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The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility
... The transfer of Russian ideas to the German intellectual milieus of the first four decades of the twentieth century bore a resemblance to the situation of transference in Freudian therapy, given that the Germans redirected to Russia the fascination and enthusiasm which they had experienced towards the Ancient Greeks at the turn of the nineteenth century, the time when German modern identity was formed (Chytry 1986;Marchand 1996;Ferris 2000). The situation of transference explains why the engagement with Russian ideas bore the traits of "reception in distraction", to use the term with which Benjamin described going to the movies (Benjamin 2002a(Benjamin [1935(Benjamin -1936, 120); fascination intermingled with philological ignorance as many an intermediary, Kracauer and Benjamin included, had a less than rudimentary command of the Russian language (Benjamin 1991a passim), often relying on stereotypical notions relating to the "national character" of the Russians. With regard to philological proficiency, Kracauer and Benjamin differed from their prodigious predecessors from the turn of the nineteenth century, who defined Germanness by relating it to the Greek ideal. ...
... (Benjamin (1991d, 64) Dostoevskii is the primordial poet of the dream -and likewise of the 'aura'. Benjamin introduces the very important notion of his theory of media -the contemporary mode of perception is characterised precisely by the dissolution of the "aura" (Benjamin 2002a(Benjamin [1935, 104-105) -in an essay on Dostoevskii's The Idiot, published in 1917, but written even earlier. The two occurrences of the word 'aura', separated by two decades, cannot be deemed merely homonymous, since the Dostoevskii aura possesses the two most important qualities of the aura as outlined in "The Work of Art in the Age of its Reproducibility" ("Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit", 1935Reproduzierbarkeit", -1936: an auratic work of art, on the one hand, pertains to a particular place in time and space and on the other it evokes the feeling of an insurmountable distance, hailing from the cultic origins of art. ...
... The two occurrences of the word 'aura', separated by two decades, cannot be deemed merely homonymous, since the Dostoevskii aura possesses the two most important qualities of the aura as outlined in "The Work of Art in the Age of its Reproducibility" ("Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit", 1935Reproduzierbarkeit", -1936: an auratic work of art, on the one hand, pertains to a particular place in time and space and on the other it evokes the feeling of an insurmountable distance, hailing from the cultic origins of art. As for the first quality, "[i]n even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art -its unique existence in a particular place", writes Benjamin in 1936(Benjamin 2002a[1935, 103). The embeddedness of every work of art in a unique context amounts to founding auratic artworks' most cherished qualities -genuineness and situatedness in tradition. ...
... Dicho de otra manera, este modelo está estructurado simbólicamente bajo lo que Benjamin (1996) denomina la reproductibilidad técnica en la cual predijo la utilización política del arte a través de la posibilidad de reproducir masivamente el producto creativo y llevarlo a diferentes espacios y territorios eliminando fronteras, o lo que Bauman denomina "ya no la conquista de un nuevo territorio, sino la demolición de los muros que impedían el flujo de los nuevos poderes globales fluidos" (Bauman, 2019, p. 17). Si bien Benjamin (1996) se refería al poder simbólico, con este esquema se presenta incluso un control directo. ...
... Dicho de otra manera, este modelo está estructurado simbólicamente bajo lo que Benjamin (1996) denomina la reproductibilidad técnica en la cual predijo la utilización política del arte a través de la posibilidad de reproducir masivamente el producto creativo y llevarlo a diferentes espacios y territorios eliminando fronteras, o lo que Bauman denomina "ya no la conquista de un nuevo territorio, sino la demolición de los muros que impedían el flujo de los nuevos poderes globales fluidos" (Bauman, 2019, p. 17). Si bien Benjamin (1996) se refería al poder simbólico, con este esquema se presenta incluso un control directo. ...
... Para Bacal (2017), el productor aparece como una nueva categoría de sujeto, que permite estudiar a los artistas creadores de contenido en una sociedad digitalizada. Son sujetos ligados directamente a la tecnología como capacidad de reproductibilidad técnica del arte, así como lo presagió Benjamin (1996), en donde la producción y el artista no están separados, pues los artistas no son dueños del capital (ni de los medios de distribución), pero son quienes están obligados bajo el esquema de mercado a producir para grandes corporaciones, las cuales hoy solamente se dedican a distribuir. ...
En 2020 se llevó a cabo el Tercer Seminario de Poder en las Organizaciones bajo la tutela del proyecto Huika Mexihco. Como resultado se construyó un compendio de trabajos de investigación, mismos que cuentan con un proceso de dictaminación a doble ciego y cuyos aportes pueden ser relevantes para aquellos interesados en el estudio del poder y de las organizaciones. En este sentido, los tópicos estudiados comprenden la perspectiva de género, la administración pública, el emprendimiento creativo, la organización como representación, la corrupción, el neoliberalismo, el clasismo y las oligarquías mexicanas. Se trata de una invitación al debate, a la reflexión, a acercanos a nuestros contextos y realidades personales, sociales y organizacionales
... Weber argumenterer for at disse prosessene gjør verden mer prosaisk og forutsigbar, og mindre poetisk og mysteriøs. Inspirert av Weber diskuterer Walter Benjamin (2003) forvandlingen av vår estetiske relasjon til tingene og verden som de nye teknologiene for reproduksjon innebaerer. Ved hjelp av aura-konseptet utvikler Benjamin forestillingen om det gjensidige forholdet mellom subjektet og tingene/objektene i verden. ...
