Queer Sinofuturism

Screen Bodies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 106-122
Author(s):  
Gabriel Remy-Handfield
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Biology I ◽  
Cultural Forms

In this article, I consider posthumanist and techno-scientific aesthetics in Lu Yang’s short film Uterus Man (2013), a film in which a male superhero is interrogating the capacities of a body to mutate, affect, and to be affected. Profoundly influenced by Japanese popular cultural forms such as manga and anime, the artist also draws on sources ranging from Buddhism to developments in neuroscience and biology. I will use the work of post-Deleuzian thinkers Luciana Parisi and David Lapoujade to investigate how the different transformations of the body shown in Uterus Man chart the unpredictable capacity for bodies and matter to mutate in contemporary techno-aesthetic landscapes. In its ambiguity, can Uterus Man contribute to the emergence of a queer Sinofuturism? And what kind of future does the perverse superhero of Uterus Man represent?

Dancing Women

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Usha Iyer
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The Body ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material History ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Hindi Cinema

Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of two of South Asia’s most popular cultural forms—cinema and dance—historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance, a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender, stardom, and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses, their publicly performed movements, private training, and the cinematic and extra-diegetic narratives woven around their dancing bodies, the book considers the “women’s question” via new mobilities corpo-realized by dancing women. Some of the central figures animating this corporeal history are Azurie, Sadhona Bose, Vyjayanthimala, Helen, Waheeda Rehman, Madhuri Dixit, and Saroj Khan, whose performance histories fold and intersect with those of other dancing women, including devadasis and tawaifs, Eurasian actresses, oriental dancers, vamps, choreographers, and backup dancers. Through a material history of the labor of producing on-screen dance, theoretical frameworks that emphasize collaboration, such as the “choreomusicking body” and “dance musicalization,” aesthetic approaches to embodiment drawing on treatises like the Natya Sastra and the Abhinaya Darpana, and formal analyses of cine-choreographic “techno-spectacles,” Dancing Women offers a variegated, textured history of cinema, dance, and music. Tracing the gestural genealogies of film dance produces a very different narrative of Bombay cinema, and indeed of South Asian cultural modernities, by way of a corporeal history co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women.

Between sacrum and simulacrum: the space of chaos in Jacek Dukaj’s novella The Cathedral

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-108
Author(s):  
Mariusz M. Leś
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Fractal Structure ◽  
The Body ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Catholic Priest ◽  
Technological Singularity ◽  
Holistic Transformation

The author of the article analyses Jacek Dukaj’s science fiction novella The Cathedral (2000), which inspired the famous animated short film released under the same title in 2002. The eponymous pseudo-building was founded on the grave of Izmir Predú, a man who has sacrificed himself to save his travel companions’ lives. It is built using programmed nanoparticles and has formed itself – chaotically – into a cathedral-like asymmetrical, fractal structure. The novella’s main character, a Catholic priest, has been sent onto a planetoid to validate rumours about Predú’s holiness. The author of the article argues that the process of incarnating the protagonist into the Cathedral’s body leads him to the point of holistic transformation of the body, psyche and knowledge, similar to technological singularity, which is indistinguishable from a mystical, religious act. It is limited to earthly life, though, and brings the risk (as a transhuman act) of losing humanity. Jacek Dukaj offers the reader a few clues, but they are inconclusive. The reader’s interpretative hesitance therefore mirrors the protagonist’s ambiguous transformation. There is no reason to name the novella a religious one, although transhuman messianism plays an important role in it.

Filipino American Visual Culture

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarita Echavez See
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Interior Design ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
The Body ◽  
Filipino American ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Cultural Forms

The visual display of Filipinos in the United States temporally and ideologically coincides with the American military conquest of the Philippines at the end of the 19th century, a brutal and brutally forgotten war that some scholars have described as genocidal according to even the most conservative definitions of genocide. This intimacy between empire and vision in the Philippine case has shaped and sharpened the stakes of studying Filipino American visual culture and its history, aesthetics, and politics. As with other minoritized communities in the United States, Filipino American visual culture is a means and site of lively and often contentious debates about representation, which typically revolve around how to document absence and how to establish presence in America. However, because Filipino Americans historically have a doubled status as minoritized and colonized—Filipinos in the United States were legally categorized as “nationals” during the colonial period even as the Philippines was deemed “foreign in a domestic sense” by the US Supreme Court—the matter of legal and visual representation is particularly complex, distinct from that of other Asian Americans and comparable with that of Native Pacific Islanders and Native Americans. So, while the politics of Asian American representation generally can get mired in debates about the absence or presence of “voice” in literature and the stereotypical or authentic depiction of the “body” in visual culture, Filipino American studies scholars of visual culture have provided valuable, clarifying insights about the relationship between imperial spectacle and history. To wit, the hypervisible representation of the Filipino in American popular cultural forms in the early decades of the 20th century—from the newspaper cartoon to the photograph to the World’s Fair exhibition—ironically enabled the erasure of the extraordinarily violent historical circumstances surrounding the emergence of the Filipino’s visibility. This relationship between spectacle and history or, rather, between visual representation and historical erasure, continues to redound upon a wide range of Filipino American visual cultural forms in the 21st century, from the interior design of turo turo restaurants to multimedia art installations to community-based murals.

