"Science, Technology, and Utopias "

Author: Christine Filippone

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1351549812

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The rise of proxy wars, the Space Race, and cybernetics during the Cold War marked science and technology as vital sites of social and political power. Women artists, historically excluded from these domains, responded critically, while simultaneously redeploying the products of "Technological Society" into works that promoted ideals of progress and alternative concepts of human community. In this innovative book, author Christine Filippone offers the first focused examination of the conceptual use of science and technology by women artists during and just after the women?s movement. She argues that artists Alice Aycock, Agnes Denes, Martha Rosler and Carolee Schneemann used science and technology to mount a critique on Cold War American society as they saw it?conservative and constricting. Motivated by the contemporary American Women?s Movement, these artists transformed science and technology into new modes of artmaking that transgressed modernist, heroic, painterly styles and subverted the traditional economic structures of the gallery, the museum and the dealer. At the same time, the artists also embraced these domains of knowledge and practice as expressions of hope for a better future. Many found inspiration in the scientific theory of open systems, which investigated "problems of wholeness, dynamic interaction and organization", enabling consideration of the porous boundaries between human bodies and their social, political and nonhuman environments. Filippone also establishes that the theory of open systems not only informed feminist art, but also continued to influence women artists? practice of reclamation and ecological art through the twenty-first century.

"Science, Technology, and Utopias "

Author: Christine Filippone

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1351549820

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The rise of proxy wars, the Space Race, and cybernetics during the Cold War marked science and technology as vital sites of social and political power. Women artists, historically excluded from these domains, responded critically, while simultaneously redeploying the products of "Technological Society" into works that promoted ideals of progress and alternative concepts of human community. In this innovative book, author Christine Filippone offers the first focused examination of the conceptual use of science and technology by women artists during and just after the women?s movement. She argues that artists Alice Aycock, Agnes Denes, Martha Rosler and Carolee Schneemann used science and technology to mount a critique on Cold War American society as they saw it?conservative and constricting. Motivated by the contemporary American Women?s Movement, these artists transformed science and technology into new modes of artmaking that transgressed modernist, heroic, painterly styles and subverted the traditional economic structures of the gallery, the museum and the dealer. At the same time, the artists also embraced these domains of knowledge and practice as expressions of hope for a better future. Many found inspiration in the scientific theory of open systems, which investigated "problems of wholeness, dynamic interaction and organization", enabling consideration of the porous boundaries between human bodies and their social, political and nonhuman environments. Filippone also establishes that the theory of open systems not only informed feminist art, but also continued to influence women artists? practice of reclamation and ecological art through the twenty-first century.

The Romantic Machine

The Romantic Machine PDF

Author: John Tresch

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2012-02-06

Total Pages: 469

ISBN-13: 0226812227

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In the years immediately following Napoleon’s defeat, French thinkers in all fields set their minds to the problem of how to recover from the long upheavals that had been set into motion by the French Revolution. Many challenged the Enlightenment’s emphasis on mechanics and questioned the rising power of machines, seeking a return to the organic unity of an earlier age and triggering the artistic and philosophical movement of romanticism. Previous scholars have viewed romanticism and industrialization in opposition, but in this groundbreaking volume John Tresch reveals how thoroughly entwined science and the arts were in early nineteenth-century France and how they worked together to unite a fractured society. Focusing on a set of celebrated technologies, including steam engines, electromagnetic and geophysical instruments, early photography, and mass-scale printing, Tresch looks at how new conceptions of energy, instrumentality, and association fueled such diverse developments as fantastic literature, popular astronomy, grand opera, positivism, utopian socialism, and the Revolution of 1848. He shows that those who attempted to fuse organicism and mechanism in various ways, including Alexander von Humboldt and Auguste Comte, charted a road not taken that resonates today. Essential reading for historians of science, intellectual and cultural historians of Europe, and literary and art historians, The Romantic Machine is poised to profoundly alter our understanding of the scientific and cultural landscape of the early nineteenth century.

