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This white paper briefly outlines two co-dependent research initiatives: ‘Global Emblems’ and ‘Transmission and Intermediality: the impact of the emblematic culture in Ibero-America’. Both projects are in their initial stage of development, at Brown University. ▪ ‘Global Emblems’ is set to map, document and study the presence of emblems in material culture, around the world, and cross-link these occurrences with pre-existing digital collections of emblem books. The database will be fed by an international network of specialists, which is already active, with members in over ten countries and the support of the Society for Emblem Studies. The platform will allow searches by concepts (using Iconclass classification system) and a number of locations will allow users to ‘visit’ them through Virtual Reality (360 annotated photos). The database will be systematically studied through ‘thematic clusters’. Although at first glance the focus on emblems may seem narrow, emblems have a broad geographical and historical spread, which can be traced, and that provides the necessary data for the kind of analytical and interpretative study required in the second research initiative, which illustrates the importance of emblems within the wider frame of Latin American cultural history. ▪ ‘Transmission and Intermediality: the impact of the emblematic culture on the Early Americas’ will analyse the data from ‘Global Emblems’ in order to understand the role of emblems in the colonial process in the Americas. More specifically, this project will look at the ‘pictorial dispute’ in the New World, by examining the ‘pictorial turn’ from the ‘catecismos jeroglíficos’ to the displayed emblems in the 17th-century (many of them resulting from the remediation of European prints), and the ideological, political and sociological implications around the presence of these emblems in buildings and early-modern festivals.

Symbola es una base de datos y biblioteca digital destinada a recopilar el mayor número posible de divisas o empresas históricas que usaron reyes, caballeros, damas, eclesiásticos, académicos, impresores, etc. entre los siglos XIV y XVII, tanto en el ámbito español como internacional. Se ofrece como una aplicación de acceso gratuito a través de Internet junto con otros recursos creados por el mismo grupo de investigación (SIELAE-Grupo Hispania, de la Universidade da Coruña –España­–) con financiación del programa estatal I + D de España (proyectos BIDISO 5 y BIDISO 6). Este artículo expone la motivación del planteamiento del proyecto, objetivos, las especificaciones para el diseño conceptual de la base de datos y detalles sobre el desarrollo de la herramienta web de gestión y la interfaz web de consulta.

"Shepherding on Argeș Valley – spatial coordinates This paper presents the essential elements that define the spatial coordinate characteristic of shepherding which is practised in the sub-Carpathian villages on the Argeș Valley, following the documentary attestations of the villages, the genesis and evolution of the village boundaries, the evolution of land ownership and the right to use lands (in condominium or individually). Also within the spatial coordinate, there are researched the traditional ways in which the potential of the rural land fund is highlighted, as a result of its geomorphological, pedological, climatic qualities, etc., the study taking into consideration all the areal types with pastoral potential, not only those on the administrative territory of the villages, but also those in the mountain area destined for summer grazing. If for the presentation of origins, attestations, borderline fixation of the villages from the studied areal, documents, monographic studies and other categories of specialized works have been used, for the understanding of the manner of pastoral, individual and especially collective exploitation of the land fund by the village communities, of valorizing the fodder qualities of the different types of surfaces, it was necessary to carry out field research in the three targeted villages: Albeștii de Argeș, Corbeni and Arefu, all in the Argeș County. The visit of sheepfolds from Lespezi, Lipitoarea, Ciocanu, Podeanu, Oticu, in the alpine hollow of the Făgăraș Mountains, were necessary both for studying some elements related to the spatial coordinate (sheepfold location, daily travel routes, travel routes from the village hearth to the mountains, etc.) as well as for conducting interviews, based on an elaborate questionnaire, interviews generating unique and extremely useful information also for researching the other coordinates of the pastoral system practiced in the area. Keywords: shepherding, Argeș Valley, spatial coordinate, pastoral system, field research "

Předmětem studie je uměnovědná deskripce, analýza a interpretace Tizianova plátna Toaleta mladé ženy (1512−1515) z Obrazárny Pražského hradu. Ve studii je uplatněn ikonografický přístup k výkladu konkrétních motivů, včetně postižení historických, výtvarných i literárních předloh a vlivů. Pozornost je kladena zejména na motiv zrcadla, zrcadlení a renesanční ideál ženy v kontextu dobové módy, péče o tělo a tělesný půvab. V této souvislosti je popsán a analyzován také vznik ženského polovičního portrétu jako výtvarné inovace v dílech benátských mistrů první třetiny 16. století. Studie neopomíjí ani další verze a variace tohoto plátna z okruhu dílny Tiziana nebo malíře, kteří ve své umělecké tvorbě navázali na obraz Toaleta mladé ženy. V závěru studie je prezentován akviziční osud plátna a jeho výskyt ve sbírce Rudolfa II. na Pražském hradě.