... 2018, s. 465-466) Digitaliseringen av verden medfører ifølge Han en forestilling om full menneskelig kontroll over verden som gjør oss blinde for den Andre. Med Walter Benjamin kan vi si at kunstverket mister sin «aura»(Benjamin, 2003). Når vi argumenterer for en re-romantisering av musikkpedagogisk tenkning, er tenkningen ikke nødvendigvis knyttet til det psykologene omtaler som «høydepunktsopplevelser», sjeldne opplevelser av svaert sterk karakter, hvor man for eksempel kan oppleve seg selv løftet utenfor tid og rom(Gabrielsson, 2008). ...
... (Knausgård, 2018, s. 465-466) Digitaliseringen av verden medfører ifølge Han en forestilling om full menneskelig kontroll over verden som gjør oss blinde for den Andre. Med Walter Benjamin kan vi si at kunstverket mister sin «aura» (Benjamin, 2003). Når vi argumenterer for en re-romantisering av musikkpedagogisk tenkning, er tenkningen ikke nødvendigvis knyttet til det psykologene omtaler som «høydepunktsopplevelser», sjeldne opplevelser av svaert sterk karakter, hvor man for eksempel kan oppleve seg selv lø et utenfor tid og rom (Gabrielsson, 2008). ...
... Weber argumenterer for at disse prosessene gjør verden mer prosaisk og forutsigbar, og mindre poetisk og mysteriøs. Inspirert av Weber diskuterer Walter Benjamin (2003) forvandlingen av vår estetiske relasjon til tingene og verden som de nye teknologiene for reproduksjon innebaerer. Ved hjelp av aura-konseptet utvikler Benjamin forestillingen om det gjensidige forholdet mellom subjektet og tingene/objektene i verden. ...
... (Knausgård, 2018, s. 465-466) Digitaliseringen av verden medfører ifølge Han en forestilling om full menneskelig kontroll over verden som gjør oss blinde for den Andre. Med Walter Benjamin kan vi si at kunstverket mister sin «aura» (Benjamin, 2003). Når vi argumenterer for en re-romantisering av musikkpedagogisk tenkning, er tenkningen ikke nødvendigvis knyttet til det psykologene omtaler som «høydepunktsopplevelser», sjeldne opplevelser av svaert sterk karakter, hvor man for eksempel kan oppleve seg selv lø et utenfor tid og rom (Gabrielsson, 2008). ...
... Weber argumenterer for at disse prosessene gjør verden mer prosaisk og forutsigbar, og mindre poetisk og mysteriøs. Inspirert av Weber diskuterer Walter Benjamin (2003) forvandlingen av vår estetiske relasjon til tingene og verden som de nye teknologiene for reproduksjon innebaerer. Ved hjelp av aura-konseptet utvikler Benjamin forestillingen om det gjensidige forholdet mellom subjektet og tingene/objektene i verden. ...
... Yet this is not new. As Walter Benjamin (2006Benjamin ( [1936) pointed out almost a century ago, technological apparatuses foremost work on the mediation of the human sensorium and everyday sense experience. Consider, for instance, how today's media technologies inform the affective organization of work and everyday life (Gregg, 2011;Just, 2019). ...
... Yet this is not new. As Walter Benjamin (2006Benjamin ( [1936) pointed out almost a century ago, technological apparatuses foremost work on the mediation of the human sensorium and everyday sense experience. Consider, for instance, how today's media technologies inform the affective organization of work and everyday life (Gregg, 2011;Just, 2019). ...
Organization and management are the perpetual, and perpetually fraught and resisted, ordering of sense experience. However, banning the senses into the outside of thought, and of organizational analysis, was – and to a large degree still is – the default and mostly implicit and unquestioned mode of thinking and studying organization and management. Introducing the special issue on ‘The Senses in Management Research and Education’, this essay historicizes and contextualizes the neglect of the senses, dwells upon possible reasons for keeping the sensory at bay and discusses recent attempts to remedy this situation. The contributions to the special issue are introduced into this context. In conclusion, we speculate on what might happen next.
... If, as I have suggested elsewhere, we shift the emphasis of Benjamin's essay from the 'authenticity of the thing' to the authenticity of our experience of the thing, then certain of these reproductive daguerreotypes might be said to offer just such an experience. 35 In line with Benjamin's constantly shifting conception of aura, they make possible what Carolin Duttlinger calls 'a transhistorical model for interpersonal encounter'. 36 Artworks, and even engraved copies of artworks, are meant for a public and therefore collective reception, whereas reproductive daguerreotypes tend to be private and personal keepsakes. ...
