Bøker utgitt av MIT Press

"Establishes the cultural power of hair in the 19th century through critical interpretation of the significant space and time devoted to it as an important sociocultural symbol"--

"In this book, digital anthropologist Payal Arora proposes ways in which we can envision new design systems and thinking to include the world. Drawing from fieldwork on young people's digital usage in Brazil, India, Bangladesh and Nigeria, Arora reveals how their understandings of algorithmic systems shape their creativity, trust, identity, and political action"--

A powerful collection of perspectives on the contemporary and evolving meanings of home, and how they capture both the shared and conflicting narratives that impact our country today.Home is shaped by many factors: culture, region, environment, citizenship, economics, state of mind, and more. Edited by Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, Christina De León, and Michelle Joan Wilkinson, Making Home explores the diverse perspectives on home across the United States, US Territories, and Tribal Nations to reveal how design impacts this country, its value systems, and the people who inhabit its landscapes. Positioning home not only as a place of dwelling but also as a complex and highly subjective ecosystem, contributors show how notions of home resonate through private and public consciousness to inform the shared or conflicting histories that impact our country.Probing urgent topics related to home such as colonialism, technological innovation, landscapes and the environment, and aesthetics and culture, Making Home uses the framework of design to pair investigative and practical analyses with imaginative and speculative ones. Contributors include designers, scholars, writers, artists, and critical thinkers across disciplines whose work and lived experiences illustrate specific circumstances that shape the contemporary home.Contributors:Brian Adams, AphroChic, Joe Baker, Joseph Becker, La Vaughn Belle, Frank Blazquez, Lori Brown, Michael Bullock, CareHaus, Mona Chalabi, Katrina Collins, Michelle Commander,Sean Connelly, Reverand Houston Cyprus, Design Earth, Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, Leah DeVun, Heather Dewey Hagborg, Terrol Dew Johnson, Jarrett Earnest, Sofia Gallisa Muriente, Roxane Gay, Sophia Gebara, Curry Hackett, David Hartt,Hord, Coplan, Macht, Joyce Hwang, Alan Isaac, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Dalton Johnson,Kenneth Kuper, Ruba Katrib, Elleza Kelley, Michelle Lanier, Natalia LaSalle Morillo, Liam Lee, Brent Leggs, Dominic Leong, Sarah Lopez, Gervais Marsh, Carlos Martin, Catherine E. McKinley, Joiri Minaya, Tommy Mishima, Victoria Munro, Maria Nicanor, Caroline O’Connell, Camille Okhio, Betty Poncho, Sheila Pree Bright, Ronald Rael, Suchi Reddy,Katherine Simóne Reynolds, Tracey Robertson Carter,Dr. Yashica Robinson, William Scott, Siddhartha V. Shah, SITU Research, Gretchen Sorin, Carlos Soto, Renée Stout, Journey Streams, Isabel Strauss, Davóne Tines,Gene Tinnie, Dr. Wallis Tinnie, Cornelius Tulloch, Whitney Lee White, Kevin Young,John ZeiselA copublication with the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Translation of: Serendipitáa: l'inatteso nella scienza.

"This book is Todd Stern's eyewitness account of the full, charged, seven-year story of how the Paris Agreement came to be, following an arc from Copenhagen, to Durban, to the secret U.S.-China climate deal in 2014, to Paris itself. It illuminates the strategy and tactics, policy, politics and diplomacy that made Paris possible, and it also depicts the pitfalls and challenges overcome, the struggle between different groups of countries, the sometimes shifting alliances, the last-minmute maneuvering and the ultimate historic success"--

"Davis addresses the "screen time" debate by recognizing that children's experiences of technology and social relationships are qualitatively distinct at different stages of development"--

A unique, critical, and creative encyclopedia from scholars, artists, and writers on the world and words of finance capital.What does finance capital look like? How do the push and pull of debt and credit shape our feelings and relations? Across fifty-five unforgettable entries, Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary offers an unorthodox appraisal of our bizarre, distorted contemporary condition.

An electroacoustic, olfactory, and textual project by artist Florian Hecker.Florian Hecker is an artist whose work is realized through the technical manipulation of sensory data. By utilizing machinic scales and registers, Hecker creates environments marked at once by overwhelming complexity and vexing subtlety, where audience members are led to dwell on the outer limits of their own perceptual capacities.Resynthesizers took place in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, in the Fitzpatrick-Leland House, a tri-level residence designed by Rudolf Schindler and built in 1936. Centered around a trio of compositions produced using a novel algorithm for texture synthesis, the exhibition also featured three olfactory accords selected by Marc vom Ende and Philip Kraft of Symrise, and three electrophoretic displays transmitting a libretto by Robin Mackay.The molecular construction of sensory experience enabled by the technical manipulation and synthesis of materials emerges as a central theme of Resynthesizers. The regime of these ‘immaterials’ disjoins sensation from inherited conceptual models, and in the encounter with its resyntheses we are challenged to reintegrate sense and formulate new concepts.Designed by NORM, Zurich, this meticulously assembled document features exhibition documentation by Fredrik Nilsen Studio and data visualizations by Axel Roebel alongside essays by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Alex H. Barnett, Marc Vom Ende and Philip Kraft, Robin Mackay, and Luciana Parisi.

