scholarly journals Cybernetic Sparks and Philosophical Feedback Loops

Author(s):  
Steve Dixon

Gregory Bateson observed that cybernetics is not essentially about "exchanging information across lines of discipline, but in discovering patterns common to many disciplines" (Bateson, 1971, p. 23). This paper adopts his line of thought to join the dots between cybernetics and the philosophy of Existentialism, and then interconnect both with contemporary art. It demonstrates that while terminologies may differ, many of the three fields' primary concerns closely cohere. The world's most ground-breaking artists are found to apply and fuse cybernetic paradigms and Existentialist themes, from Robert Rauschenberg and Marina Abramović to Damien Hirst, Stelarc and Anish Kapoor. The research offers the first detailed comparison between cybernetics and Existentialism, and reveals surprising commonalities. Feedback loops, circular causality and negative entropy are not only central tenets of cybernetics, but also of Existentialism. Autonomy, autopoiesis and interactivity equally unite both fields, and each is visionary and forward looking in seeking radical change and transformations. Both explored artistic endeavours, with Existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus equally renowned for their powerful novels and plays as their philosophical works, while cybernetic art became a major phenomenon in the 1960s following the landmark exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity: the Computer in the Arts (1968), and influenced artistic practices thereafter.

Author(s):  
Judith G. Coffin

When this book's author discovered a virtually unexplored treasure trove of letters to Simone de Beauvoir from Beauvoir's international readers, it inspired the author to explore the intimate bond between the famed author and her reading public. This correspondence, at the heart of the book, immerses us in the tumultuous decades from the late 1940s to the 1970s — from the painful aftermath of World War II to the horror and shame of French colonial brutality in Algeria and through the dilemmas and exhilarations of the early gay liberation and feminist movements. The letters provide a glimpse into the power of reading and the power of readers to seduce their favorite authors. The relationship between Beauvoir and her audience proved especially long, intimate, and vexed. The book traces this relationship, from the publication of Beauvoir's acclaimed The Second Sex to the release of the last volume of her memoirs, offering an unfamiliar perspective on one of the most magnetic and polarizing philosophers of the twentieth century. Along the way, we meet many of the greatest writers of Beauvoir's generation — Hannah Arendt; Dominique Aury, author of The Story of O; François Mauriac, winner of the Nobel Prize and nemesis of Albert Camus; Betty Friedan; and, of course, Jean-Paul Sartre — bringing the electrically charged salon experience to life. The book lays bare the private lives and political emotions of the letter writers and of Beauvoir herself. Her readers did not simply pen fan letters but, as the book shows, engaged in a dialogue that revealed intellectual and literary life to be a joint and collaborative production.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Ursic

Christian theology is the study of God and religious belief based on the Christian Bible and tradition. For over 2,000 years, Christian theologians have been primarily men writing from men’s perspectives and experiences. In the 1960s, women began to study to become theologians when the women’s rights movement opened doors to higher education for women. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, female theologians developed Christian feminist theology with a focus on women’s perspectives and experiences. Christian feminist theology seeks to empower women through their Christian faith and supports the equality of women and men based on Christian scripture. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). The arts have an important role in Christian feminist theology because a significant way Christians learn about their faith is through the arts, and Christians engage the arts in the practice of their faith. Christian feminist theology in the visual arts can be found in paintings, sculptures, icons, and liturgical items such as processional crosses. Themes in visual expression include female and feminine imagery of God from the Bible as well as female leaders in the scriptures. Christian feminist theology in performing arts can be found in hymns, prayers, music, liturgies, and rituals. Performative expressions include inclusive language for humanity and God as well as expressions that celebrate Christian women and address women’s life experiences. The field of Christian feminist theology and the arts is vast in terms of types of arts represented and the variety of ways Christianity is practiced around the world. Representing Christian feminist theology with art serves to communicate both visually and performatively that all are one in Christ.


2012 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maciej Karpiński

ABSTRACT Maciej Karpiński. The Boundaries of Language: Dealing with Paralinguistic Features. Lingua Posnaniensis, vol. LIV (2)/2012. The Poznań Society for the Advancement of the Arts and Sciences. PL ISSN 0079-4740, ISBN 978-83-7654-252-2, pp. 37-54. The paralinguistic component of communication attracted a great deal of attention from contemporary linguists in the 1960s. The seminal works written then by Trager, Crystal and others had a powerful influence on the concept of paralanguage that lasted for many years. But, with the focus shifting towards the socio-psychological context of communication in the 1970s, the development of spoken corpora and databases and the significant progress in speech technology in the 1980s and 1990s, the need has arisen for a more comprehensive, coherent and formalised - but also flexible - approach to paralinguistic features. This study advances some preliminary proposals for a revised treatment of paralanguage that would meet some of these requirements and provide a conceptual basis for a new system of annotation for paralinguistic features. A range of views on paralinguistic features, which come mostly from the fields of speech prosody and gesture analysis, are briefly discussed. A number of assumptions and postulates are formulated to allow for a more consistent approach to paralinguistic features. The study suggests that there should be more reliance on continua than on binary categorisations of features, that multi-functionality and multimodality should be fully acknowledged and that clear distinctions should be made among the levels of description, and between the properties of speakers and the speech signal itself.