Soul Incorporated

Slavic Review ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 772-800
Author(s):  
Nariman Skakov
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Biology I ◽  
Socialist Realist ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
A Site ◽  
Animal World

In this essay I explore how Soviet policymakers, biologists, and writers negotiated the borderline dividing the human and animal domains and conceptualized the animal world for ideological purposes. I link the classic Soviet clash betweenstikhiinost’(spontaneity) andsoznatel‘nost’(consciousness) with biological experiments of the 1920s that were set to deconstruct the human-animal hierarchy and to create a vision of “classless” biology. I show whyDzhan, one of Andrei Platonov’s first earnest attempts to evolve into a socialist realist writer glorifying the Soviet state’s firm strides toward the communist future, fails to achieve the semantic certitude of the Stalinist text. Various recurrent and profoundly unconventional themes, often connected with animality and corporeality, drastically muddle the ideological coordinates of the text and preclude the possibility of a clear passage from stikhiinost' to soznatel'nost'. The (a)political status of the Dzhan people as a newly formed Soviet collective body manifests itself in the complex interplay between two rather commonplace categories:bodyandsoul. The body acquires abstract political qualities by becoming collective, while the soul, as a designator for the Dzhan people and as a category, gains flesh. The novella reveals the “Turkmen” nation as a site of bare life itself in its indestructible corporeal glory.

scholarly journals Introduction: Andrei Platonov, an Engineer of the Human Soul

Slavic Review ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 719-726 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nariman Skakov
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Biology I ◽  
Socialist Realist ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
A Site

In this essay I explore how Soviet policymakers, biologists, and writers negotiated the borderline dividing the human and animal domains and conceptualized the animal world for ideological purposes. I link the classic Soviet clash between stikhiinost’ (spontaneity) and soznatel'nost’ (consciousness) with biological experiments of the 1920s that were set to deconstruct the human-animal hierarchy and to create a vision of “classless” biology. I show why Dzhan, one of Andrei Platonov's first earnest attempts to evolve into a socialist realist writer glorifying the Soviet state's firm strides toward the communist future, fails to achieve the semantic certitude of the Stalinist text. Various recurrent and profoundly unconventional themes, often connected with animality and corporeality, drastically muddle the ideological coordinates of the text and preclude the possibility of a clear passage from stikhiinost’ to soznatel'nost'. The (a)political status of the Dzhan people as a newly formed Soviet collective body manifests itself in the complex interplay between two rather commonplace categories: body and soul. The body acquires abstract political qualities by becoming collective, while the soul, as a designator for the Dzhan people and as a category, gains flesh. The novella reveals the “Turkmen“ nation as a site of bare life itself in its indestructible corporeal glory.

scholarly journals Body Language: Symbiosis Between Art, Culture and Animated World

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (11S2) ◽  
pp. 236-241
Keyword(s):  
Body Language ◽  
The Body ◽  
Short Film ◽  
3D Animation ◽  
Visual Storytelling ◽  
The World ◽  
Animated Film

Inside the world from movies, it’s very important to apply the body language of each part of characters. The purpose of this research is to study the important and ways of robotic body language in animated film. This research also will focus on the important of mood and body language related to movement in Malaysia’s animated series which is can make a way to look in deep of visual storytelling, art of acting and others technical sequences that involve when making an Animated Short Film. Thus, from this research a prototype short animated film known as “SpiDay” will be produce by using 3D animation media technique.

scholarly journals Thinking Materially: Cognition as Extended and Enacted

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karenleigh A. Overmann
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Functioning ◽  
Cognitive Activity ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Incremental Change ◽  
Multiple Material ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
The Brain

Human cognition is extended and enacted. Drawing the boundaries of cognition to include the resources and attributes of the body and materiality allows an examination of how these components interact with the brain as a system, especially over cultural and evolutionary spans of time. Literacy and numeracy provide examples of multigenerational, incremental change in both psychological functioning and material forms. Though we think materiality, its central role in human cognition is often unappreciated, for reasons that include conceptual distribution over multiple material forms, the unconscious transparency of cognitive activity in general, and the different temporalities of metaplastic change in neurons and cultural forms.

