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The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility [First Version]
... Copies may be made by students for practice, by teachers for teaching, by producers for dissemination of their work, or, of course, by others for profit. [2] The main difference between the two is that a copy does not have the "originality" of an original. There is no doubt that the original work, the first of its kind, was the most unique at the time it was created and that the person who created it was the greatest compared to the imitators and copiers who have since made a profit. ...
... At a time when perceptions were limited to the late Roman art industry, no amount of perfect copying could match the original work. That is the reason why the core of "aura" was considered to be the "here and now" [2] of the original work, it was impossible to go back in time, and one could not go back to that particular point in time, so the traces of time on the artwork are evidence of the "here and now" of the artwork's creation. In other words, the core of "aura" is the "authenticity" of the artwork, that is, all the history it has undergone since its inception. ...
... It is the essence of its continuity and transmission, the proof of all the history it has undergone over the years, and the unique story of the time and context in which it was created. [2] This story exists only in the first artwork to be created. A copy of it may be able to reproduce the way it was made, the materials used, and the physical and chemical composition, but it will never be able to reproduce the thoughts of its creator when it was first created or the traces of time that have been carved into the work throughout history. ...
From the day a work of art is created, its tangible carrier has the function of being used for reference and study, which means that the vast majority of works of art are inherently reproducible. This has led to the negative impact of people with superior skills who can reproduce identical works of art and confuse the public, resulting in the infringement of the rights to which the original author is entitled and the blinding of the ignorant masses. Especially in todays technologically advanced world, the cost of making a simple copy is getting lower and lower, and the quality of a fine copy is getting higher and higher. Moreover, some copies can take away the aura of the original work. In fact, reproductions are only reproductions because the originality of the original work and the here and now of its creation cannot be reproduced. However, an exquisite copy, given the right environment, light, and other factors, may be able to replicate or even surpass the aura of the original work. This reproduction can prevent the original work from being destroyed for various reasons. Then, it will not be easy to reproduce it in the world, and a good quality reproduction can preserve the excellent original work as close to its original form as possible. In addition, a large number of copies can also increase the popularity of the original work. Therefore, the protection of reproductions is also necessary. The presence of perfect-quality copies is positive for the original work.
... He asks for the being of art and questions its actual existence, or he questions the ontological status of art and demands a revision of the history of art. In fact, he does not want "art history to really begin", but for a new art to emerge that will confidently answer the challenge of the reproductive arts (Benjamin, 2008), and for art history to begin to write about this new art. In his theory, the existence of art depends on two categories: (1) here and (2) now, which determine the originality of a work of art and guarantees its existence. ...
... Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, vol. 15, 2023 guarantee of the specific existence of the artwork (Benjamin, 2008). He describes the whole danger of the extinction and decline of art through a critique of technical reproducibility, which distorts and 'dissolves' the aura of the work of art. ...
This paper reanalyses the issue and the concept of the end of art as a biased, ambiguous and (from the aestheticians´ point of view) controversial phenomena. The aim of the paper is not to place the end of art in different era, or to concrete artistic tendency, but to analyse and refocus on the issue of the end of art as such. Central part of the paper is the assumption that in order to evaluate the problem correctly, we must first accept the end of art as a purely theoretical concept, with all its connotations and implications. Afterwards we can approach the issue more critically. The issue of the end of art will be dealt with on two levels. At the first level we will identify all the situations that can be understood as an aspect(s) of the end of art; concretely the paper will introduce ontological, axiological, historical, interpretational and receptional end of art/situation of the end of art. The second part of the paper will build upon the argument that our history is full of these situations, and that we can understood the end of art, under certain condition, as a milestone of the history of art.
... When the medium of photography first emerged, it was not readily accepted by established artists as a legitimate art [22][23][24][25]. However, photography has since gained widespread recognition as an art form, and its artistic domain has expanded considerably, diversifying and broadening its scope [26]. ...
