bildwechsel is one of the most prolific and longstanding video collectives established in Europe within the framework of the women’s movement. Founded in 1979 by students of the Hamburg College of Fine Arts, in 1986 the group became an umbrella organization with activities and agents spread all over Europe and the world sharing a common infrastructure. The purpose of bildwechsel is to strengthen women’s presence in the audiovisual media and to advance feminist and queer art. The group has been pursuing (...) its mandate initially through local workshops and exhibitions, then through archival practices and programming activities promoted on the organization’s website. This article examines bildwechsel as an example of women’s ability to maintain a niche presence within the European and the world art scene since the late 1970s via grassroots globalized practices, from within a theoretical framework drawing on transnational feminism and new media theory. (shrink)

Installation art is one of the most important and provocative developments in the visual arts during the last half century and has become a key focus of artists and of contemporary museums. It is also seen as particularly challenging or even disliked by many viewers, and—due to its unique in situ, immersive setting—is equally regarded as difficult or even beyond the grasp of present methods in empirical aesthetic psychology. In this paper, we introduce an exploratory study with installation art, utilizing (...) a collection of techniques to capture the eclectic, the embodied, and often the emotionally-charged viewing experience. We present results from an investigation of two pieces, both part of Olafur Eliasson’s exhibition “Baroque, Baroque” held at the Belvedere museum in Vienna. These were assessed by pre- and post-viewing questionnaires focusing on emotion, meaning-making, and appraisals, in tandem with mobile eye tracking to consider viewers’ attention to both installed artworks and/or to the museum environment. The data showed differences in participants’ emotional states, appraisals, and visual exploration, which together paint a picture of the aesthetic reactions to the works. These differences also showed how viewers’ appraisal strategies, meaning making, and physical actions facilitated relatively more or less deep engagement with, and enjoyment of, the art. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for museum studies, art education, and theory in empirical aesthetics. (shrink)

With the advancement of digital technology in contemporary art, new hybrid forms of interaction emerge that invite viewers to make images present in physical space as events that claim a life of their own. In breaking away from representational and performance art theories that have dominated the critique of new media artwork since the 1980s, this article analyses an iconic vision of mobile touchscreens based on the medieval Byzantine chorographic inscription of the sacred in profane spaces. As defined in (...) recent art historical studies on Byzantine icons, chorography builds on a multisensory spatial interaction between the beholders of icons that results in feeling the presence of a divine, invisible image. In light of postmodern critique of digital images’ capacity to manipulate notions of reality, new media aesthetic theory hardly addresses this Byzantine iconic vision that is fundamental to western visual culture. Jeffrey Shaw’s installation, The Golden Calf, is discussed to offer an alternative in understanding how digital and physical spaces function together to evoke something essentially real. (shrink)

Fascism, modernism and modernity -- The Jew as anti-artist : Georges Sorel and the aesthetics of the anti- Enlightenment -- La Cité française : Georges Valois, Le Corbusier and fascist theories of urbanism -- Machine primitives : Philippe Lamour and the fascist cult of youth -- Classical violence : Thierry Maulnier and the legacy of the Cercle Proudhon.

The article offers an insight into road traffic accidents by unravelling both the internal elements and the social context of the so-called car–driver hybrid. It takes a critical perspective on the art of designing road safety. More importantly, it seeks to contribute to social studies of transport and mobility through development of analytical concepts within the discipline. The points of departure are the inherent ambiguities of mobility. The author suggests that ‘being in traffic’ is always determined by coexisting forms of (...) mobility and immobility. This ambivalent stage is then called motility. The author discusses car-drivers as motile hybrids, as they are mobile and immobile, as well as subjects and objects at the same time. In order to apply these concepts, the question of what happens to hybrids in crashes is addressed, employing Bruno Latour’s concept of ‘immutable mobiles’. The article concludes with a discussion of the social role of road safety experts, arguing that transport safety experts create a specific kind of spatio-temporal order within which the motile hybrid exists. It is the safety professional who decides when to take agency away from the subject and give it to the object, and it s/he who determines where to slow down and where to speed up the car–driver hybrid. (shrink)

This article concerns mobile technologies and the possibilities of engendering mediated presences, perceived as usual actions. Those devices have been embedded into the individual everyday practices, occupying personal spaces and making us share emotional and affective moments giving continuity to our anxiety and comprehension of the world. The theoretical approaches bring the understanding of playing and experiencing sensory states as enactive knowledge and Goffman's thoughts about co-temporality and users behaviours as social rituals. The bodyspace relation and the technological artefacts (...) have been articulating the construction of the reality as a phenomenological experience. (shrink)

Artworks are seen here as presenting themselves as a means by which to navigate and plot the city for a writing interlocutor; The examples discussed reveat a plethora of emergent forms which are concentrated into three key modalities of urban arts practice in the twenty-first century walking play and cultural memory walking includes the talked walks of artist such as Richard Wentworth, the generative street incursions of Francis Alys, and the walking spectator at a site-based event, including works by Gustv (...) Metzger, Mark Wallinger and Pavel Althamer. Play embraces popular instances of mass public mobilisation in the form of flash mobs and mobile clubbing as well as ̀creative interventions such as free ranning, graffin writing and video sniffing, which reveal themselves to be engaged increasingly in a dialogue with the ̀high art' of artists like Antony Gomely, Mark Quinn and Carsten Holler. Cultural memory is considered via the burgeoning cases of holocaust installations, interrogating two of the best-known- and controversial-European urban sites from the point of view of the physical encounters that they implicity invite Peter Eisenman's memorial in Bertin and Rachel Whitereads' in Vienna. --Book Jacket. (shrink)

