scholarly journals What is Videogame Formalism? Exploring the Pillars of Russian Formalism for the Study of Videogames

2021 ◽  
pp. 155541202110274
Author(s):  
Jasper V. Vught
Keyword(s):  
Game Studies ◽  
Robust Approach ◽  
Russian Formalism ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
Aesthetic Responses ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Functionalist Approach ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

This article provides a general overview of the theoretical foundations of formalism to assess their usefulness for the study of videogames and thereby establish grounds for a more robust approach. After determining that formalism has been used as a go-to term for a variety of ontological and methodological approaches in game studies, this article draws more specifically from Russian Formalism to use the label for a functionalist approach interested in how formal devices in videogames work to cue aesthetic responses. Through an exploration of three pillars of Russian Formalism, a videogame formalism emerges that focuses on the workings of the game as a machine while still taking the aesthetic player response as the methodological starting point and acknowledging the importance of synchronic and diachronic historical perspectives in establishing the functioning of game devices.

scholarly journals Media convergence of video games and films: Narrative, aesthetics and industrial synergy

Kultura ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 246-262
Author(s):  
Manojlo Maravić
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Multidisciplinary Approach ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Film Language ◽  
Film And Video

The starting point for defining the relation between film and video games is the well-known thesis that each new medium assumes some formal and contentual characteristics of its predecessors, although the previous medium reconfigures its own and absorbs the properties of the new medium as well. The aim is to present a broader theoretical framework, which would serve as a basis for further exploration of this relation. A multidisciplinary approach will be used based on the concepts of media studies, game studies, film studies and cultural studies. Video games are often based on cinema's thematic, narrative and genre models, while the recursive narrative logic of games is present in films. The use of film language is noticeable in video games, while in movies, it is modified by the aesthetic properties of games. Hollywood industry and the video games industry are synergistic and offer users many ways of consuming products in different media.

scholarly journals The aesthetics of political resistance: On silent politics

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 072551362110351
Author(s):  
Katariina Kaura-aho
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Effective Resistance ◽  
Representative Democracy ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Meaning ◽  
Political Subversion

This article analyses the aesthetics of silent political resistance by focusing on refugees’ silent political action. The starting point for the analysis is Jacques Rancière’s philosophy and his theorisation of the aesthetics of politics. The article enquires into the aesthetic meaning of silent refugee activism and interprets how refugees’ silent acts of resistance can constitute aesthetically effective resistance to what can be called the ‘speech system’ of statist, representative democracy. The article analyses silence as a political tactic and interprets the emancipatory meaning of silent politics for refugees. It argues that refugees’ silent acts of political resistance can powerfully affect aesthetic, political subversion in prevailing legal-political contexts.

Adopting SCAMPER`S Strategies to Incorporate the Sustainability Concepts Within Architectural Design Process

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farhan Ali ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Design Process ◽  
Creative Thinking ◽  
Architectural Design ◽  
Divergent Thinking ◽  
Functional Performance ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Existing Building ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Aesthetic

Thinking creatively, is a necessary condition of the Design process to transform ideas into novel solutions and break barriers to creativity. Although, there are many techniques and ways to stimulate creative thinking for designers, however, this research paper adopts SCAMPER; which is acronym of: Substitute- Combine-Adapt- Modify or Magnify-Put to another use-Eliminate-Reverse or Rearrange- to integrate the sustainability concepts within architectural design process. Many creative artifacts have been designed consciously or unconsciously adopting SCAMPER strategies such as rehabilitation and reuse projects to improve the functional performance or the aesthetic sense of an existing building for the better. SCAMPER is recognized as a divergent thinking tool are used during the initial ideation stage, aims to leave the usual way of thinking to generate a wide range of new ideas that will lead to new insights, original ideas, and creative solutions to problems. The research focuses on applying this method in the architectural design, which is rarely researched, through reviewing seven examples that have been designed consciously or unconsciously adopting SCAMPER mnemonic techniques. The paper aims to establish a starting point for further research to deepen it and study its potentials in solving architectural design problems.