This research investigates the aesthetic evaluation of AI-generated neoplasticist artworks, exploring how well artificial intelligence systems, specifically Midjourney, replicate the core principles of neoplasticism, such as geometric forms, balance, and color harmony. The background of this study stems from ongoing debates about the legitimacy of AI-generated art and how these systems engage with established artistic movements. The purpose of the research is to assess whether AI can produce artworks that meet aesthetic standards comparable to human-created works. The research utilized Monroe C. Beardsley’s aesthetic emotion criteria and Noël Carroll’s aesthetic experience criteria as a framework for evaluating the artworks. A logistic regression analysis was conducted to identify key compositional elements in AI-generated neoplasticist works. The findings revealed that AI systems excelled in areas such as unity, color diversity, and overall artistic appeal but showed limitations in handling monochromatic elements. The implications of this research suggest that while AI can produce high-quality art, further refinement is needed for more subtle aspects of design. This study contributes to understanding the potential of AI as a tool in the creative process, offering insights for both artists and AI developers.
... Another drawback associated with digital collections is arguably the lack of aura. Given this issue, museums might run on-site exhibitions of items, including loaned and exchanged objects, so as to provide the audience with a physical experience (Atasoy and Morewedge 2018;Benjamin 1936). ...
With the birth of museums, came the Enlightenment idea that the contemplation of the works was an educational resource that was supposed to be available to the entire population. As a result, collections ostensibly became accessible to everyone (Bazin 1967; Cataldo and Paraventi 2007; Stermscheg 2014). Everybody could enjoy collections, whether they were curators and scholars, or not. Nevertheless, since curators and museums collected items rather carelessly, regardless of the available space, resulting in over-crowded premises, the idea of accessibility has begun to falter (Ames 1985; Crenn 2021; Ferriot 1995; Gilson 1914). Museums adopted several esthetic methods to lighten displays in order to address the unappealing presentation (Avery-Quash and Crookham 2018; Bazin 1967; Griesser-Stermscheg 2014; Murray 1904; Reinach 1909). Because many stored collections have not been displayed at all, the initial intent of their democratization has been compromised. As a result, a sizable portion of collections is accessible for study purposes for professionals only and not the general public. Therefore, the topic of stored collections and their uses has become contested since it endangers the museum's reputation as a place where anybody can access and appreciate its collections.
... We recall that Walter Benjamin described his idea of 'aura' -which Böhme calls 'atmosphere in general' 5 -in terms of breath, and also of the experience of a distance that extends beyond a thing's physical proximity. 6 This led Theodor Adorno to see Benjamin's aura, insofar as it is the effect of a surpassing of raw facticity, as a claim made against the instrumental reduction of natural things. 7 This same understanding underpins Tonino Griffero's more recent characterisation of atmosphere as '[a] something-more that, finally, escapes "analytical" and therefore "immobilising" perception'. ...
Frontispieces are to do with storytelling and we find a curious example of this at the start of Humphrey Jennings’ posthumously published book Pandaemonium 1660–1886: the Coming of the Machine Age as Seen by Contemporary Observers. It is a photograph by Lee Miller of Jennings himself, a filmmaker, writer and painter whom she knew through surrealist circles. Taken as part of a 1944 photographic assignment, the image shows Jennings sitting in a shadowy interior, contemplating an enigmatic and luminous cloud suspended in the air in front of him. If this photograph is telling us a story, what kind of story is it? An answer might be that it is one to do with latency, and that the photograph gives us an image of awaiting the appearance of an image. Uncertain whether something within the cloud is coming into resolution, it is offered up to our scrutiny by the photograph—we are placed alongside Jennings and perhaps even led to see him as a delegate within the image of ourselves as viewers, which would make it a little bit more and a little bit less than a ‘portrait’, as it is usually described.
At the same time, this uncertainty about what we are looking at is accompanied by a great connotative profusion of things that we might be seeing, which the photograph puts in motion and which, it seems to me, is fundamental to what it does. What follows, then, is an attempt to articulate these through a kind of storytelling with the image. The article proposes and explores three entangled interpretative approaches to the photograph, drawn from what it describes as ‘a cultural iconography of airy things’. These concern, in turn: spirit photography; the history thought clouds; and the material convulsions produced by the devastating war that formed the immediate historical context of Miller’s photograph.
... In the history of iconography, these objects and mechanisms are intimately connected to Western art's genesis in religious representation. If, as Roelof van Straten (1994, p. 19) indicates, "there is no real interpretation of art until the late sixteenth century," then one of the explanations for this may be found in Benjamin's suggestion that art progressively loses its "cult value" throughout history (BENJAMIN, 2004b(BENJAMIN, , 2006. Art ...
