scholarly journals Aesthetic dimension of technology: dynamo as technological Sublime at the turn of the XIX and XX centuries

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-50
Author(s):  
N.V. Nikiforova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Technological Sublime ◽  
Xix Century

In the second half of the XIX century technology saturated urban space and transformed fac­tory production around the world. Reception of technologies in everyday life was connected with aesthetic comprehension. Besides, perception of new technologies was a complex emo­tional experience that fostered reflections on possibilities of human mind and of man-made power, on historical role of technology and its future development. This article is devoted to the aesthetic characteristics of interaction with technology as an affective aesthetic expe­rience of the technological sublime. As an example, the representation and reception of the dynamo in the public discourse at the turn XX century will be considered. The concept of the technological sublime develops the classical category of the sublime, which was inter­preted as an extreme degree of tension of the senses when meeting objects and phenomena that exceed the possibilities of human perception. In the XVIII century, the aesthetics of the sublime was discovered in nature, and in the XIX century new machines and technolo­gies began to claim the role of objects of the sublime aesthetic experience. Technological sublime can be regarded as a transgressive experience (collision with the limits of human perception and limits of possibilities) and as existential experience (human awareness of the finitude of being).

Schopenhauer and the Paradox of the Sublime

2020 ◽  
pp. 237-255
Author(s):  
Bart Vandenabeele
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Aesthetic Object ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
The Aesthetic

Schopenhauer explores the paradoxical nature of the aesthetic experience of the sublime in a richer way than his predecessors did by rightfully emphasizing the prominent role of the aesthetic object and the ultimately affirmative character of the pleasurable experience it offers. Unlike Kant, Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the sublime does not appeal to the superiority of human reason over nature but affirms the ultimately “superhuman” unity of the world, of which the human being is merely a puny fragment. The author focuses on Schopenhauer’s treatment of the experience of the sublime in nature and argues that Schopenhauer makes two distinct attempts to resolve the paradox of the sublime and that Schopenhauer’s second attempt, which has been neglected in the literature, establishes the sublime as a viable aesthetic concept with profound significance.

scholarly journals The Role of Art in Society with Particular Reference to the Problem of Violence$

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 160-167
Author(s):  
Camilla Pagani
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Approach ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Other ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Individual

Background: According to the Latin poet Virgil, art is capable of revealing to us what no science can ever reveal to a human mind. The main thesis of this paper is that art can play an extremely beneficial role in society as it can strongly foster humans’ efforts to attain a deeper and broader comprehension of reality. Objective: The experience of art can provide a powerful contribution to the efforts to avoid resorting to violence and to address conflicts constructively. Violence or, more exactly, unjustified violence, basically rests on an irrational and short-sighted analysis and interpretation of reality. Results: The psychological processes relating to the aesthetic experience and to its connections with violence are described. It is also pointed out that this theoretical perspective does not fully coincide with the theoretical theses underpinning art therapy. In fact, in this paper art is not considered as a mere therapeutic instrument. Instead, an attempt has been made to consider art and our relationship with art in their more complex and partly still unexplored aspects, where neither art or the individual is “at the service” of the other. Conclusion: Art can provide the possibility to experience a new dimension, where no power relations exist and where new ways of seeing and feeling are made possible. It can hence foster the development of less primitive and richer personalities. In this way violence should lose its raison d’être. So it appears that this theoretical approach might be particularly helpful in order to better understand and countervail violence.

The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Scientific Explanation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Empirical Knowledge ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Central Claim

This collection of thirty-one essays written by contemporary Schopenhauer scholars has six sections: (1) Influences on Schopenhauer, (2) Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics of Will and Empirical Knowledge, (3) Aesthetic Experience, Music, and the Sublime, (4) Human Meaning, Politics, and Morality, (5) Religion and Schopenhauer’s Philosophy, and (6) Schopenhauer’s Influence. Some of the issues addressed concern the extent to which Schopenhauer adopted ideas from his predecessors versus how much was original and visionary in his central claim that reality is a blind, senseless “will,” the effectiveness of his philosophy in the field of scientific explanation and extrasensory phenomena, the role of beauty and sublimity in his outlook, the fundamental role of compassion in his moral theory, the Hindu, Christian, and Buddhistic aspects of his philosophy, the importance of asceticism in his views on how best to live, how pessimism and optimism should be understood, and his impact on psychoanalysis, as well as upon music, the visual arts, and literature. The collection is an internationally constituted work that reflects upon Schopenhauer’s philosophy with authors from a variety of backgrounds, presently working in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, England, France, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Scotland, Spain, and the United States.

