As the year comes to a close, we've curated this short list of our top book recommendations and favorite reads of 2023. These carefully selected books transcend the ordinary, inviting you to explore the intersections of art, science, and technology through the eyes of visionaries. Dive into the pages of this curated selection tailored for inquisitive minds.

1. Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media for Equity and Justice 

This book by Katerina Cizek and William Uricchio (with many coauthors) provides conceptual explanations and practical examples to show how co-creation only becomes wise when it is grounded in equity and justice. Cizek is an Emmy and Peabody-winning documentarian and the Artistic Director and Cofounder of the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. Uricchio is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where he is also Founder and Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab and Principal Investigator of the Co-Creation Studio.

Here's the description from the MIT Press:

"Co-creation is everywhere: It's how the internet was built; it generated massive prehistoric rock carvings; it powered the development of vaccines for COVID-19 in record time. Co-creation offers alternatives to the idea of the solitary author privileged by top-down media. But co-creation is easy to miss, as individuals often take credit for—and profit from—collective forms of authorship, erasing whole cultures and narratives as they do so. Collective Wisdom offers the first guide to co-creation as a concept and as a practice, tracing co-creation in a media-making that ranges from collaborative journalism to human–AI partnerships.

Why co-create—and why now? The many coauthors, drawing on a remarkable array of professional and personal experience, focus on the radical, sustained practices of co-creating media within communities and with social movements. They explore the urgent need for co-creation across disciplines and organization, and the latest methods for collaborating with nonhuman systems in biology and technology. The idea of “collective intelligence” is not new, and has been applied to such disparate phenomena as decision making by consensus and hived insects. Collective wisdom goes further."

 

2. Handbook of Transdisciplinarity: Global Perspectives 

Edited by Roderick J. Lawrence, this handbook is a valuable resource for all researchers and institutions. It addresses the global approach of transdisciplinarity by unifying conceptual, pedagogic and practical contributions from over 100 authors across five continents.

Here's the synopsis from Edward Elgar Publishing:

"This expansive Handbook guides readers through a multi-layered landscape of the interpretations and uses of transdisciplinary thinking and practices worldwide. It advances understanding of the strengths and limits of transdisciplinary research in the context of societal power relations, institutional structures and social inequalities.

Original chapters from 116 scholars and experts in 27 countries create a multi-cultural constellation of conceptual and methodological approaches to transdisciplinary research, teaching, training and community projects, showcasing the diversity and plurality of transdisciplinary contributions. Framed through the core themes of thinking, doing and being, this Handbook thoroughly reviews key topics including philosophies and theories, research and practice, education and training and financial and institutional resources with examples from innovative transdisciplinary global projects.

Inclusive in its approach, this Handbook will be an ideal resource for public and private domain professionals wishing to explore collaborative working practices. Scholars looking for a better understanding of transdisciplinarity and how it differs from interdisciplinarity will find the case studies illustrative and informative."

 

3. How to be a Renaissance Woman: An Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity

Professor Jill Burke is the author of this lively and intriguing glimpse into the world of female artists, artisans, and businesswomen carving out space for themselves during the Renaissance. 

Burke is the Chair of Renaissance Visual and Material Cultures at the University of Edinburg and has published widely on the history of art, gender, and the body. She is currently Principal Investigator of a Royal Society-funded project, Renaissance Goo, working with a soft-matter scientist to remake 16th-century cosmetic and skincare recipes.

Plunge into the intimate history of cosmetics with Burke, and discover how, for centuries, women have turned to make-up as a rich source of creativity, community, and resistance. Burke gives us a window into an overlooked realm of history—revealing everything from 16th-century women’s body anxieties to their sophisticated botanical and chemical knowledge.

Here's the description from Pegasus Books:

"An alternative history of the Renaissance—as seen through the emerging literature of beauty tips—focusing on the actresses, authors, and courtesans who rebelled against the misogyny of their era.

Beauty, make-up, art, power: How to Be a Renaissance Woman presents an alternative history of this fascinating period as told by the women behind the paintings, providing a window into their often overlooked or silenced lives.

