Ecologies of Invention

Are artists, designers and musicians inventors? 
Or does the invention originate from scientific discovery alone?

Ecologies of Invention is the first collection of essays that brings together writers and scholars of international standing from the University of Sydney and beyond to examine assumptions underlying notions of inventiveness. The writers explain how inventiveness borne out of aesthetic ambitions is impacting on and changing our culture and society.

Ecologies of Invention describes the articulation of inventive capacities across disciplines and across multiple scales, from personal capacities to the social, spatial and network configurations that drive people to produce inventions.

The book poses new questions for scholars, artists, architects, designers, historians, engineers, scientists, lawyers and economists about the nature, origins and processes of invention.

'This is a challenging book which confronts traditional thinking around creativity and inventiveness and raises issues that need serious debate'. 
Barry Jones AO

Acknowledgements
Foreword by Marc Newson
Introduction by Andy Dong, John Conomos and Brad Buckley

Part 1: invention at the local scale [capacities]
1. Discourses of intervention: a language of invention by Andy Dong
2. Inventing cultural machines by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders

Part 2: invention at the local scale [sensibilities]
3. The ‘character’ and the ‘algorithm’: an essay on technology and art by Dan Lovallo
4. Art and robotics: a brief account of 11 years of cross-disciplinary invention by Mari Velonaki and David Rye

Part 3: invention at the social scale [social configurations]
5. Melting into the texture of everyday life by Kit Messham-Muir
6. On building a perceptual apparatus: experiments in proximity by John Tonkin

Part 4: invention at the social scale [cultural and socio-spatial configuration]
7. The artist-run initiative: an agent that blurs the studio, laboratory and exhibition space, creating a site for inventiveness by Brad Buckley and John Conomos
8. ICAN: reinventing the autonomy of the artist-run initiative by Alex Gawronski

Part 5: invention at the city scale [architectural and spacial configurations]
9. Fit to burst: bodies, organs and complex corporealities by Chris L. Smith
10. Entangled: complex bodies and sensate machines by Dagmar Reinhardt and Lian Loke

Part 6: invention at the network scale [network configurations]
11. Inventions are networks: fostering the liminal play of ideas by Sean Lowry
12. Expanding sonic space: an Antipodean approach to telematic music by Ivan Zavada

Part 7: inventions and recombinant poetry
by Bill Seaman and Otto E. Rössler

About the contributors
Bibliography
List of figures
Index

Andy Dong is an ARC Future Fellow at the University of Sydney and holds the Warren Centre Chair for Engineering Innovation.

John Conomos is an associate professor at the Victoria College of Arts, University of Melbourne.

Brad Buckley is a professor of contemporary art and culture at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.