scholarly journals Cloud Opera through the prism of artistic research: looking for media archaeological issues from the clouds

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-95
Author(s):  
Liina Keevallik ◽  
Indrek Ibrus

AbstractCloud Opera or The Dido Problem (Vaba Lava, Tallinn, Feb-Mar 2019) is a theatrical performance investigating, through artistic means, the human condition in the datafied world. The play was created in collaboration between Vaba Lava theatre and Tallinn University’s Centre of Excellence in Media Innovation and Digital Culture (MEDIT). In terms of its representations, the play combined references to man-made data ‘clouds’ with knowledge on atmospheric clouds and suggested that the former are just as unpredictable and uncontrollable as the latter. In this article, Liina Keevallik, the author and the scenographer of the performance together with Indrek Ibrus, a media researcher, discuss the uses of the media archaeological approach both in artistic practice and in creating “Cloud Opera”. We also discuss what media archaeological “findings” we could glean from the scenic elements of the play.

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-124
Author(s):  
Alexander Pschera

"Neben der Industrie hat die Digitalisierung auch die Natur ergriffen. Die Tatsache, dass Tausende von Tieren mit GPS-Sendern aus- gerüstet und überwacht werden, erlaubt, analog zur Industrie 4.0 auch von einer Natur 4.0 zu sprechen. Dieses Internet der Tiere verändert den Begriff, den der Mensch von der Natur hat. Er transformiert die Wahrnehmung vor allem der Natur als etwas fundamental An- deren. Neben den vielen kulturellen Problematisierungen, die das Internet der Tiere mit sich bringt, lassen sich aber auch die Umrisse einer neuen, ganz und gar nicht esoterischen planetarisch-post-digitalen Kultur aufzeigen, die die conditio humana verändert. In addition to industry, digitalization has also taken hold of nature. The fact that thousands of animals are provided and monitored with GPS transmitters allows to speak of nature 4.0 by way of analogy to industry 4.0. This internet of animals changes our idea of nature. Most of all, it transforms the perception of nature as something fundamentally other. Beside the many cultural problems that the internet of animals implies, it can also outline a new, not at all esoteric planetary post-digital culture that is about to change the human condition. "


Author(s):  
Synthia Sydnor

This chapter argues that digital culture is a recent addition to myriad forms of expression and expressiveness that have occurred since time immemorial. Digital media then, “are tools that enable humans to continue doing what has always been at the core of the human condition: living in community, communicating, consuming, gathering, playing.” The chapter also develops a treatise on the nature of sport that takes into account both the digital era and theories of play, ritual, and culture. Cyber activities around sport, including “fantasy league play; social and individual memories of sports performance; video/computer games; the seemingly infinite growth of sport performances/stunts showcased on YouTube, tweets, and the colossal transglobal economy associated with sport,” replicate the “fun, thrills, danger, gravity play” and other affective sensations surrounding participation in sport itself. Ultimately, the digital revolution confirms the formal, symbolic ritualistic nature of sport more than it transforms.


Author(s):  
Adair Adams ◽  
Elizabeth Fontoura Dorneles ◽  
Tiago Anderson Brutti

This article presents narratives and arguments around the theme of ideology, based on the human condition of language. Despite having already been investigated by many authors, which hinders any claim to originality, the theme is not capable of a definitive delimitation. The issue of ideology will be addressed in line with the interpretation of notable intellectuals, with an emphasis on the culture irradiated by the media. The script of the article, constituted from a bibliographic review and a critical and reflective approach, gathers digressions on the issue of Lyotard’s meta-reports and Baudrillard’s hyper-reality.


Author(s):  
Alistair Fox

The analysis in this chapter focuses on Christine Jeffs’s Rain as evidence of a shift that had occurred in New Zealand society whereby puritan repression is no longer perceived as the source of emotional problems for children in the process of becoming adults, but rather its opposite – neoliberal individualism, hedonism, and the parental neglect and moral lassitude it had promoted. A comparison with Kirsty Gunn’s novel of the same name, upon which the adaptation is based, reveals how Jeffs converted a poetic meditation on the human condition into a cinematic family melodrama with a girl’s discovery of the power of her own sexuality at the core.


Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
Damiano Benvegnù

From Hegel to Heidegger and Agamben, modern Western philosophy has been haunted by how to think the connections between death, humanness and animality. This article explores how these connections have been represented by Italian writers Tommaso Landolfi (1908–79) and Stefano D'Arrigo (1919–92). Specifically, it investigates how the death of a nonhuman animal is portrayed in two works: ‘Mani’, a short story by Landolfi collected in his first book Il dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies) (1937), and D'Arrigo's massive novel Horcynus Orca (Horcynus Orca) (1975). Both ‘Mani’ and Horcynus Orca display how the fictional representation of the death of a nonhuman animal challenges any philosophical positions of human superiority and establishes instead animality as the unheimlich mirror of the human condition. In fact, in both stories, the animal — a mouse and a killer whale, respectively — do die and their deaths represent a mise en abyme that both arrests the human narrative and sparks a moment of acute ontological recognition.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 454-473
Author(s):  
Rachel Zellars

This essay opens with a discussion of the Black commons and the possibility it offers for visioning coherence between Black land relationality and Indigenous sovereignty. Two sites of history – Black slavery and Black migration prior to the twentieth century – present illuminations and challenges to Black and Indigenous relations on Turtle Island, as they expose the “antagonisms history has left us” (Byrd, 2019a, p. 342), and the ways antiblackness is produced as a return to what is deemed impossible, unimaginable, or unforgivable about Black life.While the full histories are well beyond the scope of this paper, I highlight the violent impossibilities and afterlives produced and sustained by both – those that deserve care and attention within a “new relationality,” as Tiffany King has named, between Black and Indigenous peoples. At the end of the essay, I return briefly to Anna Tsing’s spiritual science of foraging wild mushrooms. Her allegory about the human condition offers a bridge, I conclude, between the emancipatory dreams of Black freedom and Indigenous sovereignty.  


2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-96
Author(s):  
Ramon Reichert

The history of the human face is the history of its social coding and the media- conditions of its appearance. The best way to explain the »selfie«-practices of today’s digital culture is to understand such practices as both participative and commercialized cultural techniques that allow their users to fashion their selves in ways they consider relevant for their identities as individuals. Whereas they may put their image of themselves front stage with their selfies, such images for being socially shared have to match determinate role-expectations, body-norms and ideals of beauty. Against this backdrop, collectively shared repertoires of images of normalized subjectivity have developed and leave their mark on the culture of digital communication. In the critical and reflexive discourses that surround the exigencies of auto-medial self-thematization we find reactions that are critical of self-representation as such, and we find strategies of de-subjectification with reflexive awareness of their media conditions. Both strands of critical reactions however remain ambivalent as reactions of protest. The final part of the present article focuses on inter-discourses, in particular discourses that construe the phenomenon of selfies thoroughly as an expression of juvenile narcissism. The author shows how this commonly accepted reading which has precedents in the history of pictorial art reproduces resentment against women and tends to stylize adolescent persons into a homogenous »generation« lost in self-love


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