Biologist Cornelia Dulac has been missing since 2014. Her audiotapes were discovered at a remote cabin in Eastern Finland together with a fully-equipped research laboratory and a year?s supply of food. It is obvious that something had deviated from Dulac?s plans. She had been researching hydra, an immortal freshwater polyp.00'Immortal' is an art book that combines scientific research, art and storytelling. The authors, artist and Doctor of Arts Maija Tammi and visual storyteller Ville Tietäväinen, pull the readers into the world of forever-young hydra ? under the surface of Dulac?s experiments and obsessive mind.

This artistic research scrutinizes how sickness has been represented in art photography and examines new ways to approach, think about and create photographic art about sickness. The dissertation combines theoretical research and artworks. The theoretical part shows that while scholars have concentrated on the ethics of what kind of images of sickness or suffering ought to be shown or on the psychology of why some images of sickness bother viewers, most art photographers have concentrated on depicting personal illness experiences.0The research applies anthropologist Arthur Kleinman?s definitions on sickness, illness and disease in a diagram to examine how photographic artworks approach the topic. To understand the functions and the meanings of the different approaches, the research draws especially from Julia Kristeva?s writings on the abject. The main results of the research, artworks Leftover and White Rabbit Fever are intertwined with the theoretical part.

We live in an incredible period in history. The Computer Revolution may be even more life-changing than the Industrial Revolution. We can do things with computers that could never be done before, and computers can do things for us that could never be done before. But our love of computers should not cloud our thinking about their limitations. We are told that computers are smarter than humans and that data mining can identify previously unknown truths, or make discoveries that will revolutionize our lives. Our lives may well be changed, but not necessarily for the better. Computers are very good at discovering patterns, but are useless in judging whether the unearthed patterns are sensible because computers do not think the way humans think. We fear that super-intelligent machines will decide to protect themselves by enslaving or eliminating humans. But the real danger is not that computers are smarter than us, but that we think computers are smarter than us and, so, trust computers to make important decisions for us. The AI Delusion explains why we should not be intimidated into thinking that computers are infallible, that data-mining is knowledge discovery, and that black boxes should be trusted.

Personal authenticity was once the primary domain of the arts. Artistic expression was seen as the most individual expression of the most individual emotion, in the words of the poet Willem Kloos. Today, a century later, authenticity has become a societal ideal. It has also become an economic good, something we buy and sell. The creative industries play a central role in this commercial context. As a generator of artificial scarcity, it creates the desire for unique products, experiences and lifestyles, and promotes the permanent renewal of our living and working

From New York Times bestselling author and economics columnist Robert Frank, bold new ideas for creating environments that promise a brighter future Psychologists have long understood that social environments profoundly shape our behavior, sometimes for the better, often for the worse. But social influence is a two-way street—our environments are themselves products of our behavior. Under the Influence explains how to unlock the latent power of social context. It reveals how our environments encourage smoking, bullying, tax cheating, sexual predation, problem drinking, and wasteful energy use. We are building bigger houses, driving heavier cars, and engaging in a host of other activities that threaten the planet—mainly because that's what friends and neighbors do. In the wake of the hottest years on record, only robust measures to curb greenhouse gases promise relief from more frequent and intense storms, droughts, flooding, wildfires, and famines. Robert Frank describes how the strongest predictor of our willingness to support climate-friendly policies, install solar panels, or buy an electric car is the number of people we know who have already done so. In the face of stakes that could not be higher, the book explains how we could redirect trillions of dollars annually in support of carbon-free energy sources, all without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone. Most of us would agree that we need to take responsibility for our own choices, but with more supportive social environments, each of us is more likely to make choices that benefit everyone. Under the Influence shows how.

What is it like to be an artist? Drawing on interviews with professional artists, this book takes the reader inside the creative process. The author, an artist and a psychotherapist, uses psychoanalytic theory to shed light on fundamental questions such as the origin of new ideas and the artist’s state of mind while working. Based on interviews with 33 professional artists, who reflect on their experiences of creating new works of art, as well as her own artistic practice, Patricia Townsend traces the trajectory of the creative process from the artist’s first inkling or ‘pre-sense’, through to the completion of a work, and its release to the public. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, particularly the work of Donald Winnicott, Marion Milner and Christopher Bollas, the book presents the artist’s process as a series of interconnected and overlapping stages, in which there is a movement between the artist’s inner world, the outer world of shared ‘reality’, and the spaces in-between. Creative States of Mind: Psychoanalysis and the Artist’s Process fills an important gap in the psychoanalytic theory of art by offering an account of the full trajectory of the artist’s process based on the evidence of artists themselves. It will be useful to artists who want to understand more about their own processes, to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in their clinical work, and to anyone who studies the creative process.

"How Art Works explores puzzles that have preoccupied philosophers as well as the general public: Can art be defined? How do we decide what is good art? Why do we gravitate to sadness in art? Why do we devalue a perfect fake? Could 'my kid have done that'? Does reading fiction enhance empathy? Drawing on careful observations, probing interviews, and clever experiments, Ellen Winner reveals surprising answers to these and other artistic mysteries. We may come away with a new understanding of how art works on us."--Jacket.