The focus of this article is to structure a preliminary investigation plan for an iconographic study of capitalism as a religion. The hypothesis of capitalism as a religion stems from a recurrently quoted fragment written by Walter Benjamin in 1921 that is far from being exhausted. According to Benjamin, capitalism was not necessarily made possible by the historical struggles and conflicts related to the development of modern Christianity, as we see in Max Weber, but rather, a result of a parasitic relation to Christianity that allowed capitalism to develop as a religion itself. Departing from these reflections, the article aims to explore the analysis of capitalism via a facet which is recurrently neglected in Benjamin scholarship, that is, its relation to imagery. Given the close connection between art and religion, the article proposes to investigate further on the pictorial side of capitalism understood as a religion. As such, the article is divided in three parts. The first part recollects Benjamin’s ideas regarding the capitalist religion, highlighting a tripartite structure of its functioning. The second part discusses iconography as a possible method for investigating the subject, as it focuses on the historical development of pictorial elements such as personification, attribute, symbol and allegory; and the third part proposes and quickly develops on three potential cases for an iconographic study of the capitalist religion, namely, the image of the Sibyls, the tradition of landscape, and lastly, the iconography of monetary bills.
... It is possible to consider the principle of the historicity of art and artistic tools. He recognized and understood the theoretical foundations of making various tools in the art of human history and How the choice or method of making artistic tools is a function of the ontology of historic artists (Benjamin and Jennings 2010). Painting is among the most popular and attractive art fields for many enthusiasts. ...
The production of multipurpose cotton fabrics aimed at elevating the quality of aerobic and dance sportswear is explored in this study. Powder metallurgy, known for its high efficiency in manufacturing technological components with minimal waste, is employed as a method for fabricating brush ferrules for painting. The utilization of iron-copper material, prepared through powder metallurgy, enhances the strength and quality of the brush ferrules. A microscopic analysis reveals a robust interconnection between the particles of each layer achieved through isostatic pressure, resulting in a favorable microstructure. The relative density and strength of parts produced from copper-iron powder exhibit an increase with higher pressure levels. The application of this material in brush ferrules ensures their durability and longevity, thereby supporting the creation of artwork. The evolution of art over time reflects changing ideas and possibilities, and technological advancements have significantly improved artistic tools. The role of tools in artistic expression is paramount, and the integration of powder metallurgy materials in brush ferrules fortifies their artistic importance. In summary, this study underscores the advantages of powder metallurgy in augmenting the quality of art tools and facilitating artistic creation.
... Human creativity is limitless, ever-changing, and dynamic. Authors consistently stretch the limits of their craft by expanding upon their own and others' previous efforts (7). In contrast to AI-generated content, which operates within comparatively restrictive parameters, human creativity is inherently boundless. ...
Despite notable progressions in artificial intelligence (AI) technology, the imminent complete supplanting of human writers by AI is exceedingly improbable. Undoubtedly, AI is currently capable of producing texts that are only marginally cogent or even imitate specific writing styles by utilizing machine learning and algorithms. However, what distinguishes human writers is their capacity to imbue their works with ingenuity, sentimentality, and distinct viewpoints. Writing is more than simply assembling words; it is an authentic expression of oneself. In addition, human beings possess superior cognitive abilities such as critical thinking, intuition, and the capacity to comprehend intricate contexts beyond the current capabilities of any algorithm. However, who can say what the future may bring? It is not inconceivable that talent-matched AI writers will one day compose bestselling novels and award-winning articles alongside us humans.
... Benjamin argues that Atget's images, rather than demanding a contemplative gaze, 'unsettle the viewer; he feels challenged to find a particular way to approach them'. 52 But because mechanically produced images still have a shocking effect on the viewer, a 'free play to the politically educated eye' ...
It can be argued that architectural knowledge was of crucial importance to Walter Benjamin for elaborating his version of an anthropological historical materialism. Between 1929 and 1931 he encounters two publications on architectural history which had a decisive impact on his ensuing works: Sigfried Giedion’s Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton (1928) and Carl Linfert’s Die Grundlagen der Architekturzeichnung (1931). It can be argued that both works played a role in affirming, if not developing his historical method of awakening the dreaming collective into a ‘now of recognisability,’ a method which one can argue is based on a specific image-based epistemology. Especially the architectural image, whether in the form of a printed drawing, photographic illustration, or an actual built object, appears to have been crucial for placing the history of media technologies (architecture being one of these media) in a constellation with the ‘archaic symbol-worlds of mythologies.’ If architecture is, as Benjamin claims in his initial notes for The Arcades Project, ‘the most important testimony to latent “mythology,”’ the architectural image might very well be the agent that causes the moment of awakening, the instance when a constellation between technology and ancient symbol worlds is formed. In the second part of this essay, I will attempt to elaborate such a designation for the specificity of the architectural image by analysing a number of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s drawings and collages from the 1920s as architectural images in the Benjaminian sense.