espanolEscribiendo en respuesta al ensayo de Sartre sobre literatura comprometida, Adorno proclamo: “No es el momento para obras de arte politicas; mas bien, la politica ha migrado a la obra de arte autonoma, y ha penetrado mas profundamente en obras que se presentan a si mismas como politicamente muertas”. Hoy, los teoricos del “giro social” en el arte han rechazado completamente a Adorno, adoptando en cambio un nuevo tipo de compromiso en el arte. En este ensayo, revisito esta larga disputa sobre la “eficacia” social del arte en sus formas clasicas y contemporaneas. Al preguntarme como debemos entender la labor politica del arte en nuestros dias, examino dos teorias del efecto, basadas en un analisis del “giro comunicativo” de Habermas: una que alego que conduce a una reduccion sociologica de lo politico en el arte; y otra que sugiero que ofrece una base para entender la eficacia politica del arte, comprendida en terminos de lo que yo llamo una teoria del efecto politico “perlocutiva” o “aleatoria”. EnglishWriting in response to Sartre’s essay on engaged literature, Adorno proclaimed: “This is not the time for political works of art; rather politics has migrated into the autonomous work of art, and it has penetrated most deeply into works that present themselves as politically dead”. Today, the theorists of the “social turn” in art have all but rejected Adorno entirely, embracing instead a new kind of commitment in art. In this essay, I revisit this longstanding dispute about the social “efficacy” of art in both its classical and contemporary forms. In asking how we are to understand a political work of art today, I examine two theories of effect, based on an analysis of Habermas’s “communicative turn” –one that I allege leads to a sociological reduction of the political in art; and the other that I suggest provides a basis for understanding art’s political efficacy grasped in terms of what I call a “perlocutionary” or “aleatory” theory of political effect.

The two key aspects of water infrastructure – engineered and human – in mid-nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro are the foci of this article. On the one hand, gravity flow engineering brought fresh water from the Tijuca Forest to the fountains in the city, but on the other, hundreds of slaves carried heavy jugs of water from the fountains though the streets to residences. Using the account of Thomas Ewbank (1856), georeferenced historical maps and a field study, this article first reconstructs the route of the Carioca Aqueduct, then, using the accounts of Ewbank and other travellers, turns to the delivery of water in the city by enslaved water carriers.

This article presents three research gestures (enlarging, dismantling and diverting) undertaken at the photographic archive of the Sylvio de Vasconcellos Photo-Documentation Laboratory, in order to highlight aspects that have established a field of debate regarding city, technique and everyday life. This was engaged upon with sources from the Photo-Documentation Service in the School of Architecture at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, chiefly from the years 1954 to 1964. The research gestures, as poetics, experimented with ways of “making the archive speak”. They also provoked sounds when they brought into discussion the ordinary life captured through photography, and the implications of this technical mediation in the practice of the city and in constructing representations and discourses. By penetrating the devices of the patrimonial archive and focusing on the historical plot surrounding the vernacular, these gestures have glimpsed critical updates of what was discarded, and are also urban practices to the extent that they establish other ways with which to see the city (or un-see it, in the terms of Manoel de Barros and Rita Velloso).

This essay will assess the extent to which screened broadcasts of Shakespeare plays in Hong Kong contribute to a sense of cosmopolitan cultural identity in the city, and engage with current issues ...

Indigenous photobomb memes emerged on social networks as a media practice alongside contemporary activist campaigns, where artists insert pop culture content into digitized ethnographic photographs already in use as mainstream meme fodder. This article takes a materialist approach to such memes to explore how the technical processes of digital image editing function ideologically. Meme series by Kiowa-Choctaw artist Steven Paul Judd and others illustrate how compositing methods like cloning and healing tools may disrupt ethnographic photographs’ claims to history, interrogating the aesthetic systems that underwrite settler-colonial media. As these algorithmic processes remediate the digitized image and re-situate it relative to other photoshopping practices, they bear a trace of settler digitality that allows such memes to intervene in current cultural debates and aesthetic trends. Circulation via social media generates a web of twice-remediated memes, which always refer back to their prior analog and digital iterations.

Scholars have shown that historicizing studies of sight can shed light on everything from art history to statecraft to scientific inquiry. But the disciplined eye of the scholar of language—the philological observer—has received little attention, an omission particularly worthy of notice given recent interest in how the history of humanities might be incorporated into the history of science more broadly. This article contributes to a treatment of philological observation in the nineteenth century. Focusing particularly on the career of the Munich Latinist Eduard Wölfflin (1831–1908), a founding father of the monumental Latin lexicon known as the Thesaurus linguae Latinae, it isolates three distinct modes of philological observation: the constitutive, the collative, and the estimative. In the process, it indicates parallels between the kinds of sight practiced by philologists and those of their contemporaries in other investigative arenas, showing how developments on a Latinist's desk can be tied into much larger networks of cultural and epistemic concerns

My investigation into the cognitive aspects of landscape description takes as its focus the landscapes that the poet evokes on the Shield of Achilles (Il. 18.478–608). Drawing on studies in cognitive psychology I note the extent to which an audience might derive a ‘spatial mental model’ from the topographical or ‘locative’ indicators that the Homeric poet offers. Then I consider the ‘non-locative’ information that the poet conveys about the landscapes of the Shield. In this connection I develop Barbara Tversky's notion of landscape representation as a ‘cognitive collage’. What makes the scenes on the Shield vivid, however, is human presence. Finally, therefore, I draw on enactivist theories of cognition, recently introduced into Classics, which offer a valuable supplementary approach to ‘reading’ and enjoying landscape descriptions in Homer.