Little has been published about reproductive daguerreotypes, a genre of photographic still life in which another picture – a drawing, an engraving, a lithograph, a painting, a printed text – is the sole referent. However, as this essay demonstrates, a study of reproductive daguerreotypes is a study of daguerreotypy itself – of its capacities and limitations as a medium, of its major figures and its diversity of commercial applications, of its many possible meanings, functions and related viewing practices. But it is also an opportunity to reflect on the place of such daguerreotypes in the larger story concerning the photographic reproduction of artworks. Reproductive daguerreotypes are distinctive in that they copy an artwork exactly but unfaithfully: they often laterally reverse the image even while rendering it small, monochrome, precious, shiny, evanescent, mobile. Most striking is the way such daguerreotypes partake of the logic of reproducibility without necessarily participating in the processes of mass production normally associated with it: as unique copies, they offer replication without multiplicity. In so doing, they complicate the orthodox account of this process promulgated by Walter Benjamin in the 1930s and repeated so many times since.
... As a consequence, a new form of aesthetic response of masses to images is emerging. What Benjamin (2003) said about the role of distraction in watching films, can also be applied to the way people engage with still images on social media. Benjamin (2003: 267) states: 'The painting invites the viewer to contemplation; before it, he can give himself up to his train of associations'. ...
This study investigates how the essence of the image has changed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, according to the cultural hegemony that emerged in Western societies. It does so by comparing and contrasting three different types of images that belong to three different epochs: modernism, postmodernism, and the age of digital reproducibility. Under examination are three self-portraits by three significant figures: Vincent van Gogh, Andy Warhol, and Kim Kardashian (taken from her Instagram profile). The production, circulation, and consumption of images underwent a drastic transformation from one era to the next, with consequences for their aesthetics and materiality.This was mainly due to technological developments and the consolidation of mass society, which was brought about as a result of liberalism and consumerism. This study argues that the transformation that images underwent in this period not only involves their appearance but also their content, which has been increasingly emptied with the rise of consumerism and the strengthening of capitalism.
... To be applied in art, it demands a of «unity» which «lies in the metaphysics of mixing formal and material realities through 15 For a sharp confrontation with this lecture, see Krauss (1992). 16 See Benjamin (1936). introducing the concreteness», and it is therefore a mirror of modern art itself; it is «the form assumed by the ambiguities that have matured in our time concerning both art and the realities it has purported to represent» (Rosenberg [1974]: 175, 176). ...
In the present essay, I want to suggest that the public dimension is a crucial issue in Kaprow’s un-artistic art theory, and that this shift from art to “nonart” literally occurs as a transition from private to public: from private contemplation of “complete” paintings to artistic experience publicly performed and shared. Primarily, I will focus on his troubled relationship with painting. Then, I will concentrate on his ground-breaking reflections on framing and unframing. After that, I will analyse his most relevant theoretical achievements, environment and happening, emphasizing the active role of publicity in his personal idea of performance art. Finally, I will discuss his distinctive interpretation of “nonart”, by comparing it with other substantial variations on the “post-art” theme, offered by different authors, either modernist or post-modernist. In the end, the Kaprowian un-artistic theory will emerge re-configured as a singular, and someway “aerial”, utopian proposal for public art.
... 'No breath of prehistory surrounds [spleen] -no aura' (Benjamin, 2006: 202). In his essay on 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Benjamin (2003b) had defined the aura as 'the unique apparition of a distance' however near an object may be (p. 255). ...
This article focusses on Walter Benjamin’s approach to the experience of modernity through his long-term engagement with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. Benjamin translated Baudelaire and produced a theoretical reflection on translation based on this experience in his essay ‘The Task of the Translator’. Years later, he would place Baudelaire at the centre of his attempt to reconstruct the prehistory of modernity in his great unfinished work The Arcades Project. This article brings to light the relationship between translating and interpreting Baudelaire in Benjamin’s work, attempting to recover a systematicity in his thought that escapes from traditional disciplinary borders. In order to do so, it reads Benjamin’s essay on ‘The Task of the Translator’ in light of major issues that can only be clarified with reference to his later adoption of historical materialism and, conversely, it approaches Benjamin’s interpretation of Baudelaire as the writer of modern life as a revision of philosophical concerns that were first approached in his metaphysics of language and translation. A concluding section explores how such an interpretation relates to a materialist physiognomics which puts language and translation at the heart of a critique of modernity.
... At the same time, the de-anthropisation of the eye (Hick, 1999) is a first instance of the mechanisation of vision that will become a key element of photographic reproduction, of the industrialisation of the production of images and of the eradication of fixity that had characterised the relationship of the body with the observed space. The development of a panoramatic vision (Schivelbusch, 1979) resulting from the advent of mechanical means of transport (railways and tramways) completes this transformation: the experiential contexts of vision within a frame (such as the mechanised panorama of the Paris Passages, film projections, comics, windows of means of transport) complete this shift of the relationship with built space from the field of pure vision to that of tactile perception (Benjamin, 2008). Schivelbusch, Desportes (Desportes, 2008) and, with a focus on visualisation in dynamic media, Schwarzer. ...