Autonomous labor and its attendant values have now become familiar tools of neoliberal capitalism: work has become freelance, flexible, mobile, project-based, hybrid and temporary. If these conditions are novel to the general economy, this way of working is not new to artists, who began experiencing these precarious conditions long before Post-Fordism was a buzzword. The contributors to Mobile Autonomy, drawn from a variety of disciplines including art, political philosophy and sociology, examine the alternate working methods and economic models (...) developed, in theory and in practice, by artists and other creative professionals to make artistic work viable in contemporary social, economic and political conditions. (shrink)

Art has the power to affect our thinking, changing not only the way we view and interact with the world but also how we create it. In Art in Mind , Ernst van Alphen probes this idea of art as a commanding force with the capacity to shape our intellect and intervene in our lives. Rather than interpreting art as merely a reflection of our social experience or a product of history, van Alphen here argues that art is a historical (...) agent, or a cultural creator, that propels thought and experience forward. Examining a broad range of works, van Alphen—a renowned art historian and cultural theorist—demonstrates how art serves a socially constructive function by actually experimenting with the parameters of thought. Employing work from artists as diverse as Picasso, Watteau, Francis Bacon, Marlene Dumas, and Matthew Barney, he shows how art confronts its viewers with the "pain points" of cultural experience-genocide, sexuality, diaspora, and transcultural identity-and thereby transforms the ways in which human existence is conceived. Van Alphen analyzes how art visually "thinks" about these difficult cultural issues, tapping into an understudied interpretation of art as the realm where ideas and values are actively created, given form, and mobilized. In this way, van Alphen's book is a work of art in itself as it educates us in a new mode of thought that will forge equally new approaches and responses to the world. (shrink)

The remarkable growth in the application of information and communications technologies indicates a great shift toward a globally integrated society. The urban metropolises are turning into intersections of transit and migration of goods, capital, services, cultures, knowledge and especially people. Moreover the flow of bodies, information and money is changing the rules of what defines national territory, space and identity. Social realities with specific qualities are appearing, implying a new spatial correlation between the local and the global. International airports and (...) within emerging extraterritorial zones have become an important threshold controlling the flow of people in a free market economy. The airport border mutates into an abstract space permeating the physical territory of the airport and beyond. This abstract border space, within which mobile bodies operate, is created by a bureaucratic system of inclusion and exclusion particular to transition states. Transit zones at airports emerge because of a complex set of factors: border crossing as well as increasingly stringent security and safety regulations. The innumerable thresholds within these transit zones are points of congestion governed and increasingly supported by technological systems of identification. Within the transnation state, the movement of bodies is the constant subject of streaming and proceduralization. Increasingly, the conventional system of control based on face-to-face interaction between the controlling and the controlled is being replaced by the algorithmic precision of database logic. The paradigm of pattern matching ensures precise verification of the uniqueness of the body, in turn offering new potentials for permeability and flux. These different orders of legal and economic categorization create manifold sub-territories accessible to select groups of travellers. Nowadays, the airport is a transnation state spatialized through a new order of architecture, a manifestation of technology of abstract procedures of transition, inclusion and exclusion, adopting emergent patterns of socio-spatial mobility in a globalized network. (shrink)

. Effective text region extraction and binarization of image embedded text documents on mobile devices having limited computational resources is an open research problem. In this paper, we present one such technique for preprocessing images captured with built-in cameras of handheld devices with an aim of developing an efficient Business Card Reader. At first, the card image is processed for isolating foreground components. These foreground components are classified as either text or non-text using different feature descriptors of texts and (...) images. The non-text components are removed and the textual ones are binarized with a fast adaptive algorithm. Specifically, we propose new techniques for foreground component isolation, text extraction and binarization of text regions from camera captured business card images. Experiments with business card images of various resolutions show that the present technique yields better accuracy and involves low computational overhead in comparison with the state-of-the-art. We achieve optimum text/non-text separation performance with images of resolution 800×600 pixels with an average recall rate of 93.90% and a precision rate of 96.84%. It involves a peak memory consumption of 0.68 MB and processing time of 0.102 seconds on a moderately powerful notebook, and 4 seconds of processing time on a PDA. (shrink)

Cities today are dynamic urban ecosystems with evolving physical, socio-cultural, and technological infrastructures. Many contestations arise from the effects of inequitable access and intersecting crises currently faced by cities, which may be amplified by the algorithmic and data-centric infrastructures being introduced in urban contexts. In this article, I argue for a critical lens into how inter-related urban technologies, big data and policies, constituted as Urban AI, offer both challenges and opportunities. I examine scenarios of contestations in _urban mobility_, defined broadly (...) to include equitable access, movement, and liberty to engage with the socio-cultural, political, and urban fabric of cities. I anchor my arguments through a framework of _rights, risks,_ and _responsibilities_ for critically examining and configuring the roles, values and ethical implications for all stakeholders including human, AI and non-human entities within an urban ecosystem. As a way forward, I examine the European Commission’s proposed regulations on AI systems through an illustrative case study of an automated parking control system introduced by the City of Amsterdam. In moving beyond the city to broader urban ecosystems, I highlight the role of engaging Indigenous perspectives for designing and reconciling the implications of equitable and sustainable Urban AI ecosystems in the future. (shrink)