The Sublime Conditions of Contemporary Art

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Zepke
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Genetic Model ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
History Of ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
The Moment

Deleuze's relationship to Kant is intricate and fundamental, given that Deleuze develops his transcendental philosophy of difference in large part out of Kant's work. In doing so he utilises the moment of the sublime from the third Critique as the genetic model for the irruption of the faculties beyond their capture within common sense. In this sense, the sublime offers the model not only for transcendental genesis but also for aesthetic experience unleashed from any conditions of possibility. As a result, sensation in both its wider and more specifically artistic senses (senses that become increasingly entwined in Deleuze's work) will explode the clichés of human perception, and continually reinvent the history of art without recourse to representation. In tracing Deleuze's ‘aesthetics’ from Kant we are therefore returned to the viciously anti-human (and Nietzschean) trajectory of Deleuze's work, while simultaneously being forced to address the extent of its remaining Idealism. Both of these elements play an important part in relation to Deleuze's ‘modernism’, and to the discussion of his possible relevance to contemporary artistic practices.

Embodied/Virtual Environments

Anthropology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kara Miller
Keyword(s):  
Human Perception ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Body ◽  
Virtual Design ◽  
Religion And Ecology ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
Bodily Knowledge ◽  
Virtual Experiences

This article by no means serves to account for theories on virtual technologies or virtual design but, rather, offers a distinct exploration on the role of the body in virtual experiences and spaces. Selected works account for embodiment literature and emergent considerations of the body in what may be considered a post-body, or post-human, era of technology, connectivity, and communications. This list includes work that researches, discusses, or questions notions of virtual with regard to landscapes of experience and that looks to discourses on the role of the body in human perception. With implications for larger questions regarding the human mind, and apart from dualistic conversations on mind-body connections, embodiment theories view the body as a tool for participation in lifeworlds. Embodiment is inherently a social concept, and one that rests on foundational understandings of human evolution and adaptation as well as human sociability and socialization, sometimes explored as ecosocial phenomena. Conjuring many inquiries in biology, cognition, psychology, ethics, philosophy, religion, and ecology, this collection is composed mostly of work in the humanities and social sciences and is skewed by traditions in anthropology. It is generally well accepted that cultural perspectives inform human knowledge, but theories in embodiment ask how social and cultural conditions inform not only perspectives, but also experiences or felt senses (or both). Questions of materiality give way to attention on the physical, earthly environment to which humans have evolved and with which humans have coadapted. Scholars have referred to this era as the Anthropocene, which ultimately points to human dilemma, since human behavior is defined by progressively more destructive behavior that yields an earth on which humans cannot rely for resources. Simultaneously, media, entertainment, and design technology have moved into virtual reality and augmented experiences that either transcend, mimic, or escape earthly realms or physical limitations. Simulated or virtual experiences make use of what we know about human perception to create new forms of reality. Theories of being and knowing, inherent to the anthropological canon, pose examination of bodily knowledge and bring about inquiry in medicine, disability studies, cognition, and health, to name a few. Mediated and augmented experiences have all manner of applications and implications, including overriding biology and genetics, posing questions for the future of the human condition. This article includes new work from science journals and popular media to illustrate how new human adaptations, ecologies, and virtual perceptions interface with embodiment.

Urban Mobility—Urban Discovery

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-58
Author(s):  
Jonathan Maskit ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Urban Mobility ◽  
Or Efficiency ◽  
Affective Characteristics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Transportation Technologies

In this paper I investigate how different modes of urban transportation shape our experience of the urban environment. My goal is to argue that how we move through a space is not merely a question of convenience or efficiency. Rather, our transportation technologies can fundamentally shift how we experience where we are. I propose a framework for considering mobility from the standpoint of phenomenological everyday aesthetics considering the social, somatic, temporal-epistemic, and affective characteristics of experience. I then suggest a typology of different forms of urban mobility distinguishing between private and public forms of transportation as well as between faster and slower modes. I next suggest a trio of factors—speed, ability to survey one’s surroundings, and ease of interruption—that play into how we experience an urban environment while discovering it by means of mobility. By applying the framework of experience and the trio of factors to the typology of transportation modes I show how each of them can foster or hinder an aesthetic experience of the urban environment. I conclude by reflecting on some further issues for investigation including the role of power in urban space, questions concerning mobility and difference (class, race, dis/ability, etc.), the place of technological mediation in urban mobility, and the role of spatial planning.

