scholarly journals This Kinetic World: Rethinking the Grid (Neo-Baroque Calls)

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 285
Author(s):  
Lara D. Nielsen

In performance research today, as in the 1960s, the pressing question is: how to do things with systems. I return to the grid to attend both sites and modes of cultural practices and techniques� (technologies) that so powerfully harness and transform the control society.� My approach to the grid as dispositif seeks to open familiar dialogues, about variants of subjectivity and presence, to the materialities and devices of systems, structures, and bureaucratic operations. As seeing machine, the grid�s story includes linear perspective, geometricization, and fugitivity. Defined by consistency and contradition, by optics, haptics, and cybernetics, I identify grid logics with the neo-baroque. Exploring the grid through tiling, weaving, seafaring, and curating techniques that link the administrative and the algorithmic state, I discuss the arts of two architectural sites in the port cities of Cartagena, Colombia and Singapore.

Author(s):  
Elizabeth Ursic

Christian theology is the study of God and religious belief based on the Christian Bible and tradition. For over 2,000 years, Christian theologians have been primarily men writing from men’s perspectives and experiences. In the 1960s, women began to study to become theologians when the women’s rights movement opened doors to higher education for women. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, female theologians developed Christian feminist theology with a focus on women’s perspectives and experiences. Christian feminist theology seeks to empower women through their Christian faith and supports the equality of women and men based on Christian scripture. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). The arts have an important role in Christian feminist theology because a significant way Christians learn about their faith is through the arts, and Christians engage the arts in the practice of their faith. Christian feminist theology in the visual arts can be found in paintings, sculptures, icons, and liturgical items such as processional crosses. Themes in visual expression include female and feminine imagery of God from the Bible as well as female leaders in the scriptures. Christian feminist theology in performing arts can be found in hymns, prayers, music, liturgies, and rituals. Performative expressions include inclusive language for humanity and God as well as expressions that celebrate Christian women and address women’s life experiences. The field of Christian feminist theology and the arts is vast in terms of types of arts represented and the variety of ways Christianity is practiced around the world. Representing Christian feminist theology with art serves to communicate both visually and performatively that all are one in Christ.


2012 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maciej Karpiński

ABSTRACT Maciej Karpiński. The Boundaries of Language: Dealing with Paralinguistic Features. Lingua Posnaniensis, vol. LIV (2)/2012. The Poznań Society for the Advancement of the Arts and Sciences. PL ISSN 0079-4740, ISBN 978-83-7654-252-2, pp. 37-54. The paralinguistic component of communication attracted a great deal of attention from contemporary linguists in the 1960s. The seminal works written then by Trager, Crystal and others had a powerful influence on the concept of paralanguage that lasted for many years. But, with the focus shifting towards the socio-psychological context of communication in the 1970s, the development of spoken corpora and databases and the significant progress in speech technology in the 1980s and 1990s, the need has arisen for a more comprehensive, coherent and formalised - but also flexible - approach to paralinguistic features. This study advances some preliminary proposals for a revised treatment of paralanguage that would meet some of these requirements and provide a conceptual basis for a new system of annotation for paralinguistic features. A range of views on paralinguistic features, which come mostly from the fields of speech prosody and gesture analysis, are briefly discussed. A number of assumptions and postulates are formulated to allow for a more consistent approach to paralinguistic features. The study suggests that there should be more reliance on continua than on binary categorisations of features, that multi-functionality and multimodality should be fully acknowledged and that clear distinctions should be made among the levels of description, and between the properties of speakers and the speech signal itself.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregg Henderson