... Furthermore, learning about the artist's life story and historical context can help one better understand the context in which each work of visual art is meant (Cupchik & Gebotys, 1988;Cupchik et al., 2009;Nodine et al., 2008). Guner et al. (2019) confirmed that things other than the visual arts, like experience and the art's authenticity (Benjamin & Jennings, 2010), boost and strengthen a person's sense of beauty. ...
Experiencing art is a complex phenomenon to grasp. The difficulty in comprehending the Pua Kumbu textile relates to several factors influencing participants' aesthetic perception, such as art knowledge, gender, and cultural background. Individuals with all these factors can better comprehend the art piece's values. Thus, the purpose of this study is to use the ARS-Revised questionnaire to assess the aesthetic perception of 400 participants about the Pua Kumbu textiles based on their gender and background. The findings revealed that the participants' positive aesthetic perception of the Pua Kumbu textile was influenced by gender, background, and art knowledge. The aesthetic perceptions were received similarly based on gender, except for textile knowledge. Females, who exhibited more interest in creative arts, observed a greater aesthetic perception of the textile. Those from Sarawak, on the other hand, scored higher in factor 2 (textile knowledge) and could better relate to textile information (factor 3) than those from other backgrounds. Participants from Sabah demonstrated the lowest scores in both factors despite Sabah being situated in the same region as Sarawak, Borneo. The participant's gender and background significantly impact their knowledge of the Pua Kumbu textiles. Conclusively, the beauty of the Pua Kumbu lies in the eyes of the beholder, and those with art knowledge can perceive the textile more clearly with a more comprehensive understanding.
... Artistic creativity, in which human beings can conceive transcendence and aesthetics as singular and unique, will lead to the exchange of subjectivity or agency, one of the natural attributes of being human, with the posthuman. While Benjamin and Jennings (2010) think of the aura of art on the axis of uniqueness, uniqueness, presentness, and hereness that are specific to human beings, the displacement that exists in a complex equation in which all these components are both preserved as conditions and preserved as non-conditions and in which they cannot be preserved as conditions and cannot be preserved as non-conditions, will also change the perception of singularity. As a matter of fact, the "technological singularity" (Vinge, 2003;Chalmers, 2010), which constitutes one of the common fears dominant in technocracy, contains the story of one-day artificial intelligence displacing human beings and becoming the sole and absolute ruler. ...
... It increased the number of geotagged images that combine the context of the monument with the content produced by the visitors through hashtags, comments, descriptions, and images of their own, their vehicles, daily practices, and alike. What we see today in the posts geotagged at the monument are the digital reproductions of the physical, which is itself already a reproduction par excellence, reminding us of Walter Benjamin's seminal work 'The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility' (Benjamin, 2010). Therefore, this paper aims to revisit the key concepts delineated in this essay in order to get insight into the new layers of information produced in the hybrid space of digital and physical through shared content geotagged at the digital location of Atatürk, His Mother and Women's Rights Monument on Instagram. ...
This research delves into the digital reproductions of a specific monument in locative media employing Walter Benjamin’s conceptual framework presented in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’. The monument in question, namely, the recently reconstructed and rescaled Atatürk, His Mother and Women’s Right Monument in İzmir, Turkey serves as an exemplary case for examining the reproducibility of monuments within both physical and digital environments. Its significance lies not only in the ongoing political and scholarly debate revolving around the decision of local municipality to undertake its reconstruction, but also in its growing popularity in social media as a consequence of this debate. The analyses of digital reproductions of the monument in the paper are twofold: The first gives insights into the effects of digital reproductions on the aura and authenticity of the monument in locative media. The second focuses on how the local municipality and individual users instrumentalize these productions to perform official and mundane rituals and aestheticize not only their own political agendas but also their everyday life.