Aesthēsis and Technē: New Technologies and Lyotard’s Aesthetics

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley Woodward
Keyword(s):  
Information Technologies ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Free Play ◽  
Traditional Model ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Conceptual Meaning ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines Lyotard’s consideration of the way that technologies, and in particular information technologies, reconfigure the nature of aesthetic experience. When art uses communication technologies themselves as its matter or medium, the “traditional” model of aesthetic experience becomes problematised. Lyotard argues that this is the case because information technologies determine or “program” a conceptual meaning in advance of an aesthetic experience. Therefore, we no longer have a situation of the “free play” between sensible forms and concepts that constitutes the aesthetics of the beautiful for Kant. Lyotard argues, however, that this decline in aesthetic experience as traditionally conceived need not be understood negatively: rather, it may be seen positively in so far as it furthers experimentation with materials, and activates an aesthetic of the sublime.

Thinking Colours and/or Machines

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 39-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Friedrich Kittler
Keyword(s):  
Human Perception ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Media Technology ◽  
Natural Languages ◽  
Life World ◽  
Universal Machine ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
The Mind

The article attempts to locate the role of the computer in the long-standing conflict between the humanities on one side and the hard sciences and mathematics on the other. The state-sponsored promotion of philosophy and its subsequent demotion of scientific explanations provoked a scientific counter-attack, in the course of which psychophysical research subjected the human perception apparatus to rigorous investigations that all but mechanized the faculties of human understanding that were so central to the aspirations of philosophers. The latter retaliated either by creating realms such as Husserl’s phenomenological ‘life-world’ that preceded, and hence were immune to, psychophysical explanations of sensation and perception, or by universalizing the faculty of understanding in such a way as to ensure the importance and competence of philosophy (e.g., in the work of the early Heidegger). This ongoing antagonism was also present in the ways in which the parties treated media technology: Philosophy tried to constrain media by conceptualizing them as obedient instruments tools at the beck and call of their users, whereas psychophysical research modeled the human mind on the very media that were indispensable for accessing this mind in the first place. The former saw media as ‘handy’ tools, the latter proceeded to make them the very measure of man. Alan Turing’s universal machine puts an end to this struggle: Not only does it blur the distinction between instructions and data, it converts the materials of the real world, the mechanisms of the mind, and the principal bastion of philosophy, natural languages, into numbers.

Meiotic CENP-C is a shepherd: bridging the space between the centromere and the kinetochore in time and space

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-261
Author(s):  
Jessica E. Fellmeth ◽  
Kim S. McKim
Keyword(s):  
Chromosome Segregation ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Early Prophase ◽  
Unique Role ◽  
Kinetochore Assembly ◽  
M Phase ◽  
In Vivo Analysis ◽  
Meiosis I

Abstract While many of the proteins involved in the mitotic centromere and kinetochore are conserved in meiosis, they often gain a novel function due to the unique needs of homolog segregation during meiosis I (MI). CENP-C is a critical component of the centromere for kinetochore assembly in mitosis. Recent work, however, has highlighted the unique features of meiotic CENP-C. Centromere establishment and stability require CENP-C loading at the centromere for CENP-A function. Pre-meiotic loading of proteins necessary for homolog recombination as well as cohesion also rely on CENP-C, as do the main scaffolding components of the kinetochore. Much of this work relies on new technologies that enable in vivo analysis of meiosis like never before. Here, we strive to highlight the unique role of this highly conserved centromere protein that loads on to centromeres prior to M-phase onset, but continues to perform critical functions through chromosome segregation. CENP-C is not merely a structural link between the centromere and the kinetochore, but also a functional one joining the processes of early prophase homolog synapsis to late metaphase kinetochore assembly and signaling.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Technology ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Grant Allen

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

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