scholarly journals DIGITAL CULTURE, UMWELT AND ALETHEIA AN ONTOLOGICAL INTRODUCTION

Author(s):  
Andrea Pasqui

The paper presented here focuses on the idea of interpreting the digital culture as an image of the material culture rather than a mere copy of it. First of all, we should ask ourselves what an image really is; it is in investigating its deep meaning, which is often devalued due to the enormous dissemination of void images, that we can overcome the superficial concept of the digital as a digitalised copy. The description of an archaeological artifact cannot prescind from its physical and material appearance, but has to go further towards its profound nature and meaning. Considering the so-called aura of archaeological and artistic objects as an engagement between the hic et nunc of the object and the hic et nunc of the observer it will be possible to go beyond in the comprehension of the agency of the objects. Moreover, it is necessary to consider technology as a way through which objects could reveal themselves in a process of ἀλήθεια and not just a tool with the only scope of showing itself and its capacities. Considering digital copies as images could yield compelling challenges: every archaeological object, at any scale from the very little to the very big, has its own lost Umwelt: a way of being entangled in the world in which it was created. Probably, no answer will be provided within this paper, but suggestions to move towards an ontology of digital objects and their relationship with virtual realm.

Author(s):  
Kristina Bross

Chapter 3 analyzes English claims to a central role in a global network of indigenous and English people connected by faith around the world, claims made manifest in Of the Conversion of Five Thousand Nine Hundred Indians on the Island of Formosa, a 1650 publication by Baptist minister Henry Jessey, printed by radical bookseller Hannah Allen. It reports on Dutch missions in Taiwan, comparing them with evangelism efforts in New England. The coda considers the experiences of an Algonquian woman who is unnamed in Jessey’s tract but is identified as a basket maker, speculating on the meaning she may have encoded in her basket designs. Though we cannot “read” them directly, the fact that she made them, coupled with the provocative arguments offered by recent scholars about Native material culture in the colonial period, enables us to reconsider the print archive in which she appears.


Author(s):  
David Fearn

The introduction sets the following discussions in their scholarly context, with particular attention to other contemporary approaches to lyric both within Classics and in comparative literature and critical theory, as well as to art-historical approaches. Literary approaches to lyric deixis are brought together with art-historical and other literary approaches to visuality, subjectivity, and ecphrasis. Pindar’s immersion in a world of material culture and attention to the world as perceived visually fosters a special poetic creativity. The upshot is a poetics of referentiality, according to which Pindar’s consumers are invited to consider the distance between their own situatedness and the worlds being creatively referred to, through the complex mediation of poetic voices. The sensibilities, attitudes, and experiences being constructed also contribute to a new understanding of the importance of lyric as a culturally valuable resource in fifth-century Greece.


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-114
Author(s):  
Nicole Vilkner

AbstractIn the summer of 1828, the Entreprise générale des Dames Blanches launched a fleet of white omnibuses onto the streets of Paris. These public transportation vehicles were named and fashioned after Boieldieu's opéra comique La dame blanche (1825): their rear doors were decorated with scenes of Scotland, their flanks painted with gesturing opera characters, and their mechanical horns trumpeted fanfares through the streets. The omnibuses offered one of the first mass transportation systems in the world and were an innovation that transformed urban circulation. During their thirty years of circulation, the omnibuses also had a profound effect on the reception history of Boieldieu's opera. When the omnibuses improved the quality of working- and middle-class life, bourgeois Parisians applauded the vehicles’ egalitarian business model, and Boieldieu's opera became unexpectedly entwined in the populist rhetoric surrounding the omnibus. Viewing opera through the lens of the Dames Blanches, Parisians conflated the sounds of opera and street, as demonstrated by Charles Valentin Alkan's piano piece Les omnibus, Op. 2 (1829), which combines operatic idioms and horn calls. Through these examples and others, this study examines the complex ways that material culture affects the dissemination and reception of a musical work.


Author(s):  
Larisa Badmaevna Mandzhikova ◽  

Introduction.Dorje Soktunovich Bembeyev-Salmin is one of the famous representatives of the old Kalmyk intelligentsia, a linguist, orientalist, public and political figure. His scientific works and biographical information are preserved in the private archive of D. S. Bembeev-Salmin in the Scientific Archive of the Kalmyk Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences (F. 10). This archive contains 12 items of storage for 1959. Among them are translations of works by Russian writers to the Kalmyk language, manuscripts of the text «The Orthography of the Oirat-Mongolian writing», Kalmyk folk proverbs and sayings, triads, pentastichesrecorded by D. S. Bembeev-Salmin. Of particular interest are the triads ― «orchlngingurvnts»(‘that there are three in the world’), recorded by him in 1931, they are one of the varieties of Kalmyk riddles. The themes of the riddles of the triads are diverse: everyday life, house hold activities, material culture, nature, family and kinship relations, ethics. D. S. Bembeyev-Salmin translated some of the three verses himself. This determines the value of the materials collected by him and their introduction into scientific circulation. The full text of the manuscript materials is published for the first time in this article.


2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 312-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Dickson

This article explores the material and digital culture of warfarin, one of the most commonly prescribed medications in the world. The author uses the drug’s 60-year history to describe its materiality and use, showing how and why it has become an informed material. Three ethnographic cases then show where warfarin has produced and is now reproduced by three types of information: NHS Trust guidelines, genetic codes and the INR (International Normalized Ratio). When a drug becomes so entangled with informational and digital technologies, it becomes reliant on them for its proper and safe use; it can no longer be just an informed material but is a digitally informed one.


