Böcker i The MIT Press-serien

Reclaiming the artist Ana Mendieta as a formally innovative maker of performative art who forged connections to the marginalized around the world.The artist Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) is remembered as the creator of powerful works expressing a vibrant and unflinching second-wave feminist sensibility. In Radical Virtuosity, art historian Genevieve Hyacinthe offers a new view of Mendieta, connecting her innovative artwork to the art, cultural aesthetics and concerns, feminisms, and sociopolitical messages of the black Atlantic. Mendieta left Cuba as a preteen, fleeing the Castro regime, and spent years in U.S. foster care. Her sense of exile, Hyacinthe argues, colors her work. Hyacinthe examines the development of Mendieta's performative artworks—particularly the Silueta series (1973-1985), which documented the silhouette of her body in the earth over time (a series "without end,” Mendieta said)—and argues that these works were shaped by Mendieta's appropriation and reimagining of Afro-Cuban ritual. Mendieta's effort to create works that invited audience participation, Hyacinthe says, signals her interest in forging connections with the marginalized, particularly those of the black Atlantic and Global South. Hyacinthe describes the "counter entropy” of Mendieta's small-scale earthworks (contrasting them with more massive works created by Robert Smithson and other male artists); considers the resonance of Mendieta's work with the contemporary practices of black Atlantic female artists including Wangechi Mutu, Renee Green, and Damali Abrams; and connects Mendieta's artistic and political expressions to black Atlantic feminisms of such popular artists as Princess Nokia. Mendieta's life and work are often overshadowed in popular perception by her early and tragic death—at thirty-six, she plunged from the window of the thirty-fourth floor Greenwich Village apartment she shared with her husband, the artist Carl Andre. (Andre was charged with her murder and acquitted.) Hyacinthe's account—profusely illustrated, with many images in color—reclaims Mendieta's work and legacy for its artistic significance.

Investigating the entanglement of industry, politics, culture, and economics at the frontier of ocean excavations through an innovative union of art and science.The oceans are crucial to the planet's well-being. They help regulate the global carbon cycle, support the resilience of ecosystems, and provide livelihoods for communities. The oceans as guardians of planetary health are threatened by many forces, including growing extractivist practices. Through the innovative lens of artistic research, Prospecting Ocean investigates the entanglement of industry, politics, culture, and economics at the frontier of ocean excavation. The result is a richly illustrated study that unites science and art to examine the ecological, cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic reverberations of this current threat to the oceans.Prospecting Oceans takes as its starting point an exhibition by the photographer and filmmaker Armin Linke, which was commissioned by TBA21-Academy, London, and first shown at the Institute of Marine Science (CNR-ISMAR) in Venice. Linke is concerned with making the invisible visible, and here he unmasks the technologies that enable extractions from the ocean, including future seabed mining for minerals and sampling of genetic data. But the book extends far beyond Linke's research, presenting the latest research from a variety of fields and employing art as the place where disciplines can converge. Integrating the work of artists with scientific, theoretical, and philosophical analysis, Prospecting Ocean demonstrates that visual culture offers new and urgent perspectives on ecological crises.

An argument that health is optimal responsiveness and is often best treated at the system level.Medical education centers on the venerable "no-fault” concept of homeostasis, whereby local mechanisms impose constancy by correcting errors, and the brain serves mainly for emergencies. Yet, it turns out that most parameters are not constant; moreover, despite the importance of local mechanisms, the brain is definitely in charge. In this book, the eminent neuroscientist Peter Sterling describes a broader concept: allostasis (coined by Sterling and Joseph Eyer in the 1980s), whereby the brain anticipates needs and efficiently mobilizes supplies to prevent errors.Allostasis evolved early, Sterling explains, to optimize energy efficiency, relying heavily on brain circuits that deliver a brief reward for each positive surprise. Modern life so reduces the opportunities for surprise that we are driven to seek it in consumption: bigger burgers, more opioids, and innumerable activities that involve higher carbon emissions. The consequences include addiction, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and climate change. Sterling concludes that solutions must go beyond the merely technical to restore possibilities for daily small rewards and revivify the capacities for egalitarianism that were hard-wired into our nature.Sterling explains that allostasis offers what is not found in any medical textbook: principled definitions of health and disease: health as the capacity for adaptive variation and disease as shrinkage of that capacity. Sterling argues that since health is optimal responsiveness, many significant conditions are best treated at the system level.

An elaborately illustrated A to Z of the face, from historical mugshots to Instagram posts.By turns alarming and awe-inspiring, Face offers up an elaborately illustrated A to Z—from the didactic anthropometry of the late-nineteenth century to the selfie-obsessed zeitgeist of the twenty-first.Jessica Helfand looks at the cultural significance of the face through a critical lens, both as social currency and as palimpsest of history. Investigating everything from historical mugshots to Instagram posts, she examines how the face has been perceived and represented over time; how it has been instrumentalized by others; and how we have reclaimed it for our own purposes. From vintage advertisements for a "nose adjuster” to contemporary artists who reconsider the visual construction of race, Face delivers an intimate yet kaleidoscopic adventure while posing universal questions about identity.