Dieser Beitrag untersucht, was es heißt, verwundet zu leben. Was auf den ersten Blick als eine mehr als gewöhnliche und kaum spektakuläre Frage erscheinen mag, wird nach Untersuchung der dominanten Phantasmen der Unverletzlichkeit als eine Grundfrage der historischen Anthropologie erkennbar: Wie entsteht und wandelt sich der tägliche Umgang mit eigener Verletzlichkeit und Verwundung im Menschenbild? Welche Wunden des Gewöhnlichen werden in den meisten Lebens- und Arbeitsumgebungen im Allgemeinen ignoriert und ausgeblendet? Worin bestehen die Idiosynkrasien eines empfindsamen Leibes, eines sensorisches Corpus? Und in welchem Zusammenhang stehen die Begehren eines bestimmten Menschen zu seinen Wunden? Eine Körperanthropologie der Wunden bezieht die Verletzungen eines Menschen im Laufe seines Lebens als integraler Teil eines Menschenbildes mit ein.

The author introduces the concept of looking without seeing to describe the layered use of technology required to experience microorganisms during the making of The Stars Beneath Our Feet: an audiovisual installation for Lumiere Durham, a four-day international light festival produced by Artichoke in the U.K. First, the author describes the experience of technological layering when attempting to perceive microorganisms in the visual field and then the methodology adopted to determine how the same microorganisms might be perceived in the auditory field. The conclusion describes the author's sense of being with the organism as a form of constructed perception in the context of “looking for” and “listening for” microorganisms through an expanded technological frame.

Sonia Delaunay is best known for her abstract and colourful style which is manifested across her artwork, fashion, textile and interior designs alike. In 1926, this culminated in a fashion film, titled ‘L’Elégance’. Shot using the Keller-Dorian colour process, the film features a succession of Delaunay’s simultaneous fashion and textile designs. This article explores the implications and origins of the film, considering technological, cultural and social factors. It focuses on the themes of colour and movement that were essential both to the film and Delaunay’s philosophy at large and were strongly related by Delaunay and her contemporaries to modernity and women’s liberation. The author positions Delaunay’s earlier work as a form of proto-cinema and demonstrates how her film uniquely transfers aesthetic and cultural themes. She explains why fashion film was a necessary step for Delaunay and how she employed notions of temporality to further fashion film as an avant-garde form.

The author recounts how she came to carry out artistic research on guitar multiphonics when composing a piece for solo guitar. She explains how the investigation gave rise to a new form of usage of that unconventional technique.

This article explores concepts of compositional meaning that arise from cocreative composing with music-generation software. Drawing from an analysis of the 2017 electroacoustic composition Virtutes Occultae, the composer discusses the implications of computer-generated music for the role of the composer. After an overview of how the music-generation software he developed contributed to the creation of Virtutes Occultae, the composer makes comparisons between his process and the use of generative commercial music software to create music, in order to draw distinctions between creating computer-generated music to extend aesthetic sensibilities and creating computer-generated music that iterates based on established commercial styles. Finally, the composer proposes future paths for further investigation involving the development of new musical styles through computer-generated music and reactive computer improvisation.

This article describes and discusses a transdisciplinary research project that archives children’s drawings of their lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer + (LGBTQ+) family structures. Children with LGBTQ+ parents from Ontario, Canada, were interviewed and asked to draw a portrait of their family. The drawings and related interviews have provided empirical data with which to generate theory about their subjective realities. Analysis rests in two locations: the act of a child drawing and the adult’s collective witnessing of the drawings. In asking what new forms of kinship can be symbolically elaborated in their drawings, we have worked with the children to cultivate representations that re-figure notions of family so that a multiplicity of attachments and forms of cohabitation are better understood. Our analysis employs affect theory, psychoanalysis, and arts-based research methods, with emphasis on the socio-political significance of aesthetic expression.

This article discusses an experiment in combining personal archival digital images, including those taken at various dance performances or rehearsals, in which the phenomenon of interruption was both discovered and investigated. The composite images were shown at a Space, Race, Bodies cultural studies and activist conference with the theme of ‘Walls’, held in 2018 in Aotearoa New Zealand. Parallel with discussing the process of creating these images and considering their effects, the article draws on the experience of exhibiting at the conference to explore relations between poetics and politics. The idea of interruption can be a key to this relation. With its rich history in the modernist performing arts and film, interruption facilitates making connections through difference.

This article examines and discusses how teachers at upper secondary school relate to teaching dance history within the course Dance Theory, focusing on the aim that students critically examine various dance history writings. The study uses interviews and open-ended questionnaires, and the material has been analysed qualitatively and discussed in relation to historiographical and norm-critical perspectives. The study shows that a historiographic perspective is important to teachers when they describe their teaching but less important when describing what they think students should gain from their studies. Instead, a general knowledge of dance history and an ability to connect one’s dancing to a historical context are central. The norm-critical perspective is manifested mainly in the teachers’ positioning of themselves, but as I understand it, the critical examination primarily lies within the norm rather than providing a means of looking outside the Western box. The next challenge is therefore to not only review the conditions in which history is created but also question and change the structures that create knowledge.

