Here are 100 books that Lumen Naturae fans have personally recommended if you like
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Art, technology, and science…I have been seamlessly traversing domains all my life. I grew up with twin interests in physical sciences and visual arts, finding beauty in math and art and seeing creativity as being one thing rather than something living in compartments. Art influenced my research in chaos and complexity, and blurring boundaries characterized my work as dean of engineering when creating educational/research initiatives in design, art, entrepreneurship, energy, and sustainability. I also received visible external recognition as a Guggenheim Fellow and member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
This book will capture your imagination and dazzle your senses with deep scholarship.
Deep exploration of creative outputs at their maximum states, the state of “flow”, condensing Csikszentmihalyi’s thirty years of research and nearly one hundred interviews with exceptionally creative people, spanning science, business, and art, in all of their dimensions. Creativity in art, technology, and science, perceived by many as being different types of creativity, revealed, at its core, to be the same.
“Although the benefits of this study to scholars are obvious, this thought-provoking mixture of scholarly and colloquial will enlighten inquisitive general readers, too.” — Library Journal (starred review)
The classic study of the creative process from the bestselling author of Flow.
Creativity is about capturing those moments that make life worth living. Legendary psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (“The leading researcher into ‘flow states.’” — Newsweek) reveals what leads to these moments—be it the excitement of the artist at the easel or the scientist in the lab—so that this knowledge can be used to enrich people's lives. Drawing on nearly one hundred…
Art, technology, and science…I have been seamlessly traversing domains all my life. I grew up with twin interests in physical sciences and visual arts, finding beauty in math and art and seeing creativity as being one thing rather than something living in compartments. Art influenced my research in chaos and complexity, and blurring boundaries characterized my work as dean of engineering when creating educational/research initiatives in design, art, entrepreneurship, energy, and sustainability. I also received visible external recognition as a Guggenheim Fellow and member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
This book will educate you and show how ideas are connected to each other.
Could there be social science laws? What did social science borrow from physics and math? And, more surprisingly, what physics borrowed from social science when disciplines were just emerging? Complex systems serve as a backdrop for many of the stories. The history of science is far from rectilinear. That’s what makes the story fascinating.
Is there a 'physics of society'? Philip Ball's investigation into human nature ranges from Hobbes and Adam Smith to modern work on traffic flow and market trading, across economics, sociology and psychology. Ball shows how much of human behaviour we can understand when we cease trying to predict and analyse the behaviour of individuals and look to the impact of hundreds, thousands or millions of individual human decisions, in circumstances in which human beings both co-operate and conflict, when their aggregate behaviour is constructive and when it is destructive. By perhaps Britain's leading young science writer, this is a deeply…
Art, technology, and science…I have been seamlessly traversing domains all my life. I grew up with twin interests in physical sciences and visual arts, finding beauty in math and art and seeing creativity as being one thing rather than something living in compartments. Art influenced my research in chaos and complexity, and blurring boundaries characterized my work as dean of engineering when creating educational/research initiatives in design, art, entrepreneurship, energy, and sustainability. I also received visible external recognition as a Guggenheim Fellow and member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
This book will inspire you, make you see possibilities, and widen your thinking.
The back cover’s proclamation, “It is not about the world of design, it is about the design of world”, says it all. The design of this book itself opened new frontiers; text and images interspersed as they had never been seen before, intertwining technologies, inventions, and pivotal events that are affecting humanity worldwide.
Massive Change is a modern, illustrated primer on the new inventions, technologies, and events that are affecting the human race worldwide. This book is part of a broader research project by Bruce Mau Design, intended to provoke debate and discussion about the future of design culture - defined generally as the 'familiar objects and techniques that are transforming our lives'.
Through an original selection of essays, interviews and provocative imagery aimed at a broad audience, Massive Change explores the changing forces of design in the contemporary world and, from this angle, expands the definition of design to include the built…
Art, technology, and science…I have been seamlessly traversing domains all my life. I grew up with twin interests in physical sciences and visual arts, finding beauty in math and art and seeing creativity as being one thing rather than something living in compartments. Art influenced my research in chaos and complexity, and blurring boundaries characterized my work as dean of engineering when creating educational/research initiatives in design, art, entrepreneurship, energy, and sustainability. I also received visible external recognition as a Guggenheim Fellow and member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
This book will open your eyes and make you see the world with an augmented lens.