Descriptions of basic visual mechanisms and related clinical abnormalities, by a neuroscientist and an ophthalmologist.

A concise, accessible, and engaging guide for students and practitioners of sociology.In Forms of Life, Harry Collins offers an introduction to social science methodology, drawing on his forty-plus years of conducting high-profile sociological research. In this concise, accessible, and engaging book, Collins explains not only how to do sociology (the method) but also how to think about sociology (the meaning). For example, he describes the three activities that are the foundations of sociological method (immersing oneself in a society; estranging oneself from that society; and explaining what has been discovered to those who have not been immersed) and goes on to consider broader questions of the meaning of science in relation to social science and the scientific authority of "subjective” methods. He explains that sociology is the study of social collectivities (often overlapping, subdividable, and embedded), and cites Wittgenstein's notion of "forms of life” in his definition of collectivity. Collins covers such methodological topics as participant comprehension; interview-based fieldwork ("expect plans to fail”); interactional expertise; alternation and methodological relativism; tangible and inferential experiments; tribalism and emotional loyalty; and how to communicate your findings. Finally, he offers recommendations for "saving the science of sociology,” considering, among other things, sociology's identity as a discipline and the perils of both "groupism” and being too afraid of it. Appendixes offer a code of conduct for interviews; a list of his relevant publications; and an account, in Q&A form, of a disastrous day in the life of a sociologist doing fieldwork.

Examining radical reinventions of traditional practices, ranging from a queer reclamation of the Jewish festival of Purim to an Indigenous remixing of musical traditions.

An introduction to financial tools and concepts from an operations perspective, addressing finance/operations trade-offs and explaining financial accounting, working capital, investment analysis, and more.Students and practitioners in engineering and related areas often lack the basic understanding of financial tools and concepts necessary for a career in operations or supply chain management. This book offers an introduction to finance fundamentals from an operations perspective, enabling operations and supply chain professionals to develop the skills necessary for interacting with finance people at a practical level and for making sound decisions when confronted by tradeoffs between operations and finance. Readers will learn about the essentials of financial statements, valuation tools, and managerial accounting.The book first discusses financial accounting, explaining how to create and interpret balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements, and introduces the idea of operating working capital—a key concept developed in subsequent chapters. The book then covers financial forecasting, addressing such topics as sustainable growth and the liquidity/profitability tradeoff; concepts in managerial accounting, including variable versus fixed costs, direct versus indirect costs, and contribution margin; tools for investment analysis, including net present value and internal rate of return; creation of value through operating working capital, inventory management, payables, receivables, and cash; and such strategic and tactical tradeoffs as offshoring versus local and centralizing versus decentralizing. The book can be used in undergraduate and graduate courses and as a reference for professionals. No previous knowledge of finance or accounting is required.

How the meaningless process of natural selection produces purposeful beings who find meaning in the world.

An examination of the implications for society of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence systems, combining a humanities perspective with technical analysis; includes exercises and discussion questions.AI and Humanity provides an analytical framing and a common language for understanding the effects of technological advances in artificial intelligence on society. Coauthored by a computer scientist and a scholar of literature and cultural studies, it is unique in combining a humanities perspective with technical analysis, using the tools of literary explication to examine the societal impact of AI systems. It explores the historical development of these technologies, moving from the apparently benign Roomba to the considerably more sinister semi-autonomous weapon system Harpy. The book is driven by an exploration of the cultural and etymological roots of a series of keywords relevant to both AI and society. Works examined range from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, given a close reading for its themes of literacy and agency, to Simon Head's critique of the effects of surveillance and automation on the Amazon labor force in Mindless.Originally developed as a textbook for an interdisciplinary humanities-science course at Carnegie Mellon, AI & Humanity offers discussion questions, exercises (including journal writing and concept mapping), and reading lists. A companion website provides updated resources and a portal to a video archive of interviews with AI scientists, sociologists, literary theorists, and others.

Scientists attempt to decode what may be a message from intelligent beings in outer space.By pure chance, scientists detect a signal from space that may be communication from rational beings. How can people of Earth understand this message, knowing nothing about the senders—even whether or not they exist? Written as the memoir of a mathematician who participates in the government project (code name: His Master's Voice) attempting to decode what seems to be a message from outer space, this classic novel shows scientists grappling with fundamental questions about the nature of reality, the confines of knowledge, the limitations of the human mind, and the ethics of military-sponsored scientific research.