Laura Dean's creative output in minimalist art spans interconnected work in dance, music, and drawing. Throughout the early 1970s, Dean represented her compositional structures as works on paper, which present an expanded visualization of her artistic experimentation with color, symmetry, repetition, and form. Dean rejects the reconstruction of her performance works, instead she advances a notion of dances as impermanent. Situating Dean in the context of serial and conceptual art in which the material art object is deemphasized in favor of communicating compositional logic, I argue that Dean presents a choreographic legacy premised on the intentional disappearance of her work in favor of perpetuating ideation and concept.

The abstraction of musical structures (notes, melodies, chords, harmonic or rhythmic progressions, etc.) as mathematical objects in a geometrical space is one of the great accomplishments of contemporary music theory. Building on this foundation, I generalize the concept of musical spaces as networks and derive functional principles of compositional design 15 by the direct analysis of the network topology. This approach provides a novel framework for the analysis and quantification of similarity of musical objects and structures, and suggests a way to relate such measures to the human perception of different musical entities. Finally, the analysis of a single work or a corpus of compositions as complex networks provides alternative ways of interpreting the compositional process of a composer by quantifying emergent behaviors with 20 well-established statistical mechanics techniques. Interpreting the latter as probabilistic randomness in the network, I develop novel compositional design frameworks that are central to my own artistic research. One Sentence Summary: Network theory is an innovative tool for the classification of generalized musical spaces and provides a framework for the discovery or generation of functional 25 principles of compositional design.

De Rerum Natura is an electroacoustic composition by the author, based on field recordings from the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. The piece is part of wider research from the author that explores the act of listening, associated visual mental imagery and dynamic subjective links between the composer's experience of listening to/recording experience of the original material and the audience's perception of the final composition as it is performed. This article focuses on the author's process of developing De Rerum Natura, based on Deep Listening. De Rerum Natura also examines the merging of the composition with the acoustics of the performance space.

Stowaway City is an immersive audio experience that combines electroacoustic composition and storytelling with extended reality. The piece was designed to accommodate multiple listeners in a shared auditory virtual environment. Each listener, based on their tracked position and rotation in space, wirelessly receives an individual binaurally decoded sonic perspective via open-back headphones. The sounds and unfolding narrative are mapped to physical locations in the performance area, which are only revealed through exploration and physical movement. Spatial audio is simultaneously presented to all listeners via a spherical loudspeaker array that supplements the headphone audio, thus forming a hybrid listening environment. The work is presented as a conceptual and technical design paradigm for creative sonic application of the technology in this medium. The author outlines a set of strategies that were used to realize the composition and technical affordances of the system.

The author argues that significant aspects of electronic music performance have been diminished in the rush to incorporate the latest, often discreet (as in intentionally unobtrusive) technologies. He identifies these aspects as agency, ritual and, to a lesser extent, serendipity and mess. Using references to his own work, he suggests that applying an understanding of how actors create totems to present agency and affordance is essential to regain, and possibly acclimate, these tools and practices so they are relevant to live electronic music performance practice in a contemporary technology environment.

This article examines Eleo Pomare's concept of vitality in his pieceBlues for the Jungle(1966) as a black aesthetic approach to choreography. Vitality seeks to connect with black audiences in Harlem by referencing and affirming shared cultural knowledge, conveying an embodied epistemology of the US political economy defined by the lived experiences of Harlem: “Harlem knows.” Using a lens of diaspora citation, I argue that Pomare's choreographic citations of “vital” ways of moving and knowing in Harlem critique the terms for “proper” national belonging, while articulating diasporic belonging in motion.

Music Gesture can be thought of as being made up of dynamic, multisensorial lines. From this, the author draws from Ingold's “correspondence of lines” as a conception of music and a transformative compositional process, informing gestural line expressions and the development of notation systems for the body. The author outlines the technology he has developed for two compositions, involving a video scoring methodology and software that enables interactive video gestural sampling in a collaborative art music context. The author also engages with Ingold's concept of the “mesh,” as lines that overflow, and imagines how the mesh could be perceived through sensory modalities. This discourse of lines is contextualized through examples of absurdist instrumental pieces and corporeally based music.

This article reflects upon an artist residency at the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee, hosted by Parkinson’s disease research. It examines three distinct ways in which drawing methods and the prints they generate respond to the medical research. First, drawing methods mirror practices of looking and visualizing in the research laboratories. The relationship between datasets, algorithms and the images they generate is explored to propose the unstable nature of visualizations. Second, the artist’s original drawings are destabilized and transformed into ‘mutants’ to mirror the genetic mutations that are at the heart of the research. By substituting artworks for scientific images in a public-facing event, scientists enact the uncertainties and ambiguities of interpreting visual material. Finally, visitors interact with a print installation to mirror and enact scientific practices of selecting, categorizing and searching for patterns to emerge in visualizations.