This paper addresses the relations between art and everyday life in the city from the vantage points of urban aesthetics and sociology, where the “city” refers as well to a normative world. The aim is to show how art/artistic life contributed to the normative change and new urban lifestyles. First, I focus on Baudelaire’s theory of beauty and life in modern metropolis or the city as “poetic object” and dandyism as an art of the self, seen as a crucial normative (...) change: the emergence of new norms of excellence and art of living, such as creativity and self-fashioning. Second, I discuss a recent yet related normative change, described by Boltanski and Chiapello as a passage to the “project-oriented city”, seen as a new way of working and living that fuses cultures of creativity and uncertainty. Third, I tackle the “creative city” hailed by Florida, where the creative lifestyle of “creative people” is the new mainstream setting the norms for society: individuality, diversity and openness, but also impermanent relationships and loose ties. I will argue that extending the hyper-mobile and flexible creative lifestyle from the extraordinary figure of the artist to ordinary people, as everyday urban life, triggers both benefits and risks. (shrink)

In this article, I am using the example of the introduction of osteosynthesis into surgical routine practice to analyze the use of the notions of art and science in medical innovation. The examination of the renegotiations of power and responsibility associated with the introduction of this new technique shows that proponents and critics actively linked their arguments to more fundamental epistemological and social issues. The proponents claimed to manage the uncertainties of innovation through making surgery more scientific, drawing on the (...) ideals of control, rationality, objectivity, and predictability. The critics mobilized another discursive pattern. They considered surgery an art and emphasized the individuality, contingency, and situatedness of medical practice. I investigate the discursive function of these argumentative patterns and how they played out in the concrete example of this surgical technique. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est le tout premier à proposer un tour d'horizon historique et systématique des multiples conceptions phénoménologiques du mouvement. Après une introduction qui s'efforce de retracer la 'Begriffs- und Wirkungsgeschichte' de cette notion de mouvement, et par là de montrer comment elle fut longtemps l'apanage de la philosophie de la nature avant que la phénoménologie ne s'en empare et lui rétrocède toute sa dimension subjective et charnelle, les auteurs livrent une série d'analyses détaillées qui se répartissent en deux grandes (...) parties. Dans la première, il s'agit d'examiner critiquement le traitement que des penseurs-clés lui ont réservé. Sont ainsi étudiés le sens et la portée des notions de kinesthèse, de géostatisme et d'a priori matériel chez Husserl, mais également le concept de mobilité chez Heidegger, la dynamique de l'existence chez Patocka ou encore l'interprétation merleau-pontienne du cas Schneider. Dans la seconde partie, il est davantage question d'explorer de nouvelles voies, d'articuler des usages neufs et de développer des interprétations inédites du mouvement à partir de la méthode et de la conceptualité phénoménologiques, en dialogue avec les sciences cognitives, la religion et les arts - en l'occurrence la danse. L'ensemble pose ainsi les jalons pour une approche phénoménologique renouvelée du mouvement vécu. (shrink)

Le immagini leonardiane di nascita e creazione, di trasformazione dei corpi e della morfologia terrestre, di eventi atmosferici violenti, sottolineano una concezione metamorfica e trasformista dell'arte che si accorda con una visione della natura e della terra come animata da uno spirito vitale.

Taking the publication in English of several works by Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière as its point of departure, this review article attempts to outline what may be at stake in reading these two authors together. Looking especially at the works on politics and on aesthetics, the article also draws on other major texts by these authors as a way of clarifying their basic philosophical principles. Under the rubrics of ‘the axiom of equality’ and ‘the empty set’, these two thinkers (...) establish links with their tradition in ways that are mobilized towards invention or transfiguration in spheres of both politics and art. (shrink)

In this essay Noël Carroll explores the question of whether a moral defect in a work of architectural art can ever also count as an aesthetic /artistic defect. Adopting the stance of a moderate moralist and mobilizing what has been called the “uptake argument,” he argues against the moderate autonomist that sometimes a moral defect in an architectural artwork can also be an aesthetic/artistic defect.

France’s agreements on the joint management of migration flows figure centrally within studies of bilateral migration agreements. With their origins in friendship and navigation treaties of the late 19th century, the AJMs are successors to the postcolonial, circular mobility conventions of the 1960s, and are uniquely positioned for periodizing the evolution of bilaterally negotiated labor mobilities. Nonetheless, due to the European Union’s reluctance to embrace mass regularization and the EU Member States’ legislative powers over labor markets, they have time and (...) again scotched France’s ambition to leverage preferential labor market entries in exchange for more cooperation over irregular migration. Through documents and statistical data analysis, this Article studies the case of Senegal’s negotiation of additional pathways to France for its lower-skilled workers. At the center is France’s administrative court of appeals, which has confirmed the broad margin of discretion over Art. 42 in the AJM between France and Senegal. This jurisprudence has decoupled the automatic linkage between a job listed under duress in France under the Annex to the AJM and the entitlement to exceptional admission. We argue that France’s courts have removed a privilege of Senegalese workers, which has re-politicized France’s migration diplomacy with Senegal. At the same time, retention of the prefectorial discretionary power has levelled the playing field among West and North African countries that have concluded similar bilateral agreements with France. This Article adds to the research on bilateral migration agreements by proposing a multilevel legal analysis, which studies AJMs in the context of France’s common law, EU labor and return directives, and the multilateral of WTO/gats liberalization. (shrink)