scholarly journals The Excellence as a Habit - The Thyroid Repair

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-27
Author(s):  
Lucian Mândrea ◽  
Ioan Curta ◽  
Aurel Chirilă ◽  
Dragoș Deaconu
Keyword(s):  
Energy Level ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
The Body ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Good State ◽  
Long Time ◽  
First Time ◽  
General Balance

Abstract The research shows in the first part that it is possible to maintain a very good state of the human being for a long time, almost continuously. This thing is highlighted using the values of the human being general balance, while the other values are in the optimal range. The measurements were performed by means of a Bio Well device. The tested subject was the first author of this article. Different techniques were used continuously to reach this important goal. Of course, this attitude can only lead to excellence in everyone’s activity domain and also, in general, in everybody’s life. The second part of the research refers to the human being’s possibilities to send energy to the energy cover of the body to improve the human being functioning. This thing is proved by the measurements made with the help of a thermo-vision camera. A short film was made to show the temperature increase at the level of the head skin during five minutes due to the energy arrived at that zone. The third part refers of the possibility of the human beings to repair themselves. The analysis of the thyroid energy level of the measured subject by means of the Bio Well device is presented. Because the thyroid was used a little too much to improve the optimization of the human being functioning, as presented in the first part of this article, the device shows a possible future danger. Immediate measures had to be taken. Due to successive measures, the subject succeeds in bringing his thyroid energy level to a normal one, without the help of medicines. All the three types of the measurements are very original, presented maybe for the first time in the world. The general purpose of the article is to show that we can do more than we believe about our health and our level of performance.

3. How religion is expressed

2020 ◽  
pp. 32-65
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Tweed
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Sensory Input ◽  
The Body ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Religious Expression ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
The Brain

“How religion is expressed,” aims to understand how religion functions by looking at how religion is mediated and expressed. Contrary to some writers who have been called mystics, the author suggests there is no unmediated religious experience. Religion is mediated by institutions and technologies, and also by the body and the senses. The brain shapes thinking and feeling. It orients adherents in time and space and shapes how sensory input is classified and how emotions are expressed. The embodied experience of religion is expressed through sound, smell, taste, touch, and sight. Religion is also expressed in diverse cultural forms. There are eight modes of religious expression: experiencing, imagining, making, narrating, conceptualizing, enacting, performing, and gathering.

scholarly journals O CORPO FEMININO NA TELA: DESAFIOS POLITICO-AFETIVOS E OS SENTIDOS POÉTICOS NA REALIZAÇÃO DE UM CURTA-METRAGEM / The female body on-screen: political-affective challenges and poetic meanings in the making of a short film

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (40) ◽  
pp. 31-43
Author(s):  
Júlia Machado
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Short Film ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Arts ◽  
De Se ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The One ◽  
Affective Meanings

O artigo apresenta uma reflexão sobre a vitalidade político-afetiva do corpo feminino na tela a partir da realização de um curta-metragem, Femme (2016). Minha aspiração artística com o filme foi de transmutar os significados afetivos usualmente associados ao corpo feminino e trabalhar com sua visualidade extrema no limiar estético entre o belo e o abjeto. Ao lidar com a exibição de certos conteúdos do corpo visceral, a artista pode enfrentar um desafio duplo: se há o risco de se ser meramente apelativo aos sentidos, há também o risco de se repetir uma certa poética da abjeção que se tornou padrão no artes. Em seu processo, o filme-experimento levou-me a combinar elementos singulares a partir do retrato de uma personagem e a gerar, de modo inesperado e contundente, indícios acerca das forças poéticas do corpo e da imagem no contexto contemporâneo.Palavras-chave: Imagem; Corpo; Poética; Afetos; Cinema.AbstractThe article provides a reflection on the political-affective vitality of the body on-screen based on the making of a short film, Femme (2016). My artistic aspiration with the film was to question the usual affective meanings of the female body and work with extreme visuality at the thresholds of the beautiful and the abject. In dealing with the display of visceral body contents, an artist might face a double challenge: on the one hand, there is a risk of being too appealing to the senses; on the other, one risks repeating a poetics of abjection that has become standard in the arts. This film-experiment led me to gather unique elements in the making of it as a portrait of a character and generate unexpected evidence on the poetic force of the body and image in the contemporary context.Keywords: Image; Body; Poetics; Affect; Film.

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