Reading the Simultaneous Motion and Reality Bending Concepts through Doctor Strange

In order to exemplify the interaction between architecture and science fiction films, Doctor Strange (2016), one of today's cinema examples, was chosen because of that the special effects created in computer environment by transferring the dreams to the film have a surrealist effect on the film; of the fantastic spaces that arise with the deformation of real places become the main character of the film; of foreseeing a different future in terms of architecture. Within the scope of the study, the film was read through the changes of time and space of the concepts of “reality bending” and “simultaneous motion”. As a result of the readings on these concepts, the relationship of cinema with architecture has gained a different dimension, and it has been seen that this film can create a fantastic perspective and inspiration to the designers about the future deconstructivist buildings.

Constructing Meanings: The Museum as a Stage Set for the Presentation of Archeological Collections

Museums are real places that in a dematerializing world offer an encounter between visitors and tangible objects. With the shift of museum buildings away from recognizable types to heterogeneity and experimentation, as well as the greater emphasis placed on the visitor’s engagement with the museum, the issue of the role of museum architecture in relation to the collections it is designed to accommodate has become a key challenge. This paper argues that museum buildings as organized spaces can contribute to constructing meanings and become part of the distinctive experience of the collections each museum offers. It analyses three archeological museums with newly built or extended buildings, that experiment with novel ways of presenting their collections, and shows how the tension between visitors’ paths of movement and lines of sight can become the conceptual spine of the museum displays and stage the presentation of archeological objects. Three modalities of staging are identified, suggesting a critical shift: from emphasis on a theoretical concept, to attribution of symbolic meaning, and then to embodied, sensory and affective contextualization. This is argued to reflect the “experiential turn” in museums and the increasing understanding of meaning as being grounded in our bodily experience.

A systematic approach to literature analysis: traveling through stories

Travel literature has captured humanity’s imagination ever since the emergence of famous works such as The Wonders of The World by Marco Polo and The Journal of Christopher Columbus. Authors in this genre must process large and diverse volumes of data (visual, sensory, and written) obtained on their trips, before synthesizing it humanly in such a way as to move and communicate personally with the reader, without losing the factual nature of the story. This is the ultimate goal of the natural language processing (NLP) field: to process and generate human–machine interaction as naturally as possible. Hence, this article’s purpose is to analyze and describe a nonfictional literary text, which is a type of documentary text that contains objective, qualitative, and quantitative information based on evidence. In this analysis, traditional methods will not be used. Instead, it will leverage NLP techniques to process and extract relevant information from the text. This literary analysis is a new kind of approach that encourages further discussions about the methodologies currently used. The proposed methodology enables exploratory analysis of both individual and unstructured corpus databases while also allowing geospatial data to complement the textual analysis by connecting the people in the text with real places.

Lviv musical impressions on the pages of A. Bennett’s diary

Background. Objectives and methodology of the research. The article contains a commentary to the separate pages of A. Bennett’s diaries, in which the impressions of the famous English writer, playwright, actor and journalist from visiting the cities of Moscow, Orel and Lviv were recorded in May 1988. This trip took place at the invitation of the Writers’ Union of the USSR. As part of the British delegation, A. Bennett carried out a mission of “cultural diplomacy”, whose goal was to open the “Iron Curtain” between the West and the countries of Eastern Europe. The program of the visit of the foreign delegation is analyzed, in particular, visits to opera performances (at the Bolshoi Theater – “Werther” by J. Massenet, at the Lviv Opera and Ballet Theater – «The Ukrainian Cossack beyond the Danube» by S. Gulak-Artemovsky). The purpose of this article is to introduce into the scientific circulation the evidence that allows illuminating the events of the recent past through the prism of the perception of their immediate participants. Another task of this article is to determine the pragmatics of “hospitality” and its operatic component in the conditions of the Soviet system on a concrete example. In addition, the article establishes, with the help of diary notes, the specifics of the guests’ reaction to the realities of Ukrainian life during the “Perestroika” period and to the fact that opera represents power, which is essential for cultural diplomacy. The research is based on diary prose, which was originally prepared for publication in a literary journal. This determined the appropriate mode of expression and set the choice of illuminated objects. The descriptive-evaluative narrative appeals to real places and persons. So, the author tries to achieve the effect of documentary. At the same time, there is a noticeable tendency to create a slightly entertaining text that should interest the average reader and meet his expectations. Research results. This material made it possible to supplement with interesting facts the practice of cultural diplomacy that was established in the USSR, which was covered by the Western researchers, for example F. Barghoorn (1960), P. Hollander (1981), M. David-Fox (2011). In addition, the analysis of this evidence made it possible to introduce into scientific use not only the events, but also the attitude of foreign guests towards them. This is important for historiography and reconstruction of the recent past. The events, mentioned in the text of the evidence, acquire an outside view. The words of the “outsider” become comparative frame through which it is possible to comprehend what happened, freely from the obsessive rhetoric of the perestroika time. According to Bennett, in 1988 the protective function of the totalitarian system came into conflict with the new trend of the time. The imprint of stagnation and decline, even decomposition, but not the sense of purpose and optimism, which P. Hollander described as the “stigma of these countries”, also affected the “window” of Soviet reality, where obvious cracks of loud selfdisclosures appeared. The mandatory program of the visit included meeting with colleagues. With the help of diary, the specific reaction of the guests is set to the fact why an opera self-representation was so important for the «Soviet side». The pages of Bennett’s diaries showed attention to everyday details. The writer was able to create not an image of faceless mass, but the vivid portraits of his contemporaries and capture his experience of meeting a different reality. Conclusions. A. Bennett – a man and a writer – recreated his short stay in Lviv, capturing the theatrical nature of the life-giving performance that unfolded here in the tense collisions between official rhetoric and living reality. The opera itself was of little interest to A. Bennett, but he was well aware of the exceptional importance attached by the organizers of the trip to the fact of visiting the opera house. As an “object of showing” to foreigners, the opera served, first of all, as a proof of the “culture” of the country, a proof that the cultural heritage of the past is better preserved here. At the same time, in the system of “cultural diplomacy” the opera topos functioned as an aesthetic representation of power, the “higher truth” about it. Opera representation existed as a self-sufficient complete phenomenon, which testified to the presence of higher meanings in the real world.