An astronaut returns to Earth after a ten-year mission and finds a society that he barely recognizes.Stanislaw Lem's Return from the Stars recounts the experiences of Hal Bregg, an astronaut who returns from an exploratory mission that lasted ten years—although because of time dilation, 127 years have passed on Earth. Bregg finds a society that he hardly recognizes, in which danger has been eradicated. Children are "betrizated” to remove all aggression and violence—a process that also removes all impulse to take risks and explore. The people of Earth view Bregg and his crew as "resuscitated Neanderthals,” and pressure them to undergo betrization. Bregg has serious difficulty in navigating the new social mores.While Lem's depiction of a risk-free society is bleak, he does not portray Bregg and his fellow astronauts as heroes. Indeed, faced with no opposition to his aggression, Bregg behaves abominably. He is faced with a choice: leave Earth again and hope to return to a different society in several hundred years, or stay on Earth and learn to be content. With Return from the Stars, Lem shows the shifting boundaries between utopia and dystopia.

An early realist novel by Stanislaw Lem, taking place in a Polish psychiatric hospital during World War II.Taking place within the confines of a psychiatric hospital, Stanislaw Lem's The Hospital of the Transfiguration tells the story of a young doctor working in a Polish asylum during World War II. At first the asylum seems like a bucolic refuge, but a series of sinister encounters and incidents reveal an underlying brutality. The doctor begins to seek relief in the strange conversation of the poet Sekulowski, who is posing as a patient in a bid for safety from the occupying German forces. Meanwhile, Resistance fighters stockpile weapons in the surrounding woods. A very early work by Lem, The Hospital of the Transfiguration is partly autobiographical, drawing on the author's experiences as a medical student. Written in 1948, it was suppressed by Polish censors and not published until 1955. The censorship of this realist novel is partly what led Lem to focus on science fiction and nonfiction for the rest of his career.

Selections from Gabriel Orozco''s notebooks: sketches, photographs, and texts that offer a rare look inside his art-making process.Written Matter presents selections from the notebooks of the prolific and celebrated artist Gabriel Orozco. These texts, sketches, and images from notebooks spanning 1992 to 2012 offer insights into Orozco''s artmaking process, revealing his thinking, methods, and rationales. The texts, translated from the original handwritten Spanish, offer personal truisms, compelling insights, observations, and notes on process and method, forming a subterranean stream that runs parallel to his artwork. “Art is the opposite of spectacle,” he writes. “Art does not try to convince anyone, that''s why it''s shocking.” The notebooks are fundamental to Orozco''s work, serving as a travelogue and personal dictionary that, when consulted, allow him to resume the trajectory of his thought anywhere. Because Orozco chooses not to work in a studio, his notebooks act as a different kind of studio space, on paper and bound between covers. Orozco works in a variety of media—drawing, installation, photography, sculpture, video. His notebooks reveal and revel in the style and substance of his art.Profusely illustrated and designed under Orozco''s art direction, Written Matter offers an unusually intimate look at an artist''s process and practice.

The untold story of a radical approach to the teaching of sculpture at Saint Martin's School of Art.In 1969, four tutors at Saint Martin's School of Art in London undertook a radical experiment in the teaching of sculpture. Students in the ”A” Course were placed together in a large white room, locked from the inside. They were given projects that specified only what they could not do, not what they were required or assigned to do. Students were not permitted to speak to each other or to their instructors while in the Locked Room. Instructors gave students no feedback or evaluation. Discussing the course outside the Locked Room was discouraged. Not surprisingly, this approach was controversial. Fifty years later, in this book, students and staff from the Locked Room come together to explore, reflect upon, and reveal what really happened in the white room.The Locked Room includes interviews, conversations, and writings from participants alongside never-before-published photographs and archival documentation. It presents more than thirty student projects, spanning four years of inventive instruction by its four tutors, Peter Atkins, Garth Evans, Peter Harvey, and Gareth Jones, as well as student-initiated games and actions—including an account of the infamous extracurricular "boxing match” organized by students. The Locked Room challenged the notion of a canon and the idea of an academy. It questioned the very act of instruction, proposing instead that students engage critically with their own experiences and become the authors of their own learning. Its radical approach continues to reverberate in art education.Copublished with the A-Course Project

A frontline account of how to fight corruption, from Nigeria's former finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

In the bestselling tradition of Stuff Matters and The Disappearing Spoon: a clever and engaging look at materials, the innovations they made possible, and how these technologies changed us.

How curating has changed art and how art has changed curating: an examination of the emergence contemporary curatorship.

An authority on creativity introduces us to AI-powered computers that are creating art, literature, and music that may well surpass the creations of humans.

A new edition of a book, written in a humorous question-and-answer style, that shows how to implement and use an elegant little programming language for logic programming.

A comprehensive introduction to type systems and programming languages.

How control over information creation, processing, flows, and use has become the most effective form of power: theoretical foundations and empirical examples of information policy in the U.S., an innovator informational state.

For anyone who has ever wondered how computers solve problems, an engagingly written guide for nonexperts to the basics of computer algorithms.

A fresh research approach that bridges the study of human information interaction and the design of information systems.

An exploration of Cope's experimentation in artificial musical creativity; includes a CD containing performances of music discussed in the text.