Category Archives: consciousness

Expanded Cinema

By Gene Youngblood (1970)
Author Gene Youngblood argues that a new, expanded cinema is required for a new consciousness. He describes various types of filmmaking utilising new technology, including film special effects, computer art, video art, multi-media environments and holography. Forward by R. Buckminster Fuller. Also available for download at http://www.vasulka.org/Kitchen/PDF_ExpandedCinema/ExpandedCinema.html

Posted in art, consciousness, culture, media, technology, theory

The Portable Jung

Edited by joseph Campbell (1971)
In making this masterful selection from the vast corpus of Carl Jung’s writings, Joseph Campbell has aimed to introduce the elementary terms and themes of analytical psychology and to provide an overall understanding of the scope and direction of Jung’s entire works.

Posted in consciousness, myth, psychology

The Poetics of Space

By Gaston Bachelard (1964)
The classic book on how we experience intimate spaces. A magical book. A prism through which all worlds from literary creation to housework to aesthetics to carpentry take on enhanced—and enchanted-significances. Every reader of it will never see ordinary spaces in ordinary ways. Instead the reader will see with the soul of the eye, the glint of Gaston Bachelard.

Posted in architecture, art, consciousness, language, phenomenology, philosophy

A Natural History of the Senses

By Diane Ackerman (1990)
An exciting multidiscipline book that crosses the lines of literature, history, anthropology, music, psychology, sociology, and philosophy and that flows with grace and reason. The theme is expressed in such a way as to draw readers into experiential thought and, therefore, impacts heavily upon the way one looks at the issue of sensing and its role for humanity. It is sure to raise readers’ consciousness level while providing researched and analyzed information on this topic. In addition, the language is clear and concise, which makes the book valuable to a large cross section of readers. The generous use of cultural and historical examples adds to the readability.

Posted in consciousness, history, language, music, philosophy, science

A Pictorial History of Psychology

Edited by Wolfgang G. Bringmann (1997)
Compendium of 107 historical essays and illustrations. Expanded version of a translated German title (1993). Includes 50 new English language essays.

Posted in consciousness, history, psychology, science

Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again

By Andy Clark (1996)
Brain, body, and world are united in a complex dance of circular causation and extended computational activity. In Being There, Andy Clark weaves these several threads into a pleasing whole and goes on to address foundational questions concerning the new tools and techniques needed to make sense of the emerging sciences of the embodied mind. Clark brings together ideas and techniques from robotics, neuroscience, infant psychology, and artificial intelligence. He addresses a broad range of adaptive behaviors, from cockroach locomotion to the role of linguistic artifacts in higher-level thought.

Posted in consciousness, language, science, technology

Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology

By Lawrence Weschler (1995)
In the non-Aristotelian, non-Euclidean, non-Newtonian space between the walls of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles exist bats that can fly through lead barriers, spore-ingesting pronged ants, elaborate theories of memory, and a host of other off-kilter scientific oddities that challenge the traditional notions of truth and fiction. Lawrence Weschler’s book, expanded from an article for Harper’s, is, at turns, a tour of the museum, a profile of its founder and curator, David Wilson, and a meditation on the role of imagination and authority in all museums, in science and in life. Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder is an exquisite piece of “magic realist nonfiction” that will prove utterly captivating.

Posted in art, biography, consciousness, exhibition, philosophy, science

Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings

By Martin Heidegger
Heidegger’s most popular collection of essential writings, now revised and expanded — includes the 10 key essays plus the introduction to Being and Time.

Posted in art, consciousness, language, philosophy

Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness by Roy Ascott

Edited by Edward Shanken (2003)
Long before e-mail and the Internet permeated society, Roy Ascott, a pioneering British artist and theorist, coined the term “telematic art” to describe the use of online computer networks as an artistic medium. In Telematic Embrace Edward A. Shanken gathers, for the first time, an impressive compilation of more than three decades of Ascott’s philosophies on aesthetics, interactivity, and the sense of self and community in the telematic world of cyberspace. This book explores Ascott’s ideas on how networked communication has shaped behavior and consciousness within and beyond the realm of what is conventionally defined as art.

Posted in art, consciousness, education, media, science, technology, theory

Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination and the Construction of the Underworld

By Clayton Eshleman (2003)
This arresting diptych of verse and philosophical prose charts a twenty-five-year obsession with the prehistoric cave paintings of southwestern France. The region’s enigmatic art work, dating from the Upper Paleolithic era, has been a constant muse for Eshleman, whose wildly discursive style mirrors the superimposed scenes of animal herds and shamanistic figures that populate the cave walls. Breathless accounts of cave exploration appear in counterpoint with poems in eerily primordial voices. Although his thesis that all art results from the separation anxiety between human and animal is unpersuasive, there is an impressive exuberance to his efforts to trace back to this common source everything from Greek myth to Allen Ginsberg. For Eshleman, it seems, the artist’s imaginative predicament is something of a cave itself, both maze and refuge.