scholarly journals Cultural based preconceptions in aesthetic experience of architecture

Spatium ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 20-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir Stevanovic
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Visual Language ◽  
Cultural Backgrounds ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
Perceived Reality ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Eastern Traditions

On a broader scale, the aim of this paper is to examine theoretically the effects a cultural context has on the aesthetic experience of images existing in perceived reality. Minimalism in architecture, as direct subject of research, is a field of particularities in which we observe functioning of this correlation. Through the experiment with the similarity phenomenon, the paper follows specific manifestations of general formal principles and variability of meaning of minimalism in architecture in limited areas of cultural backgrounds of Serbia and Japan. The goal of the comparative analysis of the examples presented is to indicate the conditions that may lead to a possibly different aesthetic experience in two different cultural contexts. Attribution of different meanings to similar formal visual language of architecture raises questions concerning the system of values, which produces these meanings in their cultural and historical perspectives. The establishment of values can also be affected by preconceptions resulting from association of perceived similarities. Are the preconceptions in aesthetic reception of architecture conditionally affected by pragmatic needs, symbolic archetypes, cultural metaphors based on tradition or ideologically constructed dogmas? Confronting philosophical postulates of the Western and Eastern traditions with the transculturality theory of Wolfgang Welsch, the answers may become more available.

scholarly journals Una mirada a la parodia desde el formalismo ruso: "Tristram Shandy" de Laurence Sterne

2011 ◽  
pp. 299
Author(s):  
María Djurdjevic
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Laurence Sterne ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Russian Formalism ◽  
Tristram Shandy ◽  
Postmodern Novel ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Aesthetic

El artículo aborda la revolucionaria lectura de la novela Tristram Shandy (1767) de L. Sterne por los formalistas rusos (Shklovski), que subrayó la importancia de los aspectos formal y paródico de esa obra, calificada también como la primera novela postmoderna. No obstante, la parodia como herramienta de reflexión metaliteraria está en uso desde la antigüedad griega. Se aborda paralelamente el hito principal de la teoría literaria y cultural rusa –la reconexión con la tradición filosófica premoderna– que ilustra que toda labor hermenéutica depende de las normas estéticas de la tradición cultural desde la cual se estudia.The article tackles a revolutionary reading of the Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy (1767) by Russian Formalism (V. Shklovsky, 1921), focused on the importance of its formal and parodic aspects. The novel has also been assessed as the first postmodern novel in history. But the parody is being used as a tool for metaliterary thinking from the times of the Ancient Greece. Thus, this text also tackles the principal milestone of the Russian Literature and Cultural Theory –its reconnecting with the pre- Modern philosophical tradition– illustrating how our hermeneutic work depends on the aesthetic norms of the cultural tradition we belong to.

scholarly journals The Power of the In-Between: Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis and Critical Reflection

10.16993/baq ◽  
2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Individual Case ◽  
Media History ◽  
Cultural Objects ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Media Objects ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
The Aesthetic

The Power of the In-Between: Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis and Critical Reflection gathers fourteen individual case studies where intermedial issues—issues concerning that which takes place in between media—are explored in relation to a range of different cultural objects and contexts, different methodological approaches, and different disciplinary perspectives. The cases investigate the intermediality of such manifold objects and phenomena as contemporary installation art, twentieth-century geography books, renaissance sculpture, media theory, and public architecture of the 1970s. They also bring together scholars from the disciplines of art history, comparative literature, theatre studies, musicology, and the history of ideas.Starting out from an inclusive understanding of intermediality as “relations between media conventionally perceived as different,” each author specifies and investigates “intermediality” in their own particular case; that is, each examines how it is inflected by particular objects, methods, and research questions. “Intermediality” thus serves both as a concept employed to cover an inclusive range of cultural objects, cultural contexts, methodological approaches, and so on, and as a concept to be modelled out by the particular cases it is brought to bear on. Rather than merely applying a predefined concept, the objectives are experimental. The authors explore the concept of intermediality as a malleable tool of research.This volume further makes a point of transgressing the divide between media history and semiotically and/or aesthetically oriented intermedial studies. The former concerns the specificity of media technologies and media interrelations in socially, politically, and epistemologically defined space and time, and the latter targets formal considerations of media objects and its various meaning-making elements. These two conventionally separated fields of research are integrated in order to produce a richer understanding of the analytical and historical, as well as the aesthetic and technological, conditions and possibilities of intermedial phenomena.

