Books in the The MIT Press series

Reflections on how institutions inform art, curatorial, educational, and research practices while they shape the world around us.Contemporary art and curatorial work, and the institutions that house them, have often been centers of power, hierarchy, control, value, and discipline. Even the most progressive among them face the dilemma of existing as institutionalized anti-institutions. This anthology-taking its title from Mary Douglas's 1986 book, How Institutions Think-reconsiders the practices, habits, models, and rhetoric of the institution and the anti-institution in contemporary art and curating. Contributors reflect upon how institutions inform art, curatorial, educational, and research practices as much as they shape the world around us. They consider the institution as an object ofienquiry across many disciplines, including political theory, organizational science, and sociology.Bringing together an international and multidisciplinary group of writers, How Institutions Think addresses such questions as whether institution building is still possible, feasible, or desirable; if there are emergent institutional models for progressive art and curatorial research practices; and how we can establish ethical principles and build our institutions accordingly. The first part, "Thinking via Institution,” moves from the particular to the general; the second part, "Thinking about Institution,” considers broader questions about the nature of institutional frameworks.Contributors includeNatasa Petresin Bachelez, Dave Beech, Mélanie Bouteloup, Nikita Yingqian Cai, Binna Choi and Annette Kraus, Céline Condorelli, Pip Day, Clémentine Deliss, Keller Easterling and Andrea Phillips, Bassam El Baroni, Charles Esche, Patricia Falguières, Patrick D. Flores, Marina Grzinic, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Alhena Katsof, Emily Pethick, Sarah Pierce, Moses Serubiri, Simon Sheikh, Mick Wilson

An introduction to dependent types, demonstrating the most beautiful aspects, one step at a time.A program's type describes its behavior. Dependent types are a first-class part of a language, and are much more powerful than other kinds of types; using just one language for types and programs allows program descriptions to be as powerful as the programs they describe. The Little Typer explains dependent types, beginning with a very small language that looks very much like Scheme and extending it to cover both programming with dependent types and using dependent types for mathematical reasoning. Readers should be familiar with the basics of a Lisp-like programming language, as presented in the first four chapters of The Little Schemer. The first five chapters of The Little Typer provide the needed tools to understand dependent types; the remaining chapters use these tools to build a bridge between mathematics and programming. Readers will learn that tools they know from programming—pairs, lists, functions, and recursion—can also capture patterns of reasoning. The Little Typer does not attempt to teach either practical programming skills or a fully rigorous approach to types. Instead, it demonstrates the most beautiful aspects as simply as possible, one step at a time.

How the approaches and methods of think tanks—including systems theory, operational research, and cybernetics—paved the way for a peculiar genre of midcentury modernism.In Think Tank Aesthetics, Pamela Lee traces the complex encounters between Cold War think tanks and the art of that era. Lee shows how the approaches and methods of think tanks—including systems theory, operations research, and cybernetics—paved the way for a peculiar genre of midcentury modernism and set the terms for contemporary neoliberalism. Lee casts these shadowy institutions as sites of radical creativity and interdisciplinary practice in the service of defense strategy. Describing the distinctive aesthetics that emerged from such institutions as the RAND Corporation, she maps the multiple and overlapping networks that connected nuclear strategists, mathematicians, economists, anthropologists, artists, designers, and art historians.Lee recounts, among other things, the decades-long colloquy between Albert Wohlstetter, a RAND analyst, and his former professor, the famous art historian Meyer Schapiro; the anthropologist Margaret Mead''s deployment of innovative visual aids that recall midcentury abstract art; and the combination of cybernetics and modernist design in an “Opsroom” for the short-lived socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1970s Chile (and its restaging many years later as a work of art). Lee suggests that we think of these connections less as disciplinary border crossings than as colonization of the specific interests of arts by the approaches and methods of the sciences. Hearing the echoes of think tank aesthetics in today''s pursuit of the interdisciplinary and in academia''s science-infused justification of the humanities, Lee wonders what territory has been ceded in a laboratory approach to the arts.

How to develop robots that will be more like humans and less like computers, more social than machine-like, and more playful and less programmed.Most robots are not very friendly. They vacuum the rug, mow the lawn, dispose of bombs, even perform surgery—but they aren't good conversationalists. It's difficult to make eye contact. If the future promises more human-robot collaboration in both work and play, wouldn't it be better if the robots were less mechanical and more social? In How to Grow a Robot, Mark Lee explores how robots can be more human-like, friendly, and engaging.Developments in artificial intelligence—notably Deep Learning—are widely seen as the foundation on which our robot future will be built. These advances have already brought us self-driving cars and chess match-winning algorithms. But, Lee writes, we need robots that are perceptive, animated, and responsive—more like humans and less like computers, more social than machine-like, and more playful and less programmed. The way to achieve this, he argues, is to "grow” a robot so that it learns from experience—just as infants do. After describing "what's wrong with artificial intelligence” (one key shortcoming: it's not embodied), Lee presents a different approach to building human-like robots: developmental robotics, inspired by developmental psychology and its accounts of early infant behavior. He describes his own experiments with the iCub humanoid robot and its development from newborn helplessness to ability levels equal to a nine-month-old, explaining how the iCub learns from its own experiences. AI robots are designed to know humans as objects; developmental robots will learn empathy. Developmental robots, with an internal model of "self,” will be better interactive partners with humans. That is the kind of future technology we should work toward.

Here, Murray shows how the computer is reshaping the stories we live by and discusses the properties and pleasures of digital environments and connects them with the traditional satisfactions of narrative.

The long-awaited history of the art college that became an unlikely epicenter of the art world in the 1960s and 1970s. How did a small art college in Nova Scotia become the epicenter of art education—and to a large extent of the postmimimalist and conceptual art world itself—in the 1960s and 1970s? Like the unorthodox experiments and rich human resources that made Black Mountain College an improbable center of art a generation earlier, the activities and artists at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (aka NSCAD) in the 1970s redefined the means and methods of art education and the shape of art far beyond Halifax.A partial list of visiting artists and faculty members at NSCAD would include Joseph Beuys, Sol LeWitt, Gerhard Richter, Dan Graham, Mel Bochner, Lucy Lippard, John Baldessari, Hans Haacke, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Frank, Jenny Holzer, Robert Morris, Eric Fischl, and Dara Birnbaum. Kasper Koenig and Benjamin Buchloh ran the NSCAD Press, publishing books by Hollis Frampton, Lawrence Weiner, Donald Judd, Daniel Buren, Michael Asher, Martha Rosler, and Michael Snow, among others. The Lithography Workshop produced early works by many of today's masters, including John Baldessari, Vito Acconci, and Claes Oldenburg. With The Last Art College, Garry Kennedy, the college's visionary president at the time, gives us the long-awaited documentary history of NSCAD during a formative era.From gallery openings to dance performances to visiting lectures to exhibitions to classroom projects, the book gives a rich historical and visual account of the school's activities, supplemented by details of specific events, reminiscences by faculty and students, accounts of artists' talks, and notes on memorable controversies.

An integrated, holistic model for infrastructure planning and design in developing countries.

How solar could spark a clean-energy transition through transformative innovation-creative financing, revolutionary technologies, and flexible energy systems.

What it means for global sustainability when environmentalism is dominated by the concerns of the affluent-eco-business, eco-consumption, wilderness preservation.