fabrication in this and the last century, and interrogates theories of the aesthetic, the technological, and the feminine from Hegel and Baudelaire to Benjamin and Barthes. It is a contribution to current debate centering on the construction of gender and its place in literature and art.

Author : Barry Allen
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 14,69 MB
Release : 2011-03-15
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 0801457025

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"As familiar and widely appreciated works of modern technology, bridges are a good place to study the relationship between the aesthetic and the technical. Fully engaged technical design is at once aesthetic and structural. In the best work (the best design, the most well made), the look and feel of a device (its aesthetic, perceptual interface) is as important a part of the design problem as its mechanism (the interface of parts and systems). We have no idea how to make something that is merely efficient, a rational instrument blindly indifferent to how it appears. No engineer can design such a thing and none has ever been built."—from Artifice and Design In an intriguing book about the aesthetics of technological objects and the relationship between technical and artistic accomplishment, Barry Allen develops the philosophical implications of a series of interrelated concepts-knowledge, artifact, design, tool, art, and technology-and uses them to explore parallel questions about artistry in technology and technics in art. This may be seen at the heart of Artifice and Design in Allen's discussion of seven bridges: he focuses at length on two New York bridges—the Hell Gate Bridge and the Bayonne Bridge—and makes use of original sources for insight into the designers' ideas about the aesthetic dimensions of their work. Allen starts from the conviction that art and technology must be treated together, as two aspects of a common, technical human nature. The topics covered in Artifice and Design are wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, drawing from evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and the history and anthropology of art and technology. The book concludes that it is a mistake to think of art as something subjective, or as an arbitrary social representation, and of Technology as an instrumental form of purposive rationality. "By segregating art and technology," Allen writes, "we divide ourselves against ourselves, casting up self-made obstacles to the ingenuity of art and technology."

Author : Marie Lathers
Publisher : Unc Department of Romance Studies
Page : 162 pages
File Size : 17,53 MB
Release : 1996
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN :

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Drawing on feminist and psychoanalytic theory, this study exposes the ideological foundations of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's L'Eve Future, a late 19th-century revision of the Genesis story. Villier's future Eve, who owes her life to man's manipulation of sculptural techniques, photography, and film, symbolizes the complex conjunction of literature, art, technology, and the feminine in the late 19th century. The novel thus charts modernity's restructuring of traditional aesthetics to accommodate the age of mechanical reproduction. The female body becomes the locus of this manifesto of technology, producing a discourse on artificiality and and the feminine which Lathers's study exposes in detail. It also relates this monstrous tale to other versions of woman's fabrication in this and the last century, and interrogates theories of the aesthetic, the technological, and the feminine from Hegel and Baudelaire to Benjamin and Barthes. It is a contribution to current debate centering on the construction of gender and its place in literature and art.

Author : Barry Allen
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 27,57 MB
Release : 2011-03-15
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 0801457025

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"As familiar and widely appreciated works of modern technology, bridges are a good place to study the relationship between the aesthetic and the technical. Fully engaged technical design is at once aesthetic and structural. In the best work (the best design, the most well made), the look and feel of a device (its aesthetic, perceptual interface) is as important a part of the design problem as its mechanism (the interface of parts and systems). We have no idea how to make something that is merely efficient, a rational instrument blindly indifferent to how it appears. No engineer can design such a thing and none has ever been built."—from Artifice and Design In an intriguing book about the aesthetics of technological objects and the relationship between technical and artistic accomplishment, Barry Allen develops the philosophical implications of a series of interrelated concepts-knowledge, artifact, design, tool, art, and technology-and uses them to explore parallel questions about artistry in technology and technics in art. This may be seen at the heart of Artifice and Design in Allen's discussion of seven bridges: he focuses at length on two New York bridges—the Hell Gate Bridge and the Bayonne Bridge—and makes use of original sources for insight into the designers' ideas about the aesthetic dimensions of their work. Allen starts from the conviction that art and technology must be treated together, as two aspects of a common, technical human nature. The topics covered in Artifice and Design are wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, drawing from evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and the history and anthropology of art and technology. The book concludes that it is a mistake to think of art as something subjective, or as an arbitrary social representation, and of Technology as an instrumental form of purposive rationality. "By segregating art and technology," Allen writes, "we divide ourselves against ourselves, casting up self-made obstacles to the ingenuity of art and technology."