In this article the authors present their sound art project Nephew vs. Overheard as an exploration of a messy, fragile and incoherent local approach to public ecological art, an approach that aims at creating links of affectivity with technological creatures, such as large wind turbines, with which we share our landscape. Supplementing, as well as challenging, the dominant global strategy of ecological art, the authors argue that it is essential to experiment with transductive chains of local environmental data, creating sensibilities that we can relate to in our everyday environments. In this article the authors present their sound art project Nephew vs. Overheard as an exploration of a messy, fragile and incoherent local approach to public ecological art, an approach that aims at creating links of affectivity with technological creatures, such as large wind turbines, with which we share our landscape. Supplementing, as well as challenging, the dominant global strategy of ecological art, the authors argue that it is essential to experiment with transductive chains of local environmental data, creating sensibilities that we can relate to in our everyday environments.

Focusing on a one-minute ‘fashion film’ by the Dutch fashion designer Alexander van Slobbe for the retrospective exhibition on his work in Utrecht’s Centraal Museum in 2010, this article investigates the interconnectedness of film and fashion through their mutual concern with the processes of crafting and dressing. A close reading of Van Slobbe’s film highlights a current return to a minimal design aesthetic in both fashion and film that shows fashion as a process or as a ‘manual’ operation. This film goes beyond the portrait of a fashion designer, becoming a meditation on the material practice of designing, crafting and viewing. That practice involves an intimacy with materiality constituting the fashion garment as a material, crafted and dynamic sartorial object that requires an axial positionality stemming from horizontal closeness. Ultimately, this article presents horizontality as being part of the experience of both moving images and fashion as a material object. The aim is thus to reflect on what is termed ubiquitous ‘screenic fashion’ (as a peculiar affinity between fashion and screen) by considering an alignment of horizontality and materiality as related to a current and vivid concern in the field of fashion and clothes-making.

It can be difficult to acknowledge our own fragility. The equilibrium between a healthy environment, the energy our society needs to maintain or improve its usual lifestyle, and the world’s interconnected economies can pass more quickly than expected from a delicate balance to an entirely new reality where human beings would need to be more creative than ever before to survive. The frequency and severity that certain weather and climate-related events are having around us are increasing, and the ability of human beings to modify our adjacent surroundings has turned into a power capable of altering the planet. Do the media arts have a role in all this?

The term decolonize has gained a new life in recent art activism, as a radical challenge to the Eurocentrism of museums (in light of Native, Indigenous, and other epistemological perspectives) as well as in the museum's structural relation to violence (either in its ties to oligarchic trustees or to corporations engaged in the business of war or environmental depredation). In calling forth the mid-twentieth-century period of decolonization as its historical point of reference, the word's emphatic return is rhetorically powerful, and it corresponds to a parallel interest among scholars in a plural field of postcolonial or global modernisms. The exhortation to decolonize, however, is not uncontroversial-some believe it still carries a Eurocentric bias. Indeed, it has been proposed that, for the West, de-imperialization is perhaps even more urgent than decolonization. What does the term decolonize mean to you in your work in activism, criticism, art, and/or scholarship? Why has it come to play such an urgent role in the neoliberal West? How can we link it historically with the political history of decolonization, and how does it work to translate postcolonial theory into a critique of the neocolonial contemporary art world? Respondents include Nana Adusei-Poku, Brook Andrew, Sampada Aranke, Ian Bethell-Bennett, Kader Attia, Andrea Carlson, Elise Y. Chagas, ISUMA, Iftikhar Dadi, Janet Dees, Nitasha Dhillon, Hannah Feldman, Josh T. Franco, David Garneau, Renee Green, Iman Issa, Arnold J. Kemp, Thomas Lax, Nancy Luxon, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Saloni Mathur, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Alan Michelson, Partha Mitter, Isabela Muci Barradas, Steven Nelson, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Alessandro Petti, Paulina Pineda, Christopher Pinney, Elizabeth Povinelli, Ryan Rice, Andrew Ross, Paul Chaat Smith, Nancy Spector, Francoise Verges, Rocio Zambrana, and Joseph R. Zordan.

By focusing on surviving costumes of the 1913 production ofThe Rite of Spring, this article asks how a close examination of costumes and their role in historical performance practice can change our understanding of a canonical work of art. It argues for methodological pluralism in examining material remains together with manuscript annotations, images and reviews of the production rarely considered in previous research and, consequentially, for a critical examination of all previous claims, including the so-called reconstruction (1987) ofThe Rite of Spring. Compared with designs and costumes of other productions by the Ballets Russes company, those of the 1913 production explain much of the contradictory ways in which the work figured in discourses relating to art and modernism in France and Russia at the time. Most importantly, the costumes exemplify a particular tradition of making theatre that has been obscured by the prevailing Orientalist view of the Ballets Russes company that is hegemonic in what is claimed to be ‘known’ aboutThe Rite of Springand its reception.

This ultimate Archaeology celebrates the legacy of Leonardo, an idea that became a Journal that developed into a global transdisciplinary community. The author reflects on the last half century of innovation in the practice of art and science that has galvanized generations of creative practitioners entangled in the turbulence of transdisciplinary thinking. In tracking the emergence of this mind space, this Archaeology projects to the future where Leonardo has a vital role to play in engaging and shaping new world perspectives.