This paper seeks to discuss
how commonplace architecture, as a cultural artefact, is constituted through the
stories of everyday domesticity practices.
... 31 Kemp 1982, 417-19. 32 Benjamin [1936] 1963English translation by Michael W. Jennings, in Benjamin [1936] 2008, 25. 33 Kemp 1982, 418. 34 Dorner 1930transl. ...
Between 1929 and 1930 the Der Kreis journal hosted a debate among art historians and museum directors on how art copies were changing the museum landscape. The so-called Hamburger Faksimile-Streit constitutes a crucial moment in the Weimarian theoretical debate on the categories of copy and original, culminating a few years later in Benjamin’s well-known essay on the work of art. After examining the theses of the main participants in the debate, this article focus on the position of curator and museum director Alexander Dorner – the only one advocating for the non-superiority of originals over copies in art museums – and on his relationship with Walter Benjamin’s later theories.
The Bhil and Girassia tribal regions of Udaipur district in the state of Rajasthan in Western India have been historically associated with ideas of wildness and primitivity that have relegated them to zones of exception. This article examines how everyday legal practices reflect and reproduce tribal exceptionalism. In particular, the article examines cases that are registered under sections 323 and 341 of the Indian Penal Code. The combination of 323 and 341 is locally known as petty violence. The manner in which high caste legal practitioners, including police officers, government doctors, lawyers, magistrates, and court clerks, inscribe documents in a legal file pertaining to crimes of 323 and 341, such as the First Information Report, injury report, map of crime, and list of witnesses, is mediated by a complex infrastructure of caste ideology that assumes that Bhils are wild, lack mental skills, and are only capable of petty violence. Legal practitioners believe that tribal life is incommensurable with the specific forms of selfhood, modes of interaction, and publicity that comprise legal personhood and that tribals are more effectively governed by their own customary laws. The article reveals how through these everyday police and court practices, legal practitioners legitimize and establish the state by creating spheres of tribal exceptionalism.
Destination management has discovered design as a possible way to amplify the value of destinations. Design as means for value enhancement must be investigated critically: what will happen if design and destination planning are connected? First: it is necessary to differentiate design from design thinking. Design thinking as toolkit guarantees a comprehensive analysis of problems and provides a range of creative solutions. Even if destination planning is carried out in a responsible way, it is questionable if design interventions are necessary at all to increase the numbers of visitors. Second: every design activity is an intervention into the status quo of nature and culture, and this intervention could change the perception and behaviour of visitors fundamentally. Third: based on the thesis that every destination is a landscape, the text investigates the possibilities and limits of shaping them via design thinking and design practices. Destination management must absolutely respect the fact that the visual imagery of the communication of a destination has lost its value. The perception of the atmosphere of a destination defines its aesthetic value, and this value could be communicated most suitably by telling unique and honest stories about the specific site. A photographic field study supports the written argumentation.
Compression is an essential technique used across diverse information systems, one in which supposedly redundant or superfluous information is minimized or eliminated in order to make the storage, transmission, or reception of other information more legible or efficient. Compression is involved in everything from computer data storge (encoding) and efficient computational processes (floating point arithmetic) to the formatting of media (telephony, radio, streaming) or the engineering and circulation of sound and image (dynamic compression of volume, JPEG resolution). Beyond any particular technical implementation, though, compression names the peculiar perceptual regime of late modernity—it is our percepteme, our episteme.
As Galloway and LaRivière (2017) have noted—everything is compressed, from the logic of digital computers to our attention spans. Yet, if compression designates the essence of experience today, it is precisely in response to a complementary concept of noise. Noise is the lived affect of our material conditions which cannot be made significant to us: not only the literal acoustic noise of late modernity (the waste-product of technologies which hang over perceptual spaces like smog hangs over cities) but, perhaps more critically, compression emerges to cope with a new, properly “cognitive complexity” embodied in the unprecedented entanglement and mediation of social relations through the technical/computational unfolding of the value-form of capital. Such complexity—lying beyond the grasp of any human individual—is logistically offloaded onto the nootechnical exteriorizations associated with, for instance, AI algorithms. On the other hand, it is individuated in experience as noise. Because such noise is perceptually intractable, compression becomes the necessary shape of our aesthesis, one that rigorously flattens the available modalities of experience/value—yet giving birth to new forms of abstraction, perception, and thought.
While several thinkers—notably, Jason LaRivière and Cécile Malaspina—have brilliantly elaborated each concept on its own, I argue that they can only be properly situated through each other. In order to do this, I combine computational and information theory, philosophy, media and cultural theory, as well as political economy with concrete domains where compression and noise articulate the phenomenological stakes for aesthetics today.
