Slovanská fantasy globálnym popkultúrnym fenoménom

The aim of the paper is to introduce or rather (re)present The Witcher as a model-like pop cultural phenomenon illustrating the mechanisms within the framework of which a local hero, the main character of fantasy narratives written by Andrzej Sapkowski, transforms into a global hero. The Witcher — the character as well as the trademark, or rather brand — represents popular culture pars pro toto and emblematically a pop cultural artefact, undergoing a transformation on an axis from short stories to a novel saga, becoming an object of local cinematic and television-based adaptation and also a thematic basis for a successful digital-game series distributed globally, as well as recently a source of a high-budget television series designed for a global television market.

Living Death: Imagined History and the Tarrant Manifesto

This essay analyses the manifesto of terrorist Brenton Tarrant, the perpetrator of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings. Reading Tarrant’s manifesto (The Great Replacement) as a cultural artefact of digital white nationalism, it is possible to identify a specific worldview and emotional subjectivity that is also shared with the actions and writing of Anders Breivik, the perpetrator of the 2011 Oslo and Utøya massacre. After examining both terrorists’ manifestos, their biographical particulars and drawing from ethnographic research into the online communities that Tarrant frequented, a shared phenomenological framework emerges. This framework is presented as ‘the imagined past and present’ of the Replacement Theory terrorist. This essay will address these white nationalist imaginings via a cultural exegesis of Tarrant’s and Breivik’s manifestos, as well as an analysis of their comparable monastic aesthetic or ‘living death’ in the lead up to their attacks.

SYMBOLIC VALUES AND IMPLICATIONS OF THE GRAND ETHIOPIAN RENAISSANCE DAM PROJECT IN ETHIOPIAN IDENTITY POLITICS

This paper attempts to show how the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) ’s economic and political gains could help develop a shared outlook to regulate Ethiopia’s opposing political trajectories, i.e., the ethnocentric and pan-Ethiopian nationalist camps. Presently, different ethnic-based “in-group and out-group” contrasting political discourses have dominated Ethiopian polity. The paper reviews and exposes relevant philosophical concepts, including “mirror identity,” primordial and instrumental conception of ethnicity. Notably, following Anderson’s (2006) line of thought, nationalism as a “cultural artefact” and expression of an “imagined community,” the paper argues that GERD could serve as a shared symbolic and developmental language to reshape Ethiopian national consciousness and imagination by improving the political and economic domains of the country. Accordingly, the GERD covertly or overtly helps reform the polity’s self-recognition mechanisms and circuitously re-approaches outstanding political differences by inspiring trust-based relations among major political actors. Ethnocentric motivations raise political questions such as secession, the right to linguistic and cultural recognition, economic equality, and political security and representation by using their respective ethnic lines as means of political mobilization. In current Ethiopia, political identities have been practically blended with ethnic identity. In this sense, as diverse ethnic groups exist, political borders sustain among the multiple ethnic-based nationalists and between pan-Ethiopian and ethnocentric actors. Thus, a comprehensive dialogue and constructive political cross-fertilization are required between various political actors, horizontally and vertically, among ethnocentric nationalists and the pan-Ethiopian advocates. In Ethiopia, the realization of internal political consensus requires an instantaneous remedial mechanism. Accordingly, the politically drawn antithetical ethnic demarcations and occasionally fabricated historical narratives have undeniably pushed politics into unfavourable conditions. That is why, as the paper maintains that developmental projects such as the GERD would have pertinent economic and political mechanisms to developing a national sentiment, which in turn symbolically facilitate national consensus among the major political actors. Hence, borrowing Fukuyama’s (2018) notion of “creedal national identity”, one could resonate that developmental projects can help realize symbolic worth by constructively enabling citizens to recognize their countries’ foundational ideals and elevating common factors. The present paper does not examine the GERD project’s external geopolitical and legal concerns concerning scope, although these topics are worth examining for further investigations.

Evaluation of Augmented Reality Application Development for Cultural Artefact Education

This paper presents the evaluation of Augmented Reality Application development for the educational purpose of Palembang cultural artefacts in Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin II (SMB II) Museum. The method applied in this study effectively developed an AR application to visualize the 3D object of SMB II Museum collections and created new digital 3D objects of Palembang cultural artefact which no longer exist. The digitization of the collection is an innovation that provides new culture learning experiences utilizing AR technology and also contributes to the preservation of Palembang cultural artefacts. Users can interact directly with these artefacts virtually which cannot be performed in the real environment but AR enabling it. In term of effectiveness and efficiency, some testing scenarios were performed. The results showed that the application could run its functionality as designed with time responsiveness for detecting marker was 0.599 seconds on average. App usability was also evaluated using the SUS method. The SUS survey score of 78.3 showed that the developed AR of the SMB II museum was acceptable by two variations of the millennial user. The augmented reality (AR) application is proposed as a medium to support the services of SMB II museum for education that effective improving users knowledge by 28.5% after using the App. The use of AR in the SMB II Museum leads to an enhanced interactive learning experience that promotes cultural heritage preservation in Palembang Indonesia.

Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia

As urban development in Asia has accelerated, cities in the region have become central to skateboarding culture, livelihoods, and consumption. Asia's urban landscapes are desired for their endless supply of 'spots'. Spots are not built for skateboarding; they are accidents of urban planning and commercial activity; glitches in the urban machine. Skateboarders and filmers chase these spots to make skate video, skateboarding's primary cultural artefact. Once captured, skate video circulates rapidly through digital platforms to millions of viewers, enrolling spots from Shenzhen to Ramallah into an alternative cartography of Asia. This book explores this way of desiring and consuming urban Asia, and the implications for relational and comparative hierarchies of urban development.

A Transdisciplinary Approach to Recovering Natural and Cultural Landscape and Place Identification: A Case Study of Can Moritz Spring (Rubí, Spain)

The perception of the quality of green and blue spaces can be key in the relationship between a community and its local landscape (i.e., place identification). The lack of transdisciplinary training and social-specific education of landscape architects regarding the complexity of landscape as a participative cultural artefact limits reaching the general population. Bridging this gap of landscape and place identification and evaluation by a local community was the main objective of the present case study conducted at an abandoned spring and seasonal stream area in Rubí (Spain). The “Steinitz method” of landscape evaluation was used as a participatory method to activate community members to learn about and express their visual preferences regarding this neglected landscape. Bottom-up interventions applying an “urban acupuncture” approach in the area identified as the least attractive by the residents were co-designed and combined with a top-down restoration of a nearby, existing but derelict and hidden, spring. In addition, before and after planning and implementing the intervention, we conducted surveys about the community perception, sense of belonging and use of the space. We observed that the lack of awareness of the inhabitants about this spring was an obstacle preventing the community from embracing the potential for health and wellbeing presented by the spring and adjacent landscape. Following the work, the landscape saw increasing use, and the historic spring was brought back to life as a resource to help people to improve their health and wellbeing.

Literature and Cultural Studies: A Tool in Criticism

Cultural Studies is the process by which power relations between and within groups of human beings organize cultural artefact s- such as food habits, music, cinema, sports events and celebrity culture and their meanings. A field of academic study that finds its roots in the Birmingham Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies (UK) and the work of critics like Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and later by Stuart Hall, Tony Bennet and others, Cultural Studies is a discipline between disciplines. It believes that the ‘Culture’ of a community includes various aspects; economic, spatial, ideological, erotic and political. It is interested in the production and consumption of culture.

Research on Changes of Spatial Structure Genotype of a Former Artillerymen’ Military Town of Kaunas Fortress

Immovable cultural heritage creates a background for sustainable cultural development of cities. As a cultural artefact, it appears in two-fold situation in the above-mentioned context. Firstly, the continuity of the valuable features as carriers of cultural content should be preserved. Secondly, the possibility of the evolution (functional, spatial or social) of the object should be assured. Now the valuable features of the immovable cultural heritage are described in a static, quantitative ways with focus on phenotype, e.g. spatial volume, place, details of architectural style, number and places of windows, etc. Such type of description without any argumentations is practically closing any possibilities for further evolution of the protected objects. It is especially true if we speak about urban valuable structures. The authors of the article present a proposal for dynamic, genotype oriented modelling of the possible evolution of the former military town of Kaunas Fortress as an example of immovable urban cultural heritage. The model is based on the evaluation of changes in the cognition of urban structure with presentation of complex numerical values. Research included the following parts: historical urban development analysis of heritage territory, current state analysis, investigation and modelling of territory spatial structure genotypic changes. The results of the presentation demonstrate the limitations and subjectivity of the present system of description of valuable features of the objects of immovable cultural heritage and present the possible way for the improvement of the situation.

Born in the USA: The Cigar Box Guitar, Object Displacement and Performative DIY

The cigar box guitar is a long-standing cultural artefact which, over the course of its history, has undergone a series of displacements. Initially an acoustic instrument made by impoverished people in the mid-nineteenth century to fulfil a social need to make music and help the singing of traditional folk songs, it soon became a simple do-it-yourself project associated largely with children, and later, in the 1990s, it was reimagined as a serious, electrified musical instrument employed in a particular, performative form of DIY. In this most recent incarnation, the Internet has enabled the cigar box guitar to break free of its American roots to become the focus of a global practice of Performative DIY and a vehicle through which physical and virtual communities of makers support each other, express themselves, explore their creativity and display their self-identities.

Behold! The Voices of Angels: Narrative, Audience and Affect in Eadmer of Canterbury’s Breviloquium Vita Sancti Wilfridi

Two new, lengthy and highly detailed miracle stories appear at the end of Eadmer of Canterbury’s ‘Brief Life of St. Wilfrid’. The first involves an invisible angelic choir, while the second comprises a vision of angels worshipping Wilfrid’s relics in a church suffused with golden, heavenly light. As neither story features in the earlier, full-length Vita, Powell examines what sets these narratives apart, focusing on their cognitive and affective impact upon their audience. In foregrounding Eadmer’s declared desire to inspire veneration, Powell distances herself from traditional historicist interpretations of hagiography. She proposes that hagiography should be seen as a cultural artefact, and demonstrates how the topoi of visions and voice-hearing offered particularly effective vehicles for the provocation of wonder and veneration.