BiblioVault - Books about Black Box

Between the Black Box and the White Cube

Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art

Andrew V. Uroskie

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Today, the moving image is ubiquitous in global contemporary art. The first book to tell the story of the postwar expanded cinema that inspired this omnipresence, Between the Black Box and the White Cube travels back to the 1950s and 1960s, when the rise of television caused movie theaters to lose their monopoly over the moving image, leading cinema to be installed directly alongside other forms of modern art.

Explaining that the postwar expanded cinema was a response to both developments, Andrew V. Uroskie argues that, rather than a formal or technological innovation, the key change for artists involved a displacement of the moving image from the familiarity of the cinematic theater to original spaces and contexts. He shows how newly available, inexpensive film and video technology enabled artists such as Nam June Paik, Robert Whitman, Stan VanDerBeek, Robert Breer, and especially Andy Warhol to become filmmakers. Through their efforts to explore a fresh way of experiencing the moving image, these artists sought to reimagine the nature and possibilities of art in a post-cinematic age and helped to develop a novel space between the “black box” of the movie theater and the “white cube” of the art gallery. Packed with over one hundred illustrations, Between the Black Box and the White Cube is a compelling look at a seminal moment in the cultural life of the moving image and its emergence in contemporary art.

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The Black Box of Biology

A History of the Molecular Revolution

Michel Morange

Harvard University Press, 2020

In this masterful account, a historian of science surveys the molecular biology revolution, its origin and continuing impact.

Since the 1930s, a molecular vision has been transforming biology. Michel Morange provides an incisive and overarching history of this transformation, from the early attempts to explain organisms by the structure of their chemical components, to the birth and consolidation of genetics, to the latest technologies and discoveries enabled by the new science of life. Morange revisits A History of Molecular Biology and offers new insights from the past twenty years into his analysis.

The Black Box of Biology shows that what led to the incredible transformation of biology was not a simple accumulation of new results, but the molecularization of a large part of biology. In fact, Morange argues, the greatest biological achievements of the past few decades should still be understood within the molecular paradigm. What has happened is not the displacement of molecular biology by other techniques and avenues of research, but rather the fusion of molecular principles and concepts with those of other disciplines, including genetics, physics, structural chemistry, and computational biology. This has produced decisive changes, including the discoveries of regulatory RNAs, the development of massive scientific programs such as human genome sequencing, and the emergence of synthetic biology, systems biology, and epigenetics.

Original, persuasive, and breathtaking in its scope, The Black Box of Biology sets a new standard for the history of the ongoing molecular revolution.

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Black Box

Poems

Frank X Walker

Ohio University Press, 2005

A powerful collection from Frank X Walker, winner of the 2005 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. In this collection of sixty-eight poems, Kentucky writer Frank X Walker continues the personal poetic writing of his bestselling debut collection, Affrilachia. In Black Box, he expertly melds autobiography, political commentary, and literary allusions into a devastatingly beautiful journey through the real “Affrilachia”—a word Walker created to render visible the lives of the African Americans who call the rural and Appalachian South home. Written with passion, clarity, and emotional honesty, the poems in Black Box illuminate profound experiences at the intersection of race, love, social justice, family, identity and place. Published in 2005 by Old Cove Press

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