On Broken Glass: For a Semiotics of Anti-Materiality

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Massimo Leone
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
Damaged Materials ◽  
Initial Exploration

AbstractScholars have mostly focused on “positive materiality,” studying the meaning of materials and techniques in the production of artifacts. Matter, however, means not only when it is shaped into materiality but also when it is destroyed. The essay that follows is meant to represent a first tentative enquiry into the meaning of anti-materiality. The study of destroyed artifacts aims at pointing out that matter is always materiality. It always conserves a shadow of meaning, independently from how profoundly its earlier form was disintegrated. The crepuscular significance of damaged materials has mostly escaped the attention of scholars. The essay attempts an initial exploration of it, proposing a condensed cultural history of broken glass. It therefore seeks to combine, in the same exposition, a chronological and a structural overview of broken glass, from Greco-Roman antiquity until early modernity.

A Cultural History of Sport in Antiquity

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Sporting Culture ◽  
Public Baths ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chariot Racing ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
Comprehensive History

A Cultural History of Sport in Antiquity covers the period 800 BCE to 600 CE. From the founding of the Olympics and Rome’s celebratory games, sport permeated the cultural life of Greco-Roman antiquity almost as it does our own. Gymnasiums, public baths, monumental arenas, and circuses for chariot racing were constructed, and athletic contests proliferated. Sports-themed household objects were very popular, whilst the exploits of individual athletes, gladiators, and charioteers were immortalized in poetry, monuments, and the mosaic floors of the wealthy. This rich sporting culture attests to the importance of leisure among the middle and upper classes of the Greco-Roman world, but by 600 CE rising costs, barbarian invasions, and Christianity had swept it all away. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Sport presents the first comprehensive history from classical antiquity to today, covering all forms and aspects of sport and its ever-changing social, cultural, political, and economic context and impact. The themes covered in each volume are the purpose of sport; sporting time and sporting space; products, training, and technology; rules and order; conflict and accommodation; inclusion, exclusion, and segregation; minds, bodies, and identities; representation.

Carlos Poveda's Menu

2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 78-83
Author(s):  
marjorie ross
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Art Form ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
Domestic Landscapes ◽  
Contemporary Artists

Carlos Poveda's Domestic Landscapes are linked to a history of food and art that reaches back to Greco-Roman antiquity and becomes empowered with contemporary artists who sculpt or paint their works in edible materials to be devoured by spectators. Poveda's Landscapes, however, offer food that is symbolic——inedible. He reinvents the organic by using industrial refuse that he converts, colors, and models in a cauldron in a process as akin to alchemy as to cooking. His is not a faithful transcription of meals in the style of classical still lifes, but rather an artistic overlapping of emotions, that surround the idea of the edible. Looking at his sculptures we may feel revulsion, but what sickens us is not so much his creation as the awareness it brings of our intrinsically predatory nature. He gives us an art form that not only fails to provoke appetite but also touches our deepest culinary memories and leads us back to a primal past by asserting the significance of food in our collective memory. Ultimately, our strongest reaction to his work may be the fear that we won't be able to digest the absurdity of our daily life.

scholarly journals A socio-cultural history of the machine metaphor

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir Glebkin
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Blow Up ◽  
Conceptual Metaphor ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Metaphor Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Phenomenon ◽  
The Middle Ages

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-up, a scene of affection, after enlarging the negatives, transforms into a scene of an attempted or an actual murder. It seems a good image to characterize the change of the initial view of conceptual metaphor from a more precise perspective. The conceptual metaphor theory emerged with the claim that primary metaphors, such as Categories Are Containers, More Is Up, Affection Is Warmth, and even Time Is Money, were determined by the fundamental constants of our perceptual experience; hence, they could not change or evolve, and had no history. Later, however, plenty of studies have provided strong evidence that such metaphors, being much more complicated structures, essentially rest on the cultural-historical ground. The article can be considered as a step in this direction. It addresses the machine metaphor as a cultural-historical phenomenon examining its development from Antiquity to Early Modernity. The author reveals that conceptual machine metaphor appears in the Middle Ages, long before Newton and the Industrial Revolution, in the wake of the transformation of basic elements of the cultural model from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.

scholarly journals Anchoring Innovation: A Classical Research Agenda

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ineke Sluiter
Keyword(s):  
Research Agenda ◽  
Revolving Door ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
American Constitution ◽  
Electric Cars ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
New Research

Several periods in classical (Greco-Roman) antiquity provide an intriguing mix of being ‘in the grip of the past’ and profoundly innovative in all societal domains at the same time. A new research agenda of the Dutch classicists investigates this combination, under the hypothesis that the two are connected. Successful innovations must somehow be ‘anchored’ for the relevant social group(s). This paper explores the new concept of ‘anchoring’, and some of the ways in which ‘the new’ and ‘the old’ are evaluated and used in classical antiquity and our own times. Its examples range from a piece of ancient theatrical equipment to the history of the revolving door, from an ornamental feature of Greek temples to the design of electric cars, and from the Delphic oracle to the role of the American constitution.

History of the Sciences in Greco-Roman Antiquity

Nature ◽  
1927 ◽  
Vol 119 (3004) ◽  
pp. 776-776 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. G. F. DRUCE
Keyword(s):  
Greco Roman ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roman Antiquity

Greek and Roman in dialogue: the pseudo-Lucianic Nero

1999 ◽  
Vol 119 ◽  
pp. 142-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Whitmarsh
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Aegean Island ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Colonial Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
Of Greece

The short dialogue entitled Nero or on the digging of the Isthmus, preserved in the manuscripts of Lucian, is an intriguing piece. The contents are quickly summarised. Nero's abandoned attempt to dig through the Isthmus of Corinth is discussed by the two interlocutors, a certain Menecrates and the philosopher Musonius Rufus, who is said to have taken part in the digging (1). The scene is apparently the rugged Aegean island of Gyara to which the historical Musonius was exiled. The discussion broadens out to include Nero's tour of Greece, with a particular focus upon his singing; and it concludes as the news breaks of Nero's death (11). Menecrates' role in the discussion is limited to that of ‘prompter’, while Musonius assumes the authoritative, pedagogic role in the dialogue. Is there any unified meaning to this text? And why the dialogue form (given that Menecrates' role in it is so perfunctory)? This paper proposes one set of answers to these questions, by siting the Nero in the context of the cultural history of Greco-Roman relations, an area that has attracted much attention over the years (and has been further reinvigorated in the light of post-colonial theory).

History of the Sciences in Greco-Roman Antiquity

1928 ◽  
Vol 14 (196) ◽  
pp. 248
Author(s):  
A. Raymond ◽  
Ruth Gheury de Bray
Keyword(s):  
Greco Roman ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roman Antiquity
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