We live today in a new virtual and global space. Computers and electronic devices (smartphones) make us stay online, immersed in the cyberspace, in a network connected in an all-to-all system. An increasingly hyperreal world implies how our perception depends on simulations. The whole system is swamped by indeterminacy and reality is absorbed by the hyperreality of the simulation, says Baudrillard. Hyperreality and simulation replace and seem more real than reality itself. We must reflect on what the virtual is and what are its effects or consequences, since each new electronic medium or digital device brings new procedures, behaviors, and ways of being. Following a theoretical and conceptual approach, the aims of this study are: a) to understand the implications of the virtual and its effects, and b) to problematize the ordinary experiences of hyperreality that reshape and restructure patterns of culture and social interaction. The virtual is not just what Baudrillard defines as illusion. The virtual thinks for us. In the recent past, it was the opposite. We conclude that technology has accustomed us to virtual mediatization and now we perceive it as real without distinction, preferring the unlimited power of the illusory with its effects to the limitations of the real.
This essay contemplates the media histories and politics of the digital twin: an accurate three-dimensional model designed to offer data-based simulation, predictive capability, and remote control over a material entity. Currently being developed across the spheres of industry, design, and “smart city” governance, digital twins are “digital-physical” databases purporting not only to represent the appearance of an object but also to capture or simulate all changes to its physical and informatic state, down to the bolt or data point. What are the media histories and stakes of a real-time digital simulation of the world? What of the desire to imitate the physical world in fully machine-readable form? Through three episodes that contribute to the technological imaginary of the twin—the digital factory, the “smart” building model, and the 3D “dashboard” city—it shows how contemporary simulations do not simply reflect reality or create fictional ones but are committed to remaking reality over and over again—each time with greater efficiency, oversight, and predictability.
Simultaneously addressing the (Native) American and Palestinian/Israeli context, Maḥmūd Darwīš’s poem Ḫuṭbat al-Hindī al-aḥmar – ma qabla al-aḫīra – amāma al-raǧul al-abyaḍ (The ‘Red Indian’s’ Penultimate Speech to the White Man), published in 1992 to critically commemorate the ‘discovery’ of ‘America’ by Columbus in 1492, is a deep reflection about the violence of borders and frontiers created by white European invaders. In my article, I aim to answer the question of how the poem’s manifold boundaries (between colonizer and colonized; nature and culture; equality and hierarchization; the living and the dead; identity and otherness) are addressed and re-framed. Although partly essentializing cultural difference by drawing from a romanticized image of the “noble savage” (the “Red Indian”), the poem nevertheless finds a voice to raise crucial questions regarding the self-perception of European/western modernity, anticipating the recently discovered fact that (white) human agency has pushed ‘progress’ so far as to enable humanity to destroy itself, nature, and earth. In intertextual dialogue with key texts of de/coloniality and western modernity, I attempt to show how the poem confronts us with fundamental questions about humanity in the face of self-destruction.
The paper focuses on the virtual tours that major institutions feature as part of their sites. As these tours often promise an authentic experience, the question of what means here arises. Since such programs do not simply serve to show digital images of museum objects but also convey a quasi-presence, the paper proposes to examine the authenticity of the experience of the virtual tour in comparison to the physical one. On the other hand, it also looks at the possible authenticity of museum exhibits in the virtual space. To do this, not only the notion of authenticity needs to be clarified, but also that of the virtual. Following Walter Benjamin’s approach, the paper examines what conception of time can constitute authenticity. Upon the concept of authenticity remaining the same in the case of the virtual, the paper opposes two positions: one is the historian’s view, and the other is that of the postmodern cultural critic. A comparison of their possible arguments aims to show that whatever we bring up against the virtual can also be played off—at least partly—against the traditional museum. In conclusion, it argues that these two museum forms are still part of the same museum paradigm.
In 2016, as the Turkish military's “security operations” targeting Kurdish towns in southeastern Turkey were in full swing, a series of disturbing photographs began to appear on social media. The photographs, which showed soldiers posing in front of derelict houses covered with graffiti written only a few moments before, had an almost “playful” quality to them whereby the act of killing was presented as an object of amusement. To achieve this effect, those who shot the photographs appropriated certain aesthetic practices of resistance, specifically the use of street art by protest movements in Turkey. This article calls the appropriation of these practices and their presentation in the photographs “the grotesque mimicry of joyful dissent.” The photographs' mimicry seeks to serve multiple, and seemingly contradictory, purposes including the erasure of the memory of both the atrocities that were being committed at the time and the former struggles against the regime. What lies underneath this project of erasure and becomes visible in the photographs' display of power is the instability and fragility of the regime's violent rule, both within the region, which it treats as an internal colony, and beyond.