Taking a cue from, and echoing, the oft-repeated call in media studies to move from studying media to mediation, this keyword-memo suggests concretion as a possible critical term in media theory today. In doing so, it tracks a speculative deep history of concretion, reflects upon the limited kinds of argumentations available to scholars in the field today, and argues that contemporary media studies lacks the vocabulary to deal with state changes, such as those between ideas/ideologies and the materialities of technics. The provocation then is to think with the unifying possibilities that con-cretion might offer us as an agglomeration of conceptual frameworks.
The pioneers of what has been labelled New Queer Cinema laid the foundation for a Queer Post-Cinema — a movement in which artists experiment with technology in innovative ways. Through original readings of Todd Haynes’s early films, Sharon Hayes and Yael Bartana’s videos and installations, Su Friedrich’s digital video Seeing Red , Charlie Prodgers’s iPhone film Bridgit , and Claire Denis’s science-fiction film Highlife , this monograph shows how artists are creating a new form of resistance in the time of the digital image and generative AI.
This chapter attempts to lay bare the historical preconditions of Walter Benjamin’s conception of the surrealist need. Reading Benjamin’s works on Baudelaire and the Paris Arcades alongside his conception of the revolutionary technique of twentieth century surrealism brings to the fore a series of dialectical contradictions that persist or remain unresolved in the present historical moment. More specifically, Benjamin’s conception of the phantasmagoria of capitalism, of the dreams and nightmares, illusions and sobering truths, of commodity production are revealed to be essential to the surrealist aim of disenchanting the enchanted world. Whether it is the link between the obsolete objects of kitsch and rising authoritarianism, the play between the sonorous and optical unconscious, or the heroic rescue of fairy tales, criminality, and adventure stories, a constellation of images are assembled to illuminate, in the spirit of Benjamin’s work, what avenues of expression still remain open to the surrealist need in the era of aestheticized politics.
Read online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-02-PR-Things-Between-Things
In this article, we intend to discuss the growing influence of artificial intelligence (AI) in the fields of art. The phenomenon, which has long been familiar in the visual arts sector, is now also gaining relevance in the music sector. The impact of AI on music, particularly on the more avant-garde and experimental sub-genres, is generating debates ranging from copyright, authenticity and, above all, creativity. The specific case discussed in this one is the album Diotima by New York band Krallice, released in 2011, and its ‘counterpart’, Coditany of Timeness, generated by Dadabots, a collective experimenting with AI, created using a neural network trained on Diotima. Released at NeurIPS 2017, Coditany of Timeness exemplifies how AI can reinterpret musical styles, enabling a reflection on ‘machinic’ creativity. Both albums were subjected to analysis with regard to song structure, melody and harmonic language. The creative dimension behind the project was deepened through a textual analysis of articles and online interviews, a total of 37 documents. This set of results was then discussed with members of the Krallice through a semi-structured interview. The intention is to explore how AI interacts with the human creative process, asking questions about how the machine interprets these processes, and how these results are perceived by the artists themselves.
In this article I attempt to systematically reconstruct Theodor Adorno’s account of the relationship between the processes of authoritarian subject formation and the processes of political formation of the democratic common will. Undertaking a reading that brings Adorno into dialogue with contemporary philosophical perspectives, the paper asks the question of whether it is possible to think of a “democratic We” in nihilistic times. In order to achieve this aim, I will analyze in reverse the modifications that the concept of narcissism has undergone, from Adorno’s use of it to account for the symbolic obstacles to the formation of democratic subjectivities after the Holocaust, to the initial formulations of Freudian psychoanalysis. Finally, I will attempt to outline an affirmative answer to the initial question, formulating the potentials and merits of what I will call a politics of negativity.
Yeats, Revivalism, and the Temporalities of Irish Modernism offers a new understanding of a writer whose revivalist commitments are often regarded in terms of nostalgic yearning and dreamy romanticism. It counters such conventions by arguing that Yeats's revivalism is an inextricable part of his modernism. Gregory Castle provides a new reading of Yeats that is informed by the latest research on the Irish Revival and guided by the phenomenological idea of worldmaking, a way of looking at literature as an aesthetic space with its own temporal and spatial norms, its own atmosphere generated by language, narrative, and literary form. The dialectical relation between the various worlds created in the work of art generate new ways of accounting for time beyond the limits of historical thinking. It is just this worldmaking power that links Yeats's revivalism to his modernism and constructs new grounds for recognizing his life and work.
