Unshackling the Mind, Body, and Spirit: Reflections on Liberation and Creative Exchange between San Quentin and Auckland Prisons

This article explores a creative project entitled Performing Liberation which sought to empower communities with direct experience of incarceration to create and share creative work as part of transnational dialogue. One of the aims of the project was to facilitate creative dialogue and exchange between two incarcerated communities: prisoners at Auckland Prison and prisoners at San Quentin Prison in San Francisco. Written using autoethnographic methods, this co-authored article explores our recollections of key moments in a creative workshop at Auckland Prison in an attempt to explain its impact on stimulating the creativity of the participants. We begin by describing the context of incarceration in the US and New Zealand and suggest that these seemingly divergent locations are connected by mass incarceration. We also provide an overview of the creative contexts at San Quentin and Auckland Prison on which the Performing Liberation project developed. After describing key moments in the workshop, the article interrogates the creative space that it produced in relation to the notion of liberation, as a useful concept to interrogate various forms of oppression, and as a practice that is concerned with unshackling the body, mind, and spirit.

Creative Environment in the Context of Coworking Center Design

The article is devoted to identifying the features of the creative environment in the context of the specifics of the space of the coworking center and to determine the basic design principles and means of its creation. The concept of "creative space" in the context of the specifics of the design of the coworking center has been clarified and supplemented. In this study, the concept of creative environment is considered by us as a subject-spatial environment, in the process of development and creation of which the designer takes into account not only the specifics of the philosophy of self-realization, but also tools to meet this need in anthropocentric approach. The study found that modern coworking centers, thanks to unique design approaches, are positioned as a favorable creative environment for the work of the creative class in the context of the implementation of new creative ideas. It is proved that functionality, artistic image, providing the necessary conditions for efficiency, ease of use, safety and aesthetic pleasure from being in the space of the coworking center and interaction with objects is achieved only through a systematic approach to design, which takes into account functional and technological and social -cultural factors. It is determined that the creation of a creative environment of a coworking center by a designer is the result of complex design - joint technical, aesthetic and artistic activities, the main property of which is anthropocentrism, ie human orientation. Accordingly, in the design process, the designer proceeds solely from human needs (in this case during work) to avoid unwanted adaptation of visitors to the coworking center to the environment created by him.

Excitement lies elsewhere: Teenage film-makers and popular culture

When teenagers are given access to digital media equipment, their teachers and film club leaders may hope that they will take the opportunity to make films of personal significance. Instead, young people often choose to engage in a parodic dialogue with popular culture, in a process which feels more familiar and/or comfortable to them, providing as it does a creative space unburdened by expectations of sincere expression. From a survey of numerous short films made in Scotland, it is evident that the use of pastiche and parody facilitates both progressive and reactionary perspectives, often within the same film. Exploring a series of detailed case studies of films made by young people in Scotland in the early 2000s, this article argues that parody can provide for young people an aesthetic distance from personal expression, which, ironically, is unexpectedly revealing of generalised teenage sociocultural attitudes.

The Role of Experimenting with the Human Voice in Film Music in the Representation of the Human/Alien Divide: the Case of Arrival (2016)

This article focuses on the musical dimension of experimentation in the creative space of science fiction film, concerning its uncanny, new and fantastic places, and otherworldly encounters within fictional, but possible worlds. The aim is to consider the function and potential of the audible – to examine how sound is used in the filmic exploration of the boundaries between the human and the alien (the unknown). More particularly, we are interested in the role that human voice-like and human vocal sounds can play in this divide, as we believe manipulations with such audible qualities contribute greatly to the emotional dimension of cinematic stories of otherworldly encounters. For that purpose, we concentrate on Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) and its soundtrack composed by Jóhann Jóhannsson, who resorts to different singing practices and vocal techniques to accompany a story charting the territories between the human and the alien.

New ways: the pandemics of science fiction

In unprecedented times, people have turned to fiction both for comfort and for distraction, but also to try and understand and anticipate what might come next. Sales and rental figures for works of fiction about pandemics and other disease outbreaks surged in 2020, but what can pandemic science fiction tell us about disease? This article surveys the long history of science fiction's engagement with disease and demonstrates the ways in which these narratives, whether in literature or film, have always had more to say about other contemporary cultural concerns than the disease themselves. Nonetheless, the ideas demonstrated in these texts can be seen perpetuating through the science fiction genre, and in our current crisis, we have seen striking similarities between the behaviours of key individuals, and the manner in which certain events have played out. Not because science fiction predicts these things, but because it anticipates the social structures which produce them (while at the same time permeating the culture to the extent that they become the touchstones with which the media choose to analyse current events). This paper demonstrates that science fiction can be a valuable tool to communicate widely around a pandemic, while also acting as a creative space in which to anticipate how we may handle similar events in the future.

Pathetic Predicament and Resistance of the Subaltern in Trishna Gurung’s Selected Songs

This article overviews the distress situation of the Nepalese ethnic subaltern concerning Trishna Gurung’s five selected songs- “Sajha Ko Bela”, “Gainey Dajai”, “Khani Ho Yahmu”, “Rail Lai Ma” and “Maya Man Bhari” and explores how the aesthetic expression and the pathetic predicament of the subaltern come to be a subtle form of resistance. Her songs hold the spirit of remoteness and auratic root and counter the western musical hegemonic propensity and the dominant music culture of Nepal. Articulating subaltern sighs as a major concern of her songs in the auditory and visual representation she presents the repressed aesthetics as a constructive and creative space formation for the resistance.

Landscape Philosophy in Relation to the Description of Contemporary Society and its Environment

The article discusses the features of landscape philosophy, as well as the prospects of its practical application to analyze the crises of modern society associated with the scientific and technological revolution, globalization and the massification of culture. The concept of landscape becomes particularly important in connection with the urban turn in philosophy. The analysis given in this article has shown that landscape philosophy explains the negative characteristics of colonial cognition. The interpretation of the concept of space in landscape philosophy is considered. Following S. Goryainov, we consider landscape philosophy as a philosophy of crisis. Our analysis has shown that landscape philosophy contributes to the approbation of models for solving the crisis of language and mind. Landscape philosophy and philosophical anthropology reveal existential problems. The works of M. de Unamuno, M. Scheler, M. Foucault and V. Podoroga were analyzed in this context. The significance of Unamuno's philosophy for the analysis of the role of individual creative space in the contemporary world is revealed. The applicability of Scheler's concept of spirit for the analysis of the problems of landscape philosophy is revealed. It is proved that within the framework of Podoroga's landscape philosophy, the problem of the correlation of politics and political. Using the concepts of utopia, atopia, and heterotopia, various aspects of the crisis of contemporary man man associated with the transformation of the subject's identity, the fragmentation of meanings and significance are studied. Thus, Podoroga's works are valuable for crisis philosophy because they analyze both spatial and political aspects of the crisis of contemporary society. Podoroga's works make it possible to reflect the contradictions of contemporary society, which ensures the prospects of their application for the analysis of changes in the contemporary social space.