Can the pressures women feel to look good be traced back to the sixteenth century?

As the Renaissance visual world became populated by female nudes from the likes of Michelangelo and Titian, a vibrant literary scene of beauty tips emerged, fueling debates about cosmetics and adornment. Telling the stories of courtesans, artists, actresses, and writers rebelling against the strictures of their time, when burgeoning colonialism gave rise to increasingly sinister evaluations of bodies and skin color, this book puts beauty culture into the frame.

How to Be a Renaissance Woman will take readers from bustling Italian market squares, the places where the poorest women and immigrant communities influenced cosmetic products and practices, to the highest echelons of Renaissance society, where beauty could be a powerful weapon in securing strategic marriages and family alliances. It will investigate how skin-whitening practices shifted in step with the emerging sub-Saharan African slave trade, how fads for fattening and thinning diets came and went, and how hairstyles and fashion could be a tool for dissent and rebellion—then as now."

 

4. Unmasking AI

This book by Joy Buolamwini, shortlisted for the Inc. Non-Obvious Book Award, is a national bestseller that exposes the myriad, deeply ingrained biases encoded into facial recognition and other ‘trusted’ AI systems, pushing us to confront our blind trust in these machines.

Dr. Joy Buolamwini is the founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, a groundbreaking researcher, and a renowned speaker. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Time, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and The Atlantic.

Here's the description from Penguin Random House:

"To most of us, it seems like recent developments in artificial intelligence emerged out of nowhere to pose unprecedented threats to humankind. But to Dr. Joy Buolamwini, who has been at the forefront of AI research, this moment has been a long time in the making.

After tinkering with robotics as a high school student in Memphis and then developing mobile apps in Zambia as a Fulbright fellow, Buolamwini followed her lifelong passion for computer science, engineering, and art to MIT in 2015. As a graduate student at the “Future Factory,” she did groundbreaking research that exposed widespread racial and gender bias in AI services from tech giants across the world.

Unmasking AI goes beyond the headlines about existential risks produced by Big Tech. It is the remarkable story of how Buolamwini uncovered what she calls “the coded gaze”—the evidence of encoded discrimination and exclusion in tech products—and how she galvanized the movement to prevent AI harms by founding the Algorithmic Justice League. Applying an intersectional lens to both the tech industry and the research sector, she shows how racism, sexism, colorism, and ableism can overlap and render broad swaths of humanity “excoded” and therefore vulnerable in a world rapidly adopting AI tools. Computers, she reminds us, are reflections of both the aspirations and the limitations of the people who create them.

Encouraging experts and non-experts alike to join this fight, Buolamwini writes, “The rising frontier for civil rights will require algorithmic justice. AI should be for the people and by the people, not just the privileged few.”

 

5. Voidopolis

Part of the Leonardo Book Series, this book created by Kat Mustatea—a transmedia playwright and artist known for language and performance works that enlist absurdity, hybridity, and the computational uncanny to dig deeply into what it means to be human—this hybrid digital artistic and literary project in the form of an augmented reality book was shortlisted for the 2023 Lumen Prize in the 3D/Interactive category.

Here's the description from the MIT Press:

"Voidopolis is a digital performance about loss and memory presented as an augmented reality (AR) book with a limited lifespan. The book loosely retells the story of Dante's Inferno as if it were the dystopic experience of wandering through New York City during the pandemic; instead of Virgil, however, the narrator is guided through this modern hellscape by a caustic hobo named Nikita.

Voidopolis is meant to culminate in loss. It features images that are created by digitally “wiping” humans from stock photography and text that is generated without the letter “e”—in homage to Oulipo author Georges Perec's A Void, a 300-page novel written entirely without the letter—by using a modified GPT-2 text generator. The book, adapted from a series of Instagram posts that were ultimately deleted, is likewise designed to disappear: its garbled pages can only be deciphered with an AR app, and they decay at the same rate over a period of one year, after which the decay process restarts and begins again. At the end of this decay cycle, only the printed book, with its unintelligible pages, remains. Each July 1, the date the project first started on Instagram, the book resets again, beginning anew the cycle of its own vanishing.