Networks are everywhere; in biology, social systems, economics, and technologies, and the study of networks connects mathematics, physics, computer sciences, biology, and social sciences, producing fascinating connections. This book brings together all this, highlighting the interconnections between ideas and technical work in different areas and telling us how networks emerge, and how they evolve.
A cocktail party. A terrorist cell. Ancient bacteria. An international conglomerate. All are networks, and all are a part of a surprising scientific revolution. In Linked , Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, the nation's foremost expert in the new science of networks, takes us on an intellectual adventure to prove that social networks, corporations, and living organisms are more similar than previously thought. Barabasi shows that grasping a full understanding of network science will someday allow us to design blue-chip businesses, stop the outbreak of deadly diseases, and influence the exchange of ideas and information. Just as James Gleick and the Erdos-Renyi model…
I make prints and visual books. I founded Bridge Press, now in Kennebunk, Maine, 1989 to publish limited edition artist's books and etchings. The name of the press underscores the collaborative nature of book making. Visual books offered possibilities for the continuity, connection, and unfolding of images—each image is complete yet linked to every other through the structure of the book. Books seemed an ideal vehicle to assemble and connect my prints, to order and unfold a sequence of images, with defined and recurrent shapes, motifs, and composition, and to create a setting in which each image is complete yet linked to every other through the structure of the binding or enclosure.
This book brilliantly revives the concept of cosmography, the visual depiction of the universe, from the beginnings of Romanticism to images from the Hubble telescope. By intermingling images from art and science, the book underscores the powerful visual parallels between the two disciplines, their discoveries equally strange, wondrous, and insightful.
From Galileo to Yves Klein the cosmos has been the inspiration for generations of artists, architects and designers. Their multifacetted cosmic visions are the subject of this original volume.
Having written several books on cultural history, I was puzzled in the late 1990s by the insistence of most American curators, art historians, and gallerists that there could not possibly be any spiritual content in modern artbecause the modernproject (beginning, they assert, with the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874) was all about the rejection of tradition, religion, etc. This overarching narrative has dominated the professional art world since World War II. I knew it was false because I was aware that many prominent modern artists had spiritual interests, which were expressed in their art. So began a 17-year-long research quest focused on what the artists themselves had said.
I noticed when I was interviewing prominent contemporary artists for my book that many of them had a Catholic childhood. Eleanor Heartney noticed the same thing when she began to research the art and artists who became a focus in the culture wars of the 1990s. This is a dimension of the art history of the modern era that has not been told. Heartney explores the influence of an “Incarnational consciousness” in works that transgress boundaries. Beyond that, she frames artistic manifestations of the “Catholic imagination,” tracing the influence of “the beauty of religious art, music, and literature and the slippage in sacramental rituals between the carnal and the spiritual.” Her final chapter is on “Knowledge Through the Body: The Female Perspective.”
NEWLY EXPANDED AND REDESIGNED 2ND EDITION. This redesigned, re-edited, illustrated new edition of the classic study "Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art" explores the Catholic roots of controversial artists and the impact of Catholicism on the 1990s Culture Wars. In the 1990s the United States was embroiled in a deeply divisive Culture War. "Postmodern Heretics" offers a radically original interpretation of the extraordinary cultural and political battles that took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Examining this period from the perspective of religion, Eleanor Heartney discovers that the most controversial artists of the time came, almost…
I have been professionally involved with contemporary art since the 1980s, when I was a curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. In the forty years since I've seen an enormous shift in the orientation of American curators and scholars from Western art to a global perspective. After earning my PhD at Harvard, and writing several books on contemporary art, I wanted to tackle the challenge of a truly comparative contemporary art history. To do so, I've depended on the burgeoning scholarship from a new more diverse generation of art historians, as well as on many decades of travel and research. My book Heritage and Debt is an attempt to synthesize that knowledge.
Hito Steyerl is one of the most prominent artists and media theorists in the world. Her essays draw unexpected and always stimulating connections between media technologies, surveillance, war, and political power. They are short, concise, and a pleasure to read, but they always engage with big ideas around the ethical and social challenges of a world made global through the framework of the Internet and digital communication more broadly.
