Bøger udgivet af MIT Press

"Argues that hacking provides a privileged vantage point for probing the logic of informational capitalism since hackers are at the forefront of structural transformations of late modernity"--

The electric vehicle revival reflects negotiations between public policy, which promotes clean, fuel-efficient vehicles, and the auto industry, which promotes high-performance vehicles.Electric cars were once as numerous as internal combustion engine cars before all but vanishing from American roads around World War I. Now, we are in the midst of an electric vehicle revival, and the goal for a sustainable car seems to be within reach. In Age of Auto Electric, Matthew N. Eisler shows that the halting development of the electric car in the intervening decades was a consequence of tensions between environmental, energy, and economic policy imperatives that informed a protracted reappraisal of the automobile system. These factors drove the electric vehicle revival, argues Eisler, hastening automaking’s transformation into a science-based industry in the process.Challenging the common assumption that the electric vehicle revival is due to the development of better batteries, Age of Auto Electric instead focuses on changing environmental and socioeconomic conditions, energy and environmental policies, systems of energy conversion and industrial production, and innovation practices that affected the prevalence and popularity of electric vehicles in recent decades. Eisler describes a world in transition from legacy to alternative energy-conversion systems and the promises, compromises, new problems, and unintended consequences that enterprise has entailed.

The marvelous sonic world of whales, from the perspective of music and science.Whale song is an astonishing world of sound whose existence no one suspected before the 1960s. Its discovery has forced us to confront the possibility of alien intelligence—not in outer space but right here on earth. Thoughtful, richly detailed, and deeply entertaining, Whale Music uses the enigma of whale sounds to open up whales' underwater world of sonic mystery. In observing and talking with leading researchers from around the globe as they attempt to decipher undersea music, Rothenberg tells the story of scientists and musicians confronting an unknown as vast as the ocean itself. His search culminates in a grand attempt to make interspecies music by playing his clarinet with whales in their native habitats, from Russia to Canada to Hawaii.This is a revised edition of Thousand Mile Song, originally published in 2008. The latest advances in cetacean science and interspecies communication have been incorporated into this new edition, along with added photographs and color whale scores.

In the Black Fantastic' assembles art and imagery from across the African diaspora that embraces ideas of the mythic and the speculative. It brings to life the forces that shape Afrofuturism - the cultural movement that conjures otherworldly visions out of the everyday of Black experience - and beyond, looking at how speculative fictions in Black art and culture are boldly reimagining perspectives on race, gender, identity and the body in the 21st century. Standing apart from Western narratives of progress and modernity - based as they are on the historical subjugation of people of colour - the book explores how Black artists are drawing inspiration from African-originated myth, knowledge systems and spiritual practices to confound the Western dichotomy between the real and unreal, the natural and the supernatural. With 250 illustrations spanning the spheres of photography, painting, sculpture, cinema, literature and architecture, this book reaches across time, space and art form, drawing together everything from works by leading visual artists such as Kara Walker, Chris Ofili and Lina Iris Viktor to groundbreaking films like Black Panther and Get Out and the radical politics of pan-Africanism.

A wide range of philosophical essays informed by the work of Harry Frankfurt, who offers a response to each essay.

Canvases and Careers Today brings together contributions from the eponymous conference organized by the Institut für Kunstkritik, Frankfurt am Main. Its goal is to provide deeper insights and more complexity to current debates on the relationship between criticism, art, and the market. "It was especially interesting for us to watch a kind of transatlantic divide happening. While the US-American participants mostly declared criticism as obsolete while hoping for turning its weakness into a strength, most European participants departed from the opposite diagnosis: that criticism has never been as strong as it is today, since it is now part of a knowledge-based economy." Isabelle Graw/Daniel Birnbaum

Vygotsky opened up an original field in the science of psychology, based on the sociohistorical theory of the nature of man's consciousness.This work, written more than forty years ago and now translated into English for the first time, approaches the study of art from a psychological basis. However, Vygotsky's view is free of the old subjective-empirical outlook. His method, while objective and analytical, found its basis in the reasoning that to analyze the structure of artistic creation one must re-create the total concept motivated Vygotsky to evolve the means by which artistic accomplishments could be examined and the elements of their validity "revealed.”The Psychology of Art discusses the literary genre in its classical forms - the fable, the epic, the short story, and Shakespearean tragedy. The heightened levels of perception and feeling that are created by great literature and drama are discussed by Vygotsky with clarity and conviction.Many of the appraisals in this work resulted from Vygotsky's reaction to the fallacious "solutions” proposed by the one-sided, traditional views of the literary critics of his time. An entire chapter, "Art as Technique,” investigates and expresses his contradistinctive views of the formalistic view of the nature of art. For Vygotsky, form did not and could not exist independently as a valid dimension - form appeared only in relation to the medium or the material it incarnated.Vygotsky's presentation of his thesis in The Psychology of Art is a logical procession of his basic thoughts. In the first chapter, "The Psychological Problem of Art,” he clarifies the major pitfall of criticism up to his day, where he points out: "The fundamental error of experimental aesthetics consists in starting from the wrong end, that of aesthetic pleasure and aesthetic appraisal, all the while intentionally ignoring the fact that both pleasure and appraisal may be arbitrary, secondary, or even irrelevant features of aesthetic behavior.” From here he goes on to investigate the psychological premises of art.In viewing a work of art as "a combination of aesthetic symbols aimed at arousing emotions in people,” Vygotsky proceeds to analyze these symbols and re-create the basic, "impersonal” components that make up the psychology of the work - without specific references to author-creator or reader-subject - examining only the elements of form and material that are combined in the work. For example, in his chapter on Hamlet Vygotsky examines the structure from "subjective” and "objective” viewpoints, presents the problems of "identification” of the hero, and discusses the play in its various levels of consciousness.Essentially a work of synthesis, The Psychology of Art laid the foundations for a new science of art, and as such is a major contribution to its study.