In this article, the concept of mobility is examined theoretically, from a phenomenological perspective, as well as empirically, through two design case studies. First, a background to how the notion of mobility is generally conceptualized and used in academia as well as within industry is provided. From a phenomenological analysis, it becomes necessary to question the currently dominating understanding of mobility as first and foremost a provider of freedom from a number of constraints. Rather, it is argued, mobility needs to (...) be understood primarily as quite the opposite; as being about getting involved in different contexts. Based on this analysis, it is described how such an altered way of understanding mobility has come to challenge our design team’s preconceptions of mobile interaction design and influence the design of two mobile support system for service and maintenance in industrial settings. (shrink)

This article evaluates the role of art – particularly mechanically reproduced forms of art – in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. The central claim is that both thinkers share the same conviction as to the emancipatory potentials of the work of art. Yet, they evaluate the effects of technological innovation differently. The underpinnings of this later resolved discord, however, are philosophical. In contrast to Benjamin’s belief in the possibility of mass mobilization, for Adorno the relevant category (...) remains unequivocally the individual subject. (shrink)

As social, locative, and mobile media render the intimate public and the public intimate, this volume interrogates how this phenomenon impacts art practice and politics. Contributors bring together the worlds of art and media culture to rethink their intersections in light of participatory social media. By focusing upon the Asia-Pacific region, they seek to examine how regionalism and locality affect global circuits of culture. The book also offers a set of theoretical frameworks and methodological paradigms for thinking about contemporary (...) art practice more generally. (shrink)

"Staging the archive: art and photography in the age of new media is dedicated to art practices that mobilize the model of the archive, demonstrating the ways in which such archival artworks probe the possibilities of what art is and what it can do. Through a variety of media, methodologies and perspectives, the artists surveyed here also challenge the principles on which the notions of organization, evidence and documentation are built. The book shows how artists have, over recent decades, read (...) the concept of the archive against the grain, questionning not only what the archive is and can be but what materials, images or ideas can be archived. Ernst van Alphen explores the work of artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Broodthaers, Christian Boltanski, Fiona Tan, and Sophie Calle, writers including Georges Perec and film-makers such as Alain Resnais and Péter Forgács. Staging the Archive reveals how modern and contemporary artists have used and contested the notion of the archive to establish new relationships to history, information, data. (shrink)

A symposium was held at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge on June 12th 2019, ‘Rethinking Repetition in a Digital Age’, at which Geoff Stead, a leading mobile tech designer, was a keynote speaker. The focus of the Cambridge UK event was on how the potentials of digital technologies—whose harms have received widespread attention—could be redirected for the social good. For Stead, this is precisely what Babbel are doing in (...) their approach to commercial digital language learning. Stead spoke to the idea of reversing our personal relationships to mechanical affordances, and finding empowerment in understanding their designed logics. The transcript of the interview below, made in October 2021, revisits some of the main points he raised at that event. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Medieval Troubadour Mobilized in the French Resistance *Roy RosensteinIntroduction: The Place of Poetry under VichyRien ne semblait plus anachronique que d’interroger, inter arma, le silence des Muses médiévales....Frank 1In Chantons sous l’occupation André Halimi details how raucously the band played on in wartime Paris. 2 If Vercors in 1941 advocated the practice of silence and Sartre in 1945 maintained that Paris had been dead for the four years (...) of the Nazi occupation, Halimi and others have shown that Parisians [End Page 499] sang, danced, and laughed during the Occupation as never before. 3 Rarely had so many plays been staged, so many movies been produced. 4 While in other Nazi-occupied countries the theaters and restaurants remained closed, thus preserving a modicum of national dignity in defeat, in France the arts thrived and la vie mondaine accelerated its pace. Journalist Henri Amouroux rightly explains how cinema and theater provided more than entertainment and why they were periodically the target of curfews. In these wartime performances a seemingly insignificant phrase could take on a rich contemporary context. Thus a line like “toute la fleur du royaume se trouve en prison” in Montherlant’s La reine morte invariably provoked applause. Whether the text was classical or contemporary in origin, the audience “seized upon all the passages that could be linked to the current situation.” 5 In this broad sense, Resistance literature came to include any “poetry written and/or distributed in France during the Occupation, and which the reader sees as implicitly or explicitly conveying hostility to Nazism and Collaboration.” 6Between 1940 and 1944 French audiences escaped their national misfortunes more through literature than through film and drama combined. “Never, perhaps, had literature played such a momentous part in the daily life of French readers,” wrote the late Henri Peyre in 1945. 7 As is often noted, the intellectual Resistance “fut surtout poétique.” 8 Every page of poetry, past or present, seemed to remind wartime readers of their current circumstances. One young poète résistant is categorical: “Never before had poetry played such a decisive role in history.” 9 Pierre Brunel of the Sorbonne is just as emphatic in confirming [End Page 500] the judgment of contemporary scholars and Resistance fighters alike: “During the war years, French poetry found a singleness of purpose and an audience that it had never enjoyed before.” 10In anticipation of more comprehensive treatments of French Resistance poetry sens large, the present study proposes a necessarily modest and certainly partial approach to the role of poetry in the French Resistance. Following the general groundwork of Seghers, Gaucheron, Higgins, and others, it undertakes to track, if only schematically, the reaction to France’s fall as polarized across three territories—in American exile, in Vichy France, and in German camps—through a focus on one exemplary twelfth-century troubadour. Concurrently with the “nouvelle floraison poétique” hailed by André Rousseaux in 1941, 11 Jaufre Rudel was one earlier poet who enjoyed a resurgence of interest during the war. With respect to this troubadour, to date only Dietmar Rieger has mentioned in passing an oblique reference to Rudel’s trademark distant love in Aragon’s “Pour un chant (national)”: “Jaufre’s love from afar is set against a love for France.” 12 This particular troubadour’s legend and lyrics assumed new dimensions through their immediate relevance not only for Aragon but for all French nationals, both imprisoned at home and exiled abroad. Literary historian René Dumesnil observed as early as 1941 with respect to pre-war French classics: “Present circumstances give them new depth and extend their range.” 13 Regarding France’s medieval literature, a modern critic has noted how “the troubadours, just as much as Tristan, Roland, Lancelot, Perceval, or even Yseult..., emerge as agents of unity, even of unanimity, around whom it is still possible to muster the French people in 1940.” 14 [End Page 501]As has been observed for centuries, “Frenchmen abroad seldom wholly give up the idea of going back to France some time or other.” 15 All French patriots and expatriates, wherever they found themselves after the Armistice in June 1940, whether... (shrink)

