scholarly journals Changescapes

IDEA JOURNAL ◽  
1969 ◽  
pp. 193-206
Author(s):  
Ross Gibson

Some aesthetic forms ‘dramatise’ change. I call them ‘changescapes’. They help us know mutability by immersing us in it, by letting us be with it. Change is their theme and it is often their matter too, for they are usually of fragile and ephemeral stuff that reacts to altering conditions in the larger world. Transformations happen at their boundaries, at the limits between the inside and the outside of their systems, and then the symptoms of change become manifest in them, palpably available for our contemplation. These aesthetic forms have become plenteous recently because we are ready now to understand them and because we need now to understand mutability with them. Versions of these forms have been in human cultures for ages. For example, in the Chinese shopping district of almost every sizable city in the world, you’ll find a wonderful shop dedicated to ‘live arts’, where you can buy your aquarium, horticultural and water-fountain supplies. But there’s something about the present historical moment that’s calling changescapes forth in greater numbers and greater variety. Assaying these developments, this essay will finish in aesthetics and linguistics. But it starts with a story.

Author(s):  
George E. Dutton

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.


Transfers ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charissa N. Terranova

This essay focuses on a body of photoconceptual works from the 1960s and 1970s in which the automobile functions as a prosthetic-like aperture through which to view the world in motion. I argue that the logic of the “automotive prosthetic“ in works by Paul McCarthy, Dennis Hopper, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Wall, John Baldessari, Richard Prince, Martha Rosler, Robert Smithson, Ed Kienholz, Julian Opie, and Cory Arcangel reveals a techno-genetic understanding of conceptual art, functioning in addition and alternatively to semiotics and various philosophies of language usually associated with conceptual art. These artworks show how the automobile, movement on roads and highways, and the automotive landscape of urban sprawl have transformed the human sensorium. I surmise that the car has become a prosthetic of the human body and is a technological force in the maieusis of the posthuman subject. I offer a reading of specific works of photoconceptual art based on experience, perception, and a posthumanist subjectivity in contrast to solely understanding them according to semiotics and linguistics.


1997 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Blakemore

This essay demonstrates that James Fenimore Cooper was incorporating the language and values of Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) into the "world" of The Last of the Mohicans (1826). In the Enquiry Burke's distinction between the sublime and beautiful centers on traditional distinctions between men and women-an "eternal distinction" that Burke continually underscores. In Mohicans Cooper initially incorporates the beautiful into the sublime, in an intentionally illusive "mix" that corresponds to the illusory mixing of the white and Indian races. He then reinscribes Burke's distinction between the sublime and beautiful as an eternal distinction between whites and Indians-writing "out" the problem of the "Other" (gendered "femininity" and alien, "red" beauty) in a meditation of the significance of culture and race in America. In retrospect, Mohicans is a novel of ambiguous "crosses" and complicitous combinations-a novel of fatal and fruitful mixes comprising a series of covert traces telling a secret story contradicting Cooper's overt, racial ideology. Yet it is this "pristine" ideology that finally overpowers and double-crosses the novel's "other" message. Written in 1826, at a specific historical moment when the Indian tribes were being removed or destroyed, the novel reaffirms a racial ideology tortured with its own historical ambiguities.


2014 ◽  
Vol 584-586 ◽  
pp. 650-653 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bian Ling Zhang

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.


Author(s):  
Peter T. Daniels

It seems to me that the study of writing is about where the study of language was before the development of linguistics over the past century-and-a-bit. Everyone we know knows how to write, and therefore everyone we know thinks they know about writing. This paper looks at how writing has been presented to the general public, and how it has been treated in linguistics since the first real textbook of 1933.


