MITPressLog

Wednesday Blog Watch: Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Recently there was a post on the website Kottke.org about the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is a famous incunabulum - a book printed (not handwritten) using movable type before 1501. Known for its exceptional woodcut illustrations, unusual layout, and typographic flair, this erotic text was printed at the press of a Venetian publisher over 500 years ago - in 1499.
A complete electronic facsimile of the original Hypnerotomachia Poliphili was placed online in 1997. It can be viewed here. The editing of this electronic book was based on research published in Liane Lefaivre's Leon Battista Alberti's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Re-Cognizing the Architectural Body in the Early Italian Renaissance, where she attributes this unusual book to the talented Leon Battista Alberti. The architectural historian Alberto Pérez-Gómez updated the story of the Polyphili in his 1992 Polyphilo: or the Dark Forest Revisited - an Erotic Epiphany of Architecture.

Up, Up, and Away

Last night the Discovery Channel wrapped up its series "When We Left Earth."  David Mindell, author of Digital Apollo, offers his thoughts on the documentary:

I watched the entire series of the Discovery Channel's "When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions," all six hours as they replayed last week's episode and then played a new one.  As with so many of these films, the footage and the visuals were great (I'm only sorry I couldn't see it in HD).  But the story lines were generally disappointing--nothing new here, and in fact a great deal left out.  Begin with the subtitle, "the NASA missions," implying that the only NASA missions sent humans into space; the series hardly mentioned any remote missions.  Skylab was given pretty short shrift, despite a great deal of interesting work that went on during that project.  The interviews with key players were interesting in some cases, but they often seemed to be justifying themselves--of course Shuttle astronauts are going to think the shuttle was successful, but what about any other perspectives?  What about some of the interesting glitches, human conflicts, mistakes, and all the other interesting imperfections that make spaceflight a compelling human endeavor?  I was hoping for a little more on the "return to flight" after the Columbia accident; the film brushes over the fact that NASA made many of the same mistakes in recovering from the accident that they had made in leading up to it (not to mention similar ones that had been made on Challenger), and that the first Discovery flight after Columbia showed that the foam-shedding problem had been only incompletely solved.  I suppose there is a place in the world for younger generations to get the basic stories of American human spaceflight, but too often this genre is characterized by repetition more than analysis or originality.  This, I suppose, is partly what leads to the current status of human spaceflight in the US today: some people are for it and will not be convinced otherwise, and others are opposed or uninterested and will not change their minds.

I have higher hopes for the series "Moon Machines" which airs on Discovery July 6-10, made by the same people who made last year's film "In the Shadow of the Moon." David Sington and Chris Riley are smart, creative film makers.  I've seen the third episode, "The Navigation Computer," which is partly based on my book "Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight," and it came out very well.  The episode, and I bet the entire "Moon Machines" series brings to light some of the numerous other stories that went into the Apollo missions.

Award News - Digital Performance wins Lewis Mumford Award

Digital Performance by Steve Dixon has been selected as the winner of the 2008 Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics given by the Media Ecology Association (MEA).

The Lewis Mumford Award is given for “books and articles that focus on the history and/or philosophy of technology or science; studies of specific technologies, techniques, or media, and/or their social, cultural, and psychological effects; analysis and criticism of the technological/information society.”

For more about this award, see the description of the Media Ecology awards.

…and if you're wondering what Media Ecology is, the MEA provides some answers here.

Wednesday Blog Watch - Aliens Among Us

This week we came across a post entitled "Aspects of Alien Art"on the Xenolinguistics blog.
Xenolinguistics, in case you're wondering, is the study of alien language (the word also triggers a spell check flag). This is an interesting topic on its own, but anyway, the post mentioned Jonathan Shear's Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem, an MIT Press book. It got us thinking about whether discussions of extraterrestrial life have often come up in our books.
Well, we weren't disappointed. In 1975, MIT published Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, edited by the great Carl Sagan. The book is sadly out of print now (although a perfect POD opportunity...), but happily, The Cosmic Water Hole, written by Emmanuel Davoust in 1991, does in fact discuss life beyond earth and is indeed available in POD format. Likewise, the aptly named Life in the Universe, a 1982 classic from John Billingham, discusses exobiology (now known as Astrobiology - the study of life in the universe).
A related book, Gavagai!, or the Future History of the Animal Language Controversy , brings us back to Xenolinguistics and asks, "If we meet an extraterrestrial who keeps shouting "gavagai!", how are we to decode its meaning?"

