Search

The article explores the category of interdiscursivity from a perspective of its realization in films. As a point of departure, the historical ties of the avant-garde and cinema are ana­lyzed in terms of interdiscursivity. Literary and artistic works of the representatives of the Russian avant-garde are characterized by a number of innovations that are relevant for the understanding of the interdiscursivity in cinematography as art. The established avant-garde foundations of interdiscursivity make it possible to define it as a linguocreative appropriation of discourses and to elaborate a methodology of its study in films. The film “Stalker” is select­ed as an object of research due to the fact that Andrey Tarkovsky’s innovative cinematic ap­proach makes his works akin to the approaches of art innovators of the avant-garde epoch. The specificity of the interdiscursivity of “Stalker” is determined both by a significant degree of transformation of its literary basis and by a varied appropriation of certain types of discourse in the process of making a film as an original artistic-aesthetic object. Elements of different types of discourse act as linguistic and creative means that influence the heuristic potential of the verbal system of a film.

The article deals with a ‘literary scandal’ as a mode and a script of communication within cubo-futurists poetic circles as far as the communication between poets and their addressees during a public performance is concerned. The latter is an essential component of the “literary everyday routine” of the poetic circles analysed. Not only does scandal betray an intention of insulting the recipient but also it is due to the scandal that the avant-garde author could find the addressee, become closer to him and make him more engaged in a poetic happening. The goal of the study (based on the evidence of cubo-futurist public performances) is to describe a scandal as a communicative script, a frame, identify a potential addressee, single out reception profiles and analyse communication orientations underlying those profiles. Drawing on the understanding of a literary scandal suggested by Reitblat, we trace a connection between a scandal and the public (recipients). According to Warner, the public are people actively par­ticipating in an event. Participatory strategies of the cubo-futurists public could be nar­rowed down to three types of reception: a sceptic, a critic, and a potential ally. Using the speech act theory (Austin, Derrida) and the actor-network theory (Callon’s opposition of framing and overflowing), we analyse how the performative utterance functions in a given context. We show how the performative utterances carrying a seed of a potential scandal were construed (or could have been construed). The article analyses the interpretation of a scandal and com­municative strategies chosen by recipients. While the critic prefers to frame the utter­ance in a predictable way by placing it into a fixed context and literally interpreting the ut­terance, the ally, on the contrary, is open to a variety of contexts and is ready to participate in a play of the pragmatic unfolding of an utterance. The latter type of reception underlies the possibility of the recipient’s creative engagement with a communicative experiment of the avant-garde.

The heritage of the architectural Avant-garde in Ukraine, formed in the interwar period (1921-1939), is large-scale in the number of objects and diverse in their typology, techniques and forms of expression of modern architectural ideas. Volyn – a historical Ukraine region that, at that time, was part of Poland (the Second Polish Republic) – plays a special role in this context. To date, the region has preserved a significant array of objects that demonstrate the specifics of the interpretation of European and Polish Avant-garde concepts. The article attempts to analyze the architectural context, ways of spreading and formation features of the architectural image of residential and public buildings as part of the European heritage of Interwar Modernism. Lack of professional evaluation and recognition of the objects’ value leads to their gradual degradation, reconstruction or destruction. Methods of comparative and stylistic analysis, archival research and field surveys of architectural objects were used in this research. The study showed that the spread of the Avant-Garde style in the architecture of Volyn was significantly delayed compared to similar processes in the architecture of Western Europe and Poland and reached its peak at the end of the interwar period. The use of formative techniques of Avant-Garde architecture in housing construction became an identifier and symbol of the social prestige of certain social groups. The design of public buildings reflected Volyn’s rapid social modernization.

In the article I concern a period of Franciszka Themerson’s life when she was a lecturer at two academies in Great Britain: Wimbledon School of Art (1963–1968) and Bath Academy of Art (1967–1968). I display a didactical practice of the painter, putting attention on material outputs of collaborations – the selected issue of magazine “It’s”. The aim of analysis of publishing experiments made by Themerson together with her students is to show relations between artistic, editional and didactical practices of this vanguard artist.

