How we can enact meaningful change in computing to meet the urgent need for sustainability and justice. The deep entanglement of information technology with our societies has raised hope for a transition to more sustainable and just communities—those that phase out fossil fuels, distribute public goods fairly, allow free access to information, and waste less. In principle, computing should be able to help. But in practice, we live in a world in which opaque algorithms steer us toward misinformation and unsustainable consumerism. Insolvent shows why computing’s dominant frame of thinking is conceptually insufficient to address our current challenges, and why computing continues to incur societal debts it cannot pay back. Christoph Becker shows how we can reorient design perspectives in computer science to better align with the values of sustainability and justice. Becker positions the role of information technology and computing in environmental sustainability, social justice, and the intersection of the two, and explains why designing IT for just sustainability is both technically and ethically challenging . Becker goes on to argue that computing could be aided by critical friends—disciplines that draw on critical social theory, feminist thought, and systems thinking—to make better sense of its role in society. Finally, Becker demonstrates that it is possible to fuse critical perspectives with work in computer science, showing new and fruitful directions for computing professionals and researchers to pursue.

"Claude Monet was one of the first artists to move his studio out into the open air, creating works which continue to fascinate and inspire us today as much as they did his contemporaries. One of the founding fathers of Impressionist art, Monet's works consistently reflect the artist's profound love of nature. Many of his paintings were directly inspired by the gardens that played such an important role in his life--the gardens at his two homes in Argenteuil in the 1870s, followed by a garden at his estate in Vatheuil. Yet the most famous of Monet's gardens was the expansive park in Giverny, which inspired his masterful handling of light and color for more than thirty years and provided motifs for hundreds of individual paintings and series that remain immensely popular today--among them the masterpieces of his Water-Lilies series."--Dust-jacket.

Known as "the notary" by his contemporaries for his very proper disposition, Georges Seurat (1859-1891), was nonetheless a trailblazing artist, who devised mesmerizing effects in paint, creating what Museum of Modern Art, New York director Alfred Barr described as a "strange, almost breathless poise." Seurat's most famous painting, "La Grande Jatte" (1884), exemplifies the airy suspension of which "Pointillism" (as his style of painting-by-dabs was named) is uniquely capable, a sensation well suited to evoking in paint the sedate pace of Paris' new leisure class. For Seurat, Pointillism was also a way to attain for painting the mathematically explicable harmony of music: "Art is Harmony. Harmony is the analogy of the contrary and of similar elements of tone, of color and of line, considered according to their dominance and under the influence of light, in gay, calm or sad combinations," he declared in a letter to a friend. Seurat's style lent itself especially well to the portrayal of figures in space, and the endowing of those figures with volume and atmosphere. No other visual theme so well illustrates the tremendous innovations in Seurat's paintings and drawings as this handling of the figure, a theme which is at the heart of this new appraisal.

The Swiss painter Félix Vallotton (1865-1925) and his artworks were uniquely poised to embrace both the dawn of modernism and the fading light of the post-impressionist and symbolist movements. Lavishly illustrated, Félix Vallotton traces the artist's life from his early days as a portraitist and printmaker to his later work as painter who prefigured European modernism. Linda Schädler and Christoph Becker reveal Valloton to be not only the most important Swiss symbolist, but an intelligent observer of his tumultuous times, highly critical of bourgeois convention. His sometimes eerie naturalism, the authors argue, links him to literary fashions of the day as well as reflecting the inception of psychoanalysis. This stunning volume forges a new understanding of landmark paintings from an especially fertile period in art history and the fascinating artist behind them.

The Monaco-based family with extensive branches in London and New York has been collecting great art for two generations. With an expert eye, the art dealers from Syria have determinedly purchased as well as sold paintings and sculptures. Alongside its flourishing art business, a first-class collection has also emerged. Exclusively and for the first time ever, over 100 masterpieces from this unique private collection will be exhibited at the Kunsthaus Zürich and presented in an opulent catalogue.

Der erste Band der Zeitschrift für Schwäbische und Bayerische Rechtsgeschichte versammelt unter anderem Beiträge zur Tagung "Rechtsdenkmäler in Schwaben" vom Herbst 2014 auf Kloster Irsee und Arbeiten zu schwäbischen Werkwohnungen und Wohnungsbaugesellschaften des 20. Jahrhunderts.