The editorial aims to unveil the attracting force of Laruelle's non-philosophy for scholars from different disciplines and artists. It shows how a new "democratic order of thinking" permits non-philosophy to enclose domains that have long been considered as opposites: philosophy, science, religion and the arts. Conceived as parameters of thought of the same right and without privileges, these variables can be superposed in a process of creative invention. The performative force of non-standard thinking, which can take different forms of philo-fiction, (...) science fiction, art fiction, Christo-Fiction etc., dismantles the decisional gestures and the sufficiency claims of philosophy, science and religion, and thus permits a regeneration as well as a choral orchestration in a "minimalistic symphony". In this sense, non-philosophy invites us every day to the "movable feast", that it is. (shrink)

Collaboration in the arts is no longer a conscious choice to make a deliberate artistic statement, but instead a necessity of artistic survival. In today’s hybrid world of virtual mobility, collaboration decentralizes creative strategies, enabling artists to carve new territories and maintain practice-based autonomy in an increasingly commercial and saturated art world. Collaboration now transforms not only artistic practices but also the development of cultural institutions, communities and personal lifestyles. This book explores why collaboration has become so integrated into a (...) greater understanding of creative artistic practice. It draws on an emerging generation of contributors—from the arts, art history, sociology, political science, and philosophy—to engage directly with the diverse and interdisciplinary nature of collaborative practice of the future. (shrink)

At Pech Merle in 1952, André Breton provoked a controversial incident by damaging a Palaeolithic wall painting that he suspected to be a fake. This episode provides an insight into the contested status of prehistoric sites in post-war France and the theoretical and ideological implications of their cultural mobilization. Such sites allowed for a disavowal of wartime trauma and supported the reaffirmation of French national identity and its civilizing mission by locating the birthplace of human culture on French soil. Yet (...) their extreme age also threw into relief the relative fragility of the recently invented nation-state. Breton's vandalism cast doubt on the models of cultural progress and pre-eminence that sought to instrumentalize prehistoric art but failed to appreciate the subversiveness of its ‘deep’ history. Ironically, however, Breton's scepticism ultimately enhanced the subversive dimension of archaeology by allowing it to demonstrate the authenticity and age of cave art. (shrink)

In the West, "the Left," understood as a loose conglomeration of interests centered around the goal of a fairer and more equal society, still struggles to make its voice heard and its influence felt, even amid an overwhelming global recession. In _Arts of the Political: New Openings for the Left_, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift argue that only by broadening the domain of what is considered political and what can be made into politics will the Left be able to respond (...) forcefully to injustice and inequality. In particular, the Left requires a more imaginative and experimental approach to the politics of creating a better society. The authors propose three political arts that they consider crucial to transforming the Left: boosting invention, leveraging organization, and mobilizing affect. They maintain that successful Left political movements tend to surpass traditional notions of politics and open up political agency to these kinds of considerations. In other words, rather than providing another blueprint for the future, Amin and Thrift concentrate their attention on a more modest examination of the conduct of politics itself and the ways that it can be made more effective. (shrink)

Special purpose service robots have already entered the market and their users’ homes. Also the idea of the general purpose service robot or personal robot companion is increasingly discussed and investigated. To probe human–robot interaction with a mobile robot in arbitrary domestic settings, we conducted a study in eight different homes. Based on previous results from laboratory studies we identified particular interaction situations which should be studied thoroughly in real home settings. Based upon the collected sensory data from the (...) robot we found that the different environments influenced the spatial management observable during our subjects’ interaction with the robot. We also validated empirically that the concept of spatial prompting can aid spatial management and communication, and assume this concept to be helpful for Human–Robot Interaction design. In this article we report on our exploratory field study and our findings regarding, in particular, the spatial management observed during show episodes and movement through narrow passages. Keywords: COGNIRON, Domestic Service Robotics, Robot Field Trial, Human Augmented Mapping, Human–Robot Interaction, Spatial Management, Spatial Prompting. (shrink)

