Urban Choreographies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriele Klein
Keyword(s):  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Dimensions ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Public Protest ◽  
Artistic Interventions ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Forms

In recent years, above all in urban environments, new cultures of public protest and artistic interventions have established themselves. These artistic and aesthetic forms increasingly operate with physical, theatrical, and choreographic practices and tools, developing a politics of images in an effective and affective media environment. This chapter discusses, using the examples of LIGNA’s performances Radioballet and Dance of All, the aesthetic, political, and social dimensions of artistic interventions based on a concept of community that is defined by corporeal and aesthetic practices. The chapter highlights the political potential implied in the aesthetic and artistic forms of public cultural gatherings. It focuses on the production of attention by means of bodily practices (gestures, facial expressions, movement, dance), theatrical settings (stage, costumes, music), and choreographic tools (organization of bodies, rhythm, dramaturgy).

Dante Alighieri

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Bartoloni
Keyword(s):  
Dante Alighieri ◽  
The Political ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Artistic Process ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
The Aesthetic

The Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) is invoked several times in the work of Giorgio Agamben, often in passing to stress a point, as when discussing the political relevance of désoeuvrement (KG 246); to develop a thought, as in the articulation of the medieval idea of imagination as the medium between body and soul (S, especially 127–9); or to explain an idea, as in the case of the artistic process understood as the meeting of contradictory forces such as inspiration and critical control (FR, especially 48–50). So while Agamben does not engage with Dante systematically, he refers to him constantly, treating the Florentine poet as an auctoritas whose presence adds critical rigour and credibility. Identifying and relating the instances of these encounters is useful since they highlight central aspects of Agamben’s thought and its development over the years, from the first writings, such as Stanzas, to more recent texts, such as Il fuoco e il racconto and The Use of Bodies. The significance of Agamben’s reliance on Dante can be divided into two categories: the aesthetic and the political. The following discussion will address each of these categories separately, but will also emphasise the philosophical continuity that links the discussion of the aesthetic with that of the political. While in the first instance Dante is offered as an example of poetic innovation, especially in relation to the use of language and imagination, in the second he is invoked as a forerunner of new forms of life. Mediality and potentiality are the two pivots connecting the aesthetic and the political.

Bossa Mundo

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
K.E. Goldschmitt
Keyword(s):  
Local Governments ◽  
Film Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Brand ◽  
Brazilian Music ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Media ◽  
Rich Countries

Bossa Mundo chronicles how Brazilian music has been central to Brazil’s national brand in the United States and the United Kingdom since the late 1950s. Scholarly texts on Brazilian popular music generally focus on questions of music and national identity, and when they discuss the music’s international popularity, they keep the artists, recordings, and live performances as the focus, ignoring the process of transnational mediation. This book fills a major gap in Brazilian music studies by analyzing the consequences of moments when Brazilian music was popular in Anglophone markets, with a focus on the media industries. With subject matter as varied as jazz, film music, dance fads, DJ/remix culture, and new models of musical distribution, the book demonstrates how the mediation of Brazilian music in an increasingly crowded transnational marketplace has had lasting consequences for the creative output celebrated by Brazil as part of its national brand. Through a discussion of the political meaning of mass-mediated music in chronologically organized chapters, the book shifts the scholarly focus on the music’s transnational popularity from the scholarly framework of representing Otherness to broader considerations of a media environment where listeners and intermediaries often have differing priorities. The book provides a new model for studying music from culturally rich countries in the Global South where local governments often leverage stereotypes in their national branding project.

