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While the cultural phenomenon known as vaporwave is commonly traced back to 2009, its defining characteristics remain a subject of ongoing debate within both popular culture and academic circles. Various perspectives categorize it as a microgenre of electronic music, a meme, an art movement, a critique of capitalism, or even a manifestation of pure aesthetics. As such, vaporwave remains a complex and multifaceted topic for research. In this paper, I explore the influence of post-internet culture on the formation of vaporwave and its aesthetics by analyzing the methods and strategies used to create what is recognized as vaporwave, rather than attempting to label or define it precisely. As a further step in this inquiry, I document an attempt to apply these methods and strategies, resulting in the publication of four music albums. This practice-based approach to analyzing vaporwave through creation and publication helps to better understand some core qualities and aesthetics of this art movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is dedicated to the theoretical approaches and methodologies of artwork interpretation. By drawing from the contemporary materialist philosophy, primarily the theories of Bruno Latour and Donna J. Haraway, the paper aims to develop a version of contextual interpretation that is both terrestrial and spectulative. The paper discusses the conditions of discoursive emancipation, networked inclusivity and agency of artworks, namely: author's death, the importance of cognition, and Rancière's notion of aesthetic regime. Rancière talks about the emancipation of viewer as a result of the unpredictability of sensory cognition and the incongruity of the rules of poetics and aesthetics, which implies the activisation of artworks (images, texts, etc.). The paper argues that artworks (mediated images) have more agency than texts, which is confirmed by visual phenomenology, psychoanalysis of the gaze, the paradigm of effigies, etc. The artworks are thus the active and not-quite-dead participants of social interrelations because they keep generating unforeseen performative consequences and random meanings, as well as shaping the behaviour of the audiences that perceive them. Meanwhile authors and interpreters are not subjects but 'mere' actants - they are not-quite-alive as they rely on mediatised repositories of knowledge and forms. In terms of Latour's Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the perceiving audience (including art theorists themselves) are networked actants, and their interrelations involve many other actants, including originary imagery, (meta)stories, ideas, artists, thinkers, atmospheric phenomena, animals, and artefacts. Within Haraway's paradigm of situated knowledge, an artwork would be a sympoietic companion that joins us in thinking, makes us worry, assemble into the networks of partial, embodied, and site-specific knowledge, as well as mourn and facilitate our response-ability. If we are able to think together with various human and non-human entities, both alive and dead, this surely extends to artworks too. Haraway calls the paradigm of cohabitation of species and entities Chthulucene, and sometimes it is possible to apply it to the artworks that are not necessarily new. In the second part, I ignore the distinction between the art theoretical text and meta-text, and take up the case of Antanas Gudaitis (1904-1989). A master figure of Lithuanian modernism, Gudaitis studied in Paris (1929-1931), and his later period is marked by the plentitude of references to inter-species cohabitation. In his drawings from the 1970s, we see birds sitting at the table together with people, and his later work features 'double-portraits' that combined the heads of humans and various animals. Depicted in the distinctly expressionist style, objects and animate creatures are turned into equal actants. Gudaitis stresses the optical similarities between humans and non-humans, which gives his work the quality of the Freudian uncanny. In the conditions of an almost total cultural isolation during the soviet era, the art of Gudaitis, as well as that of the CoBrA collective, with their vision of an empathetic and slightly uncanny inter-species cohabitation (which today we would call post-anthropocentric), could have only emerged in the artistic soil already prepared by surrealism. The research of creative contexts, cultural environment and imagery is common in art history, and it is also one of the traits of the situative - terrestrial - interpretation, although the reformation of the art theoretical language through a meaningful developing of the speculative dimension is certainly not an easy task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has not been much academic research into how the artefacts of orientalist art ended up in Lithuanian museums, libraries and private collections, and how they are represented. This paper raises the question of the Far Eastern art heritage in Lithuania, and addresses the problems of artistic attribution. The paper analyses the case of the Chinese woodblock prints--nianhua (年画), or the so-called "New Year images"--stored in the orientalist art collections of the Lithuanian Art Museum (LAM) and Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis National Museum of Art (MKČNMA). The collections contain seven nianhua prints of this particular format and style. The research has successfully decoded the Chinese inscriptions; specified and determined the titles of the prints; attributed the prints to specific printmaking schools and workshops; identified the theatrical motifs with their corresponding literary sources and Peking opera productions; elaborated on the characters and their various properties; specified the meanings of the allegories, emblems, scenographic makeup, and costumes; and defined the particularities of artistic expression. The paper combined iconographic, historical and comparative methodologies, and carried out a partial research on the artistic style. Compared to the Chinese graphic art collections in the museums abroad, the works stored in LAM and MKČMA are not as numerous, yet they are arguably just as rare and valuable. The prints are unique in their form, aesthetic value, and artistic technique. All prints are attributed to the famous Yangliuqing school and dated to the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. They are all in good condition, and some of them are professionally restored. This first attempt to identify and introduce the Chinese woodblock prints from the orientalist art collections of Lithuanian museums is intended to inspire further research, promote the museum