We argue that the proper context for understanding Collingwood’s The Principles of Art is his claim that it has bearing “upon the condition of art in England in 1937”. We thus argue that he formulated a philosophical argument that underpins avant-garde dramatic poetry and theatrical practices (Eliot, Auden and the Group Theatre), taking his interpretation of Spinoza’s Ethics 5 prop. 3 to be the book’s central thesis: it is through art that one knows, against the ‘corruption of consciousness’, what emotions (...) one feels and recognizes them as one’s own. Collingwood further believed that this could only be achieved through collaboration between the artist and the community, validating new theatrical practices involving interaction with the audience. We analyse these views in the context of England in 1937: in an era marked by the rise of Fascism and Nazism, Collingwood believed that art thus conceived could help restoring emotional support for the defense of liberal democracies. We conclude with an exploration of parallels with and divergences from the Spinozist idea of ‘mobilizing affects’ in contemporary ‘left populism’ (Mouffe). (shrink)

Creating a mobile software-based exploration (artwork?/app?) puts the artist-coder in a position to interact with the mediated image streams that connect people on the Internet. The mediated streams often contain portraits and self-portraits, selfies, of the participants. These selfies are visual status messages of the people participating in the data streams. They can be used by the poster to identify themselves in the data stream and represent a way the creator of the selfie wants to be seen by the (...) social circle in which the image is posted. These images could reveal recognizable characteristics of the subject. The characteristics could be recognizable by people and software along the mediated path that the image traverses. Algorithmic intervention on the image affects the human and software interpretation of the image. In the works #autoselfie and FIFO ribbon, images are modified on a pixel level, in a way that the user of the app/work cannot control completely. The modifications reveals the potential power of the software systems to modify the imagery that people use to identify themselves in mediated communication environments. Moreover, the changes applied are chosen by the artist coder to impede recognition by software systems downstream but make human recognition possible in some cases. The alterations make the software in the app visible on a pixel level. The works then let the user post the altered images on Twitter or Google+ social media streams. The framing of this work as artwork or mobile app creates a tension, which affects audience interpretation and user experience choices made by the artist. These ideas are explored in the 2013 work #autoselfie and the 2014 work FIFO ribbon that runs on Android devices. #autoselfie was used to remix images created by winners of the South African 2013 Sanlam National Portrait Award, to explore the intervention of algorithms on mediated portraits and self-portraits. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to analyse interactive reinterpretations of two of Raul Meel’s artworks. They were created after the original works were made; they reference the original artworks and are meta-referential. These reinterpretations allow the original artworks to be opened and explained and become instantiations of their algorithmic content. The questions that arise in this article are as follows: how can physical artworks be opened up for audiences by means of interactive emulations? How can this serve to document (...) and preserve the unique experience of the artist? The aim of this article, in addition to the practical analysis of the two case studies, is to discuss the wider context of the problems of meta-artworks and the following direct questions that arise out of analysing them as research objects. I analyse in detail a selection of media artworks in which meta-referentiality is foregrounded. A focal point of my discussion is an interactive emulation of Raul Meel’s Under the Sky, which was created for his biggest retrospective exhibition entitled Dialogues with Infinity (2014) at the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn. My second object of interest is the mobile app ‘seeESE’ based on Meel’s installation The Dice, shown in the same exhibition at the Kumu museum in 2014, of which the original version dates back to 1969. (shrink)

This beautiful photojournal is a visually stunning tour of the history and funerary art of Mobile's 19th-century urban cemeteries.

It is difficult to make sense of the notion of postmodernity, because “modernity” is clearly a shifter, in the sense of Jespersen and Jakobson: a term dependent for its meaning on its moment of enunciation. It is true that, from the Middle Ages onwards, several meanings of modernity have received an objectified reference. But in the arts, particularly in the visual arts, this is not true. Modernity has been defined as the ever-new transgression of norms established by the period coming (...) immediately before. In another sense, modernity is connected to urbanity, as it first took place (or at least was observed) in the coffeehouses of the seventeenth century and the boulevards of the nineteenth century. This meant a close connection of individuals having nothing to do with each other from the point of view of family relationships. At the same time as this concept of modernity is overhauled by the perpetual presence of the mobile phones, it is confirmed and extended by the Internet. A third kind of modernity, perhaps closely connected to the second one ( but essentially opposed to the first kind) is that of thinking, as initiated during the Enlightenment, striving to go beyond the divergent doxa of different cultures to some kind of rational understanding. Taking into account the standing of rationality in the history of humanity, postmodern philosophy really amounts to some kind of mobbing of the poorest and most feeble members of the crowd. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 58-64 [Access article in PDF] Media Literacy Education in Art:Motion Expression and the New Vision of Art EducationThe Bauhaus, which established the foundation of modern design, has greatly influenced Japanese design and art education. It is a historical fact that the movement views "synthetic art" as an integration of the various fields and the integration of the art and machine technology experimentally. (...) However, the Bauhaus is not just of historical importance but continues to have an influence even in the integration of the art and electronic technology in today's "multimedia." In addition, it can be said that it is very much alive as "the digital Bauhaus" or "the electronic Bauhaus." 1 As we know, today's multimedia and the Internet give us a new life-environment, and expandthe possibility of expression in art. Therefore, current art education must examine how these new medias will be incorporated into the curriculum.In the cases of the photograph, video, or computer, an expression by the image media is added to the art course for the junior high school course of study. 2 Also in school art classes, image media was introduced, expanding the possibilities of self-expression through art. This result can be matched to the needs of the industrial world in Japan as well. As an educational practice, the content of this course of study is promising, even though someproblems must be solved, acquiring new equipment, re-educating the artteacher, and securing additional art school hours. The new content in art education can be summarized as follows:1. The motion picture (animation) which includes time and movement. Motion picture is asequence of continuous images, obviously different from the still images of painting. There are, of course, artworks that express motion or induce the viewer'seye movement. There are also kinetic artworks that do move, such as mobiles. Works of motion picture have, however, a fixed time shaft, and they are formed by the afterimage phenomenon. Thinking about the progress of time shaft is an indispensable element for the production. [End Page 58]2. The synchronism of image and sound. Because time is a factor in the visual expression, the works are compatible with music — the art of time. There is a synchronized relation between the motion picture and music. Image expression with multimedia became synthetic art, just as the Bauhaus looked for "architecture." Currently, this kind of expression transitions from art to entertainment, and permeates daily life.3. The method with interactive art work. Not only artworks of installation, but also TV games and web design have interactive construction as an indispensable interface. The aesthetic value of these visual works will be appreciated when the user starts the action by hitting a touchpad, pushing buttons, or clicking a mouse. To make this kind of artwork, one needs to consider the latent relationships between humans and work, and establish the input-output order for the method of construction.4. The problem of virtual reality. The term "virtual reality" is used by some art teachers as criticism against digital works such as computer graphics. These teachers insist that there is no reality there. One can, however, get an aesthetic feeling through sensory information, imagination, and sensitivity, even though what one sees is an illusion. The feeling of reality a picture of an apple gives, for example, may be equal to a computer graphic apple.Human imagination also creates "virtual reality" beyond reality in the myth, the novel, and so on. It can be said that this is the basis for human creativity.Furthermore, expression by image media raises the problem of a "reality" in which material experience is important to encounterthe world directly. Such an argument discusses multimedia as a tool of expression and a teaching material while reconsidering human reality.More recently, "media literacy" (ability to read and understand media) became an important point of discussion for Japanese educators. Usually, in this discussion, the critical ability to talk back to the television program is emphasized. However, through art... (shrink)