This article looks at the emergence of physical material in a growing number of contemporary sound-based art practices. From academic symposia to music festivals and media art exhibitions, the material presence of physical artefacts is notable in a variety of sound-based disciplines and scenarios. Considering the significance of the visual aspect of these works, this article proposes a reassessment of what audiovisual entails. I argue that our understanding of audiovisual status needs to be expanded beyond the scope of screen-based applications and move into the physical realm of objects and material. Further to this, I outline how the dominant discussions around materiality in sound-based art do not speak sufficiently to the physical materiality manifested in a growing wave within the field. Using an example of my own creative work, I will then suggest audiovisual materialism as an alternative lens through which such practices can be better examined, understood and built upon.

There are a number of electroacoustic (EA) composers who draw on spiritual or religious material for their work. However, for some the word ‘spiritual’ is problematic, being too vague or broad, and the word ‘religious’ too narrow. To refine the word ‘spiritual’ therefore, in a way that might be acceptable also to those who are religious, I employ the contemporary concept of spiritual intelligence (SI) as a proposed framework for linking a discourse of spirituality with electroacoustic music. In addition to postulating SI as a way of framing the word ‘spirituality’, I identify three different ways in which EA composers draw on spiritual or religious material: some use existing sacred texts or methods; some approach sound itself to explore the nature of reality; finally, there are those who are drawn to ancient ways of understanding where spirit and material worlds are not separated; for example, in the West, the Pythagorean tradition.

This article seeks to problematize our understanding of Tasso’s depiction of Goffredo in the Gerusalemme Liberata. I do so by considering how Tasso revised three passages of the Gottifredo—his poem’s original title—in response to his censors’ recommendations: specifically, I discuss Goffredo’s failed attempt to win Sveno’s sword (omitted from canto 8 of the Liberata), and then turn to the Christian captain’s reactions to Armida’s seduction of his men in canto 4 and to Rinaldo’s killing of the fellow crusader Gernando in canto 5. I argue that, particularly as his character was initially delineated in the Gottifredo, the Christian captain is neither a monolithic embodiment of virtue nor a personification of Tasso’s supposed authoritarianism. Goffredo is, instead, the complex persona of a political and military leader who reveals the flaws buried beneath an apparently impermeable surface.

Benedetto Varchi’s Due Lezzioni not only represent the high point of the debate on the paragone between painting and sculpture, but they also bring up the question of the comparison of painting and poetry. Building his argument on their common foundation in imitation, in the second lecture Varchi advocates the superiority of poetry over painting based on its mimetic capacity. My paper investigates this topic in Varchi’s sonnets, focusing on a rhetorically consistent series of poems addressed to the painter and poet Angolo Bronzino, with whom the poet enjoyed a close friendship, and culminating in a correspondence with the medalist Domenico Poggini. In these poems Varchi renovates the Petrarchan model of Rvf 77–78 by setting up a Neo-platonically based dialectic between dentro as the domain of poetry and fuori as the domain of painting, thereby shifting the comparison from the field of their mimetic capacity to that of their glorifying and immortalizing function.

Autor przygląda się afektywnym aspektom oraz związanej z nimi performatywnej sprawczości wykorzystania we współczesnym kinie nagrań terenowych. Wywód jest zogniskowany wokół twórczości i postaci Chrisa Watsona, specjalisty od nagrań terenowych przyrody, pracującego m.in. dla BBC, zwłaszcza przy produkcjach Davida Attenborough. Zestawiając dyskursy współczesnych afektywnych teorii kina i jego warstwy dźwiękowej (m.in. Michela Chiona, Barbary Flückiger, Caryl Flinn, Danijeli Kulezic-Wilson) z dyskursami wokół samego field recordingu (Francisco López) oraz różnymi narzędziami współczesnej humanistyki, autor pokazuje, w jaki sposób nagrania terenowe współtworzą afektywne narracje filmów oraz oddziałują na odbiorcę, budując przestrzeń światów przedstawionych, a także w jaki sposób nagrania terenowe przyrody wpisują się w szerszy krajobraz afektywny niepokojów doby katastrofy klimatycznej.

