The language of gesture: Untimely bodies and contemporary performance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Davies
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
Video Installation ◽  
English Poem ◽  
Contemporary Performance ◽  
Twenty First Century

This chapter explores the medieval interests of two twenty-first century pieces of art: Elizabeth Price’s immersive video installation, The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (2012), and Michael Landy’s Saints Alive (2013). Both of these works turn to medieval culture in order to examine the untimeliness of the body and this chapter traces their sources and explores how their work speaks with, and to, medieval representations of the body. It contextualises Price and Landy’s work with explorations of medieval effigies and the Middle English poem St Erkenwald. The methodology of this chapter is informed by Aby Warburg’s work on gesture in early modern art and interrogates moments of contact and communication across time.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
First Century ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Metaphysics Of Time ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Impact

This Conclusion draws the study to a close, and recounts its developmental theses. The first thesis is that the complexity of positions on time (and space) defended in early modern thought is hugely under-appreciated. An enormous variety of positions were defended during this period, going far beyond the well-known absolutism–relationism debate. The second thesis is that during this period three distinct kinds of absolutism can be found in British philosophy: Morean, Gassendist, and Newtonian. The chapter concludes with a few notes on the impact of absolutism within and beyond philosophy: on twenty-first-century metaphysics of time; and on art, geology, and philosophical theology.

scholarly journals Beyond Discipline: Evolving Design Practice and Design Education in the Twenty-First Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lara Furniss
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Education ◽  
Design Education ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
Design Practice ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Ethnographic Studies ◽  
Current Design ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Uk

Since 2000, design practice in the UK has changed dramatically. Boundaries between design disciplines have dissolved, and many contemporary design studios now defy classification. These studios are reconfiguring the design landscape, yet a uni-disciplinary structure still dominates undergraduate education. This is creating a disconnection between practice and education and posing critical questions for the current design education system. This article outlines the findings of a PhD research study exploring this disconnection, and although situated within the UK, the findings have international relevance. An initial scoping exercise draws on interviews with leading commentators from the UK design sector, examining the evolution of design practice over the past 10 years, and possible future directions for undergraduate education. Findings highlight that UK policy for creative education has placed undergraduate design courses in potential crisis. Arguably, the current university system for design education is outdated. It is now necessary to redefine the skills and processes twenty-first-century designers need. The body of the research is situated within five internationally renowned creative studios which defy classification. In-depth ethnographic studies cross-analyse the creative processes of these studios and their views on education. Findings identify key components of each studio’s processes, while also exploring studio members’ educational experiences, and reflections on future implications for pedagogy. This article argues that this growing disconnect between practice and education calls for existing pedagogic models to be challenged, proposes alternative approaches and highlights the need for policymakers, practitioners and educators to work together to best prepare young designers to meet today’s challenges.

Precariousness, kinship, and care: Becoming human in Claire Cameron’s The Last Neanderthal

2020 ◽  
pp. 002198942096798
Author(s):  
Rūta Šlapkauskaitė
Keyword(s):  
Female Subject ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Origins ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Twenty First Century

This article employs Christine L. Marran’s notion of “obligate storytelling” to examine the poetic structures of vulnerability in Canadian author Claire Cameron’s novel The Last Neanderthal (2017). The theoretical backbone of ideas on the materiality of being suggested by Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Erinn C. Gilson, and Matt Edgeworth, among others, solicits a reading which foregrounds the moral upshot of conceiving the body as an affective centre of life and an arc of anthropogenesis. By following this trajectory, I attempt to show how in troping the archeological dig as a biosemiotic archive, Cameron exposes the structural homologies between the lives of her two female protagonists, a twenty-first-century scientist and a Neanderthal, whose bones she has unearthed. The novel’s use of narrative bifocality offers a visceral construction of subjectivity, which takes its bearings from the shared experience of corporeal vulnerability. By thus imaginatively unspooling the affective links between the neoliberal female subject and her Neanderthal cousin, the novel calls upon us both to rescale our conceptions of creaturely life and rethink our narratives of human origins.

scholarly journals Biophysics and systems biology

2010 ◽  
Vol 368 (1914) ◽  
pp. 1125-1139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis Noble
Keyword(s):  
Systems Biology ◽  
Computational Biology ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Nerve Impulse ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
The Body ◽  
Molecular Biophysics ◽  
First Century ◽  
Computational Power ◽  
Twenty First Century

Biophysics at the systems level, as distinct from molecular biophysics, acquired its most famous paradigm in the work of Hodgkin and Huxley, who integrated their equations for the nerve impulse in 1952. Their approach has since been extended to other organs of the body, notably including the heart. The modern field of computational biology has expanded rapidly during the first decade of the twenty-first century and, through its contribution to what is now called systems biology, it is set to revise many of the fundamental principles of biology, including the relations between genotypes and phenotypes. Evolutionary theory, in particular, will require re-assessment. To succeed in this, computational and systems biology will need to develop the theoretical framework required to deal with multilevel interactions. While computational power is necessary, and is forthcoming, it is not sufficient. We will also require mathematical insight, perhaps of a nature we have not yet identified. This article is therefore also a challenge to mathematicians to develop such insights.