Abstract C. formosanus is often transported by boats and shipping containers to port cities before being carried further inland via landscape materials such as railroad ties (railway sleepers). This may explain the current C. formosanus distribution in the USA with coastal areas more densely infested than inland areas (Hochmair and Scheffrahn, 2010). Temperature and humidity are primary factors affecting the establishment of C. formosanus, and it is potentially invasive to areas of high humidity approximately 35° north and south of the equator (Su and Tamashiro, 1987). Competition from native species is another limiting factor for many exotic pests, but C. formosanus is more aggressive and is known to out-compete the endemic termites such as Reticulitermes species. Another factor that has allowed the successful establishment and spread of C. formosanus in exotic areas has been the pest control industry's heavy reliance on soil termiticide barriers for subterranean termite control since the 1950s. Numerous studies, using mark-recapture methods, have revealed that a single colony of C. formosanus might contain several million termites that forage up to 100 m in the soil (Lai, 1977; Su and Scheffrahn, 1988). These agree with the results of excavation studies for C. formosanus colonies (Ehrhorn, 1934; King and Spink, 1969). Because of the large colony size, the application of soil termiticides beneath a structure does not usually have a major impact on the overall population, and the surviving colony continues to produce alates that can further infest nearby areas. Once established, C. formosanus has never been completely eradicated from an area. The dependency of soil termiticide barriers as the primary tool for subterranean termite control is probably the main reason for the establishment and spread of C. formosanus from four isolated port cities in the 1960s in the USA to all south-eastern states by 2001.


Author(s):  
Brian Cremins

After Fawcett’s legal settlement with National in 1953, the original Captain Marvel did not return to comic books until 1973. In the meantime, comic book fans and amateur historians began writing about the character in the 1960s. This chapter traces Captain Marvel’s afterlife in these fanzines, publications that helped to establish the foundation for comics studies in the United States. The chapter also includes an overview of recent developments in the field of memory and nostalgia studies. These recent studies of the history of nostalgia in medicine, psychology, and the arts are essential for an understanding of how childhood memories have shaped comics studies as a discipline.


2020 ◽  
pp. 289-316
Author(s):  
Robert Kelz

This concluding chapter takes a look at the German theaters of Argentina between the 1930s and the 1960s. During this time, Buenos Aires was a volatile, conflict-ridden place which allowed both antifascist and nationalist German blocs to cultivate intercultural alliances without modifying many aspects of their own political platform. Here, the chapter revisits the themes introduced in this volume by linking them to a more poignantly profiled reflection on the salient themes of this study, including inclusion and exclusion, integration, transnationalism, drama theory, theatrical energies, and, of course, competition. The central role of theater enables a reexamination of German-speaking immigrants in Argentina, emphasizing previously underexplored events and individuals while offering new perspectives on more frequently studied topics. The chapter thus depicts the impact of theater on existing narratives about Germans in Argentina, as well as the power of a focus on culture and the arts to inform and shape studies of migrant groups.


Utafiti ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-110
Author(s):  
Kiagho Kilonzo

Abstract The twentieth century saw a huge increase worldwide in the presence of the arts in organisations and institutions involved in healthcare activities, including public health care research conducting in various countries. This article shows the impact of using art to engage literate and non-literate people in the pro-active translation of research outcomes into their own cultural practices and their personal decisions affecting their health status. The study demonstrates that art can be of use changing social behaviour and therefore to improve public health records in statistically significant ways. This work also demonstrates that the term ‘art’ refers to more than a means of entertainment and passive appreciation of aesthetics; the effectiveness of art is tangible and its impact is measurable as a mode of education, and as providing a deeply needed instructive incentive for hygienic and sanitation transformation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-105
Author(s):  
Rowena Kennedy-Epstein