This paper deals with the emergence and meaning of the term spiritual in modern, postmodern, and contemporary art with a particular focus on its transdisciplinary and transcultural aspects. The problem develops because of the hitherto neglected involvement of the spiritual in the development and expansion of the modernity program in recent European art history, with a particular focus on recent research redirected from traditional positions of national context to the transformation of visual language and transcultural character of some movements in modern art. This work covers the meaning and development of transdisciplinary spiritual art, the non-national character of its production, and the internationalization of its practice, focusing on the link with the reduction, abstraction, and tendencies of media dematerialization. It concludes with a review of innovative aspects of spiritual art and its apolitical character in times of intense social change.
The films of Theo Angelopoulos narrate a poetic “new humanism,” and this genius director of the 20th century has left an enduring artistic ‘aura’ in Walter Benjamin’s era of mechanical reproduction through his unique use of long-take narration and internal montage. This paper explores the dialectical relationship between long takes and internal montage in Angelopoulos’ films, as well as how the conflicting arrangement of mise en scène affects the audience’s psyche. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s theories of Shock Effect, Optical Unconscious, and Messianic Time, the analysis focuses on Landscape in the Mist, one of Angelopoulos’ Trilogy of Silence, to examine his “boundary-crossing” cinematic language. Benjamin’s shock effect is evident as Angelopoulos breaks the logical constraints using iconic and impactful images, delivering a disruptive shock to an audience accustomed to the anesthesia of art reproductions, prompting critical contemplation. Angelopoulos’ lens possesses a unique magic, consistently influencing the audience’s optical unconscious and prompting reflections on the past and self. Landscape in the Mist tells a story of searching for the father, with the protagonist transcending allegorical boundaries. Angelopoulos’ transcendent cinematography, beyond time and space, inherits the imagery of Greek culture, revealing the anticipation of the past and future in messianic time. The paper concludes with the reflection that on the desire for redemption through a messianic promise, asserting that the present time is the optimal moment for crossing boundaries, no matter how much we yearn to await redemption.
How might the future of a city be foretold in a single ubiquitous, yet often invisible, building material? Across the Chinese capital today, municipal planners, developers, artists, and residents alike are mobilising the brick not only as a window to the past and an indictment of the present, but a key portent of the future. Amid a capricious climate of creative destruction, this article tracks how bricks emerge as historicised artifacts, aesthetic interventions, and weapons used by and against the forces of China’s spectacular development. Against clichés of intractable permanence, the Chinese brick today is revealing new and unpredictable vicissitudes as it is co-opted in projects of governance and resistance, demarcating both the material and symbolic parameters of urban belonging in contemporary Beijing. Approaching the lived form of the Chinese metropolis through this traditional architectural material, the article describes Beijing brick in three instantiations: as a lightning rod for debate about the past, present, and future of Beijing’s historic old city; as a materialisation of the atmospherics of pollution and “progress”; and as the armament of both development and its opposition. Through these instances, the brick oscillates between being understood as a relic of aestheticised tradition, a symbol of modernisation, and a trenchant instrument of both building and destruction. As extended fieldwork in Beijing evidences, it is precisely this social and material mutability of the brick that today reorients life in the city toward novel human and nonhuman alliances and oppositions, while also conditioning wider political sensibilities about who counts and what matters in official and unofficial imaginings of China’s future.
As human life is rapidly unfolding within digital realms, it has become urgent to (re)evaluate the meaning of the intangible heritage of our digital environments by looking closely into Hito Steyerl's re-readings of Walter Benjamin with the recognition of the 'image as object,' not merely as representation. The idea of activating an object could be a starting point, or a productive force, in the new approach towards an architectural digital heritage, advancing the transformation of our everyday reality with new readings of architectural spaces. Even though film has been recognised as a form of heritage, it is less present in the case of architectural heritage. This article questions what is the afterlife of 'cinematic spaces' as an affective memory of the moving image since they are neither neutral nor passive, as film is a form of expression and a product of collective memory. At the same time, it emphasises the necessity of (re)questioning the 'fluid' borders of the 'uncertain and complex' past, the 'acute and unstable' present and the 'desired or possible' future within cinematic spaces by rethinking the practice of archiving 'cinematic architecture' and expanding it into the digital realm.