In Duty Free Art, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl wonders how we can appreciate, or even make art, in the present age. What can we do when arms manufacturers sponsor museums, and some of the world's most valuable artworks are used as a fictional currency in a global futures market that has nothing to do with the work itself? Can we distinguish between creativity and the digital white noise that bombards our everyday lives? Exploring artefacts as diverse as video games, Wikileaks files, the proliferation of spam, and political actions, she exposes the paradoxes within globalization, political economies, visual culture,…
Having written several books on cultural history, I was puzzled in the late 1990s by the insistence of most American curators, art historians, and gallerists that there could not possibly be any spiritual content in modern artbecause the modernproject (beginning, they assert, with the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874) was all about the rejection of tradition, religion, etc. This overarching narrative has dominated the professional art world since World War II. I knew it was false because I was aware that many prominent modern artists had spiritual interests, which were expressed in their art. So began a 17-year-long research quest focused on what the artists themselves had said.
This is the grand exhibition catalogue that burst through the professional art world’s wall of denial that modern, especially abstract, art would have any spiritual content. The extensive exhibition this book accompanied opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986 and then travelled to The Hague, where it influenced young European art historians (though was largely ignored in the United States). This catalogue contains excellent articles by 17 noted “rebellious” art historians, including an overview by the head curator of the exhibition, Maurice Tuchman. The many color plates are stunning. This book is indispensable for anyone seeking to learn about the subject.
The seventeen essays in this provocative book provide a radical rethinking of abstraction, from the Symbolism that prefigured abstract art through the current manifestations of spiritual content in American and European painting.
Having written several books on cultural history, I was puzzled in the late 1990s by the insistence of most American curators, art historians, and gallerists that there could not possibly be any spiritual content in modern artbecause the modernproject (beginning, they assert, with the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874) was all about the rejection of tradition, religion, etc. This overarching narrative has dominated the professional art world since World War II. I knew it was false because I was aware that many prominent modern artists had spiritual interests, which were expressed in their art. So began a 17-year-long research quest focused on what the artists themselves had said.
Lipsey, an art historian, was inspired by Coomaraswamy’s perception of spiritual interests in the work of early modernist artists who exhibited at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery in New York in the 1920s. Lipsey had a hunch that many more prominent 20th-century artists most likely had a similar engagement with the spiritual. In seeking to present “the hidden side” of modern art, he discusses some 20 renowned artists and relevant movements that attracted many of them in various decades, such as Theosophy, Orphism, and Cubism. The title is taken from a quotation by the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who favored a nature-based spiritual sensibility that was distinct from church-based religious art: “It is time we had an art of our own.” Lipsey is an insightful and graceful guide in this area.
I am a professor of International Studies and a former museum curator. This combination provides me with a unique perspective not only on the inner workings of the art world, but the way that those practices map on to broader social, political, and economic transformations that occur as a result of globalization. This leads me, for example, to an assessment of how free-trade zones affect the art market. In past research, I have focused on colonialism and French art in the nineteenth century, so I am attuned to power imbalances between the center and the periphery and I am fascinated to see how these are shifting in the present.
This book provides a primer on the global art market from scholars around the world.
The issues addressed include economic integration of multiple circuits/regional markets, the rise of markets in Asia, online marketplaces, and the importance of galleries and collectives to propel artists to success. The biggest advantage to this work is that it is the first book to consider global art markets from divergent perspectives.
While there remains a real center to the art world analyzed in this volume, you can start to see how new regions and countries are charging forward, transforming the domain of contemporary art in the twenty-first century by making it far more diverse and global.
Since the late 1990s, contemporary art markets have emerged rapidly outside of Europe and the United States. China is r s1the world's second largest art market. In counties as diverse as Brazil, Turkey and India, modern and contemporary art has been recognized as a source of status, or a potential investment tool among the new middle classes. At art auctions in the US, London and Hong Kong, new buyers from emerging economies have driven up prices to record levels. The result of these changes has been an increase in complexity, interconnectedness, stratification and differentiation of contemporary art markets. Our understanding…