6 Questions for Boris Groys

In the new issue of Art Lies, Kurt Mueller asked NYU's Boris Groys six questions about urban space and its relationship with art.  Here is one of them.

What is the relationship of art to urban public space (in whatever form it exists)? Is this a productive relationship? To what ends?

Every urban population believes in having its own collective psychology. One can ridicule this belief, but it has produced a lot of poetry, music and cinema that we are accustomed to valuing. The volume of poems about Parisian air or St. Petersburg’s weather is a sufficient justification for their architecture. However, if we don’t speak about art that is stimulated by a city but about art in the public space, then one should be very careful. The chance that any really good artwork can go though all possible channels that evaluate it is minimal. And, in general, art that is exhibited outside of arts institutions has to additionally identify itself as art. That makes art shown in the public space even more conservative than art shown within the framework of institutions.

The rest can be found here.

Groys discusses some of these issues in greater detail in his new book, Art Power.  Check it out. 

The ubiquitous Anish Kapoor

Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art is the site of a major exhibit of the works of Turner Prize-winning sculptor Anish Kapoor. The exhibit - Past, Present, Future - runs through September 7 and has been widely (and mostly positively) reviewed in recent weeks.

From the New York Times:

[A] brilliant and unpredictable if sometimes ingratiating synthesizer who has simultaneously refined, repurposed and betrayed some of the dearest beliefs and most despised bêtes noires of late-20th-century sculpture.

From the Boston Globe:

The clean contours of Kapoor's biomorphic shapes are constantly dissolving into optical fuzz. Again and again, they confound our attempts to see how they were made, how they are prevented from falling over, or where they begin and end.

And in Time magazine:

The paradox of Kapoor's work is that it has debts to the blunt boxes of minimalists like Donald Judd and Robert Morris as well as to the weightless atmospheres of James Turrell. But the blend of heavy and vaporous, declaring and beckoning--that's all Kapoor's.

Though it isn't mentioned in the reviews, the catalogue for the show was published by the MIT Press and has recently been released. More information on the book is available here.

Wednesday Blog Watch: Book Cover Design Blogs

This week let's look at a few blogs that focus on book cover design. The Book Design Review, written by Joseph Sullivan, is one of our favorites, and in the past he has covered the controversial cover for Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution.
Caustic Cover Critic is another excellent book cover blog, and though not often exceedingly caustic, does have a fun "awful" section (Thankfully, no MIT Press covers are in that section so far!).
Another cover blog, Judge a Book by its Cover explains:

I work in a public library. I see literally thousands of books every week; the good, the bad, and the truly hideous. These are the covers from the latter category.

Indeed most of the cover designs shown in that blog (the "Phallic Phriday" section is a good place to start) do seem to be rather hideous. Again, we're glad not to see any MIT Press books...
The Première de couverture blog, a bit more scholarly, is written by a bookseller about "the fascinating world of book cover design". In a post about British vs. American design, "Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century", he mentions the design of The Future of Europe. Incidentally (as we learned from the blog), première de couverture is the French term for the front cover of a book.

Rich Gold, your companion

Rich Gold's The Plenitude is a whimsical yet serious meditation on the ecology of stuff within which we live and create. It's also a relatively short book - less than 150 pages. For anyone who's craved more wisdom from this lighthearted polymath, you can now check out "The Plenitude: A Companion." It consists of autobiographical reflections from Gold, in the same literary and visual style as the book.

Check it out.

Sound Unbound on BoingBoing

Cory Doctorow gave a shout out to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, collected by our resident "cool dude" Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid on BoingBoing today.

Check it out.