This article attends to the conjuncture in the early 1970s of post-Cagean musical practice and poststructuralist theory associated with the journal Musique en jeu and the music department of the Centre universitaire expérimental de Vincennes. Reading the theoretical writing of figures including Daniel Charles and Ivanka Stoïanova alongside the music of Costin Miereanu, the article elaborates the account of the open work that emerges there, before turning to an LP by Miereanu, Luna cinese (1975), which grapples with the aporetic figure of the open record and in so doing takes the ‘openness’ of post-Cagean experimentalism in new directions. In conclusion, I begin to theorize what Miereanu's open record suggests about the listening that records call for and the fixity of records in general.
This article explores the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on human identity and raises ethical concerns regarding using biometric data for identification. As AI advances, digital avatars become more authentic and intelligent, leading to questions about human identity and its societal effects. The integration of 5G technology and the Internet of Things accelerates data transmission and storage, resulting in the convergence of the natural and virtual realms. The article proposes an interactive art installation called Human′ to address these issues. It employs AI to create digital avatars based on facial, social media, and personal data, enabling interaction with the audience through mobile devices. Human′ prompts reflections on ethical dilemmas arising from the fusion of human and digital identities. The installation involves design, prototyping, and development phases, including motion capture, interface design, front-end and back-end development, and integration with a WeChat applet. Exhibited in May 2021, the installation received positive feedback from the audience, who expressed curiosity about the future possibilities of AI while raising concerns about the societal impact of digital avatars.
Francis Picabia’s Bobinage (Bobbin, Winding or Coil) is a pencil and ink work produced on gouache-painted paper between 1921–1922. The free-floating forms in this piece appear, at first glance, to be studies in geometric abstraction. Yet, they, and the work’s title, make both semiotic and real-world references. The admixture of perspectives is notable, for it retains traces of the Cubist visual language that motivated Picabia and his peers as well as the imagery of the early twentieth-century technical diagrams that, as has been demonstrated by scholars, inspired his work. Examining Coil and other of Picabia’s artworks in tandem with the scholarship that has investigated these influences, this article explores the artist’s engagement with the very issue of representation. Through this investigation, this paper considers the ways in which Picabia’s work alludes to gender in a manner that privileges masculinity yet calls attention to the destabilizing effects of modernity—and modern representations—on notions about gender and, even, what it means to be human. Contextualized thusly, Coil represents not an abstract divergence but rather a continuation of the artist’s technical, gender, and, one could say, even cyborg investigations, revealing his engagement with new and innovative ways of perceiving, conceiving, and depicting modern experience.
The Oxford Handbook of Opera offers a series of trenchant essays on the most important and compelling issues confronting those who think and write about opera. The handbook emphasizes not only operas themselves, but such broad concerns of the discipline as genre, voice, national style, performance, censorship, staging, film, editions, and aesthetics. In doing so, the volume captures the breadth, direction, and tone of opera studies, and most especially its methodologies. The handbook organizes fifty contributions into eight large divisions: Foundations, The Libretto, Production, Performance, Opera and Society, Criticizing Opera, Transmission and Reception, and a postlude about contemporary opera and the future of opera. Each section is designed to reflect the systematic and humanistic concerns of scholars as they juxtapose historical and critical approaches to the issues. The postlude is concerned with the multiplicity of ideas about opera in the culture of atonality and technology, opera absent what the Italians call vocalità, opera in an age that wants to remake the repertoire in its own image, and the opera of the future. The Oxford Handbook of Opera emphasizes criticism and analysis, but also the complex relationship between scholarship and performance as well as the emotionally-charged dynamic between opera and its audience.
The attributes of literature in the market economy are needed to be re-examined. Contemporary literary production has not only aesthetic and ideology but also commodity attributes. However, to propose and analyze the commodity attribute of literature is not to wave the flag and cheer for the commercialization of art. By acknowledging and understanding the commodity attribute of artistic production, we can effectively widen the living space of literary and artistic activities, and keep alert to the threat of capital to art, preventing it from killing the nature of art in the process of maximizing profit. Adhering to the spiritual character of literature in literary production, the Chinese form will try to achieve the harmonious development of the artistic value of literature and market demand. Suggestions are given to the future development of artistic production from aspects of personalization, comprehensiveness, and public interest. When the division of labor ceases to be compulsory, the capitalistic attributes of literature will gradually fade away. The full emancipation of human beings is precisely the goal and the intended orientation of contemporary artistic production.