Why do people in the UK read and collect books when there are so many other sources of information and forms of storytelling available? What are the material and experiential bases of book love? People are attached to books because books are icons: they embody and enable the realisation of sacred cultural goods. Books do not simply communicate or signal social values or ideas. Aesthetic immersion in books’ materiality allows for these values to be realised. On the basis of the qualitative analysis of 43 interviews and 60 responses to the UK’s Mass Observation project, this chapter advances the cultural sociology of reading by bridging theories of iconicity and attachment and placing materiality at the centre of the analysis. The data are used to illustrate the powerful appeal of the practical fusion of three elements: the material, surface properties of books; the highly valued cultural goods that books represent and realise; and the act of reading.KeywordsBooksIconsAttachmentCultural sociologyMaterialitySacred
Georges Perec’s memoir of his analysis, “The Scene of a Stratagem” (1977), is part of a literary oeuvre characterized by innovative forms addressing the paradoxical task of telling a story that cannot be told. His life history was constructed from memory traces, veiled behind the untimely death of his parents in World War II. The memoir tells the story of his analysis in adulthood with Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, at a time when Perec was struggling with depression and writer’s block. Beneath doubts and the tedious analytic routine, Perec presents analysis as a space in which memory traces can be given new life. The historical past takes place in a space Walter Benjamin calls time-space (Zeit-raum), or time-dream (Zeit-traum). This space is created in a flash of co-incidence between dreaming and waking. History, then, is created in a space where archived memory traces are transformed into present experience. Perec creates a kind of Benjaminian dream-space of the past to deal with the fragmentation of memory that follows traumatic loss. The significance of this distinct space is discussed in relation to the challenge of representing traumatic experiences while remaining faithful to the dreamlike and fragmented nature of the space.
A Translational Sociology provides an interdisciplinary investigation of the key role of translation in society. There is a growing recognition of translation’s intervention in the intellectual history of sociology, in the international reception of social theory, and in approaches to the global literary and academic fields. This book brings attention to aspects of translation that have remained more elusive to sociological interpretation and analysis, investigating translation’s ubiquitous presence in the everyday lives of ordinary people in increasingly multilingual societies and its key intervention in mediating politics within and beyond the nation.
In order to challenge a reductive view of translation as a relatively straightforward process of word substitution that is still prevalent in the social sciences, this book proposes and develops a broader definition of translation as a social relation across linguistic difference, a process of transformation that leaves neither its agent nor its object unchanged. The book offers elaborations of the social, cultural and political implications of such an approach, as a broad focus on these various perspectives and their interrelations is needed for a fuller understanding of translation’s significance in the contemporary world.
This is key reading for advanced students and researchers of translation studies, social theory, cultural sociology and political sociology.
The aesthetic perception of a spatial atmosphere is related to the sensory experience we have in that space. Although this experience is led by a multisensory understanding, the dominant sense is generally the sense of sight in architectural spaces. This dominance—which is generally connected to the Modernist architects as asserted by, for example, Juhani Pallasmaa (2005)—is related to the speed of the perception, or speed of the transfer of the data amount collected by this sense. What is perceived and evaluated aesthetically via the data provided by the sense of sight comprises the composition of the spatial atmosphere in visual respect. In this visual rendition, composition principles have an important role in affecting the experiencers aesthetically in the evaluation of space by setting objective criteria. Therefore, in this paper, I aim to read and understand the relationships between architectural spaces and composition principles as objective atmosphere generators. I chose rhythm, contrast, and unity in variety as the composition principles frequently used in architectural design. To demonstrate this relationship, I firstly made a literature review to provide a base for the analyses theoretically, and secondly, I made a case study comprising the examples having visual organizations created by the mentioned composition principles. The cases to discuss the visual qualities provided by these principles comprise the Villa Stein (Paris, France, 1927) designed by Le Corbusier, the Barcelona Pavilion designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Georg Kolbe’s sculpture named the Dawn (Alba) (Barcelona, Spain, 1929), and the Brion Cemetery (San Vito d’Altivole, Italy, 1969-77) designed by Carlo Scarpa. Examining the atmospheric design and genii given by the composition principles in these cases may pave the way for understanding the lack we have in the aesthetic qualities of today’s architecture.
Developed through a series of conceptual analyses (Edmund Husserl, Vilém Flusser, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin) and case studies (Fernando Lopes’s Belarmino and Jeff Wall’s Mimic), this article delves into the relationship between gesture, attunement and atmosphere and how it unfolds in photographic works dealing with urban space. The first section focuses on the role played by photography in the film Belarmino, which raises questions about both the representation of urban phenomena and issues related to expression and gesture in boxing. The second section discusses Husserl’s thinking on image consciousness and his surprising reference to a “photograph” of a boxer, which reveals the relevance of his phenomenological approach when it comes to defining the aesthetic properties of gesture-images. The third section examines the principles of Flusser’s philosophy of gestures, focusing on the semantic field of attunement and its connection with various elements related to photography, gesture, moods and affects. The question of gesture in photography—both the gestures of the photographed and those of the photographer—can be articulated with the notions of attunement and atmosphere, which go beyond semiological, psychological and communicational approaches and are important for our understanding of aesthetic and artistic experiences. Finally, if photography is a privileged way of studying atmospheres and gestures (as suggested by the Benjaminian notion of optical unconscious) and their connection with the inner life of the subject, in relation to urban space this study often acquires an intersubjective, social and political dimension, as in Jeff Wall’s Mimic.