Author(s):  
Álvaro Andrade Garcia ◽  
Lucas Santos Junqueira

In the Ciclope atelier, what moves us is the creation of new languages for the digital medium. In this text I present a synthesis of our research and experimentation work: a free digital publishing software called Managana; the first poetry eBook authored with it, Grão [Grain], launched along with the software in 2012; and our latest release, Poemas de Brinquedo [Toy Poems], launched in 2016. Grain and Toy Poems are good examples of publications that use Managana. Resulting from prolonged research in dictionaries and linguistics’ texts, etymology and mythology, Grain proposes to recreate the world through the word. Its poems experiment the evolution of James Joyce’s verbivocovisual to the possible interanimaverbivocovisual in a digital publication. The application-book-performanceToy Poems is a publication that addresses the possibilities and difficulties of today’s transmedia poiesis.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-115
Author(s):  
Gabriel Menotti

In the mid-2010s, a number of renowned museums and galleries across the world held retrospective exhibitions positioning digital arts within western art history. While inscribing some techno-aesthetic forms and behaviours into the contemporary arts institution, these exhibitions nevertheless cemented the exclusion of others. By examining the role and shortcomings of curatorial practices in this process, this article seeks to frame curating as an art of inclusion able to carve institutional and epistemic space for otherness. In doing so, I argue for the relevance of devices for noticing, defined as a range of tactics that enable the apprehension of digital vernaculars – everyday, ‘lower’ expressions of digital media culture – within institutional sites and discourses. Through these tactics, curators may provoke under-represented cultural actors, forms and behaviours into recognition, reverse the violence of institutional occlusion, and fertilize art histories.


2019 ◽  
pp. 113-126
Author(s):  
Damian Tarnopolsky

This chapter notes that one of the strangest aspects of Bowen’s novels of the 1930s and 1940s is the prevalence of nothing in these texts. Examples range from sentences including double or triple negatives and words that cancel themselves out, to descriptions of parts of London destroyed by the Blitz, to scenes built around something missing. Her characters complain that they know nothing about each other or their own motives; her plots often resist final explanation, as if the novels are in some sense about nothing. On every page, in sentences, in her characters’ lives, in her sense of the world, Bowen’s novels pursue a paradoxical task: charting the presence of lack, absence and negativity. The chapter argues that Bowen’s obsessive dealing with nothingness is a clue to her sense of her place and time. Exploring Bowen’s ‘nothings’ is a way of understanding the fractured historical moment in which she wrote, and her response to it; it is also a way of placing her responses to late and high modernism, to world history and literary history.


Author(s):  
Jörg Richter ◽  
Jurij Poelchau

A crucial experience during my time at university— computer science (with focus on AI) and linguistics—was the documentary “Maschinenträume” (1988) by Peter Krieg. It features the long-term AI project “Cyc,” in which Doug Lenat and his team try to represent common sense knowledge in a computer. When Cyc started, in 1984, it was already known that many AI projects failed due to the machine’s lack of common sense knowledge. Common sense knowledge includes, for example, that two things cannot be in the same place at the same time, or that people die, or what happens at a children’s birthday party. During the night, while the researchers are sleeping, Cyc tries to create new knowledge from its programmed facts and rules. One morning the researchers were surprised by one of Cyc’s new findings: “Most people are famous.” Well, this was simply a result of the researchers having entered, besides themselves, only celebrities like, for example, Einstein, Gandhi, and the U.S. presidents. The machine-dreaming researchers, however, were in no way despondent about this obviously wrong finding, because they figured they would only have to enter the rest of the population, too. The underlying principle behind this thought is that it is possible to model the whole world in the form of ontologies. The meaning of the world can be captured in its entirety in the computer. From that moment the computer can know everything that humans know and can produce unlimited new insights. At the end of the film Peter Krieg nevertheless asks: “If one day the knowledge of the whole world is represented in a machine, what can humans do with it, the machine having never seen the world.”


Author(s):  
Edward Triplett

Duarte de Armas’ Livro das fortalezas or Book of Fortresses illustrates 55 border fortresses in over 180 meticulous measured and annotated renderings. The book is even more impressive given that de Armas completed his on-site survey in a single year (1509) and finished annotating the book the following year. The book’s drawings, alluring in their combination of finite time and enormous space, are difficult to link together at an intra-site or inter-site scale. Consequently, while mapping the 55 border fortresses in the book provides a greater apprehension of a historical, liminal space, this alone does not solve the greater problem of reconstructing de Armas’ methods for rendering place on the Portuguese-Castilian border, nor does it acknowledge the historical moment in which it was produced. This article reconstructs the world of the Book of Fortresses through a novel, digital approach that acknowledges Duarte de Armas’ malleable sense of space rather than ‘rectifying’ his work to match modern geography.


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