Concrete Abstract: Exploring Tactility in Abstract Animations from Early Avant-garde Films to Contemporary Artworks

After witnessing social chaos and the collapse of values at the beginning of the twentieth century, avant-garde artists insert new thought patterns and progressive aesthetic into the traditional perception of art. Being enthralled by the new film medium, former painters like Viking Eggeling, Walther Ruttman and Hans Richter start to experiment with light in two-dimensional film formats, they animate lines, stripes, basic shapes, play with the foreground and the background, and, most important of all, they construct a temporality within the visual order of the screen. Viking Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale (1921-24), Walther Ruttman’s Opus I (1921) and Hans Richter’s Rhythmus 21 (1921) show such temporality built in, which is caught by the idea of music as their titles suggest. These short abstract animation films attempt to discover the artistic possibilities of the new developing medium, film. Like the pioneer avant-garde abstract filmmakers, today’s artists still seek to stimulate a new perception for a possible embodiment that will activate the sense of touch in the audience. Tactility, enhanced by the material, opens up a new network of spatio-temporal relationships in the viewer's consciousness and subjecthood. This essay aims to bring a historical perspective to the abstract moving images of which the tactile or haptic experience is a defining characteristic. Through a selection of abstract animations, the materiality of the film image and the screening site will be elaborated upon according to the haptic features that are corporally embodied by the viewers. In the light of historical abstract animation, the aim is to dwell upon the dynamics of a continuous tendency to capture tactile instances to help bring forth the spatial resonances as well as visualize and reedify the rhythmic passing of time.

Visual order of Chinese ink paintings

Visual order is one of the key factors influencing the aesthetic judgment of artworks. This paper reports the results of evaluating the influence of extracted features on visual order in Chinese ink paintings, using a regression model. We use nine contemporary artists’ paintings as examples and extract features related to the visual order of their paintings. A questionnaire survey is conducted to collect people’s rating scores on the visual order. Via regression modeling, our research analyzes the significance of each feature and validates the influences of the features on the visual order.

Dhemes Concept on Visual Branding of Laweyan Batik Surakarta

Batik etiquette, commonly known as batik stamp, is part of a promotion that serves as a differentiator from similar products. The existence of Surakarta batik etiquette was born as an effort to gain legitimacy in the community, emerging in the 1930s it was motivated by the dynamics of social and political change. The emergence of batik etiquette with a tendency to prioritise visual patterns in Surakarta is apparent in the visual structure of most Surakarta batik etiquettes. In this study it is suspected that the characteristic character of batik etiquette is related to the views and nature of thought of the people at that time. In this case the concept of dhemes is also thought to be reflected in visual patterns and arrangements in the batik etiquette of Kampung Kauman and Laweyan Surakarta. The existence of batik etiquette which was motivated by socio-political changes had an impact on changing people’s perceptions about products which in turn impacted perceptions about visual order. Etiquette status is not merely a marker of a product, but also plays a role in changing the perception of the product. Etiquette is interpreted as a form of actualization of batik producers in their respective regions. Batik etiquette as an art product is not only a personal expression, but also as a representation of the social order. At a further level art products become media to mark changes in social perception. Keywords: dhemes, batik etiquette, laweyan

The 2018 World Cup in Russia and Its Regimes of Visibility: The Cases of Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan

The article addresses visualizations of the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russian and international digital media. Drawing on the scholarship on discoursive hegemony, the authors intoduce a concept of hegemonic regime of visibility as a general frame for understanding the dominant ways of visualizing mega-events which comprise elements of attractiveness and enjoyment, on one hand, and surveillance, control, and security, on the other. Based on the cases of Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan, the authors argue, first, that the 2018 World Cup’s hegemonic regime of visibility, co-administered by FIFA and Russian government, implied a hierarchy of performative roles prescribed to the host cities as major promoters of the event. Second, local authorities in Russia used this regime for self-(re)branding to advertise the cities/regions as parts of the global world and authentically specific spaces with unique folkloric and ethnic traditions. Third, the FIFA hegemonic regime of visibility was challenged by alternative incursions that destabilized and infused new meanings in the dominant visual order.

Adjudicating sartorial elegance from the court – the sumptuary impulse in the law of modern sports sponsorship against ambush marketing

Ambush marketing, sometimes also known as guerrilla marketing, comprises attempts to create an unauthorized association with mega-sporting events (such as the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup) without obtaining official sponsorship agreements. This article contends that the contemporary law of sports sponsorships against ambush marketing harbours a palpable but much-neglected sumptuary impulse, which has never before been adequately scrutinized. It shows that pre-modern sumptuary law strangely resonates with modern anti-ambush law's sumptuary obsession with the visual order of symbols and images as prestige signifiers. It also reveals an ongoing ‘intellectual property’ turn in the recent development of sumptuary anti-ambush law-making, whose ambition is to reify sports-derived sumptuary distinction into a thing-in-itself for nearly absolute ‘property’ protection. My argument is illustrated by a carefully selected number of ambush disputes including Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) v Telstra, which represents the latest development in this field of law.

La mirada borrosa: poéticas del desenfoque y visiones oblicuas en la narrativa hispánica contemporánea

The sense of sight has been established as the preferred cognitive model in our culture; however, ¿what happens when the visual order seems to be fallible?, ¿what implications and meanings acquires the presence of some eye diseases that generate defective views in the most recent narrative? This paper addresses, from the perspective of gender and cultural studies, the work of several Latin American female writers who have articulated in their narrative different optical disorders as myopia, strabismus or diplopia. From this approach, it is pretended to demonstrate that the repeated presence of eye diseases has configured a literary motive which is directly related to the emergence of a new aesthetic positioning. The deficient visions are discovered, nowadays, as the manifestation of a different look that was required from the female discourse to be against the ocularcentric and male regime.