Change in View offers an entirely original approach to the philosophical study of reasoning by identifying principles of reasoning with principles for revising one's beliefs and intentions and not with principles of logic.

Available again from the MIT Press.

How rewilding has transformed the conservation movement, combining radical scientific insights with practical innovations. Progressive scientists and conservation professionals are pursuing a radical new approach to restoring ecosystems: rewilding. By recovering the ripple effect generated by the interactions among plant and animal species and natural disturbances, rewilding seeks to repair ecosystems by removing them from human engineering and reassembling guilds of megafauna from a mix of surviving wild and feral species and de-domesticated breeds, including elk, bison, and feral horses. Written by two leaders in the field, this book offers an abundantly illustrated guide to the science of rewilding. It shows in fascinating detail the ways in which ecologists are reassembling ecosystems that allow natural interactions rather than human interventions to steer their environmental trajectories. Rewilding looks into a past in which industrialization and globalization downgraded grasslands, describes current projects designed to recover self-willed ecosystems, and envisions the future with ten predictions for a rewilded planet. It shows how rewilding is shaking up conservation science and policy, bringing new hope and renewed purpose to efforts to revive essential ecological processes. Color illustrations capture moments of beauty in nature and offer enlightening infographics and visualizations.

A remarkable time capsule of Simi Valley, 1979, written before the author would become one of LA’s most influential artists of subsequent decades.When Sean DeLear died prematurely in Vienna in 2017, his friends discovered—among other treasures—an extensive diary kept at the age of fourteen. Still living with his Christian parents in the notoriously racist Los Angeles suburb of Simi Valley, Sean wrote almost every day about crushes and hustling, waterbeds, blackmail, Donna Summer, gloryholes, racism, and shoplifting gay porn. DeLear would go on to become the frontman for the Los Angeles punk/powerpop band Glue. He was a punk musician, visual artist, intercontinental scenester, video vixen, party host, marijuana farmer, and sometime-collaborator of artists such as Kembra Pfahler and Vaginal Davis. DeLear’s forgotten diaries capture a moment in Los Angeles underground and queer history when, as his friend the writer Cesar Padilla notes, “It wasn’t cool at all to be trans, gay, queer or whatever. Those words weren’t even in the vocabulary.” I Could Not Believe It, Padilla continues, “is a raw fearless innocent gay Black kid’s journey coming out into life at an incredible pre-AIDS period. It’s not cognizant of being literature. It’s as naïve and forthcoming as it gets. It wasn’t written with the desire to be published so Sean didn’t hold back. Sean’s goal was to be true to himself.”

Assessing the influence of scientific advice in societies that increasingly question scientific authority and expertise.Today, scientific advice is asked for (and given) on questions ranging from stem-cell research to genetically modified food. And yet it often seems that the more urgently scientific advice is solicited, the more vigorously scientific authority is questioned by policy makers, stakeholders, and citizens. This book examines a paradox: how scientific advice can be influential in society even when the status of science and scientists seems to be at a low ebb. The authors do this by means of an ethnographic study of the creation of scientific authority at one of the key sites for the interaction of science, policy, and society: the scientific advisory committee. The Paradox of Scientific Authority offers a detailed analysis of the inner workings of the influential Health Council of the Netherlands (the equivalent of the National Academy of Science in the United States), examining its societal role as well as its internal functioning, and using the findings to build a theory of scientific advising. The question of scientific authority has political as well as scholarly relevance. Democratic political institutions, largely developed in the nineteenth century, lack the institutional means to address the twenty-first century's pervasively scientific and technological culture; and science and technology studies (STS) grapples with the central question of how to understand the authority of science while recognizing its socially constructed nature.

From one of the earliest feminist science fiction writers, a novel that envisions the fall of civilization—and the plight of the modern woman in a post-apocalyptic wilderness.When war breaks out in Europe, British civilization collapses overnight. The ironically named protagonist must learn to survive by his wits in a new Britain. When we first meet Savage, he is a complacent civil servant, primarily concerned with romancing his girlfriend. During the brief war, in which both sides use population displacement as a terrible strategic weapon, Savage must battle his fellow countrymen. He shacks up with an ignorant young woman in a forest hut—a kind of inverse Garden of Eden, where no one is happy. Eventually, he sets off in search of other survivors . . . only to discover a primitive society where science and technology have come to be regarded with superstitious awe and terror. A pioneering feminist, Hamilton offers a warning about the degraded state of modern women, who—being “unhandy, unresourceful, superficial”—would suffer a particularly sad fate in a postapocalyptic social order.

"The first English translation of key texts by Georges Bataille pertaining to The Accursed Share that also map out his transition from "dissident surrealist" to systematic thinker"--

Experts report on the latest research on extending access to financial services to the 2.5 billion adults around the world who lack it.

How MIT's first nine presidents helped transform the Institute from a small technical school into a major research university.

This warm, anecdotal biography by the Greens' longtime friend, MIT geologist Robert Shrock reveals the human impulses that led to their success, the unique combination of the analytical and the personal that they brought to their business decisions and to their investments in humanity's future.