scholarly journals Immersed, yet distant: Notes for an aesthetic theory of immersive travel films

2021 ◽  
pp. 191-216
Author(s):  
Nicolas Bilchi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Visual Space ◽  
Digital Systems ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Immersive Media

The purpose of this article is to highlight a few stylistic and aesthetic principles, common to the genre of the travel film (both documentary and fictional), as employed by immersive media and devices from the twentieth century – such as the Hale’s Tours of the World, Todd-AO, and Cinerama – up to today’s digital systems like Virtual Reality and 4D Cinema. I will discuss how the different experiences of simulated travels, proffered by those media, are all related to a broader aesthetic tendency in creating what I label as enveloping tactile images. Such images are programmed to surround the viewer from every side, thus increasing their spectacular dimension, but at the same time they strive to temper and weaken the haptic solicitations aroused in the viewer by the immersive apparatus itself. In this sense I propose that the spectator of immersive travelogue films is ‘immersed, yet distant’: she is tangled in the illusion of traversing an enveloping visual space, but the position she occupies is nonetheless a metaphysical one, not different from that of Renaissance perspective, because even if she can see everything, the possibility to interact with the images is denied, in order to preserve the realistic illusion. By analysing the stylistic techniques employed to foster the viewer’s condition of non-interactive immersion in the enveloping world presented by the medium, I will consequently address the topic of the conflict that such immersive aesthetics establish with traditional forms of audiovisual storytelling.

scholarly journals DISCOURSES THAT MATTER: WOLE SOYINKA’S THEATRE AS A FORM OF REPRESENTING AND READING THE WORLD

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (14) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosa Branca Figueiredo
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Wole Soyinka ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Religious Extremism ◽  
The World ◽  
Professional Critics

Abstract: Wole Soyinka is a most significant figure in contemporary world literature. From the perspectives of the politics of postcolonial writings, perhaps the ultimate challenge of the complexity of Soyinka’s works and career lies in the fact that the metanarratives that imaginatively and discursively underwrote the great liberation movements of the twentieth century do not feature in his works in their conventional and familiar configurations. Overarching all the struggles waged by these movements is the struggle for self-representation as the existential and expressive roots of human freedom.The best examples of this structure in Soyinka’s theatre are A Dance of the Forests, Kongi’s Harvest, Madmen and Specialists and From Zia With Love. Soyinka’s critical essays also operate in a great variety of social and intellectual contexts and cover an extraordinary range of topics, including literary criticism and aesthetic theory, theatre and cultural history, political power and ideology, and, more recently religious extremism and nuclear pollution. One “form of attention” which has been influential in the reception of Soyinka’s works is that of professional critics, especially with regard to the institutionalisation of the academic study of Anglophone writings of the developing world in the second half of the twentieth century.

The Director, the Spectator and the Eiffel Tower

2005 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
DENNIS KENNEDY
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
The World ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Theatre Historiography

Though directors have been central to the theatre for more than a century, it is not easy to describe their function or explain fully what they do. Since they have not all done the same things, theorizing the office is a slippery enterprise. Despite this difficulty, the cultural authority of directors has become embedded in the thinking of both the commercial and subsidized sectors in most countries in the world, including many parts of Asia, so that directors are fundamental to the way we comprehend and value theatrical work. Though dictatorial modes of direction have been challenged in the past three decades by a variety of strategies, the theatre industry continues to rely heavily upon the managerial and aesthetic skills of the director, who stands as an icon of the successes and failures of twentieth-century theatre. This essay discusses two alternative histories of the director in the modern age, the modernist avant-garde model and an industrial model, showing that the two are much closer than typically claimed. Using André Antoine as case study, the essay offers a critique of certain tendencies in modernist theatre historiography. A final section looks at the interrelationship of the director and the spectator.