This article presents three modern female writers who (re-)create forms of self-awareness and identity in their literary texts. Sibilla Aleramo, Colette, and Mela Hartwig share the experience of patriarchal hegemony, the lack of a female writing tradition and an avant-gardist search for new identity constructions. All three became successful writers, but only for a short time before they went to exile, were silenced or marginalized. Their approaches include a plurality of voices that range from the re-enactment of the past—through mythologies, childhood, foundation narratives or matrilinear genealogies—to decompositions or destructive fantasies. As contemporaries from different European countries together they paved the way for experimental approaches to the (re-)creation of female writing in the early twentieth century. However, their understanding of the female role also undermines the traditional binarism inducing new forms of expression. By comparing their literature this article highlights their decisive roles in the articulation of subjectivity and suggests to reintegrate their work into the literary canon of European modernism.

The text offers a critical and comprehensive review of Dorota Jarecka’s book Surrealizm, realizm, marksizm. Sztuka i lewica komunistyczna w Polsce w latach 1944–1948 [Surrealism, Realism, Marxism: Art and the Communist Left in Poland between 1944 and 1948]. The reviewer appreciates the main methodological premise of the book, namely that the tensions and conflicts generated within the triangle “avant-garde – realism – emancipatory role of art” cannot be reduced to a binary opposition between totalitarian ideology and the legitimate art world. In fact, it reflects the contradictory dynamics of politically engaged art in general and the context of post-war Poland in particular. Despite the book’s formidable factual support, the result of extensive and comprehensive query, the reviewer still regrets that the author remains primarily an art historian rather than social historian of art. This note of regret however does not diminish this noble contribution to understanding the logics of Polish visual arts in the aftermath of World War II. This area is much less known generally than the literature of this very period.

An important critical tradition tends to consider Léo Malet as the father of the French noir novel. Though he owes his fame to the character of Nestor Burma that he invented in 1943, his previous production, which served as a testing ground to develop his Parisian version of noir fiction, is not as well-known. During the German Occupation of France, the publisher Georges Ventillard, taking advantage of the craze for noir fiction and the banning of Anglo-American literature in France, launched the “Minuit” series. The twenty-four French-produced titles that he published from 1941 to 1949 offered American plots, settings and characters. To reinforce their credibility, their authors adopted American-sounding pseudonyms. This is how Léo Malet, commissioned by “Minuit,” wrote the first Johnny Metal novel in 1941. With the Metal series, Malet imitated a form belonging to American tradition. Like most French novelists who produced these fake American novels, he did not know the United States. His main source of inspiration was not so much noir fiction as the movies. It is on this “American” production by Léo Malet that we will focus here. We will look at three of his best-known novels (Johnny Metal, Le Dé de jade and La Mort de Jim Licking), to show how Malet reappropriated the hard-boiled tradition through the lens of American cinema and reinvented it for the French public. A former member of the surrealist movement, Malet, in fact, did not copy but subverted the traditional aesthetics of noir fiction by injecting into it, among other things, the surrealist practice of décollage, a technique that breaks the barriers between literature and the visual arts.

The Merz Poetry of Kurt Schwitters ABSTRACT: Kurt Schwitters is a German artist whose career is closely linked to the Dada movement. Thanks to his experimental spirit, he creates the Merz art which includes several fields such as painting, poetry, theater. In this article, we focus on poetic art of Schwitters, especially his elementary poetry and his sonata. For him, letter is the root of the material of poetry and there are four dimensions of word —composition of letters, sonority, sign (meaning) and element carrying associations of ideas. Moreover, Schwitters considers that typographic form is not only a way of rendering the content of the text, but also an art under certain conditions. That is why typography plays an essential role in his poetic creation. Even though Schwitters insists on nonsense, he composes his sonata Ursonate in a logical and rigorous way. This rigor allows him to invent his own poetic language. RÉSUMÉ : Kurt Schwitters est un artiste allemand dont la carrière est étroitement liée au mouvement Dada. Grâce à son esprit expérimental, il crée l’art Merz qui concerne plusieurs domaines tels que la peinture, la poésie, le théâtre. Dans cet article, nous nous concentrons sur l’art poétique chez Schwitters, notamment sa poésie élémentaire et sa sonate. Pour lui, la lettre est à l’origine du matériel de la poésie et il s’agit de quatre dimensions du mot — la composition de lettres, la sonorité, le signe (le sens) et l’élément porteur d’associations d’idées. De plus, Schwitters considère que la forme typographique est non seulement une façon de rendre le contenu du texte, mais aussi un art dans certaines conditions. C’est la raison pour laquelle la typographie joue un rôle essentiel dans sa création poétique. Même si Schwitters insiste sur le non-sens, il compose sa sonate Ursonate d’une manière logique et rigoureuse. Cette rigueur lui permet d’inventer son propre langage poétique.