Brief Analysis for the Aesthetic Form of Chinese Garden Art

2014 ◽  
Vol 584-586 ◽  
pp. 650-653 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bian Ling Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Development History ◽  
Artistic Conception ◽  
High Uniformity ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The World ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Forms

Chinese garden art has developed gradually along with the neutralization--lasting appeal--artistic conception trend till to the peak, meanwhile, those aesthetic forms can be existed synchronously with historical advancement, logic arrangement in parallel and correspondence as well as abundance and deepening of the interior connotation and exterior extension, which represent the high uniformity of the development history and logics of Chinese garden art. Nowadays, the landscape garden development is required to probe its root, explore its cultural soul, so as to base itself upon the garden industry all over the world. Additionally, the function of traditional aesthetic form will show the powerful functions, declare publicly the deep influence of modernized landscape garden development.

Post-Mass-Media and Participation

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Research Group ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Democratic Participation ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
New Generation

Three decades after Félix Guattari introduced the concept of "post-mass-media" as a necessary condition of media participation, it is by no means self-evident that his reaction to events leading up to 1989 would still attract a new generation of scholars today. Yet, the concept continually reappears to address the role of technology in democratic participation and the relation between the aesthetic and the political. Originating in discussions of the DFG research group Media and Participation, this issu

The What-Has-Been and the Now of a Communist Past in Malaya in the Films of Amir Muhammad

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-65
Author(s):  
Carlo Bonura
Keyword(s):  
Small Group ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Village People ◽  
Communist Past ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Malayan Emergency ◽  
The Village ◽  
Communism Today ◽  
Aesthetic Forms

This article considers two films by the Malaysian filmmaker Amir Muhammad, The Last Communist of 2006 and the Village People Radio Show of 2007. Both films are focused on the Malayan Emergency and the lives of a small group of Malayan communists. Through an engagement with Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller,” the analysis in this article examines the aesthetic forms that structure Amir’s films, namely nonlinear narratives, intertextuality, and the use of images and stories as comparative frames. This article argues that Amir’s films enable audiences to recognize how the truth of a communist past in Malaysia, both of its politics and suppression, inflects the present. The films provide an opening to recognize how the absence of communism today is the effect of the ideological clearing of all leftism that became the hallmark of the end of the British Empire in Malaysia. Communism is made meaningful in Amir’s films both as a lived experience and as a displacement that is absent from the postcolonial everyday.

scholarly journals Out of Bounds: Confronting War Crimes and the Breakdown of Justice with Contemporary Art

2021 ◽  
pp. 52
Author(s):  
Catherine Bernard
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
The Political ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
International Conflicts ◽  
Administration Of Justice ◽  
Collective Remembering ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Marc Quinn ◽  
The Aesthetic

Recent art has turned to judiciary and extra-judiciary practices, specifically in the context of international conflicts, in order to assert art’s political accountability and relevance to our capacity to historicise the present. The war in Iraq inspired works that directly address issues of representation and remediation, such as Marc Quinn’s Mirage (2008), in which the aesthetic experience opens onto an ambiguous experience of the breakdown of justice. Other works have chosen to turn carceral space itself into the site of a collective remembering that harnesses affect to a critical reflection on the administration of justice, on assent and dissent. This article will turn to key works by Marc Quinn and Trevor Paglen that confront extra-judiciary malpractices, but also to recent collective art projects involving an interdisciplinary take on the experience of imprisonment, such as Inside. Artists and Writers in Reading Prison (2016), in which artists of all backgrounds responded to Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis on the very premises of Wilde’s incarceration, as well as the work of 2019 Turner Prize co-recipient: Jordanian sound artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan whose recent works rely on testimonies from Syrian detainees and probe the political pragmatics of aural art. All these works have turned to the document—literary, visual, aural—to reflect on the process of experiential mediation. How does the experience of imprisonment, or extra-judiciary malpractices, come to the spectator? How are they read, heard, interpreted, remediated? The article ponders the remediation and displacement of aesthetic experience itself and the “response-ability”—following Donna Haraway’s coinage—of such a repoliticised embodied experience. It will assess the way by which such interdisciplinary works rethink the poetics of the documentary for an embodied intellection of justice—and injustice—in the present.

