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Sublime dreams of living machines : the automaton in the European imagination
From the dawn of European civilization to the twentieth century, the automaton—better known today as the robot—has captured the Western imagination and provided a vital lens into the nature of humanity. Historian Minsoo Kang argues that to properly understand the human-as-machine and the human-as-fundamentally-different-from-machine, we must trace the origins of these ideas and examine how they were transformed by intellectual, cultural, and artistic appearances of the automaton throughout the history of the West. Kang tracks the first appearance of the automaton in ancient myths through the medieval and Renaissance periods, marks the proliferation of the automaton as a central intellectual concept in the Scientific Revolution and the subsequent backlash during the Enlightenment, and details appearances in Romantic literature and the introduction of the living machine in the Industrial Age. He concludes with a reflection on the destructive confrontation between humanity and machinery in the modern era and the reverberations of the humanity-machinery theme today. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines is an ambitious historical exploration and, at heart, an attempt to fully elucidate the rich and varied ways we have utilized our most uncanny creations to explore essential questions about ourselves.
eBook
Surface Patterns in Architecture Driven by Image Sampling and Robotic Fabrication
Design and artwork driven by image sampling processing has a half-century tradition in contemporary art and computer graphics. In the past two decades, a similar approach has been used for the fabrication of abstract surface patterns for building facades. Recent advances in digital manufacturing based on industrial robots have reignited the interest toward developing new design-to-fabrication techniques which can possess intriguing visual and tectonic properties of the facades, based on image sampling processing and abstract image representation. The aim of the paper is to investigate the different strategies for creating surface patterns, based on image sampling and applying industrial robots as fabrication tools. In this paper, three different robotic fabrication strategies for generating surface patterns driven by image sampling are presented.
Journal Article
Fly Me to the Moon
When a leaf falls on a windy day, it drifts and tumbles, tossed
every which way on the breeze. This is chaos in action. In Fly
Me to the Moon, Edward Belbruno shows how to harness the same
principle for low-fuel space travel--or, as he puts it, \"surfing
the gravitational field.\"
Belbruno devised one of the most exciting concepts now being
used in space flight, that of swinging through the cosmos on the
subtle fluctuations of the planets' gravitational pulls. His idea
was met with skepticism until 1991, when he used it to get a stray
Japanese satellite back on course to the Moon. The successful
rescue represented the first application of chaos to space travel
and ushered in an emerging new field.
Part memoir, part scientific adventure story, Fly Me to the
Moon gives a gripping insider's account of that mission and of
Belbruno's personal struggles with the science establishment. Along
the way, Belbruno introduces readers to recent breathtaking
advances in American space exploration. He discusses ways to
capture and redirect asteroids; presents new research on the origin
of the Moon; weighs in on discoveries like 2003 UB313 (now named
Eris), a dwarf planet detected in the far outer reaches of our
solar system--and much more.
Grounded in Belbruno's own rigorous theoretical research but
written for a general audience, Fly Me to the Moon is for
anybody who has ever felt moved by the spirit of discovery.
eBook
Robotic Exploration of the Solar System
This is a detailed history of unmanned missions of exploration of our Solar System, one of three volumes providing comprehensive coverage of the topic with thousands of references. Coverage includes missions from the 1950s until the present day.
eBook
Advances in Architectural Geometry (AAG) 2016 Symposium
The Advances in Architectural Geometry (AAG) symposia serve as a unique forum where developments in the design, analysis and fabrication of building geometry are presented. With participation of both academics and professionals from the fields of architecture, engineering, computer science and mathematics, each symposium aims to gather and present practical work and theoretical research that responds to contemporary design challenges and expands opportunities for architectural form. This report summarizes the AAG2016, the fifth edition of the symposia hosted by the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Digital Fabrication at ETH Zurich from 9 to 13 September 2016.
Journal Article
Sublime Dreams of Living Machines
Kang’s central contention is that the automaton, a machine that can move by itself (better known today as the robot), is one of the essential ideas with which people in the West have pondered the very nature of humanity itself. In Kang’s telling, automata are mirrors of the ideas, fears, and anxieties of a given era, in that attitudes towards the machines have always been indicative of a moment’s zeitgeist. The book is historically sweeping, but not comprehensive; the focus is on what Kang takes to be key changes in the representations of and responses to automata. His main interest is on how Europeans in different periods of the past thought about the very notion of a self-moving machine that acted as if it were alive and how they used it for various symbolic and intellectual purposes.
eBook
Le Procès de l'Europe
L'Europe se trouve aujourd'hui en position d'accusée, souvent par les Européens eux-mêmes, du fait de sa prétention à l'universalité, de sa supériorité proclamée et de son arrogance intellectuelle. Qu'elle n'ait pas toujours été fidèle à ses principes, lors de la colonisation des autres peuples, ne met pourtant pas en cause sa légitimité. La critique de l'Europe n'est en effet possible qu'à l'aide des normes juridiques et des principes éthiques qu'elle a diffusés auprès de tous les peuples pour connaître le monde plutôt que pour le juger.Levinas n'avait donc pas tort de louer «la générosité même de la pensée occidentale qui, apercevant l'hommeabstraitdans les hommes, a proclamé la valeur absolue de la personne et a englobé dans le respect qu'elle lui porte jusqu'aux cultures où ces personnes se tiennent et où elles s'expriment.» Il faut en prendre son parti : il n'y a pas plus d'égalité des cultures que de relativisme des valeurs. On ne saurait faire le procès de l'universel sans faire appel à la culture qui a donné cet universel en partage aux autres cultures.
eBook
MoneyWatch Report
Meanwhile, stocks closed mixed yesterday led by gains in tech and industrial companies. The Dow did decline twenty-six points. The NASDAQ closed up eighteen, hitting a new record. The S&P 500 gained three points.
Transcript