With historical materialistic view of science and technology as the first productive force, the revolutionary influence of technology on literature and ideological construction function of science and technology are elaborated. For literary creation, high technology dismantles the content, structure, and expression of traditional literary texts, as well as to provide new opportunities for literature. It updates our understanding of the world, brings novel aesthetic experiences and imaginations, and urges innovative literary styles and structures, which leads to a restructuring of literary concepts. With its own unique attributes and advantages, contemporary literary creation should remain reflective and transcendent toward science and technology to facilitate human beings to achieve poetic dwelling in an age of high technology. As for reading, a digital era of “Internet reading” is coming followed by the era of “text reading” and “picture reading.” The convenience of “Internet reading” changes readers’ perception and thinking habits. The reshaping of the reading subject and the emphasis on “the reader’s autonomy” is the most fundamental strategy to deal with the shortcomings of the “Internet reading era” such as fragmentation of information, weakening of deep thinking and forgetting. The “Internet reading era” calls for readers with competence to choose, critical ability, and productive capacity.
What is the point of publishing in the humanities? This Element provides an answer to this question. It builds on a unique set of quantitative and qualitative data to understand why humanities scholars publish. It looks at both basic characteristics such as publication numbers, formats, and perceptions, and differences of national academic settings alongside the influences of the UK's Research Excellence Framework and the German Exzellenzinitiative. The data involve a survey of more than 1,000 humanities scholars and social scientists in the UK and Germany, allowing for a comprehensive comparative study, and a series of qualitative interviews. The resulting critique provides scholars and policy makers with an accessible and critical work about the particularities of authorship and publishing in the humanities. And it gives an account of the problems and struggles of humanities scholars in their pursuit of contributing to discourse, and to be recognised with their intellectual work.
In this introduction to The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism special issue on the aesthetics of creative activism, we canvas influential scholarship of political aesthetics to sculpt a broad typology of six interconnected mechanisms by which art might intervene in the world. We label these: Documentation, Disruption, Recognition, Participation, Imagination, and Beauty. Each has a compelling tradition of theory and application, augmented, extended, and sometimes challenged by the thirteen fresh and provocative contributions in the special issue. Yet, we ask, if both politically minded artists and culturally minded activists are convinced of the power of art to provoke social change, and if we live a world that by almost all measures is now saturated with politically inclined, aesthetically informed practices, interfaces, objects, and texts, why does art not seem to be making a difference? Clearly, we need to think harder about the relationships between art and action, a task the articles assembled here call upon us to take seriously.
Artists have long been interested in the archival process. Their work examining and critiquing archives and archival concepts has attracted considerable scholarly attention; however, little attention has been paid to the perspectives of archivists, focusing instead on those of artists themselves, as well as critical theorists. This article focuses on how archivists consider and harness archives in their practice, examining their use of archives in exhibitions within museum and gallery settings (and, briefly, within libraries). Drawing on interviews with archivists and designers, this paper explores the display of archives through four key themes: contextualising (and, in turn, shaping) the exhibition of artworks; providing insights into the creative processes of artists and writers; enabling institutions to reflect on their collecting and curating practices; and using archives as objects for display in themselves. The discussion demonstrates a range of different perspectives that reveals the transformative possibilities of archives and their exhibition.
The American parade has been investigated in terms of how it transforms urban streets into a place where collective memory and identity are consolidated along lines of class, race, ethnicity, and gender (Ryan; Roach). However, the role of the rural parade has heretofore seen little critical analysis. Since any conception of the urban relies on the rural as a foil, we wonder how the American parade, existing in both urban and rural landscapes, promotes and challenges the unchecked expansion of cosmopolitan culture and dominant ideology. This article examines how the parade genre functions as a civic ritual that seeks to unite individuals through nationalism and consumerism, yet may paradoxically become a stage for political dissent. By juxtaposing performances from the Bread and Puppet Theater at the Fourth of July Celebration in the rural town of Cabot, Vermont, and Tony Sarg’s “upside-down marionettes” in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, I theorize how conventions of the parade work to inculcate spectators with a sense of group identity. I argue that these same conventions lay the foundation for political dissent, via a process that José Muñoz calls disidentification, to propose (and at times enact) alternatives to dominant ideology.
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