Search results for ""author michel serres""
Stanford University Press Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution?
In this highly original and provocative book, Michel Serres reflects on the relation between nature and culture and analyzes the origins of the world's contemporary environmental problems. He does so through the surprising proposition that our cleanliness is our dirt. While all living beings pollute to lay claim to their habitat, humans have multiplied pollution's effects catastrophically since the Industrial Revolution through the economic system's mode of appropriation and its emphasis on mindless growth. He warns that while we can measure what he calls "hard pollution"—the poisoning of the Earth—we ignore at our peril the disastrous impact of the "soft pollution" created by sound and images on our psyches. Sounding the alarm that the planet is heading for disaster, Serres proposes that humanity should stop trying to "own" the world and become "renters." Building on his earlier work, especially that on hominization, he urges us to establish a "natural contract" with nature. Published with the assistance of the Edgar M. Kahn Memorial Fund.
£16.99
Univocal Publishing LLC Variations on the Body
World-renowned philosopher, Michel Serres writes a text in praise of the body and movement, in praise of teachers of physical education, coaches, mountain guides, athletes, dancers, mimes, clowns, artisans, and artists. This work describes the variations, the admirable metamorphoses that the body can accomplish. While animals lack such a variety of gestures, postures, and movements, the fluidity of the human body mimics the leisure of living beings and things; what’s more, it creates signs. Already here, within its movements and metamorphoses, the mind is born. The five senses are not the only source of knowledge: it emerges, in large part, from the imitations the plasticity of the body allows. In it, with it, by it knowledge begins.
£19.99
Five Continents Editions Pablo Reinoso
This book is the first important monograph dedicated to the work of Pablo Reinoso, a Franco-Argentinian artist and designer, a curious and largely self-taught jack of all trades. Technically a sculptor, but actually an artist through and through, Pablo Reinoso has been exploring multifarious artistic avenues from an early age. Part-French, through his mother, he left his native Argentina in 1978 and settled in Paris, where he worked on his art. He produces his works in series - Articulations (1970-80), Water Landscapes (1981-86), The Discovery of America (1986-89), Breathing Sculptures (1995-2002) - which he chops up and rummages through as he explores new worlds and different materials, translating the permanent work in progress which is his way of thinking. An increasing maturity is evident in Ashes to Ashes (2002), a work in which he twists and splits wooden boards in an attempt to rid them of their function. Continuing in the same vein, but having in the meantime held important positions as an artistic director and designer in large companies, Reinoso began a new series in 2004 highlighting an icon of industrial design, the Thonet chair. He then turned his attention to the seemingly anonymous public benches found in all cultures throughout the world - objects that for this very reason are timeless and beyond fashion. The results are his so-called Spaghetti Benches (begun in 2006), which have multiplied and found their place in the most unlikely corners. In his very latest series, Scribbling Benches (started in 2009), Reinoso no longer takes an anonymous bench, nor an iconic chair, as his point of departure, but a steel girder. The work plays on the unexpectedness of a solid, heavy object, a key structural component in architecture, that is made to twist like a piece of wire and turn into a bench suggesting airy, transparent, contemplative spaces.
£58.50