Nineteen Eighty-Four: Science Between Utopia and Dystopia

Nineteen Eighty-Four: Science Between Utopia and Dystopia PDF

Author: E. Mendelsohn

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 1984-09-30

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9789027717214

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Just fifty years ago Julian Huxley, the biologist grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, published a book which easily could be seen to represent the prevail ing outlook among young scientists of the day: If I were a Dictator (1934). The outlook is optimistic, the tone playfully rational, the intent clear - allow science a free hand and through rational planning it could bring order out of the surrounding social chaos. He complained, however: At the moment, science is for most part either an intellectual luxury or the paid servant of capitalist industry or the nationalist state. When it and its results cannot be fitted into the existing framework, it and they are ignored; and furthermore the structure of scientific research is grossly lopsided, with over-emphasis on some kinds of science and partial or entire neglect of others. (pp. 83-84) All this the scientist dictator would set right. A new era of scientific human ism would provide alternative visions to the traditional religions with their Gods and the civic religions such as Nazism and fascism. Science in Huxley's version carries in it the twin impulses of the utopian imagination - Power and Order. Of course, it was exactly this vision of science which led that other grand son of Thomas Henry Huxley, the writer Aldous Huxley, to portray scientific discovery as potentially subversive and scientific practice as ultimately en slaving.

Utopian Literature and Science

Utopian Literature and Science PDF

Author: Patrick Parrinder

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-08-11

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1137456787

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Scientific progress is usually seen as a precondition of modern utopias, but science and utopia are frequently at odds. Ranging from Galileo's observations with the telescope to current ideas of the post-human and the human-animal boundary, this study brings a fresh perspective to the paradoxes of utopian thinking since Plato.

Utopias

Utopias PDF

Author: Howard P. Segal

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2012-03-02

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 1118234405

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This brief history connects the past and present of utopian thought, from the first utopias in ancient Greece, right up to present day visions of cyberspace communities and paradise. Explores the purpose of utopias, what they reveal about the societies who conceive them, and how utopias have changed over the centuries Unique in including both non-Western and Western visions of utopia Explores the many forms utopias have taken – prophecies and oratory, writings, political movements, world's fairs, physical communities – and also discusses high-tech and cyberspace visions for the first time The first book to analyze the implicitly utopian dimensions of reform crusades like Technocracy of the 1930s and Modernization Theory of the 1950s, and the laptop classroom initiatives of recent years

A Modern Utopia (Unabridged)

A Modern Utopia (Unabridged) PDF

Author: H. G. Wells

Publisher: Good Press

Published: 2024-01-05

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13:

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This carefully crafted ebook: "A Modern Utopia (Unabridged)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. A Modern Utopia is presented as a tale told by a sketchily described character known only as the Owner of the Voice. This character "is not to be taken as the Voice of the ostensible author who fathers these pages," Wells warns. He is accompanied by another character known as "the botanist." Interspersed in the narrative are discursive remarks on various matters, creating what Wells called in his preface "a sort of shot-silk texture between philosophical discussion on the one hand and imaginative narrative on the other." Because of the complexity and sophistication of its narrative structure, H.G. Wells's A Modern Utopia has been called "not so much a modern as a postmodern utopia." The novel is best known for its notion that a voluntary order of nobility known as the Samurai could effectively rule a "kinetic and not static" world state so as to solve "the problem of combining progress with political stability." Herbert George Wells (1866-1946), known as H. G. Wells, was a prolific English writer in many genres, including the novel, history, politics, and social commentary, and textbooks and rules for war games.

Science, Technology and Utopias in the Work of Contemporary Women Artists

Science, Technology and Utopias in the Work of Contemporary Women Artists PDF

Author: Christine Filippone

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13:

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This dissertation examines the work of artists Alice Aycock, Agnes Denes, Martha Rosler and Carolee Schneemann, created between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s, which incorporated science and technology as subject and media. It represents the first focused examination of the conceptual use of science and technology by American women artists during the Cold War. I argue that, for these artists, science and technology represented a realm of investigation replete with negative associations in the wake of the Vietnam War, but also ripe with opportunities for change. Motivated by the contemporary American women's movement, these artists leveraged theories in physics, cosmology and systems, as well as new technologies such as video, in order to subvert modernist, male-centered, heroic, painterly styles, in addition to the traditional economic structures of the gallery, museum and dealer. This study sheds new light on conceptual art by re-centering the use of technology, generally treated as a conservative trend and excised from avant-garde histories, as a means for critique of Cold War society and as a method for imagining alternative concepts of human community. At stake in this investigation are domains of knowledge and power from which women have been historically excluded. Informed by New Left and counter-culture criticism of nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War arising from influential theorists, such as Herbert Marcuse and Lewis Mumford, these artists associated the industries of science and technology with the military-industrial complex, which was reviled as representative of a closed, mechanistic "technological society." However Marcuse, the media-acknowledged guru of the New Left (a left-wing international movement composed of social activist groups formed in the 1960s), also inspired the counter-culture to imagine an alternative society in which "science and technology are the great vehicles of liberation." Thus, while these artists subjected the patriarchal institutions and industries of science and technology to withering attack, they also redeployed their implicit notion of progress in feminist utopian visions of a different future.

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