Author(s):  
Patrick V. Kirch

The Hawaiian Islands are the most isolated inhabited archipelago in the world. Initially colonized around A.D. 1000, the environmental gradients of rainfall and island-age have influenced subsequent cultural variation and differentiation in the islands. Settlements are typically dispersed hamlets and integrated within agricultural facilities such as irrigated pondfields and dryland field systems. Populations were politically organized in idealized pie-shaped units or ahupua`a that typically encompass a cross-section of island resources. Material culture , including fishhooks, stone tools, and religious temples, is broadly similar within these units, but there is also much evidence for elite control of specialized production in some areas. The Hawaiian Islands are the archetypal chiefdom society, although based on changes in demography, monumental architecture (heiau) and royal centers, intensive agriculture, and divine kingship, the population had likely crossed the threshold of sociopolitical complexity to that of an archaic state prior to the arrival of Europeans in 1778.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 148-159
Author(s):  
Ivana Dragoș ◽  

Rooted in the tradition of eighteenth-century circulation novels recounted by an object narrator, The Adventures of a Black Coat (1760) epitomizes the features of this experimental novelistic subgenre by foregrounding a coat which, acting as a homodiegetic narrator, lambastes the world of commodities prompted by the rise of early capitalism. As an object endowed with moral conscience, the coat epistemologically proves to be a reliable narrator that is able to render authentic experience and feelings by getting empirically involved in the world it describes. Worn by a few owners, the coat becomes a sharp observer of society and, most importantly, it foreshadows what Karl Marx has termed “commodity fetishism.” According to Marx, commodities and humans become part of a process that is economically endorsed by exchange. Read in this light, I argue that the text reveals the Marxist process of reification whereby social relations between humans turn into social relations between things. Despite being an object narrator, the coat fulfils a typically eighteenth-century pedagogical function, in that it warns the reader against the degrading morals of a society addicted to material culture.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 215-234
Author(s):  
Federica Matelli

A partir del concepto de traducción y de comunidad de humanos y no – humanos de Bruno Latour, y retomando algunos conceptos estéticos centrales en la OOO (Ontología Orientada a los Objetos), este articulo expone un tipo de traducción post-humana estrechamente relacionada con la situación global del capitalismo computacional. En este orden extremo del capitalismo global, que está gobernado por algoritmos y condicionado por techno - políticas, la difusión transnacional de las tecnologías digitales instaura un lenguaje sensorial único que traduce, uniformándolas, culturas distintas y al mismo tiempo garantiza el control sobre el presente y el futuro por medio del Big Data, así como nos advierte Armen Avanessian. Su máximo agente es el design de objetos tecnológicos y servicios. A partir de esta constatación se aporta el ejemplo de un proyecto artístico que, trabajando con la traducción de datos por medio de un diseño alternativo, desvela este estado de la cultura digital actual, traduciendo y explicitando las funciones ocultas de algunos objetos digitales de uso cotidiano –como el teléfono móvil– en una instalación con objetos tecnológicos y mapas de datos. Based on the Bruno Latour’s concept of translation and community of humans and non - humans, and retaking some central aesthetic concepts in the OOO (Object Oriented Ontology), this article exposes a type of post-human translation closely related to the global situation of computational capitalism. In this extreme order of global capitalism, which is governed by algorithms and conditioned by techno - policies, the transnational diffusion of digital technologies establishes a unique sensory language that translates, unifying them, different cultures and at the same time guarantees control over the present and the future through Big Data, as Armen Avanessian warns us. Its maximum agent is the design of technological objects and services. From this finding, the example of an artistic project is provided that, working with the translation of data through an alternative design, reveals this state of the current digital culture, translating and explaining the hidden functions of some digital objects for everyday use –Like the mobile phone– in an installation with technological objects and data maps.


2013 ◽  
pp. 21-27
Author(s):  
L. Zelisko

Solving complex spiritual problems of modern life leads us to rethinking its higher meanings, absolute values, essences. Philosophical and cultural worldview, as the supreme form of knowledge and comprehension of the existence of the world and man, now directs the study of the root causes, the essential foundations of the world order, the disclosure of the deep meaning of what is happening to the world, society, culture and man, focuses on the creation of universal explanatory models of things, its individual components. Philosophical and cultural reflection as analytical means of cognition involves the ability to go beyond the real spheres of being and deduces the general cultural categories of the world of thought, such as being and non-being, God and soul, time and eternity, spirit and matter, death and immortality, etc. It is in the sense of reflexive activity of philosophical and cultural consciousness that it is possible to consider any phenomenon of being not in itself, but through the prism of the space of deep cultural meanings, which testifies to the metaphysical nature of culture, which is connected with the world of higher, absolute meanings and entities. In cultural studies, there is a tremendous experience with genesis and historical development of socio-cultural life, in particular, religious and philosophical culture.


Author(s):  
Lars Larsson

For the individuals participating in the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition, one question must have recurrently emerged as a prime concern: ‘Should I mistrust traditions and consider innovations’? This concern encompassed the introduction of new material culture and new techniques of obtaining food. It also involved new ways of conceiving the world and people's place in it. And it was affected by important – sometimes catastrophic – changes in the physical environment. It must be emphasized that the question of whether to mistrust traditions and consider innovations is not only a matter of concern for prehistoric actors. It is also important for those who are making prehistory today. As is presented in this chapter, the facts presented for south Scandinavia have been variously interpreted as indicating the rapid introduction of a ‘Neolithic’ package with new ways of thinking and acting, as well as reflecting a mixture of traditions and gradually incorporated innovations. Future research into the transition should focus on combining new problem-oriented excavation with fresh ideas about how the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic occurred.


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