A MODERN CITY. LIVING REALITIES OF HISTORY

The article is devoted to the reality of the modern historical city in the totality of the actual values of the valuable heritage, traces of the past, mental codes, archetypal images and the memory of civilization. The place of history in today’s socio-cultural fi eld and in the professional context is not clearly defi ned. Together with the understanding of the need to preserve the heritage, traces and memory of the past, there are global trends that mediate the features of the glocal in architecture. However, even this compromise cannot fully demonstrate the complexity of the historical city viability. According to the author, it is necessary to search for reasons that sometimes appear outside the material reality, but address directly to the spiritual world and mental space of a person, which is the main purpose of the article. The emphasis is placed on the artistic dimension of environmental realities, which allows us to determine the living connections of history and modernity on the basis of the author’s concept of artc integration. The article is illustrated by some results of cooperation between the Nizhny Novgorod State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering and the Polytechnic University of Milan (Politecnico di Milano) in the fi eld of reconstruction and renovation of historically valuable territories and author’s photographs.

UNITY OF MATERIAL AND SPIRITUAL IN THE LIGHT OF COEVOLUTION

Целью статьи является анализ обоснование необходимости пересмотра одностороннего представления о взаимодействии духа и материи, бытия и сознания. Основным методом исследования является диалектический анализ взаимосвязи и неразрывного единства противоположных начал человеческого бытия (материи и духа). Результатом исследования является попытка доказать, что материя и дух образуют живую материально-духовную действительность, единую непротиворечивую субстанцию, которая не нуждается в другом основании как условии своего существования, а выступает своей собственной основой. Заслуга авторов состоит в доказательстве того, что существует единая субстанция, - духоматерия, которая содержит в себе и материальную действительность, и потенциально заложенную в ней духовную деятельность человека как естественно развивающуюся область мироздания, заключающую в себе всё многообразие социально-духовного бытия человека, ибо человек как материальное явление, так и его духовность - это результат развития единой всеобщей космической субстанции мироздания - духоматерии. Теоретическая и практическая значимость статьи содержится в попытке доказать не просто взаимосвязь материального и духовного начал, но определить основы взаимодействия этих начал как двух сторон единой космической субстанции мироздания и их диалектического взаимоперехода на разных этапах конкретных форм существования. Авторам удалось углубить предложенную проблематику, что может быть использовано для дальнейшего теоретического анализа проблемы. The purpose of the article is to analyze the substantiation of the need to revise the onesided idea of the interaction of spirit and matter, being and consciousness. The main research method is the dialectical analysis of the relationship and indissoluble unity of the opposite principles of human existence (matter and spirit). The result of the study is an attempt to prove that matter and spirit form a living material-spiritual reality, a single consistent substance that does not need another basis as a condition for its existence, but acts as its own basis. The merit of this approach consists in proving that there is a single substance - spirit-matter, which contains both material reality and the potential spiritual activity of a person embedded in it as a naturally developing area of the universe, containing all the diversity of social and spiritual life of a person, for a person as a material both the phenomenon and its spirituality are the result of the development of a single universal cosmic substance of the universe - spirit matter. The theoretical and practical significance of the article is presented in an attempt to prove not just the relationship between material and spiritual principles, but to determine the basis of the interaction of these principles as two sides of a single cosmic substance of the universe and their dialectical transition at different stages of specific forms of existence. The outlined conclusions should lead to further theoretical analysis of this problem.

In Conversation with Vicki Kirby: Deconstruction, Critique, and Human Exceptionalism in the Anthropocene

In this interview Marc Higgins invites Vicki Kirby to dilate on the themes that have exercised her attention over the last thirty years. His questions address the received assumptions that shape political and ethical debate and the suggestion that their terms of reference require a radical shake-up. Kirby’s counter-intuitive treatment of familiar and accepted ways of thinking pays special attention to the nature/culture division and its myriad reconfigurations (body versus mind; primitive, or first, versus complex, or second; illiteracy versus literacy). She interrogates the routine and almost automatic logic that segregates what is deemed abstract and ideational from the pragmatic gravitas and political urgency that we tend to secure in empirical, “on the ground” evidence. For Kirby, this notion of material evidence and the weight of its truth claims, together with the corollary belief that the ideational and abstract are entirely other to physical and material reality, promote an insidious political agenda that sustains misogyny, racism, and ecological degradation as inevitable. By underlining the implicated ecologies of life whose dynamic cross-overs and impurities are also manifest in our thought structures, we are challenged to work with/in a sense of corruption that is irreducible and not simply negative.

Democracy and Hierarchy

The chapter sets forth a political theory of what would make legal challenges to pornography successful. Obstacles are identified in early liberal concepts of “negative rights,” which prevent interventions against non-state abuses of power. A nuanced view of power recognizes “positive rights” to intervention. The feminist theory of consciousness-raising is explored, shedding light on the necessity of subordinated groups’ representation. Intersectionality theory illustrates how multiple disadvantages prevent redress for people harmed by pornography under existing laws. Hence, legal challenges are hypothesized to be more efficient when the perspectives and interests of survivor groups of pornography-related harms are represented. The postmodern position submitting that subordinated groups’ rights should not be recognized, claiming they will be misappropriated and “renaturalize” oppression, is criticized for being a reductionist anti-state position conflating social categorization with its material consequences, thus denying (like negative rights do) a politics that could challenge that same oppressive material reality.

