Infrastructural Brutalism

Download or read book Infrastructural Brutalism written by Michael Truscello and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How "drowned town" literature, road movies, energy landscape photography, and "death train" narratives represent the brutality of industrial infrastructures. In this book, Michael Truscello looks at the industrial infrastructure not as an invisible system of connectivity and mobility that keeps capitalism humming in the background but as a manufactured miasma of despair, toxicity, and death. Truscello terms this "infrastructural brutalism"--a formulation that not only alludes to the historical nexus of infrastructure and the concrete aesthetic of Brutalist architecture but also describes the ecological, political, and psychological brutality of industrial infrastructures.

Download or read book written by and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Oil Beach written by Christina Dunbar-Hester and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-01-24 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this engaging interdisciplinary investigation, Christina Dunbar-Hester, a leading scholar in the area of democratic control of technologies, focuses on the relationships between commerce, environment, and nonhuman life forms in San Pedro Bay, which houses the contiguous ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. The harbor is a heavily industrialized area built atop a land- and waterscape that is important for wildlife, containing estuarial wetlands, the LA river mouth, and a marine ecology where colder and warmer Pacific Ocean waters meet. This is a unique spot for industry too--this port complex is amongst the top-ten biggest container ports in the world, and the harbor is also home to major oil operations. Dunbar-Hester, a professor of Science & Technology Studies and Communication at the University of Southern California, centers her account on multispecies life in the period of about 1960 to the present, which coincides with the era of modern environmental regulation in the United States. Focusing on cetaceans, bananas, sea birds, and otters whose lives are intertwined with the vitality of the port complex itself, Dunbar--Hester reveals how logistics infrastructure destroys ecologies as it circulates goods and capital--and helps readers to consider a future where the accumulation of life and the accumulation of capital are not in violent tension"--

Download or read book Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities written by Olivier Coutard and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2024-04-12 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributing towards a thriving research area, this comprehensive Handbook presents a broad discussion of infrastructure as social phenomena. It compiles diverse perspectives to delineate the current ‘infrastructural turn’ and assess policy and research challenges relating to contemporary forms of infrastructural development.

Download or read book Infrastructure in Video Games written by Daniel Punday and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Brutalism as Found written by Nicholas Thoburn and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-03-19 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical appropriation of Brutalism in the crisis conditions of today. The Robin Hood Gardens public-housing estate in East London, completed in 1972, was designed by Alison and Peter Smithson as an ethical and aesthetic encounter with the flux and crises of the social world. Now demolished by the forces of speculative development, this Brutalist estate has been the subject of much dispute. But the clichéd terms of debate—a “concrete monstrosity” or a “modernist masterpiece”—have marginalized the estate’s residents and obscured its architectural originality. Recovering the social in the architectural, this book centers the estate’s lived experience of a multiracial working class, not to displace the architecture’s sensory qualities of matter and form, but to radicalize them for our present. Immersed in the materials, atmospheres, social forms and afterlives of this experimental estate, Robin Hood Gardens is reconstructed here as a socio-architectural expression of our times out of joint.

Download or read book Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies written by Natasha Lushetich and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-11-23 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology is a host of social, material, and epistemic transformation techniques, tools, and methods. The common perception of digital technology today is that it is determined, even over-determined. This volume suggests a different view: the digital is indeterminate. Mobilising insights from philosophy, art and architecture theory, mathematics, computer science and anthropology, it situates digital indeterminacy within the wider context of material and immaterial processes, causations, triggerings, and their performative working. The book’s tripartite structure reflects technology’s inherent capacity to transform knowledges, practices, and time. Part I: Social-Digital Technologies juxtaposes arguments for machinic indeterminacy to those of overdetermination in blockchain, cognitive augmentation, and digital ideology. Part II: Spatial, Temporal, Aural and Visual Technologies delves deeper into received ideas about technologies for building spatial structures, manufacturing instruments and constructing the visual space. Part III: Epistemic Technologies analyses the use of plasticity in cognitive science, contingency in thinking habits, ontogenesis in experimental computing, and divination techniques with an inbuilt margin of indeterminacy. List of contributors: Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, Iain Campbell, Stephen Darren Dougherty, Aden Evens, Oswaldo Emiddio Vasquez Hadjilyra, Stavros Kousoulas, Natasha Lushetich, Peteer Müürsepp, Luciana Parisi, Andrej Radman, Alesha Serada, Dominic Smith, Sha Xin Wei, Joel White, Ashley Woodward, and David Zeitlyn.