Spyros Papapetros – författare

Throughout human history, people have imagined inanimate objects to have intelligence, language, and even souls. In our secular societies today, we still willingly believe that nonliving objects have lives of their own as we find ourselves interacting with computers and other equipment. In On the Animation of the Inorganic, Spyros Papapetros examines ideas about simulated movement and inorganic life during and after the turn of the twentieth century—a period of great technical innovation whose effects continue to reverberate today.Exploring key works of art historians such as Aby Warburg, Wilhelm Worringer, and Alois Riegl, as well as architects and artists like Fernand Léger, Mies van der Rohe, and Salvador Dalí, Papapetros tracks the evolution of the problem of animation from the fin de siècle through the twentieth century. He argues that empathy—the ability to identify with objects of the external world—was repressed by twentieth-century modernist culture, but it returned, projected onto inorganic objects such as machines, automobiles, and crystalline skyscrapers. These modern artifacts, he demonstrates, vibrated with energy, life, and desire of their own and had profound effects on people. Subtle and insightful, this book will change how we view modernist art, architecture, and their histories.

Throughout human history, people have imagined inanimate objects to have intelligence, language, and even souls. In our secular societies today, we still willingly believe that nonliving objects have lives of their own as we find ourselves interacting with computers and other equipment. In "On the Animation of the Inorganic", Spyros Papapetros examines ideas about simulated movement and inorganic life during and after the turn of the twentieth century - a period of great technical innovation whose effects continue to reverberate today. Exploring key works of art historians such as Aby Warburg, Wilhelm Worringer, and Alois Riegl, as well as architects and artists like Fernand Leger, Mies van der Rohe, and Salvador Dali, Papapetros tracks the evolution of the problem of animation from the fin de siecle through the twentieth century. He argues that empathy - the ability to identify with objects of the external world - was repressed by twentieth-century modernist culture, but it returned, projected onto inorganic objects such as machines, automobiles, and crystal-line skyscrapers.These modern artifacts, he demonstrates, vibrated with energy, life, and desire of their own and had profound effects on people. Subtle and insightful, this beautifully illustrated book will change how we view modernist art, architecture, and their histories.

The first publication of artist and architect Frederick Kiesler s epoch-spanning history of human architecture, largely unknown but still relevant. Magic Architecture was the architect Frederick Kiesler s most ambitious book project, an epoch-spanning history of human housing from prehistory to the atomic era and yet it was never published, as Kiesler moved on to other exhibitions and projects. Kiesler s comparative exploration of the quasi-'magical' effects of atomic technology and contemporary telekinetic military systems and the alternative epistemology of magic practices associated with cave drawings and protohistoric subterranean settlements reflects his profoundly interdisciplinary perspective on the evolution of art, architecture, and design. This edition preserves Kiesler s conception of the book as a neo-Vitruvian Renaissance treatise divided into ten parts or books that narrate an alternative history and theory of architecture. Also included are sixty composite illustrations, cut and pasted from books and popular science journals, with elaborate captions. The editors have reassembled the book s text and illustrations from archival material, supplementing them with notes that document the evolution of the work. Introductory essays provide a chronology of Kiesler s research and an interpretation of key themes. Appendixes offer additional textual and visual material gathered by Kiesler for the project.

Werewolf explores an emerging but under-investigated branch of architecture that embraces the transformation of form, performance, and the responsiveness to environments and context.