El extinto Museo de Reproducciones Artísticas de Madrid, cuya colección alberga el Museo Nacional de Escultura de Valladolid desde 2011, contó con copias de 14 piezas mesopotámicas. Buena parte de las mismas se encargó a dos museos de referencia europeos: el Museo Británico (Londres) y el Museo del Louvre (París). En este artículo nos fijaremos en tres relieves de Khorsabad, de Nimrud y de Nínive cuyos originales se encuentran en el Louvre. Gracias al trabajo con documentación de archivo del Museo de Reproducciones ha sido posible, en primer lugar, descubrir el vaciado del relieve de Khorsabad como una desiderata que se trató de gestionar en 1896 pero que nunca llegó a materializarse. En segundo lugar se ha identificado al arqueólogo Pierre Paris (1859-1930) como el intermediario que posibilitó que el Louvre donara al museo madrileño los vaciados de dos relieves de Nimrud y de Nínive en el año 1900. Por todo ello, este caso de estudio articulado a partir de tres ejemplos permite reconstruir algunos aspectos de las relaciones entre el Louvre y el Museo de Reproducciones entre 1896 y 1900, reflejo a su vez de los vínculos culturales y diplomáticos entre los dos países implicados. The extinct Museum of Artistic Reproductions of Madrid, whose collection houses the National Museum of Sculpture (Valladolid) since 2011, had copies of 14 Mesopotamian pieces. A good part of them was commissioned to two European reference museums: the British Museum and the Louvre Museum. In this article we pay attention to three reliefs from Khorsabad, Nimrud and Nineveh, the originals of which are in the Louvre. As a result of the work with archival documentation from the Reproduction’s Museum, it has been possible, first, to identify the plaster cast of the Khorsabad relief as a desiderata managed in 1896 but never materialized. Secondly, the archaeologist Pierre Paris (1859-1930) has been identified as the intermediary who made it possible for the Louvre to donate to the Madrid museum in the year 1900 the plaster casts of two reliefs from Nimrud and from Nineveh. This case study, articulated from three examples, allows the reconstruction of some aspects of the relationship between the Louvre and the Reproduction’s Museum between 1896 and 1900, reflecting in turn the cultural and diplomatic ties between the two countries involved.

The anticlerical violence of the Spanish Civil War has received significant scholarly attention in recent years. However, there has been relatively little focus on the iconoclasm, even though the destruction of objects was easily the most common form of anticlerical violence. Nor has the effect of iconoclastic violence on those who treasured or venerated these objects been examined. This article looks at the emotional significance of the material artefacts that came under attack during the Civil War. It argues that, while some objects were treated simply as the material of which they were made, most provoked more complex interactions. In contrast to most earlier episodes of iconoclasm, these also left a visual record, which shows how the memory of the violence was shaped not only by textual accounts but also by photographs that memorialised and aestheticised it.

Obraz Powołanie św. Mateusza Caravaggia budził wielkie zainteresowanie już od czasu swojego powstania. Jest jednym z dzieł, na których badaniu doskonalone są metody historii sztuki. Mimo wielkiego dorobku badawczego, przedmiotem kontrowersji pozostaje nadal tak podstawowa kwestia, jak identyfikacja protagonisty: która z postaci na obrazie przedstawia Mateusza? Taka sytuacja stawia pod znakiem zapytania odpowiedniość dotychczas stosowanych metod interpretacji W artykule rozważono ten problem na generalnym tle: skąd w ogóle wiadomo kto jest kim w obrazie i zaproponowano nowe uzasadnienie tradycyjnej identyfikacji w oparciu o przesłanki wynikające z kontekstu dzieła.

The Italian dancer and painter Alberto Spadolini was rediscovered when a box containing numerous documents relating to his artistic life was recovered in 1978 by his nephew, Marco Travaglini. This box forms the core of the archive assembled by Travaglini since 2004, containing valuable information about his uncle who had been largely-neglected. Spadolini (1907–1972) was born in Ancona, Italy, studied in Rome during the 1920s and moved to France in the 1930s. In 1932, he became a famous music-hall dancer performing in solo numbers and group works with Josephine Baker and Mistinguett, among others. Throughout the decade he came to be known as ‘the nude dancer’, possibly owing to the skimpy costumes he usually wore and his statuesque body. From the 1940s he began painting a series of works featuring ballerinas in tutus. He never spoke to his nephew about his life as dancer, so that when Travaglini found the box, he was amazed at what he discovered. The box constitutes a precious archive, containing photographs, posters, articles, and reviews relating to Spadolini's career as a dancer and painter. I intend to analyse Spadolini's box using methodological tools from archive studies and from dance and cultural history, with particular attention to the concept of cultural hegemony, in order to establish the fundamental importance of such archives to the recovery of neglected figures like Spadolini.

This paper offers a conspectus of several online dance archives made in the context of the Portuguese research project TKB. The online searches we conducted from 2018 to the end of 2019 suggested four broad categories of resources for what one may call ‘online dance archives’. Aiming to observe how dance resources are available on the internet, we made each category correspond to a different operation – to collect (to build up a collection), to accumulate (to gather almost random material), to store (to organize according to a set of rules), to assemble (to compose and curate material). And we posed the same set of questions: for each of these categories: what is the mission of the archive, who are its subjects and objects, and which community of users does it bring together? The outcome is both a general overview, and the possibility of a comparative approach. Our original motivation has been to survey and to analyse a sample of available online resources for dance documentation and/or archiving, in order to feed TKB future projects and experiences. Starting from the TKB project perspective, and aiming at categorizing the different approaches to storage, curation, ownership and availability reflected by those archival platforms, we finally identified three major challenges in the relation between dance and the digital archive: the question of access, the ontology of dance and archive – what it is, what it has been, and what ‘dance and archiving’ can become in the future –, and the ‘Will to archive’ (cf. Lepecki 2010 ). Each one of these challenges will eventually provoke new questions as to the future of the TKB project and of its team of researchers, and the nature of the work they may undertake.