Reportage, the name for the literary genre of the eyewitness account, has been used interchangeably with literary journalism. This chapter tracks the genre’s intercultural theorization as a tool for social change. Key to the genre’s politicization, driven by Marxist writers between the two world wars, was the acknowledgment of the reporter’s distinct quality as human medium with a class identity, which occurred in two steps. First, Egon Erwin Kisch asserted reportage’s specific epistemological quality rooted in phenomenological experience. Then, Walter Benjamin urgently challenged existing notions of reportage in order to address the threat of fascism, which he associated with the emerging technical media of photography and film.
Playing a game does not mean that we are doing something childish and useless. Using a new technology to express our feelings and raise the awareness of social issues does not mean we cannot call it art. If we go back in time, we can realize that there has always been a resistance to novelty and machines. Sometimes, they were even considered harmful. The same life cycle happens with video games: they are valuable in many ways, they are far more developed than they were twenty years ago, and they have even reached a stage where we can find art in them. But how can they be art? Is the answer in the story or in the audiovisual elements?
For the past twenty years or so, the Austrian cultural theorist Robert Pfaller has been positing and analyzing the concepts of “interpassivity” (as opposed to interactivity) and the delegation of enjoyment both in sacred rituals and in relation to various media of reproduction (such as video recorders and photocopiers). Steintrager and Chow argue that Pfaller's insights into delegation as a key and understudied feature of media ecologies are particularly relevant today, as delegation of various activities has intensified. However, the latest media and technologies, which gather so much information about us that we end up in a state of informational debt, pose a challenge to his thesis that delegation is an unconscious strategy for seeking relief from the onslaught of images, commodities, and information.
The social and cultural changes brought about by industrialization and the Industrial Revolution highlighted the value of printmaking as a new means of expression in artistic presentation. The innovative mechanical production methods influenced their artistic production through the interest and experimentation of many artists, whose numbers should not be underestimated. On the other hand, the transfer of examples of traditional Japanese printmaking (Ukiyo-e) to Europe in 1700-1900 caused profound effects on Western art, beginning with Impressionism, one of the modern art movements. Especially in the last two decades, rapidly digitalizing technology has also provided radical changes in many social-cultural and economic fields. As a reflection of this, it has caused a change in the presentation of contemporary art and caused the formation of an innovative attitude that transforms-triggers the perception of the audience. Two effective factors are emphasized in the context of the effect of fine art print works on the phenomenon of art. One is the artist of the time, who uses all the media tools of his time with pure intuition to transform his artistic expression, his dreams into reality, and another is the audience of the artwork, who accepts only a part of his artistic presentation, which is helped by all technological tools, by discussing, and few of which will be praised by future generations. In this context, digital technology promises a free space to thousands of artists who produce screen presentations or artistic prints on many different media, enabling us to see them everywhere. It has indisputable that digital technologies are a new tool with a different line for artists, apart from the usual art presentation of contemporary art, which is in different quests with an innovative attitude in every period. From this point of view, in addition to the dynamic visual presentations in different places and platforms where the art audience can be involved and integrated into the contemporary art environment, the innovative attitude that fine art print artworks brings to the effect and behavior of the audience should also be considered. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how digital print technology and print works influence audience perception. The survey data analysis is interpreted in this article through excerpts from the dissertation titled “Effects of fine art printmaking on phenomenon of the art” which is still in progress.
The evolution of the information and communication ecosystem has caused significant changes in the visitor’s behavior and expectations – who now manifest desires for participation, collaboration, sharing, and personal representation – suggesting the corresponding need to adapt the museum’s discourse and communication approaches. In this interpretation – of an institution configured at the service of its society – current information and communication technologies find a creative opportunity, as essential support systems for cultural mediation: in the conception, construction, and dissemination of knowledge, for the proposition of new meanings. This research aims to evidence, understand, systematize and critically reflect on the main qualitative characteristics of digital media systems that support the communication processes in the museum, assessing their relevance, contours, and consequences to the visitor’s museum experience. The empirical research phase brings together five expert specialists – museum professionals – whose contributions are collected through semistructured interviews. The interviews seek to identify essential structures and contours for the design of digital mediation in a museum context. At the same time, a classification and categorization system is proposed that allows for framing the digital mediation systems that can be integrated into the museum on a taxonomic basis that comprises three distinct axes: virtualization, observation distance, and interactivity. The articulation of this taxonomic proposal with the other elements present in the investigation facilitates the identification and understanding of these essential structures, contours, and the main qualitative characteristics and respective consequences to be considered in the design of digital mediation in the museum.
Benign violation theory (BVT) claims that humour arises when a situation is interpreted as both benign and as a violation at the same time. The theory has been employed primarily in social psychology and not as a method for textual analysis. This chapter argues that BVT is valuable in the textual analysis of games as it specifies the playful conflicts that are unique to machine-mediated forms of humour, and the ways in which humour is central to deriving communicative meaning from puzzle-based games. The chapter introduces BVT, discusses its relevance to puzzles in games, and analyses Limbo and Braid, two games that, while not explicitly marketed as comedy games, can be read as a series of benign violations that produce dark comedy.