A young woman discovers that dancers at a local discotheque are being driven to acts of insane violence.“The place was full of swarming, pugnacious, dangerous missellneous reptile’s… Teenager’s everywhere pounded their way on top of each other crazily strangling, biting and slashing each other’s with broken glass, smashed records or sharpened blades… ”16-year-old Jennifer Gibbons (1963–1993) wrote Discomania in 1980, alongside her twin sister June-Alison, who was also writing her own novel, The Pepsi Cola Addict, in the bedroom that they shared.Jennifer offered Discomania to the same English vanity press who would publish June-Alison’s book, but Discomania was turned down for being “too violent, too sexual, and too futuristic.”Long thought to have been lost or destroyed, June-Alison had in fact preserved the typescript of this unique, furious, funny, and strange novel, which we present with her blessing, alongside additional texts from June-Alison, and editors David Tibet and Ania Goszczyńska.

The affects, aesthetics, and ethics of voice in the new materialist turn, explored through encounters with creative works in media and the arts.

In this book, Michael Madary examines visual experience, drawing on both phenomenological and empirical methods of investigation. He finds that these two approaches -- careful, philosophical description of experience and the science of vision -- independently converge on the same result: Visual perception is an ongoing process of anticipation and fulfillment. Madary first makes the case for the descriptive premise, arguing that the phenomenology of vision is best described as on ongoing process of anticipation and fulfillment. He discusses visual experience as being perspectival, temporal, and indeterminate; considers the possibility of surprise when appearances do not change as we expect; and considers the content of visual anticipation. Madary then makes the case for the empirical premise, showing that there are strong empirical reasons to model vision using the general form of anticipation and fulfillment. He presents a range of evidence from perceptual psychology and neuroscience, and reinterprets evidence for the two-visual-systems hypothesis. Finally, he considers the relationship between visual perception and social cognition. An appendix discusses Husserlian phenomenology as it relates to the argument of the book.Madary argues that the fact that there is a convergence of historically distinct methodologies itself is an argument that supports his findings. With Visual Phenomenology, he creates an exchange between the humanities and the sciences that takes both methods of investigation seriously.

A description of perturbation-based methods developed in machine learning to augment novel optimization methods with strong statistical guarantees.In nearly all machine learning, decisions must be made given current knowledge. Surprisingly, making what is believed to be the best decision is not always the best strategy, even when learning in a supervised learning setting. An emerging body of work on learning under different rules applies perturbations to decision and learning procedures. These methods provide simple and highly efficient learning rules with improved theoretical guarantees. This book describes perturbation-based methods developed in machine learning to augment novel optimization methods with strong statistical guarantees, offering readers a state-of-the-art overview.Chapters address recent modeling ideas that have arisen within the perturbations framework, including Perturb & MAP, herding, and the use of neural networks to map generic noise to distribution over highly structured data. They describe new learning procedures for perturbation models, including an improved EM algorithm and a learning algorithm that aims to match moments of model samples to moments of data. They discuss understanding the relation of perturbation models to their traditional counterparts, with one chapter showing that the perturbations viewpoint can lead to new algorithms in the traditional setting. And they consider perturbation-based regularization in neural networks, offering a more complete understanding of dropout and studying perturbations in the context of deep neural networks.

The lives of people (mostly women) who help to produce science or who are affected by it.The stories in Schrödinger's Wife (and Other Possibilities) travel through laboratories, observatories, rockets, hotel rooms, hospitals, out to the Antarctic and into outer space, following the trails of women scientists, technicians, patients, doctors, and spouses in their encounters with some of the most extraordinary aspects of modern science.In these science-inspired tales the nuclear physicist Lise Meitner discovers the secrets of nuclear fission while fleeing from the Nazis. An employee in the underground laboratory CERN refuses to have her own photo taken. The biologist Margaret Bastock must figure our the impact of genes on behavior while coping with post-war expectations of women’s own behavior. Scientists from East and West Germany stationed at opposite sides of Antarctica experience their own fall of the Berlin Wall. The elusive physicist Bruno Pontecorvo theorizes about an equally elusive particle. Schrödinger’s wife Anny uses his theory to get her revenge on her philandering husband. A scientific theory worries about being discovered by a woman, and a resident in a special institution extrapolates the history of the universe from a piece of toast. In this, her second collection of short stories, Pippa Goldschmidt explores the lives of real and imaginary scientists, focusing on the human emotions and social connections behind the discoveries.