This essay reassembles from archival materials the lost collaboration between Muriel Rukeyser and Berenice Abbott, So Easy to See, which pairs Abbott’s innovative Super-Sight photographs with Rukeyser’s poetic-theoretical discussions of ‘seeing’ in order to discuss lesbian desire, the atomic bomb, the relationship between art and science, and female genius. The work was repeatedly rejected by male editors and curators, who demeaned and undervalued the innovative nature of the project, in part because Abbott and Rukeyser dared to assert themselves as scientific experts; nevertheless, it is an intellectually rich and artistically innovative collaboration by two of the twentieth century’s most versatile artists. From the early 1940s through the 1960s, in a period in the U.S. defined by the elevation of the sciences over the arts, they shared a similar goal: to develop new methods for demonstrating the uses of and relationships between the arts and the sciences. Through their collaboration, Rukeyser and Abbott worked against accepted gendered and disciplinary boundaries, in order to show how ‘science and art meet and might meet in our time’ as sources of imaginative possibility and social progress. In doing so, they engendered questions about what kinds of collaborative and artistic practices are sanctioned, about the ontology of things and the everyday, about materialist philosophy and about the radical possibilities of interdisciplinarity. By making visible this lost collaboration, this essay participates in the recovery of an innovative and exciting modernist collaboration, and asks us to see both the lost potential of its inventiveness as well as to contextualise its disappearance. In order to see their work on ‘seeing’, we must also undertake an exploration into the cultural mechanisms that obfuscated it at mid-century.


Arts ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rowan Bailey ◽  
Claire Booth-Kurpnieks ◽  
Kath Davies ◽  
Ioanni Delsante

In 2015, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) commissioned John Holden, visiting professor at City University, London, and associate at the think-tank Demos, to write a report on culture as part of its Cultural Value Project. The claim within the report was to redirect culture away from economic prescriptions and to focus on ecological approaches to ‘value’. Holden considers the application and use of ecological tropes to re-situate culture as ‘non-hierarchical’ and as part of symbiotic social processes. By embracing metaphors of ‘emergence,’ ‘interdependence,’ ‘networks,’ and ‘convergence,’ he suggests we can “gain new understandings about how culture works, and these understandings in turn help with policy information and implementation”. This article addresses the role of ‘cultural critique’ in the live environments and ecologies of place-making. It will consider, with examples, how cultural production, cultural practices, and cultural forms generate mixed ecologies of relations between aesthetic, psychic, economic, political, and ethical materialisms. With reference to a body of situated knowledges, derived from place studies to eco-regionalisms, urban to art criticisms, we will consider ecological thinking as a new mode of cultural critique for initiating arts and cultural policy change. Primarily, the operant concept of ‘environing’ will be considered as the condition of possibility for the space of critique. This includes necessary and strategic actions, where mixed ecologies of cultural activity work against the disciplinary policing of space with new assemblages of distributed power


2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Talton

Scholars and other commentators have largely characterized the histories of African nations in terms of failed states, economic underdevelopment, political corruption, and civil war. This introduction and the articles that follow demonstrate the utility of breaking out of the mold of measuring African “successes” and “failures” in terms of national politics and economics, without due consideration of local political histories, popular culture, and the arts, which offer a dramatically different view of Africa’s and Africans’ influences and success within the continent and on the global stage. Toward that end, this introductory essay advocates mitigating the standard analytical model through close studies of relationships between Africans and people of African descent in which politics and economic “development” are placed alongside the arts, popular culture, and sports, with a particular emphasis on the critical decade of the 1960s as central to shaping the course of “postcolonial” African histories.


2020 ◽  
pp. 003022282096694
Author(s):  
Mita Banerjee

When we are trying to come to terms with death and dying, or the loss of a loved one, cultural practices can fulfill important functions. Literature, music, and the arts can help us cope with loss by expressing our emotions in a way which seems to be universal. This paper investigates the role of co-written centenarians’ autobiographies in this context. It focuses specifically on autobiographies by African American centenarians and white co-authors. The article investigates the dialogue between the centenarian and the co-author as a ritual for coming to terms with the co-author’s fear of mortality. It argues that for a white readership that defines itself as secular, the black centenarian – deeply religious himself – can serve as a surrogate and a role model. Just as he assures his middle-aged, white co-author that death is not to be feared, his autobiography may offer a secular readership a model for dying.


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