An exploration of new aspects of Blake's work using the concept of incarnation and drawing on theories of contemporary digital media.

Drawing on recent theories of digital media and on the materiality of words and images, this fascinating study makes three original claims about the work of William Blake. First, Blake offers a critique of digital media. His poetry and method of illuminated printing is directed towards uncovering an analogical language. Second, Blake's work can be read as a performative. Finally, Blake's work is at one and the same time immanent and transcendent, aiming to return all forms of divinity and the sacred to the human imagination, stressing that 'all deities reside in the human breast,' but it also stresses that the human has powers or potentials that transcend experience and judgement: deities reside in the human breast. These three claims are explored through the concept of incarnation: the incarnation of ideas in words and images, the incarnation of words in material books and their copies, the incarnation of human actions and events in bodies, and the incarnation of spirit in matter.

This book poses a simple question: how is this architecture possible? To respond, it will embark on a captivating journey through many singular architectural concepts. The entasis of Doric columns, Ulysses and desert islands will outline an architectural act that moves beyond representation. A ferryman who stutters will present two different types of architectural minds. A stilus and a theory of signs will reconsider the ways architects can develop a particular kind of intuition, while architectural technicities will bring forth a membranic and territorial understanding of architecture. Finally, as a melody that sings itself, a larval architecture will be introduced, bringing space and time together. Assisting this endeavour, the thought of philosophers like Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Gilbert Simondon and Raymond Ruyer will meet the latest developments in fields like affect theory, cognitive sciences, environmental studies and neuroanthropology. Eventually, by the end of this book, the readers – from architecture students and researchers to academics and practitioners with an interest in theory – will have been exposed to a comprehensive and original philosophy of architecture and the built environment.

William Blake's work demonstrates two tendencies that are central to social media: collaboration and participation. Not only does Blake cite and adapt the work of earlier authors and visual artists, but contemporary authors, musicians, and filmmakers feel compelled to use Blake in their own creative acts. This book identifies and examines Blake's work as a social and participatory network, a phenomenon described as zoamorphosis, which encourages -- even demands -- that others take up Blake's creative mission. The authors rexamine the history of the digital humanities in relation to the study and dissemination of Blake's work: from alternatives to traditional forms of archiving embodied by Blake's citation on Twitter and Blakean remixes on YouTube, smartmobs using Blake's name as an inspiration to protest the 2004 Republican National Convention, and students crowdsourcing reading and instruction in digital classrooms to better understand and participate in Blake's world. The book also includes a consideration of Blakean motifs that have created artistic networks in music, literature, and film in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, showing how Blake is an ideal exemplar for understanding creativity in the digital age.

Blake’s ‘Human Form Divine’ has long commanded the spotlight. Beastly Blake shifts focus to the non-human creatures who populate Blake’s poetry and designs. The author of ‘The Tyger’ and ‘The Lamb’ was equally struck by the ‘beastliness’ and the beauty of the animal kingdom, the utter otherness of animal subjectivity and the meaningful relationships between humans and other creatures. ‘Conversing with the Animal forms of wisdom night & day’, Blake fathomed how much they have to teach us about creation and eternity. This collection ranges from real animals in Blake’s surroundings, to symbolic creatures in his mythology, to animal presences in his illustrations of Virgil, Dante, Hayley, and Stedman. It makes a third to follow Queer Blake and Sexy Blake in irreverently illuminating blind spots in Blake criticism. Beastly Blake will reward lovers of Blake’s writing and visual art, as well as those interested in Romanticism and animal studies.

In Contingent Computation, M. Beatrice Fazi offers a new theoretical perspective through which we can engage philosophically with computing. The book proves that aesthetics is a viable mode of investigating contemporary computational systems. It does so by advancing an original conception of computational aesthetics that does not just concern art made by or with computers, but rather the modes of being and becoming of computational processes. Contingent Computation mobilises the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead in order to address aesthetics as an ontological study of the generative potential of reality. Through a novel philosophical reading of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and of Turing’s notion of incomputability, Fazi finds this potential at the formal heart of computational systems, and argues that computation is a process of determining indeterminacy. This indeterminacy, which is central to computational systems, does not contradict their functionality. Instead, it drives their very operation, albeit in a manner that might not always fit with the instrumental, representational and cognitivist purposes that we have assigned to computing.

This volume contains 17 essays with fresh new approaches to cultural history from 17 authors that belong to different academic disciplines, including archaeology, art history, classical languages, ethnology, fashion studies, history, history of ideas, history of religion, literature studies, and media studies. Making Cultural History has sprung out of the Research School for Studies in Cultural History at Stockholm University, an interdisciplinary research program focusing on interplays between past and present. The authors of this volume display a kaleidoscope of innovative approaches to traditional academic subjects such as celebrity, literary genre, prehistoric remains, television, and historic monuments. The perspectives focus on obscure corners and gaps between the illuminated centers of traditional academic knowledge and create an understanding that all narratives, representations, and claims of culture and history are in some sense political. Challenging, disturbing, inspirational, these essays all make cultural history.