An antiracist theory of cleaning.In Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism, Françoise Vergès examines the racial and gendered politics of wasting lands, bodies, and resources and the organized deprivation of clean water, shelter, and access to health services—in other words, the structural denial, along racial lines, of vital needs. Through 38 short sections, she looks at the social relations that have made cleaning into drudgery and into a racialized, gendered, poorly paid job that is nevertheless necessary for any society to function. She concludes with the proposition of a feminist, decolonial, antiracist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-capitalist politics of cleaning. Or, simply put, of “decolonial cleaning.”To Vergès, the structural denial of the elemental needs of women of color (sanitary pads, access to water, and privacy for basic washing), and why these needs are considered insignificant and trivial, shows how racism and class war are gendered. By examining the banal, the trivial, and the elemental, the author addresses cleaning as a necessity rather than the maintenance of a consumerist lifestyle, a condition of basic care of the body and the mind that is considered with indifference by racial capitalism, white environmentalism, and even, too often, by humanitarian organizations. She argues that by building “life-affirming institutions,” as Ruth Wilson Gilmore advocates, struggles against the whitening of cleaning create sites of freedom. “Decolonial cleaning” imagines cleaning as taking care of land, humans, plants, animals, and rivers, not seeking to discipline them or transform them into commodities or objects of conservation but cleaning as a practice dedicated to sustaining the living world.

Artist and teacher White delivers and develops art school lessons, striking an instructive balance between technical advice and sage concepts. These 101 maxims, meditations, and demonstrations offer both a toolkit of ideas for the art student and a set of guiding principles for the artist.

"Aims to illuminate the lives of an expanding yet heretofore understudied group of working people increasingly central to the US security industry"--

"Trapped in a London laboratory during a worker uprising in 1924, ex-artillery officer and physics instructor Jeremy Tuft awakens 150 years later - on the eve of a new Dark Age! England has become a neo-medieval society whose inhabitants have forgotten how to build or operate machinery. Though he is at first disconcerted by the failure of his own era's smug doctrine of Progress, Tuft eventually decides that post-civilized life is simpler, more peaceful. That is, until northern English and Welsh tribes invade- at which point Tuft sets about reinventing weapons of mass destruction"--

"The definitive history of the invention of D&D"--

"The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently"--Cover.

An argument that conceiving of economic value as a social force makes it possible to develop a new and more powerful theory of market behavior.With the advent of the 2007–2008 financial crisis, the economics profession itself entered into a crisis of legitimacy from which it has yet to emerge. Despite the obviousness of their failures, however, economists continue to rely on the same methods and to proceed from the same underlying assumptions. André Orléan challenges the neoclassical paradigm in this book, with a new way of thinking about perhaps its most fundamental concept, economic value.Orléan argues that value is not bound up with labor, or utility, or any other property that preexists market exchange. Economic value, he contends, is a social force whose vast sphere of influence, amounting to a kind of empire, extends to every aspect of economic life. Markets are based on the identification of value with money, and exchange value can only be regarded as a social institution. Financial markets, for example, instead of defining an extrinsic, objective value for securities, act as a mechanism for arriving at a reference price that will be accepted by all investors. What economists must therefore study,Orléan urges, is the hold that value has over individuals and how it shapes their perceptions and behavior.Awarded the prestigious Prix Paul Ricoeur on its original publication in France in 2011, The Empire of Value has been substantially revised and enlarged for this edition, with an entirely new section discussing the financial crisis of 2007–2008.

How sonically distinctive digital “signatures”—including reverb, glitches, and autotuning—affect the aesthetics of popular music, analyzed in works by Prince, Lady Gaga, and others.Is digital production killing the soul of music? Is Auto-Tune the nadir of creative expression? Digital technology has changed not only how music is produced, distributed, and consumed but also—equally important but not often considered—how music sounds. In this book, Ragnhild Brøvig and Anne Danielsen examine the impact of digitization on the aesthetics of popular music. They investigate sonically distinctive “digital signatures”—musical moments when the use of digital technology is revealed to the listener. The particular signatures of digital mediation they examine include digital reverb and delay, MIDI and sampling, digital silence, the virtual cut-and-paste tool, digital glitches, microrhythmic manipulation, and autotuning—all of which they analyze in specific works by popular artists.Combining technical and historical knowledge of music production with musical analyses, aesthetic interpretations, and theoretical discussions, Brøvig and Danielsen offer unique insights into how digitization has changed the sound of popular music and the listener's experience of it. For example, they show how digital reverb and delay have allowed experimentation with spatiality by analyzing Kate Bush's “Get Out of My House”; they examine the contrast between digital silence and the low-tech noises of tape hiss or vinyl crackle in Portishead's “Stranger”; and they describe the development of Auto-Tune—at first a tool for pitch correction—into an artistic effect, citing work by various hip-hop artists, Bon Iver, and Lady Gaga.