This article explores Alan Bennett’s Single Spies (1988), an espionage double bill comprising “An Englishman Abroad” and “A Question of Attribution,” proposing that the personalizing of social, political, and historical themes, as well as the astute documentation of a decaying Englishness and its class system in both plays, are representative of the work of a playwright whose output deserves serious critical attention. The study focuses on how Bennett historicizes the actions of his infamous protagonists (Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt) while challenging assumptions regarding patriotism. Single Spies is a Cambridge Five franchise, demonstrating the playwright’s characteristic wit, irony, and reflection on personal and national identity, illusion, and sacrifice. The one-act plays each deal with a key figure in the notorious Cambridge spy ring, enhancing the dramatic effect through the use of onstage theatrical and visual allusions. In the first play, references to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c 1599), together with English music, highlight Burgess’s duality and the bitter reality of his post-defection life in Russia, while the second play is notable for its use of two paintings (Titian and a Venetian Senator and Allegory of Prudence) as key images and conceits suggesting the gradual uncovering of the Cambridge Five. The paper therefore suggests that Bennett’s ability to lift the veil of personal and institutional secrecy, while airing his own ambivalence, confirms him as a skillful, if academically undervalued, commentator on Englishness.

Dance historians have long relied on institutional archives when reconstructing the past. Yet archives are notoriously incomplete and biased, promoting certain voices and leaving others out. This article offers a case study of what is lost when we look only at official archives. My focus is on turn-of-the-twentieth-century Paris, a time and place long thought to have been devoid of creative ballet choreography. I begin with a brief inventory of the state archives and compare those records to information recovered from the press, then demonstrate how different historical narratives can be constructed when comparing these two documentary sources. I conclude with an example of how fragmentary archives can skew history through a case study of Madame Mariquita, a once celebrated choreographer who has been left out of canonic history.

Oral archives are important components of dance archives but are not frequently discussed. In this context I am looking at the George Balanchine Foundation's Interpreters Archive and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's and Bojana Cvejić’s publication entitled The Choreographer's Score, the latter as basis for a possible archive. The oral descriptions provided in those projects transmit a form of knowledge about dance and choreographic practice that cannot be offered through physical demonstration and haptic exchanges of body postures and movement qualities alone. The oral transmission of information works here differently from written discourses, but both forms of documentation of dance can be seen as informing each other, providing traces of the choreographic practice that counteract the ephemerality of dance performances.

The paper situates current developments in British theatre within wider trends towards dystopia and (post-)apocalyptic writing. A central focus is on the role of posthuman elements in dystopian plays which are used to create a constant and pervasive, but mostly unspecific sense of crisis. Two recent works by female playwrights – Dawn King’s Foxfinder (2011) and Stef Smith’s Human Animals (2016) – are compared and related back to Caryl Churchill’s seminal Far Away (2000) to elucidate how the nonhuman comes to be perceived as a threat and how this leads to, and/or supports, a dystopian system and its violent measures. Moreover, both Foxfinder and Human Animals manage to combine absurdist elements that border on the surreal with more or less pronounced didactic implications for the audience, although these connections are realised in different ways by the two playwrights. In this manner, post-apocalyptic dystopian theatre of the early 21st century can become revolutionary rather than regressive.

This article analyzes Anne Washburn’s wildly popular, and often controversial, Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play (2012) by focusing on the principal retellings that shape Mr. Burns and delineating how Washburn’s adaptations produce the thematic content of the play. Washburn deftly interweaves a variety of high and low culture source material within the plot. Pandemic and apocalyptic tropes provide the ecofictional narrative base to adaptations of Stephen King’s The Stand (1978), Euripides’s Orestes, Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991), and a variety of episodes of The Simpsons (1989–). Through these retellings, Mr. Burns metatheatrically chronicles how stories shape listeners and their cultures. When the stories told simply pander to the materialism, greed, and commodification that permeate contemporary global capitalist culture, then society proliferates those solipsistic values. Washburn ultimately argues that, in what may seem like apocalyptic times, storytelling as embodied in the theater arts must instead advocate humanitarian collectivist values.

The article discusses the Batsheva Dance Company Archive Project, conducted by a team I headed in the years 2012–2015. 1 The analysis of this project will assist in understanding both its significance as an archival act of documenting the past, and its influence on the company's present and on Israeli dance. The method of analysis will include a description of the different practices involved in constructing a dance archive; a contextual discussion of archival practices; and a theoretical discussion, principally in the context of changes in current archiving practices and developments in critical thinking about dance as a discipline. The description of the course of events in this article mainly relies on my personal experience and involvement as director of the Batsheva Dance Company Archive Project. The different proceedings, goals, considerations and decisions were documented in monthly reports and in the project's concluding document, and so assisted in tracing the chronicle and details of events. 2

Employing an interdisciplinary sociopolitical framework, I examine Philip Osment’s play This Island’s Mine (1988) and demonstrate how it interrogates and repudiates Margaret Thatcher’s neoconservative authoritarian populism. Specifically, I argue that Osment’s play constitutes not only a damning indictment of Thatcherism, but also an enduring work that speaks directly to our present sociopolitical conjuncture, which has witnessed varied forms of reactionary populism sweep nations throughout the international community.