This article takes a speculative and design fiction approach to the critical analysis of the role of smart and autonomous vehicles (AVs) in the context of smart cities. The article explores arguments that these cars of the future will have decisive impacts on mobility, sustainability and road safety. The article examines the main parameters of smart city and smart car developments and then focuses on the visions of increasing AI-driven autonomy. The article demonstrates how these debates are linked to speculative (...) design as full autonomy does not currently exist but takes a speculative position as to what the critical issues are that face smart/autonomous city visions (enhanced surveillance and data mining) and considers the potentially hazardous ethical dilemmas that AVs may encounter once fully rolled out onto city roads. From a design fiction perspective, the article envisions the viability of AV prioritizing public rather than private transport as a means by which the ‘techno-utopic’ visions of smart city/AV integration can be realized and make positive impacts to enhance urban living in rendering future cities as more sustainable, efficiently mobile and safer urban spaces. (shrink)

In recent years, the animation industry has achieved unprecedented development trends, and many excellent animation works have emerged in China, which are popular with audiences. Among all kinds of animation works, the most important feature is the integration of traditional Chinese philosophical and cultural elements, which leads to the difference between Chinese animation works and other countries. It not only conforms to the aesthetic standards of Chinese people, but also gives play to the traditional Chinese culture, providing a direction for (...) further promoting the inheritance and development of outstanding traditions. With the rise of mobile intelligent terminals, the vigorous development of the Internet era, and the rising demand of people for the existing market, traditional philosophy and culture, as a new business opportunity, has great development prospects in this era. The fashion transformation of traditional philosophy and culture in the animation art is about to attract more attention from capital and entrepreneurs. In animation art design, the most important core concept is artistic creativity. Due to China's lack of originality in animation design for a long time, this paper attempts to revive China's animation art design by applying traditional innovative ideas in the fashion transformation of animation art design schemes. This new artistic expression method is aimed at better expressing the theme of animation activities, maximizing the value of animation works and promoting the development of animation industry. Through the transformation and innovation of traditional philosophy and culture and animation art customization, this paper explores the transformation and innovation of traditional philosophy and culture and animation art customization in order to provide some reference for the development of animation industry. (shrink)

Focused on city-scale automation, and using self-driving cars (SDCs) as a case study, this article reflects on the role of AI—and in particular, computer vision systems used for mapping and navigation—as a catalyst for urban transformation. Urban research commonly presents AI and cities as having a one-way cause-and-effect relationship, giving undue weight to AI’s impact on cities and overlooking the role of cities in shaping AI. Working at the intersection of data science and social research, this paper aims to counter (...) this trend by exploring the reverse perspective: how do cities affect the development, and expose the present limits, of SDCs? The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, by comparing urban and nonurban environments and thoroughly examining the relationship between computer vision and city-specific sociality and form, it defines machine autonomy/automation as a function of the sociotechnical milieu in which an AI system operates. Second, and related, the paper problematizes the notion of SDCs as autonomous technologies and the role it plays in envisioning contending policy arrangements and technical solutions for achieving full driving automation. Finally, the article offers insight into a materialist and spatialized understanding of AI—namely, not as an abstract quality susceptible to replication within discrete machines, but rather as a distributed property emerging through embodied interactions among a multiplicity of agents (human, non-human, and technological) within/with their environments. (shrink)