Author(s):  
Yu. V. Korelskaya

Simone de Beauvoir is a representative of one of the leading philosophical schools in the middle of the 20th century. The article presents Beauvoir’s artistic method, applied in her novel The Mandarins, and examines the theoretical and biographical sources of the novel. The author demonstrates the place that the novel has in the Beauvoir’s literary and philosophical heritage and reveals the genre features of the work, introducing some special terms such as engaged, modern or philosophical novel and testimonial autobiographical project. The article also analyzes the novel’s literary form and the binary structure of the narrative. The study of the main characters, who are Henri Perron, Anne Dubreuilh and her husband Robert, allows to give a couple of narrative lines. First of them is the inner line that opens the reflective, contemplative and intimate life of one of the main characters – Anne. The second one is the outer line that means that the reader receives the information about characters from the Henry’s actions. Basing on this structure, we draw a conclusion about the modifications in the genre of existential novel in the postwar years. The new themes can be found in the literature. Authors introduce to readers the certain social reality through the inner life of some characters – intellectuals, novelists or philosophers. The thesis about the inner transformation of the genre is proved on Beauvoir’ and Jean-Paul Sartre’s works and on the prewar works of Sartre and Albert Camus. Beauvoir’s new literary methods and plots, which are the logical development of her work, made her novel one of the pioneers in the postwar literature.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 285
Author(s):  
Lara D. Nielsen

In performance research today, as in the 1960s, the pressing question is: how to do things with systems. I return to the grid to attend both sites and modes of cultural practices and techniques� (technologies) that so powerfully harness and transform the control society.� My approach to the grid as dispositif seeks to open familiar dialogues, about variants of subjectivity and presence, to the materialities and devices of systems, structures, and bureaucratic operations. As seeing machine, the grid�s story includes linear perspective, geometricization, and fugitivity. Defined by consistency and contradition, by optics, haptics, and cybernetics, I identify grid logics with the neo-baroque. Exploring the grid through tiling, weaving, seafaring, and curating techniques that link the administrative and the algorithmic state, I discuss the arts of two architectural sites in the port cities of Cartagena, Colombia and Singapore.


2006 ◽  
Vol 18 (23) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Paulo Jonas De Lima Piva
Keyword(s):  

A alienação e o pessimismo são dois componentes preponderantes naatual conjuntura brasileira, o que torna o nosso contexto históricobastante desanimador do ponto de vista do engajamento político. Comoser um filósofo consciente e engajado num Brasil frustrado com osmensalões e com a resignação neoliberal do governo Lula e do principalpartido da esquerda, o PT? O conceito de revolta de Albert Camus, afórmula do “agir sem esperança”, de Jean-Paul Sartre, e a palavra deordem gramsciana “pessimismo da inteligência, otimismo da vontade”talvez lancem alguma luz sobre essa questão ética crucial para ospensadores que não se satisfazem com a reflexão e a crítica desvencilhadasde uma práxis transformadora.


2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (31) ◽  
pp. 13-26
Author(s):  
Olga Senkāne

The present article falls within a number of papers about research on specification of philosophical novels. The aim of this article is to analyze author’s function as a narrative category in classical philosophical novels (Franz Kafka "The Trial" (1925) ”The Castle”(1926), Jean-Paul Sartre "Nausea" (1938), Hermann Hesse "The Glass Bead Game" (1943), Albert Camus ”The Plague” (1947)) and a novel of Latvian prose writer Ilze Šķipsna „Neapsolītās zemes” [Un-Promised Lands](1970)). The analysis is based on theoretical ideas of structural narratologists Gerard Genette, William Labov, Seymuor Chatman, Wolf Schmid, as well as philosophers Edmund Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Ricouer and semioticians Yuri Lotman (Юрий Лотман) and Umberto Eco.The real author can ”enter” the text only indirectly—as an image, with the help of the storyteller, and the way how this ”entry” happens is determined by the narration of the real author or narrative (communication) skills of the author. Thus, the author and implied author are functionally different concepts: author as a real person develops the concept idea, his intention is to define the concept under his original vision; narrator, in its turn, communicates with the reader, representing the concept, and his aim is to select appropriate means of communication with regard to reader’s perceptual abilities.


This introductory chapter describes the life and career of Luigi Nono (1924–1990). It also provides an overview of the present volume. Born on January 29, 1924, in Venice, Nono's education and musical apprenticeship took place during the crucial years of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath, in a family and intellectual milieu which were solidly middle class while being fundamentally hostile to fascism. In 1950, Nono approached his first orchestral composition, Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell'op. 41 di Arnold Schönberg—Schoenberg's opus 41. During the 1960s and 1970s, political commitment, social conflict, denunciation, and the treatment of individual psychology always in relation to the collective drama became constants of Nono's production as the concept of engagement took on for him the value of a “moral imperative” (Jean-Paul Sartre) to match the aesthetic imperative.


Author(s):  
Brian Cremins

After Fawcett’s legal settlement with National in 1953, the original Captain Marvel did not return to comic books until 1973. In the meantime, comic book fans and amateur historians began writing about the character in the 1960s. This chapter traces Captain Marvel’s afterlife in these fanzines, publications that helped to establish the foundation for comics studies in the United States. The chapter also includes an overview of recent developments in the field of memory and nostalgia studies. These recent studies of the history of nostalgia in medicine, psychology, and the arts are essential for an understanding of how childhood memories have shaped comics studies as a discipline.


2020 ◽  
pp. 289-316
Author(s):  
Robert Kelz

This concluding chapter takes a look at the German theaters of Argentina between the 1930s and the 1960s. During this time, Buenos Aires was a volatile, conflict-ridden place which allowed both antifascist and nationalist German blocs to cultivate intercultural alliances without modifying many aspects of their own political platform. Here, the chapter revisits the themes introduced in this volume by linking them to a more poignantly profiled reflection on the salient themes of this study, including inclusion and exclusion, integration, transnationalism, drama theory, theatrical energies, and, of course, competition. The central role of theater enables a reexamination of German-speaking immigrants in Argentina, emphasizing previously underexplored events and individuals while offering new perspectives on more frequently studied topics. The chapter thus depicts the impact of theater on existing narratives about Germans in Argentina, as well as the power of a focus on culture and the arts to inform and shape studies of migrant groups.


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