A first-of-its-kind augmented reality book from a major university press, Voidopolis is a unique and deeply affecting artwork that speaks as much to our existential moment as it does to the fragility of experience, reality, and our connection to one another."

 

6. The Creative Act: A Way of Being

Written by Rick Rubin, this best seller is an inspiring work of art on creation, creativity, and the work of the artist. Rubin is a nine-time Grammy-winning producer, named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time and the most successful producer in any genre by Rolling Stone. His work provides a deep wisdom to help artists connect with the wellsprings of their creativity.

“I set out to write a book about what to do to make a great work of art. Instead, it revealed itself to be a book on how to be.” —Rick Rubin

Here's the description from Penguin Random House:

"Many famed music producers are known for a particular sound that has its day. Rick Rubin is known for something else: creating a space where artists of all different genres and traditions can home in on who they really are and what they really offer. He has made a practice of helping people transcend their self-imposed expectations in order to reconnect with a state of innocence from which the surprising becomes inevitable. Over the years, as he has thought deeply about where creativity comes from and where it doesn’t, he has learned that being an artist isn’t about your specific output, it’s about your relationship to the world. Creativity has a place in everyone’s life, and everyone can make that place larger. In fact, there are few more important responsibilities.

The Creative Act is a beautiful and generous course of study that illuminates the path of the artist as a road we all can follow. It distills the wisdom gleaned from a lifetime’s work into a luminous reading experience that puts the power to create moments—and lifetimes—of exhilaration and transcendence within closer reach for all of us.”

 

7. Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us

Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross coauthored this New York Times bestseller, providing a life-altering journey through the science of neuroaesthetics, which offers proof for how our brains and bodies transform when we participate in the arts. 

Magsamen, the founder and director of the International Arts + Mind Lab, Center for Applied Neuroaesthetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, works with both the public and private sectors using arts and culture evidence-based approaches in areas including health, child development, education, workforce innovation, rehabilitation, and social equity.

Ross, Vice President of Design for hardware product area at Google, leads a team that has won over 225 design awards. She is a National Endowment for Arts grant recipient and was ninth on Fast Company’s list of the one hundred Most Creative People in Business in 2019.

Ivy Ross believes that the intersection of arts and sciences is where the most engaging and creative ideas are found.

Here's the description from Penguin Random House:

"Many of us think of the arts as entertainment—a luxury of some kind. In Your Brain on Art, authors Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross show how activities from painting and dancing to expressive writing, architecture, and more are essential to our lives.

We’re on the verge of a cultural shift in which the arts can deliver potent, accessible, and proven solutions for the well-being of everyone. Magsamen and Ross offer compelling research that shows how engaging in an art project for as little as forty-five minutes reduces the stress hormone cortisol, no matter your skill level, and just one art experience per month can extend your life by ten years. They expand our understanding of how playing music builds cognitive skills and enhances learning; the vibrations of a tuning fork create sound waves to counteract stress; virtual reality can provide cutting-edge therapeutic benefit; and interactive exhibits dissolve the boundaries between art and viewers, engaging all of our senses and strengthening memory. Doctors have even been prescribing museum visits to address loneliness, dementia, and many other physical and mental health concerns.

Your Brain on Art is a portal into this new understanding about how the arts and aesthetics can help us transform traditional medicine, build healthier communities, and mend an aching planet.

Featuring conversations with artists such as David Byrne, Renée Fleming, and evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson, Your Brain On Art is an authoritative guide to neuroaesthetics. The book weaves a tapestry of breakthrough research, insights from multidisciplinary pioneers, and compelling stories from people who are using the arts to enhance their lives."

 

Embark on a Literary Journey

As we bid adieu to 2023, may these books continue to be a guide, offering tangible value in your pursuit of knowledge, fostering practical understanding, and inspiring you to push the boundaries of creativity in all your endeavors. Until next time, keep your mind sharp and your curiosity sharper. Happy reading!