Restless nature

Group exhibition of 9 artists who use nature as their source material to decribe the actual or imagined world around them

Gasworks

The material imagination of the nineteenth century had to deal increasingly with what had previously been thought to be immaterial, or as good as, and with largely imaginary forms of material. The century was one in which the material and the immaterial entered into new and surprising alliances and exchanges, exchange becoming in the process the principal mode in which the material world was made apprehensible. Increasingly, the material world was immaterialised, with the growing dependence on invisible gases, vapours and substances, from steam (or, more strictly, water-vapour), to coal-gas, to the ether of space that provided such an indisputable and indispensable ground for nineteenth-century physics. This essay considers the ways in which gas, and in particular gaslighting, was imagined, especially in Victorian fiction. I conclude that gas became a mediate material, which connected up the global and the local, the economic and the physiological, the immediate and the mediate. As such, it provides a kind of correlative to the imaginary plasma of the novel itself, which equally arises from a curiosity about the complexity of conjunctures, with the intimate traffic of proximity and distance

The smell of God: scent trails from Ficino to Baudelaire

God has a smell. Or rather, our sense of smell can bring us to a deeper knowledge of God. This is one aspect of a theory which runs through much of European history from the Renaissance onwards, with fluctuating intensity and with fundamental variations. It has been referred to, principally, as the theory of signatures, the theory of universal analogy, and the theory of correspondences, and is originally derived from Plato's philosophy of Ideas. The most common thread of the doctrine is that there are correspondences between the material and the spiritual worlds and that the material world can therefore be read like a book, revealing the secrets of the spiritual world. Another common thread of the doctrine is that the senses, which diffusely allow us to experience the material world, can be united as one, enabling our complete grasp of spiritual harmony, of the ideal world. The senses have usually figured highly in the doctrine of correspondences in general, as enabling this leap from the material to the spiritual. But individual senses have enjoyed varying degrees of attention throughout time. Smell has not been the most popular of them, but it is markedly emphasised by two users of the doctrine, the eighteenth-century Swedish scientist, theologian and mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg, and the French Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire. What Nathalie Wourm attempts here is a short history of the idea of a spiritual scent, from the Neoplatonist thinkers of the fifteenth century to the present day

[Review of] Howard L. Harrod. Renewing the World

Howard Harrod\u27s work provides an interpretation of the religious and moral world of the Arapaho, Crow, Cheyenne and Blackfeet tribes of the Northwestern Plains. Well aware that the material he is utilizing represents interpretations by early ethnographers, he transcends this hermeneutical problem to provide an idealized reconstruction of this world guided by the theories of Schutz and Geertz and the work of Joseph Brown

Discourse in a material world

We challenge recent assertions that discourse studies cannot de facto address materiality. We demonstrate how a Foucauldian theorization of discourse provides a way to analyse the co‐constitutive nature of discursive and material processes, as well as explore the power relations implicated in these relationships. To illustrate our argument, we identify exemplary studies that have effectively combined a study of discourse and different aspects of materiality – bodies, objects, spaces, and practices. In doing so, we show how discourse scholars are able to study both materiality and power relations

Reflectance Hashing for Material Recognition

We introduce a novel method for using reflectance to identify materials. Reflectance offers a unique signature of the material but is challenging to measure and use for recognizing materials due to its high-dimensionality. In this work, one-shot reflectance is captured using a unique optical camera measuring {\it reflectance disks} where the pixel coordinates correspond to surface viewing angles. The reflectance has class-specific stucture and angular gradients computed in this reflectance space reveal the material class. These reflectance disks encode discriminative information for efficient and accurate material recognition. We introduce a framework called reflectance hashing that models the reflectance disks with dictionary learning and binary hashing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of reflectance hashing for material recognition with a number of real-world materials

Cost-effectiveness Of Sailcloth Selection For Different Classes, Types And Species Of Sailing Boats

Results over of theoretical analysis for the selection of corresponding basic material of sail clothes fabric for a different classes, types and views of sailing boats are given in the article.Sailing boats needs the proper of yachting equipment, that goes both with the manipulation of boats and rigging (in accordance of views, classes and types of sailing boats). The material for sailing is elected by participants of competitions depending of the area of navigation, the strength of wind, the whole distances and boat\u27s possibilities, coming from technical criteria and parameters of the boats.Full analysis of economic efficiency is conducted and price politics of different material\u27s types for sails in accordance with its chemical composition is analyzed. The most effective type of factory fabric is certain for sewing of sails for racing boats. For a deep scientific analysis and practical realization of the investigated process an accent is done on the exposure of the most popular sailing sailcloth materials used only on the famous world regattas.These results are very important and needed foremost for the first-class skippers of modern world racing boats, to identify most practical and super persistent to the wind, the sun, salt water materials that use in sewing of racing sails. Necessary analyses and descriptions of scientific article concerning sewing of racing sails also will be useful to the yachtsmen that only begin the way in the world of cruise yachting and sporting yachting races. Importance of faithful direction at the choice of material for sails is done not only for the decision element of victories in races and regattas, but also for an answer on many questions, constrained concerning speed of boat, norm of coverage of sails and, in the end, with maneuverability, boat speed