scholarly journals Making music in divided cities: Transforming the ethnoscape

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Howell ◽  
Lesley Pruitt ◽  
Laura Hassler
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
State Level ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Community Music ◽  
Social Dimensions ◽  
Local Constraints ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Promising Strategy ◽  
Music Centre ◽  
Context Specific

In the phenomenon of the divided city – urban environments partitioned along ethno-religious lines as a result of war or conflict – projects seeking to bring segregated people together through community music activities face many operational and psychological obstacles. Divided cities are politically sustained, institutionally consolidated, and relentlessly territorialized by competing ethno-nationalist actors. They are highly resistant to peacebuilding efforts at the state level. This article uses an urban peacebuilding lens (peacebuilding reconceptualized at the urban scale that encompasses the spatial and social dimensions of ethno-nationalist division) to examine the work of community music projects in three divided cities. Through the examples of the Pavarotti Music Centre in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Mitrovica Rock School in Mitrovica, Kosovo, and Breaking Barriers (a pseudonym) in Belfast, Northern Ireland, we consider the context-specific practices and discourses that are deployed to navigate the local constraints on inter-communal cooperation, but that also contribute to the broader goal of building peace. We find that music-making is a promising strategy of peacebuilding at the urban scale, with both functional and symbolic contributions to make to the task of transforming an ethnoscape into a peacescape.

scholarly journals THE HOBBESIAN TURN

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (55-56) ◽  
pp. 23-40
Author(s):  
Joseph Margolis
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Creative Expression ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Western Politics

The “Hobbesian turn” is an invention out of whole cloth, a device by which to oppose the usually supposed autonomy of the aesthetic, the moral, the political, and the factual; to recover the collective holism of civilizational (or enlanguaged cultural) life; to feature the existential historicity of the human career, which is incompatible with any strict universalism and all the forms of transcendentalism; hence, also, to feature the adequacy of a contingent Lebensform in collecting the affinities of creative expression and agentive commitment within the terms of human solidarity; to abandon strict universality and necessary synthetic truths; and to favour the fluxive world of pragmatist construction rather than the indemonstrable fixities of rationalism and transcendentalism. The article proceeds largely by examining aspects of Picasso’s career and the history of Western politics spanning the sixteenth century to the present.

Perception Based Method for Measuring the Aesthetic Quality of the Urban Environment

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-19
Author(s):  
Hourakhsh Ahmad Nia ◽  
Resmiye Alpar Atun ◽  
Rokhsaneh Rahbarianyazd
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Spatial Configuration ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
Urban Morphology ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Aesthetic Perception ◽  
Aesthetic Quality ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Values

This study assesses changing aesthetic values and their characteristics in urban environments based on human perception. With this in mind, a model for assessing the aesthetic values of the urban environment based on the three steps of human cognition has been developed to elaborate the user's perception in different urban environments. The results of the survey confirm that by changing urban morphology the aesthetic perception of the environment also changes. The finding of this research opens up a new window for urban planners to assess the aesthetic effects of the elements of urban spatial configuration for future urban development.

In the Kingdom of Whomever: Baldwin’s Method

Empty Houses ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Kurnick
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Costs ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Generic Difference

James Baldwin is not only one of the more notable Anglophone twentieth-century novelists to attempt continually and with minimal success to enter the theater. He is also one of the major inheritors of the aesthetic and political problematic we have repeatedly encountered in the course of this book. Baldwin is perhaps the most important twentieth-century novelist to seriously explore what it means to make interiority the bearer of collective desire. This chapter argues that the novel of interiority reaches an impasse and a breakthrough in the work of Baldwin precisely when the contradictions inherent in the attempt to think collective problems through sexual interiority becomes unavoidably insistent—and does so through Baldwin's negotiation with the generic difference of the theater. His career makes clear that if the novel relentlessly personalizes collective issues, its theatrical preoccupation constitutes a record of the political costs of that reduction, one that demands to be read at the level of form.

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