Musical Bodies, Musical Minds

An enactive account of musicality that proposes new ways of thinking about musical experience, musical development in infancy, music and evolution, and more. Musical Bodies, Musical Minds offers an innovative account of human musicality that draws on recent developments in embodied cognitive science. The authors explore musical cognition as a form of sense-making that unfolds across the embodied, environmentally embedded, and sociomaterially extended dimensions that compose the enactment of human worlds of meaning. This perspective enables new ways of understanding musical experience, the development of musicality in infancy and childhood, music's emergence in human evolution, and the nature of musical emotions, empathy, and creativity. Developing their account, the authors link a diverse array of ideas from fields including neuroscience, theoretical biology, psychology, developmental studies, social cognition, and education. Drawing on these insights, they show how dynamic processes of adaptive body-brain-environment interactivity drive musical cognition across a range of contexts, extending it beyond the personal (inner) domain of musical agents and out into the material and social worlds they inhabit and influence. An enactive approach to musicality, they argue, can reveal important aspects of human being and knowing that are often lost or obscured in the modern technologically driven world

Electronic Imaging & the Visual Arts. EVA 2019 Florence

The Publication is following the yearly Editions of EVA FLORENCE. The State of Art is presented regarding the Application of Technologies (in particular of digital type) to Cultural Heritage. The more recent results of the Researches in the considered Area are presented. Information Technologies of interest for Culture Heritage are presented: multimedia systems, data-bases, data protection, access to digital content, Virtual Galleries. Particular reference is reserved to digital images (Electronic Imaging & the Visual Arts), regarding Cultural Institutions (Museums, Libraries, Palace - Monuments, Archaeological Sites). The International Conference includes the following Sessions: Strategic Issues; New Science and Culture Developments & Applications; New Technical Developments & Applications; Cultural Activities – Real and Virtual Galleries and Related Initiatives, Access to the Culture Information. One Workshop regards Innovation and Enterprise. The more recent results of the Researches at national and international level are reported in the Area of Technologies and Culture Heritage, also with experimental demonstrations of developed Activities

Playing at a Distance

An essential exploration of video game aesthetic that decenters the human player and challenges what it means to play. Do we play video games or do video games play us? Is nonhuman play a mere paradox or the future of gaming? And what do video games have to do with quantum theory? In Playing at a Distance, Sonia Fizek engages with these and many more daunting questions, forging new ways to think and talk about games and play that decenter the human player and explore a variety of play formats and practices that require surprisingly little human action. Idling in clicker games, wandering in walking simulators, automating gameplay with bots, or simply watching games rather than playing them—Fizek shows how these seemingly marginal cases are central to understanding how we play in the digital age. Introducing the concept of distance, Fizek reorients our view of computer-mediated play. To “play at a distance,” she says, is to delegate the immediate action to the machine and to become participants in an algorithmic spectacle. Distance as a media aesthetic framework enables the reader to come to terms with the ambiguity and aesthetic diversity of play. Drawing on concepts from philosophy, media theory, and posthumanism, as well as cultural and film studies, Playing at a Distance invites a wider understanding of what digital games and gaming are in all their diverse experiences and forms. In challenging the common perception of video games as inherently interactive, the book contributes to our understanding of the computer's influence on practices of play—and prods us to think more broadly about what it means to play

Print and Screen, Muriel Cooper at MIT

Muriel Cooper (1925–94) worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for more than four decades as a graphic designer, an educator, and a researcher. Beginning in the early 1950s, she was the first designer in MIT’s Office of Publications, where she visualized the latest scientific research in print. In the late 1960s, she became the first Design and Media Director for the MIT Press, rationalizing its publishing protocols and giving form to some of the period’s most significant texts in the histories of art, design, and architecture, among other fields. In the mid-1970s, Cooper co-founded the Visible Language Workshop in MIT’s Department of Architecture. There she taught experimental printing and explored new imaging technologies in photography and video. And from the 1980s until her death, Cooper was a founding faculty member of the MIT Media Lab, where she turned her attention to the human-computer interface. Cooper helped cultivate a design culture at MIT. And before her premature death, she established some of the metaphors and mentored some of the designers that have shaped our contemporary digital landscape. Few 20th century designers have made significant contributions in both print and digital media, or helped to navigate the epochal transition between the two. Yet Cooper, in designing and redesigning roles for herself within new fields at MIT, did just that. Over her career and across multiple media, Cooper’s concerns remained quite consistent: She focused on developing both design tools and user experiences that would provide greater control and quicker feedback, eventually to be aided by machine intelligence. She sought to create experiences that were dynamic rather than static and simultaneous rather than linear, ones that engaged multiple media and a range of human senses. Cooper applied her knowledge of print design to software, and considered print and the process of its production as a prototype for the experiences that she would seek on screen. She also borrowed freely from media such as photography and film to inspire some of the effects she would later explore in new media. Cooper’s career traced an arc, in her practice and her pedagogy, from a focus on objects to one on systems. And her relationship to the digital evolved from a set of effects to be emulated in other media to seeing the computer at first as a tool, then as an assistant, and finally, as the medium itself. At the same time, she participated in a broader shift during this period from the paradigm of the humanist subject to the digitally augmented, “posthuman” condition of the present. In her interests and her achievements, Cooper exceeded any traditional definition of a graphic designer. At the same time, her work has defined the present state of the field. This dissertation, the first dedicated to Cooper, charts her pathbreaking career at MIT while also shedding new light on vital moments in the history of art, design, architecture, and media in postwar America

Between physics and art: Imaging the un-image-able

This thesis explores the ways in which art practice can engage with science, and more precisely, how my own practice interacts with scientific knowledge. The theoretical underpinning and contextual position of the practice make it particularly suited to explore the concept of visuality, here deployed as a shared notion between scientific and artistic production. The artwork testifies to a deep interest in and fascination with the latest research in physics and the complex problems associated with the aesthetic visualisation of scientific concepts related to extreme scale, distance and mathematical abstraction. Through two volumes (a written thesis and supporting material) and an exhibition of artworks, the research asks: how can meaning be translated, transformed, and transfigured between one domain (science) and another (art), using the visual as its mode of mediation?Following an opening survey of the broader field of investigation, looking at past and present literature and practices in the realm of science and art, the thesis analyses my art practice (considered as a hybrid between graphic design, illustration and visual communication) in terms of its immediate context, underlying motivations and methods for the production of art. In its present form, my practice does not fit any of the current sub-domains identified in the landscape of contemporary art, and is often situated outside the dialogues and concerns of fellow practitioners. Nor does it fully belong to the realm of scientific visuality (or of an “aestheticised science”): the field has shown some limitations in relation to art’s own domain of images, where modes of practice are not shared. In this instance the art is often reduced to explaining and communicating science in visual form. In contrast, my practice deploys a more sophisticated engagement with its referent, which needs to be positioned in relation to other practices, and its wider field of enquiry. To address this issue, findings from the initial investigation are reintroduced in order to conduct a reflective analysis through which the practice – argued as distinctive, and yet related to other visual traditions – exposes the problems that exist in the loosely defined domain of “Art and Science”.Taking the position of the reflective practitioner, the thesis demonstrates how the notion of research is intrinsically embedded in the creative process; therefore the enquiry also argues for the production of artworks as artistic research. Through the formation of a three-fold proposition – a method-practice-discourse – the investigation shows how this body of work can participate in, and question, the dominant dialogues in Art and Science. Furthermore, it serves to revisit the conventional views in the study of visuality by articulating an alternative form of engagement between two otherwise specialist domains. Ultimately, the research presents its proposition as a contribution to knowledge by providing a model for both practitioners and scholars