Author : J.F. Martel
Publisher : North Atlantic Books
Page : 209 pages
File Size : 18,63 MB
Release : 2015-02-10
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1583945784

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Part treatise, part critique, part call to action, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice is a journey into the uncanny realities revealed to us in the great works of art of the past and present. Received opinion holds that art is culturally-determined and relative. We are told that whether a picture, a movement, a text, or sound qualifies as a "work of art" largely depends on social attitudes and convention. Drawing on examples ranging from Paleolithic cave paintings to modern pop music and building on the ideas of James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Gilles Deleuze, Carl Jung, and others, J.F. Martel argues that art is an inborn human phenomenon that precedes the formation of culture and even society. Art is free of politics and ideology. Paradoxically, that is what makes it a force of liberation wherever it breaks through the trance of humdrum existence. Like the act of dreaming, artistic creation is fundamentally mysterious. It is a gift from beyond the field of the human, and it connects us with realities that, though normally unseen, are crucial components of a living world. While holding this to be true of authentic art, the author acknowledges the presence—overwhelming in our media-saturated age—of a false art that seeks not to liberate but to manipulate and control. Against this anti-artistic aesthetic force, which finds some of its most virulent manifestations in modern advertising, propaganda, and pornography, true art represents an effective line of defense. Martel argues that preserving artistic expression in the face of our contemporary hyper-aestheticism is essential to our own survival. Art is more than mere ornament or entertainment; it is a way, one leading to what is most profound in us. Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice places art alongside languages and the biosphere as a thing endangered by the onslaught of predatory capitalism, spectacle culture, and myopic technological progress. The book is essential reading for visual artists, musicians, writers, actors, dancers, filmmakers, and poets. It will also interest anyone who has ever been deeply moved by a work of art, and for all who seek a way out of the web of deception and vampiric diversion that the current world order has woven around us.

Author : Owen D Pomery
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 16,10 MB
Release : 2024-06-20
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9781910395806

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On a summer's day, Ellen returns to the coastal town she grew up in: Victory Point. Revisiting old haunts and people from her past, she feels increasingly disconnected from her previous life, and exhausted by her constant struggle to forge a path ahead. Exploring the town, Ellen searches for some comfort in her own history that could give her the strength to move forward in her own life. Victory Point explores the concept of how we live and choose to be remembered, asking whether we should strive for a higher calling, or if a simple, domestic legacy is the most honest and admirable achievement we can hope for. Set in a town that is itself an architectural experiment, this graphic novel is a poignant and heartfelt search for meaning in life.

Author : Andrea Charise
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 40,5 MB
Release : 2020-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1438477457

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Investigates how nineteenth-century British literature grappled with a new understanding of aging as both an individual and collective experience. The Aesthetics of Senescence investigates how chronological age has come to possess far-reaching ideological, ethical, and aesthetic implications, both in the past and present. Andrea Charise argues that authors of the nineteenth century used the imaginative resources of literature to engage with an unprecedented climate of crisis associated with growing old. Marshalling a great variety of canonical authors including William Godwin, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and George Gissing, as well as less familiar writings by George Henry Lewes, Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, Agnes Strickland, and Max Nordau, Charise demonstrates why the imaginative capacity of writing became an interdisciplinary crucible for testing what it meant to grow old at a time of profound cultural upheaval. Charise’s grounding in medicine, political history, literature, and genre offers a fresh, original, thoroughly interdisciplinary analysis of nineteenth-century aging and age theory, as well as new insights into the rise of the novel—a genre usually thought of as affiliated almost entirely with the young or middle-aged. “Charise’s brilliantly argued, clearly written book is an important intervention in nineteenth-century British literature, age studies, and medical humanities. It brings these areas of inquiry together in what seems a seamless way—as if they have always traveled together or ought to have. Through an investigation of what she calls the ‘aesthetics of embodiment that shaped nineteenth-century visions of aging,’ Charise has given us an original and groundbreaking study of literary, historical, anthropological, and philosophical texts.” — Devoney Looser, author of The Making of Jane Austen

Author : James Curcio
Publisher : Intellect (UK)
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 42,14 MB
Release : 2019-12-06
Category : Arts and society
ISBN : 9781789381085

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Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Foreword: The Shifting Shaman of the Modern Age -- Introduction: Somebody Else Took His Place, and Bravely Cried -- 1. Masks All the Way Down -- 2. Mishima, Bowie and the Anti-Metaphysics of the Mask -- 3. Not All That Glitters Is Gold: Ziggy Stardust and the Fractured Mask of a Generation -- 4. Watch That Man: Splicing Tape with Burroughs and Bowie -- 5. From Vigilius Haufniensis to Ziggy Stardust: Pseudonyms, Irony and Truth in Kierkegaard and Bowie -- 6. Mascara and Marriage: The Twin Masks of David Bowie and Robert Smith -- 7. The Great Contrarians -- 8. Seeing Things Like Hunter: Ralph Steadman's Cartoon Visions as Revelatory Masks in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas -- 9. The Beautiful Madness: The Primacy of Wonder in the Work of Thomas Ligotti -- 10. The Skin and the Double: Firbank's Aesthetics of Surface -- 11. God's Twisted Identity -- 12. Wishful Beginnings and Creative Ends: Conversation with Davide De Angelis -- 13. On Existentialism and the Occult: Conversation with Gary Lachman -- 14. The Many Masks of Manifestation -- Epilogue: Art for Art's Sake -- Notes on Contributors -- Index -- Back Cover.