Book review: Poznin, V. F. (2021). Screen space and time. Structural-typological and perceptual aspects. St. Petersburg: Publishing House “Petropolis”.
https://www.store.rubbettinoeditore.it/catalogo/fortunato-depero-and-depero-fururista-1913-1927/
This research examines Depero futurista 1913-1927 – the so-called ‘bolted book’ – created in 1927 by Futurist artist Fortunato Depero (1892-1960). Although Depero and his book have been the subject of artistic re-evaluation, the literature relating to this work neglects several key aspects about the artist, still failing to provide a detailed account of Depero futurista 1913-1927. The goal of this study is to address these gaps in the analysis of the book and its author by examining it in greater depth than any previous account and devising a research methodology tailored to its specific qualities. This publication is an interdisciplinary study of a book published during the Fascist era – a promotional and commercial tool as well as a Futurist work of art – which seeks to accurately define the role of Depero futurista 1913-1927 in the history of design and established narratives of modern graphic design and typography. It is aimed at professionals, academics or simply design enthusiasts, who understand this discipline, and all of its facets, contexts and associated topics.
This chapter argues that the Web, as well as social networks such as Facebook or Twitter, deserve to be subsumed under the notion of cyberspace since they have a special ontological status with respect to garden-variety technical artifacts. While the latter artifacts belong to two distinct ontological categories, namely, concrete particulars and types, social networks are rather abstract particulars, and this entitles us to cast them as sui generis spaces, namely, cyberspaces.
The aim of the paper is to discuss the relations between being here and being in a distant place from where life takes place and their distinct meanings. The paper critically investigates the understanding of life from the point of view of experience, in our present times of virtual reality. What is happening in life to our sense of experience? Can we experience experience itself? It is possible to understand experience in relation to death according to Heidegger. However, what is suspended by the immersive reality concept is the relation with death, the relation with the singularity of the experience itself. The paper investigates whether we are entering in a new dimension in which we will experience life, according to the engineering organization and not directly.
“How can America import ‘American’ jazz?,” asked the music editor of Good Housekeeping , George Marek, in 1956. Marek answered, “Singers, particularly if they are very female, give the home-grown music the allure of a foreign aura.” Taking these statements as a starting point, this article gives an account of the US careers of Alice Babs and Caterina Valente. Gender, class, and ethnicity were key elements in the US construction of Babs's and Valente's musical personae, which was especially heard in their vocality, with an emphasis on high-pitched vocal stylings, melismas, and “white” timbres to signify gender and European exoticism. The US careers of Babs and Valente show us that musical Americanness or Europeanness are not created separately on either side of the Atlantic. Their European identities were not created in Europe and then imported to the United States but were created in the process of transmission into the United States. Importantly, the article argues that race and ethnicity were used by musicians, critics, and listeners to position Babs and Valente as Europeans. Their whiteness was transposed in a US context and their stories tell us as much about US ideologies of whiteness as it does about European ethnicities.
This paper problematises political satire in a time when the COVID-19 virus has provoked numerous deaths worldwide, and had dramatic effects on social behaviour, on a scale unknown in western nations since World War II. Most populations have endured lockdown, periods of enforced domestic imprisonment, which led to images of the empty streets of big cities appearing in media, symbols of the drastic changes that the health emergency was making necessary. Yet, from the outset, comic memes began to circulate across (social) media, while in mainstream print media political satirists continued to lampoon official responses to the ongoing crisis. The paper thus aims to explore the connection of political satire and humour, asking two principle research questions: firstly, how to explain the humorous effects of these multimodal artefacts in such depressing circumstances; secondly, from a pragmatic perspective, to account for their overall socio-political function.The study uses memes taken from various online sources (Facebook, Twitter, Google) during the crisis, analysed according to a mixed approach that blends notions from Humour studies, especially incongruity (Morreall 2016), with insights from linguistic pragmatics (e.g. Kecskes 2014). The findings emphasise the emotional dimension of this form of satire, as the memes work against the backdrop of a range of feelings (anger, bitterness, disappointment, frustration, despair, etc.), many of which have been widely generated by the COVID-19 crisis and political responses to it. In short, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin (2008: 378), man may run out of tears but not of laughter. The findings contribute to our understanding of online satire as an emergent genre, one that uses the affordances of new media to extend the social potentialities of a traditional subversive discourse form.
The paper aims at setting the problem of the relation between technology, and the individual within the framework of Pierre Hadot’s idea of spiritual exercises. It compares two rivaling views of technology that originated in the Weimar Republic in order to outline a problematic field for examining the present position of the individual and technology. As the approaches of Weimar philosophers call for an actualization, the conception of Michel Foucault’s technologies of the self is brought forth. In the conclusion of the paper, the need for contradistinction within the very notion of technology is stressed, in an attempt to incorporate the topical issue into Hadot’s theory of philosophy as a way of life.
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