Futuristic Advertising, A New Aesthetic Domain ABSTRACT: Marinetti conceives his activity in the futurist movement as a global, living aesthetic practice, encompassing all artistic disciplines: poetry, theater, cinema, music, painting, sculpture, fashion, cooking, advertising, are the fields in which he gives free rein to his endless creativity. Among the different fields of action of the futurists, the one related to the art of advertising is one of the most interesting, since it is related to productive processes, to competition, to the dynamism of the economy. For the futurists, to participate in the activity of advertising means to act on society and influence its progress. Marinetti sees in the colorful manifestos a fundamental element of the futuristic transformation of the landscape. Advertising becomes one of the symbols of the new industrial and metropolitan reality, intended to promote artistic products in ways comparable to those of a commodity. Advertising becomes a fundamental moment in the relationship with the public because the ephemeral nature of any artistic product leads to its submission to the rules of the market: innovation, originality, invention. Art is subjected to the same rules as any other economic activity, it becomes a product that has a price. RÉSUMÉ : Marinetti conçoit son activité dans le mouvement futuriste comme une pratique esthétique globale, vivante, englobant toutes les disciplines artistiques : poésie, théâtre, cinéma, musique, peinture, sculpture, mode, cuisine, publicité, sont les domaines dans lesquels il donne libre cours à son intarissable créativité. Parmi les différents champs d’action des futuristes, celui qui est lié à l’art de la publicité est l’un des plus intéressants, puisqu’il est lié aux processus productifs, à la concurrence, au dynamisme de l’économie. Pour les futuristes, participer à l’activité publicitaire signifie agir sur la société et conditionner son progrès. Marinetti voit dans les manifestes bariolés un élément fondamental de la transformation futuriste du paysage. La publicité devient l’un des symboles de la nouvelle réalité industrielle et métropolitaine, destinée à promouvoir tout produit artistique comparable à une marchandise de même niveau. La publicité devient dorénavant un moment fondamental dans le rapport avec le public, car le caractère éphémère de tout produit artistique entraîne sa soumission aux règles du marché : innovation, originalité, invention. L’art est soumis aux mêmes règles que toute autre activité économique, il devient un produit qui a un prix.

The article is devoted to the actual problem of interpreting the avant-garde text in the literature of the Russian diaspora, as well as the search for relevant methodological approaches and techniques for its analysis. The texts of one of the most radical representatives of the Russian avant-garde of the first wave of emigration, I.M. Zdanevich (Ilyazd). The purpose of the work is to study the features of poetics and the construction of the novel “Admiration” by I.M. Zdanevich as an experimental text, as well as revealing its relationship with the literature of the era under consideration. The study uses comparative historical and typological methods, motivational analysis and discourse analysis, as well as deconstruction strategies that reveal the internal inconsistency of the avant-garde text and the meanings hidden in it. We have established that “Admiration” is the embodiment of the principles of “all-ness” – an artistic criterion developed by Ilyazd, which is characterized by the leveling of the concept of “original”, the absence of frames and the optionality of such creative categories as inspiration and talent. In this regard, the authors of the article propose an innovative approach to the avant-garde text, which consists in the widest possible range of its interpretations in the spirit of “all-ness”: from a traditional novel with its own original plot and characters to a philosophical novel, a novel-myth and a novel about an artist and the problem of creativity (metanovel). We came to the conclusion that “Admiration” by I.M. Zdanevich is a novel in which the writer uses the experiment as a set of aesthetic principles and artistic techniques that allow him to realize his own original concept of new art. Using the limitless possibilities of the novel genre and combining in the novel as a whole the features of its various modifications – adventure, philosophical, sentimental, symbolist, futuristic novels, myth-novel, poetological novel, I.M. Zdanevich was able to conduct an experiment on the destruction of genre boundaries. We also found that “Admiration” by I.M. Zdanevich is moving closer to the literature of magical realism, and this opens up new horizons for future research.

