Literature and neuroscience come together to illuminate the human experience of beauty, which unfolds in time. How does beauty exist in time? This is Gabrielle Starr's central concern in Just in Time as she explores the experience of beauty not as an abstraction, but as the result of psychological and neurological processes in which time is central. Starr shows that aesthetic experience has temporal scale. Starr, a literary scholar and pioneer in the field and method of neuroaesthetics, which seeks the neurological basis of aesthetic experience, applies this methodology to the study of beauty in literature, considering such authors as Rita Dove, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Henry James, Toni Morrison, and Wallace Stevens, as well as the artists Dawoud Bey and Jasper Johns. Just in Time is richly informed by the methods and findings of neuroscientists, whose instruments let them investigate encounters with art down to the millisecond, but Starr goes beyond the laboratory to explore engagements with art that unfold over durations experiments cannot accommodate. In neuroaesthetics, Starr shows us, the techniques of the empirical sciences and humanistic interpretation support and complement one another. To understand the temporal quality of aesthetic experience we need both cognitive and phenomenological approaches, and this book moves boldly toward their synthesis.

A systematic theory of DIY electronic culture, drawn from a century of artists who have independently built creative technologies. Since the rise of Arduino and 3D printing in the mid-2000s, do-it-yourself approaches to the creative exploration of technology have surged in popularity. But the maker movement is not new: it is a historically significant practice in contemporary art and design. This book documents, tracks, and identifies a hundred years of innovative DIY technology practices, illustrating how the maker movement is a continuation of a long-standing creative electronic subculture. Through this comprehensive exploration, Garnet Hertz develops a theory and language of creative DIY electronics, drawing from diverse examples of contemporary art, including work from renowned electronic artists such as Nam June Paik and such art collectives as Survival Research Laboratories and the Barbie Liberation Organization. Hertz uncovers the defining elements of electronic DIY culture, which often works with limited resources to bring new life to obsolete objects while engaging in a critical dialogue with consumer capitalism. Whether hacking blackboxed technologies or deploying culture jamming techniques to critique commercial labor practices or gender norms, the artists have found creative ways to make personal and political statements through creative technologies. The wide range of innovative works and practices profiled in Art + DIY Electronics form a general framework for DIY culture and help inspire readers to get creative with their own adaptations, fabrications, and reimaginations of everyday technologies.