Development of the Jewish religious movement "Khabad" in Ukraine in the 20's of the twentieth century

2001 ◽  
pp. 85-90
Author(s):  
O. V. Kozerod
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Important Research ◽  
The World ◽  
Research Problems

The development of the Jewish religious movement "Khabad" and its organizations in the first quarter of the twentieth century - one of the important research problems, which is still practically not considered in the domestic Judaica. At the same time, this problem is relevant in connection with the fact that the religious movement "Khabad" during the twentieth century became the most widespread and influential area of Judaism in Ukraine and throughout the world.

Coda: The Rosetta Stone

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Digital Code ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Rosetta Stone ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Imagination ◽  
Origin Point

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....

Modernism, Empiricism, and Rationalism

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-47
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Squires
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
Irish Poetry ◽  
Dimensional Spectrum ◽  
Culture History ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Rule Out

Modernism is usually defined historically as the composite movement at the beginning of the twentieth century which led to a radical break with what had gone before in literature and the other arts. Given the problems of the continuing use of the concept to cover subsequent writing, this essay proposes an alternative, philosophical perspective which explores the impact of rationalism (what we bring to the world) on the prevailing empiricism (what we take from the world) of modern poetry, which leads to a concern with consciousness rather than experience. This in turn involves a re-conceptualisation of the lyric or narrative I, of language itself as a phenomenon, and of other poetic themes such as nature, culture, history, and art. Against the background of the dominant empiricism of modern Irish poetry as presented in Crotty's anthology, the essay explores these ideas in terms of a small number of poets who may be considered modernist in various ways. This does not rule out modernist elements in some other poets and the initial distinction between a poetics of experience and one of consciousness is better seen as a multi-dimensional spectrum that requires further, more detailed analysis than is possible here.

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

Features of the development of an unmanned rocket-culture technology in the first half of the twentieth century

2018 ◽  
pp. 135-144
Author(s):  
O. O. Gubka
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Subsequent Formation ◽  
Technical Schools ◽  
Space Industry ◽  
The World ◽  
Culture Technology

The features of unmanned rocket and space engineering´s development in the USSR and in the world in the first half of the XX century were considered in the article. They defined subsequent formation of scientific and technical schools in the rocket and space industry.

Aftershocks

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seva Gunitsky
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
International System ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sudden Rise ◽  
The World ◽  
National Borders

Over the past century, democracy spread around the world in turbulent bursts of change, sweeping across national borders in dramatic cascades of revolution and reform. This book offers a new global-oriented explanation for this wavelike spread and retreat—not only of democracy but also of its twentieth-century rivals, fascism, and communism. The book argues that waves of regime change are driven by the aftermath of cataclysmic disruptions to the international system. These hegemonic shocks, marked by the sudden rise and fall of great powers, have been essential and often-neglected drivers of domestic transformations. Though rare and fleeting, they not only repeatedly alter the global hierarchy of powerful states but also create unique and powerful opportunities for sweeping national reforms—by triggering military impositions, swiftly changing the incentives of domestic actors, or transforming the basis of political legitimacy itself. As a result, the evolution of modern regimes cannot be fully understood without examining the consequences of clashes between great powers, which repeatedly—and often unsuccessfully—sought to cajole, inspire, and intimidate other states into joining their camps.

A war hero or a Hitler soldier?

2019 ◽  
pp. 50-57
Author(s):  
Pavel Gotovetsky
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
National Committee ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
The Third Reich

The article is devoted to the biography of General Pavlo Shandruk, an Ukrainian officer who served as a Polish contract officer in the interwar period and at the beginning of the World War II, and in 1945 became the organizer and commander of the Ukrainian National Army fighting alongside the Third Reich in the last months of the war. The author focuses on the symbolic event of 1961, which was the decoration of General Shandruk with the highest Polish (émigré) military decoration – the Virtuti Militari order, for his heroic military service in 1939. By describing the controversy and emotions among Poles and Ukrainians, which accompanied the award of the former Hitler's soldier, the author tries to answer the question of how the General Shandruk’s activities should be assessed in the perspective of the uneasy Twentieth-Century Polish-Ukrainian relations. Keywords: Pavlo Shandruk, Władysław Anders, Virtuti Militari, Ukrainian National Army, Ukrainian National Committee, contract officer.

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