collections, and give an impetus to expand them. The research aims to bring a wider knowledge about the theatre-themed prints that reflect the whole complex of Chinese spiritual culture to the contemporary audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the concept of camouflage masculinity will be presented and discussed. The concept was coined with the aim to analyse masculinity manifestations with the main focus on gay culture, and to create works of art on the corresponding theoretical basis. In the scope of the research, empirical data from the gay dating site PlanetRomeo was collected and analysed. Such data - representational visual images - are one of the core sources of inspiration for camouflage masculinity. Another important concept in this paper is camp. Its definition and relation with gay male culture are scrutinised in the context of the relevant aesthetic and social aspects. Finally, the author aims to look beyond camouflage masculinity and campish dazzle in quite an unexpected perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper critically discusses the issues of understanding the authenticity of architectural heritage and their implications for the conservation action. A special focus is placed on analysing where to look for significance and how significance depends on authenticity. There is also a discussion of what must be taken into account to be sure that the historical narrative of the architectural structure is properly understood and thus taken into account when planning a conservation action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the creative processes that took place during the years after the totalitarian regime in the field of photography. Those creative processes were responsible for the development of two artistic tendencies that were in opposition to each other. The Lithuanian school of photography that emerged in late 1960s formulated a conception of photography that was based on the documentary approach. In the meantime, the works of the new generation that debuted in early 1980s manifested an alternative expression that abandoned the values of the established tradition. This historical analysis focuses on how the principles of a stylistic vocabulary were constructed during the period and establishes the relationship that existed between the institution and the creative individual when culture underwent Sovietization. One of the most important objectives of the Sovietization of photography was related to the creation of a new ideological reality. With the aim of presenting the precise characteristics of this reality, the paper introduces a new term alt-reality. This term not only points to the nature of the phenomenon (as, for example, hyper-) or to its scale (as, for example, total-), but also provides grounds for its ideological goal to represent an idealized Soviet reality, i.e. to visualize it in qualitative categories. Documentary photographers who developed the traditions of the school usurped the concept in terms of the basic principles of the photographic art. Therefore, this new wave can be called "a movement for devisualization" (with some reservations) due to its main creative strategy isolation from the significance of the visual content. It remained peripheral for a whole decade, not only during the Soviet period, but also during the first years of independence. The first chapter discusses the construction of a Soviet alt-reality in photography during the Thaw period, when the emerging diachronic function of photography raised the modern aesthetics of photography to a position equivalent to social realism. The new documentary photographers announced their break from photojournalism publicly in 1969 by founding the Society of Art Photographers of Lithuanian SSR and creating a new aesthetic programme based on the synthesis of the documentary and psychologism; consolidating documentary photography as an art. The recognition that the status of the photo artist subsequently gained and the strengthened position of the Society itself prompted the development of a more diverse artistic expression in the Soviet Union. However, those Lithuanian photographers acquired such favourable conditions only because of the strategic implementation of political projects and the maintenance of good relationships with the nomenclature of the party and the government. They gained a strong ideological and theoretical rearguard in Moscow and most importantly created a trustworthy alt-reality that was widely spread not only within the Soviet Union, but also abroad, thus expressing not an individual point of view, but a common Soviet world outlook. During the last decades of the Soviet occupation documentary photographers interpreted reality much more critically. They searched for connections with the past and observed the unfriendly social environment. Their creative variations of the documentary medium, however, impeded experimentation and limited the use of formal aesthetics as a means to reveal the artistic potential of photography. The second chapter analyses the contradictions that were manifest from early 1980s between the traditional and alternative expression. The new generation of artists broke away from the canon of documentary reflection, maintaining that photography itself was a new artistic reality. Thus, the cornerstone of contention became not only the different perceptions of reality that were available in photography, or through photography, but also the definition of the limits of photography as an artistic object. Still, the pragmatic policy of public relations that was observed by the Society of Lithuanian Art Photographers was orientated towards the integrity of the medium in Soviet culture. This was pursued in a complex fashion by consistently reacting to party directives, implementing ideological engagements, suppressing inner controversies and by limiting the spread of alternative expression. Such a situation demonstrates that the alt-reality that was created during the Soviet period according to the conception of the traditional school of photography remained quite united in the public space; while the split took place on the level of the professional community's discourse and ideas. In the case of the school, photography was consolidated as a modern, yet "demonstrative" art, whereas the creators of alternative expression, who had a critical approach towards the traditional representation of reality, implanted the practices of devisualization. They were the first to inspire the use of postmodern tendencies in Lithuanian art photography under the circumstances of a weakened, although still ideological, restricted culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]