scholarly journals Computer Gameplay and the Aesthetic Practices of the Self: Game Studies and the Late Work of Michel Foucault

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Feng Zhu
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Computer Games ◽  
The Self ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Practices Of The Self ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

This paper aims to critically introduce the applicability of Foucault’s late work, on the practices of the self, to the scholarship of contemporary computer games. I argue that the gameplay tasks that we set ourselves, and the patterns of action that they produce, can be understood as a form of ‘work on the self’, and that this work is ambivalent between, on the one hand, an aesthetic transformation of the self – as articulated by Foucault in relation to the care or practices of the self – in which we break from the dominant subjectivities imposed upon us, and on the other, a closer tethering of ourselves through our own playful impulses, to a neoliberal subjectivity centred around instrumentally-driven selfimprovement. Game studies’ concern with the effects that computer games have on us stands to gain from an examination of Foucault’s late work for the purposes of analysing and disambiguating between the nature of the transformations at stake. Further, Foucault’s tripartite analysis of ‘power-knowledge-subject’, which might be applied here as ‘game-discourse-player’, foregrounds the imbrication of our gameplay practices – the extent to which they are due to us and the way in which our own volitions make us subject to power, which is particularly pertinent in the domain of play.

scholarly journals “Some People Are Born Strange”

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 228-239
Author(s):  
Katja Frimberger
Keyword(s):  
International Students ◽  
Creative Writing ◽  
Ethical Concerns ◽  
Embodied Language ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Body Sculpture

The article explores the role of a Brechtian theater pedagogy as “philosophical ethnography” in four investigative drama-based workshops, which took international students’ intercultural “strangeness” experiences as the starting point for aesthetic experimentation. It is argued that a Brechtian theater pedagogy allows for a productive rather than representational orientation in research, which is underpinned by a love for the aesthetic “re-entanglement” of (dis-embodied) language and ethical concerns about mimetic representational acts. To show how a Brechtian research pedagogy functioned as philosophical ethnography, the article maps the aesthetic transformation of participant Jamal’s verbatim account in the drama workshops—from (a) its emergence in a post-creative-writing discussion in Workshop 2, to (b) its enactment as a body sculpture in Workshop 3, and (c) to its translation into a rehearsal piece in Workshop 4.

New methods of metaphor identification in various types of discourse (Review of publications)

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (6) ◽  
pp. 19-31
Author(s):  
Peter M. Shitikov ◽  
◽  
Svetlana V. Vershinina
Keyword(s):  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Great Success ◽  
Research Groups ◽  
Identification Procedure ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

This article presents a review of the latest procedures for identifying metaphor in multilingual texts and different types of discourse. The choice of methods for identifying and decoding metaphorical expressions is the starting point of any research in the field of metaphorology. With the development of corpus linguistics methods, the volume of analyzed material has grown thousands of times. So, the identification of linguistic expressions in discourse that realize conceptual metaphors has become one of the most challenging issues of modern metaphorology. The paper describes theoretical foundations and historical background for the solution of this issue. It is shown that it is impossible to verify this or that method without a large-scale approbation; in this connection, the developments of research groups (PALASIGMET, PRAGGLEJAZ) proved to be the most perspective. The MIP (metaphor identification procedure) was finalized in the metaphor laboratory of the Free University of Amsterdam with the name MIPVU. This methodology was a great success all over the world, however, in Russia only a few articles of introductory character have appeared. This article summarizes the experience of applying the procedures of metaphor identification in different languages and types of discourse.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document