Badlands and the Music of Temporal Immanence

As an eccentric outlaw crime film, Terrence Malick’s Badlands employs expressive sensory immersion, eccentric humor, and a concern for the relationship between history and human experience. The past, in Badlands, is a complex ontological ground for the characters’ (and audiences’) senses of being in the world, a temporalized film world akin to a field of pure immanence within the uncanny strangeness of material reality. A film set in the fifties, but far more concerned with transhistorical philosophical questions, Badlands uses the musical soundtrack to explore these existential concerns. Within this musically heterogeneous film, the two most important sources of compiled non-diegetic classical music (the pedagogical music of Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman and the early compositions of Erik Satie) function as active philosophical agents, cultivating embodied states of play and melancholy that strive, albeit ambiguously and inconclusively, to create meaning from the raw immediacy of experience.

Introduction

The Introduction outlines the key aims of the study, discusses relevant scholarship, and develops the methodology to be employed. In scholarship, council acts have often been used simply as source material for thematic studies, or their examination has been determined principally by editorial concerns. By contrast, the present study analyses the importance of council records as fundamental expression of the councils’ purposes and claims to legitimacy. It brings into scholarly focus the regularly neglected work of administrators and textual practitioners in ancient church councils responsible for the creation of such records, and relates their efforts to practices and concerns in the sphere of civil and legal administration. Council acts need to be understood as the products of distinct practices, in view of their underlying intentions and objectives, and with respect to the material reality of the documents created and handled. Discussions and examinations of conciliar documents, and instructions for their making in the councils themselves, provide the starting points for this investigation.

The material architect: physically engaging the design process

The contemporary architect operates within a profession which is detached from the physical processes undertaken during the making of architecture. The emergence of two-dimensional representation as the architect’s primary mode of communication and design is deeply embedded within architectural praxis. The fundamental physical reality of architecture requires that the architect have an experientially based understanding of architecture’s conceptual drivers. This situation necessitates re-conceptualizing the process of creating architecture. By reverting to a tangibly based method of design the creation of representative and demonstrative artefacts can aid in developing a stimulating and exploratory design process. The proposed method of design imbues the designer with a direct corporal experience of architectural ideas heightening an awareness of existent and emergent complexities in manifesting architectural works. The maturation of an architectural intuition steeped in the material reality of architecture developed through the fabrication of architectural prototypes is a critical tool in the arsenal of the contemporary architect.

The material architect: physically engaging the design process

The contemporary architect operates within a profession which is detached from the physical processes undertaken during the making of architecture. The emergence of two-dimensional representation as the architect’s primary mode of communication and design is deeply embedded within architectural praxis. The fundamental physical reality of architecture requires that the architect have an experientially based understanding of architecture’s conceptual drivers. This situation necessitates re-conceptualizing the process of creating architecture. By reverting to a tangibly based method of design the creation of representative and demonstrative artefacts can aid in developing a stimulating and exploratory design process. The proposed method of design imbues the designer with a direct corporal experience of architectural ideas heightening an awareness of existent and emergent complexities in manifesting architectural works. The maturation of an architectural intuition steeped in the material reality of architecture developed through the fabrication of architectural prototypes is a critical tool in the arsenal of the contemporary architect.

Modern Magicians: Guido Seeber and Eugen Schüfftan

Two technicians had a particularly formative impact on the evolution of special effects in Germany. Film pioneer Guido Seeber favoured methods like multiple exposure composites, which allow the cinematographer to excel both technically and creatively. Aiming at forging convincing composite spaces on screen, Eugen Schüfftan invented the only widely used commercial special-effects technique originating in Europe, the Schüfftan process. In similar ways, Seeber’s photographic and Schüfftan’s perceptual effects construe technology as cinema’s core creative tool and the cinematic image as fundamentally malleable. Both shared technoromantic views, which is apparent from their devotion to the goal of film art and commitment to devising medium-specific means for transcending material reality and expressing emotions and ideas.

Introduction: Special Effects and the Techno-Romantic Paradigm

German silent cinema is famous for its unconventional aesthetics and film-technological innovations. These characteristics were the result of efforts to reconcile the new medium’s automatic reproductions of physical reality with idealist conceptions of art. Special effects played a crucial role in this endeavour. They afforded creative experiments with the cinematic apparatus and inspired filmmakers to convey ideas and emotions. Special effects embodied the “techno-romantic” project of construing technology as a means for transcending material reality. This common response to industrial modernity profoundly shaped German silent film culture. The techno-romantic paradigm formed the basis of one of the most creative periods in film history and proved instrumental in the evolution of cinematic expressivity and film art.