scholarly journals New Poetics of the Film Body: Docility, Molecular Fundamentalism and Twenty First Century Destiny

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Flynn
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Fundamental Level ◽  
Twenty First Century

Abstract Twenty first century film evokes a new topology of the body. Science and technology are the new century’s ‘sovereign power’ which enforces biopolitics through bodies which, by virtue of being seen at their most fundamental level, have become docile surfaces. The film body is at once manipulated and coerced into an ethos of optimization; a thoroughly scientific and ‘molecular’ optimization which proffers ‘normalization’ and intimately regulated bodies. In the film bodies of this millennium, bodily intervention results in surveillance becoming internalized. Now the body is both a means and an end of social control. This essay applies the philosophies Michel Foucault and Nikolas Rose to twenty first century Hollywood film, elucidating a new tropos, a new film body/body of film.

‘It’s All a Bit of a Risk’

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Purcell
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
The Third ◽  
Spectator Sport ◽  
Globe Theatre ◽  
Live Broadcast ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Immersive Theatre

This essay considers three movements in twenty-first-century Shakespearean performance in light of Philip Auslander’s influential study Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (1999): (1) the live broadcasting of theatre productions; (2) the increasingly popular genre of immersive theatre as spectator sport; and (3) the body of practice emerging from, and centring on, the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. It considers the ways in which each of these movements constructs ‘liveness’, paying particular attention to the implications of these constructions for Shakespearean performance. The first movement is examined through the lens of the National Theatre Live broadcast of Nicholas Hytner’s Othello, whose ‘liveness’ involves an interplay of filmic and theatrical registers; the second, through a discussion of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More; and the third, through the modern practice of finding ‘liveness’ in game-like theatre techniques and in the responsiveness of the actor at Shakespeare’s Globe.

scholarly journals On Proto-Modernist Traits in Early Modern Art Theory

2018 ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Angelina Milosavljević
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
Giorgio Vasari ◽  
Specific Concentration ◽  
Contemporary Practice

Early modern art and art theory are still considered by historians and theorists of art mainly in terms of aesthetic principles in the service of the representation of political and ideological concepts. However, the body of early modern art and especially theory abounds with notions, which anticipate the modernist tendencies of self-criticism. In this paper, we would like to suggest that self-criticism also characterized pre-Modernist art, complemented by advanced art criticism, especially during the Mannerist era. We would like to point out that the notion of self-criticism equally applies to both early modern art and art theory in which the specific concentration on problems of construction and composition of painting based its foundations on abstract mathematical  rules, serving to justify and dignify the medium itself. Furthermore, this tendency divorced the art of painting, specifically, from the illusion of reality, thus entrenching it more firmly in its own area competence, to use Clement Greenberg’s phrase. We would also like to demonstrate that late 16th-century art theory pushed well beyond its time, especially the theory written by artists. Their programmatic reliance on pre-existing pictorial models allowed these artists-theorists to abandon the question of realism and naturalism for pure speculation, which could not have been achieved in contemporary practice. We would like to suggest that ideas of abstraction and speculation, so characteristic of Modernist art, featured well before Modernism in the writings of Mannerist artists and theorists Giorgio Vasari, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, and Federico Zuccari. Article received: March 26, 2018; Article accepted: April 10, 2018; Published online: September 15, 2018; Original scholarly paperHow to cite this article: Milosavljević, Angelina. "On Proto-Modernist Traits in Early Modern Art Theory." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 16 (2018): 19−28. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i16.251

Embodied Consciousness

2019 ◽  
pp. 134-150
Author(s):  
Nalina Wait
Keyword(s):  
Formal Logic ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
Embodied Consciousness ◽  
Practice Based Research ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Core Principle ◽  
Twenty First Century

In the twenty-first century, improvisation as a mode of performance has gained momentum in Western theatre dance. Yet its theorization remains challenged, not only by the ephemerality of the subject but also by the ways that its corporeal knowledges resist language and elude codification. This is because the practice does not comply with a dualistic hierarchy of ‘mind-over-matter’ but instead proposes body-mind unification as a core principle of the practice. Drawing from examination of the author’s own practice-based research, this chapter qualitatively examines a key methodology of improvised practice described as embodied consciousness. This chapter articulates how the bifurcation of embodied consciousness, as thinking-through-the-body and the body’s mind, can operate in an improvised performance and how it can be cultivated and refined through practice. Furthermore, it interrogates how the model for articulating composition needs reframing in an improvisational context, from a language based on formal logic to one based on attending to fluctuating, formless ‘intensities’.

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