Psychological trauma is ubiquitous, an often hidden yet influential factor in care across clinical specialties. Interdisciplinary health professions education is mobilizing to address the importance of trauma-sensitive care. Given their attention to complex human realities, the health humanities are well-poised to shape healthcare learners’ responses to trauma. Indeed, many such arts and humanities curricula propose narrative exercises to strengthen empathy, self-reflection, and sensitive communication. Trauma, however, is often unwordable, fragmentary, and physically encoded, incompatible with storying methods. This article presents a (...) recent innovation, the Art is Patient seminar series, which focuses on aesthetic exercises to help learners access and share non-verbal, embodied, and relational responses to art. Based in an art museum context, it provides successive experiences of approaching, witnessing, and engaging with visual art as an analogue to developing trauma-sensitive relationships. Reflections on the process locate the seminar vis-à-vis health humanities practices, aesthetics, and trauma-informed approaches. (shrink)

The article considers a pressing problem in the field of inclusive education: creating a comfortable learning environment for the effective education of children with special needs. In this article, a mobile electronic alphabet Braille simulator is an element of the learning environment for children with special needs. The article describes an experiment on teaching visually impaired and blind children using a mobile electronic Braille alphabet simulator. The mobile electronic Braille alphabet trainer, based on new advanced technology, was (...) developed by Kazakh scientist-inventor Galimzhan Gabdreshov under the brand of his company SEZUAL. It was developed to reduce the time that blind children need to learn to read. The relevance of the study lies in the need to educate visually impaired and blind children through the introduction of modern technologies. Children entering primary, mainstream and special needs schools have been learning Braille for several years with varying degrees of success. The article shows the result of an experiment on teaching children using an electronic Braille alphabet simulator and without this simulator. The experiment showed the benefits of teaching blind children using a Braille simulator. An experimental study on the implementation of the SEZUAL electronic alphabet simulator with Braille was carried out in schools for the blind in the cities of Atyrau and Astana. A way to improve a mobile electronic alphabet Braille simulator is to make a simultaneous sound signal when a child presses the keys of the Braille simulator, with different Braille characters. To enhance the impact on the associative zone of the cerebral cortex, in the Braille simulator, sound signals of each key are added to the touch keys, which, like visual signals, are processed by the associative zone of the cerebral cortex and help to consolidate the perception of the simulator keys. This article describes in detail an experiment on the assimilation of educational material by blind and visually impaired children using a combination of parameters of sensorimotor and auditory perception of children. To clarify the peculiarities of the perception of blind and visually impaired respondents, their leading representative systems and modalities were identified before the experiment. The test was conducted based on the educational institution Atyrau Regional School for Gifted Children, Republic of Kazakhstan. (shrink)

In relation to the question of the art of living, this chapter articulates the opposite of Richard Rorty’s liberal ironist: the egotist. In the first section, I articulate what egotism is and who egotists are. My aim is to nominate the egotist as a useful counter-figure to the liberal ironist. In the second section, I talk about irony. I emphasize the radicalism and relevance of Rorty’s conception of irony with the help of recent literature. In the third section, I argue (...) that the power of irony is crucial to fight egotism. I show how Rorty mobilizes irony by way of self-creation and solidarity to combat the problem of egotism. In the fourth section, I summarize my argument and suggest how an ironic life prevents nihilism. (shrink)

Our engagement with social media, smart and mobile technologies is ambiguous and raises existential questions about the naturalness and desirability of hyper-connectivity. On the one hand, we benefit from using these technologies in organizing and socializing our everyday life. On the other hand, they further complicate our lives. Hence, in recent years, more and more people choose to abstain from digital media by taking on a so-called ‘digital detox,’ a period of living without these technologies. In this article, we (...) look at ‘digital detoxing’ from an existential perspective by introducing Kierkegaard’s existential categories of repetition and recollection to tackle the question whether ‘dropping out’ is a meaningful act or a temporary respite. What would it mean, so we ask, to find a proper balance in a world that demands constant connectivity? (shrink)

Artistic images, of a universal nature and validated by global culture, are carriers of an emotional potential that can be used for therapeutic purposes in cultural centers as well as in clinical spaces. Esthetic studies reveal the mobilizing power in their contemplation and the capacity to bring out personal stories with healing potential. The general objective of this paper is to design and validate the PROJECTA instrument, consisting of the therapeutic use of artistic images to approach trauma or difficult conditions (...) in therapy, by means of the association between art images and emotions, feelings or states of mind related with a traumatic experience. A mixed approach of investigation with a concurrent triangulation design has been used for the integration of qualitative and quantitative results, where qualitative research outweighs quantitative, but both have been QUAL → quan sequentially developed. The study was carried out in two phases. The first was a systematic review of the literature. The second, divided into five steps, consisted of the validation of artworks and the associated emotions with the participation of students, experts in art therapy, psychologists and educators through focus groups, interviews and an online questionnaire. The analysis techniques were qualitative and quantitative. A set of 220 artistic images linked to emotional states were proposed by experts in education, psychology and art therapy, and validated through an online questionnaire. The respondents included 228 students and professionals and for 64.55% of these images a consensus of over 80% was obtained. These images and their associated emotions were again reviewed by a confirmatory focus group. Finally, 92 artistic works were linked to primary, secondary and tertiary emotions such as love, joy, victory, surprise, balance, sense of humor, anger, sadness, fear, and emptiness. In addition, there are mobilizing images that have not been related to any emotion because of the polysemy of their meanings. It concludes that PROJECTA is a visual art therapy tool that provides professionals with a resource that helps facilitate the identification, expression or demonstration of emotions or feelings related with trauma, and in challenging situations of vulnerability, psychological discomfort or post-traumatic stress. (shrink)