Innovation in Real Places

Across the world, cities and regions have wasted trillions of dollars blindly copying the Silicon Valley model of growth creation. We have lived with this system for decades, and the result is clear: a small number of regions and cities are at the top of the high-tech industry, but many more are fighting a losing battle to retain economic dynamism. But, as this books details, there are other models for innovation-based growth that don’t rely on a flourishing high-tech industry. Breznitz argues that the purveyors of the dominant ideas on innovation have a feeble understanding of the big picture on global production and innovation. They conflate innovation with invention and suffer from techno-fetishism. In their devotion to start-ups, they refuse to admit that the real obstacle to growth for most cities is the overwhelming power of the real hubs, which siphon up vast amounts of talent and money. Communities waste time, money, and energy pursuing this road to nowhere. Instead, Breznitz proposes that communities focus on where they fit within the four stages in the global production process. Success lies in understanding the changed structure of the global system of production and then using those insights to enable communities to recognize their own advantages, which in turn allows to them to foster surprising forms of specialized innovation. All localities have certain advantages relative to at least one stage of the global production process, and the trick is in recognizing it.

Using geosciences and mythology to locate Prospero's island

The Tempest, the last work entirely attributed to William Shakespeare, has been subject to many studies and interpretations, ranging from adventure and Shakespeare's biography to colonialism and the cultural revolution, and is studied in this paper in the context of naturally occurring hazards. The play tells the story of a magician, Prospero, and his daughter who are shipwrecked on an unknown island where they encounter strange creatures and beings. But is it a fantastic island or was the author inspired by real places? Literary scholars proposed several hypotheses through the years, based on historical sources. Here, we analyse the play in the light of geosciences and mythology supporting the hypothesis that the playwright was inspired by the Mediterranean. Our goal is not to identify the island but rather to examine the various geographical and philosophical–political factors that may have influenced Shakespeare's literary creation. Nevertheless, some verses in the play suggest volcanism, placing the island in the Sicilian sea. This underlines once again how deep the playwright's knowledge of Italy was. It also suggests that this part of the Mediterranean was known, at the time of Shakespeare, as the theatre of phenomena originated in the volcanism of the area. One implication is that he could have used historical sources, still unknown and precious, to reconstruct geological events that occurred off the Sicilian coast.

PHARMACY AND MEDICINAL PLANTS IN THE LITERATURE: CASE OF GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

It is a bibliographic work that aims to obtain a “Pharmaceutical Look” at the work of García Márquez. It relates medicinal or associated plants, some medicinal and pharmaceutical aspects, with literary works that appear in a representative sample of the author’s novels, including One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Times of Cholera. These novels take place in imaginary or real places in Colombia in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. Plant remedies and to a lesser extent chemical and animal remedies have been found. For each of them, observations and interpretations medical, social and histórical, have been made that value the pharmacy and medicinal plants, which the author has used as resources to build the novels, regardless of whether they have a scientific basis or not. For this they are accompanied by textual literary texts. In conclusion, we highlight the masterful way in which García uses these resources and we recommend their reading or re-reading, also taking into account that at the same time it can be done from a pharmaceutical point of view.