This article aims to explore self-translators as what Olga Castro would call cultural and ideological ambassadors "situated in a privileged position to challenge power, to negotiate conflicting minorized versus hegemonic cultural identities." The phenomenon of self-translation must be understood within the wider context of how historical events can not only shape the content of a literary work but also modify language identity when self-translating from a major language to a minor one. This article will explore the case of Debora Vogel, an avant-garde Yiddish poet who decided to self-translate her poems from German and Polish into Yiddish in her early years. By choosing to write and translate into a minor language, Vogel affirmed her Jewish cultural identity and, as Cordingley states, "challenges the myth of the nation's monolithic culture" by bringing her peripheral and minority experiences to the fore in writing a transnational, Yiddish, feminist, and modernist aesthetic. Finally, this article will present Vogel as a two-way ambassador between Polish and Yiddish culture who, in turn, not only enriched the field of modern Yiddish poetry but also opened new viewpoints in the Polish world of the avant-garde. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1950s, decisive changes that were taking place in our country would have an impact on the economic, social, political and cultural levels. All those changes would favour the renovation of architecture through a process in which industrial activity development was essential, in addition to industrial architecture and public works, which would experience significant growth. Hydroelectric power plants would be very present in those debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arte, Individuo y Sociedad is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The protagonist of the essay is Andrzej Kolo, actually Andrzej Kołodziej, a Polish painter from Tarnów (born 1944), who emigrated to the USA in 1973. In 1981, he founded the KrakArt group in California, whose members were graduates of national art academies who had been living and working in the United States for years. This group is very active in terms of exhibitions; it has no single program, its members represent a wide variety of currents and tendencies present in contemporary European and world art. In Poland, they exhibited their works for the first time only in 2020 at the Kazimierz Pulaski Museum in Warka and at the Polonia House in Krakow. In 2022, further exhibitions of the group were planned in Łódź and Warsaw. However, due to technical reasons, only two individual exhibitions of the group leader, Andrzej Kolo, have been held so far. This multi-talented artist (painter, draftsman, photographer, poet, musician and playwright), admirer of the art of the rebellious Stach from Warta Szukalski, most willingly paints pictures, mainly figurative and landscape paintings, definitely expressionistic, with elements of decorative color. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What may be considered as the greatest emergency in the contemporary world is the lack of a sense of emergency; the prevailing feeling that everything is fine, that, despite ongoing crises, we live in the only acceptable system, and it is impossible to imagine any alternative to it. Mainstream digital games, by offering repetitive, standardised, and predictable forms of gameplay, by focusing on technological advancement, and by exploiting workers in large corporations, became a part of that emergency. According to Santiago Zabala, what is needed to recover the sense of emergency and to break through contemporary complacency, is an "aesthetic force," a disruptive artistic shock. What is proposed in this article is the possibility of considering the avant-garde as an aesthetical force in the field of videogames; a force that shocks the player and demands something more than a simple contemplation. As presented by game scholars, avant--garde videogames (through formal experimentation and political intervention) open the medium, and propose games that object to standardised, mindless repetition. Avant-garde games proclaim new ways of playing, accept diversity that opposes the stereotypical image of a player as a white, heterosexual male, and propose new kinds of engagement with the outside world. They tend to "remove the automatism of the perception" by disrupting players' engagement and through disclosure of the system. To achieve that, avant-garde videogames break through the category of flow, problematize notions of videogame hermeneutic and interrupt the feeling of immersion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By juxtaposing two ostensibly divergent characters, the Jewish art historian and Egyptologist Hedwig Fechheimer (1871–1942) and Soviet filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), this paper investigates how both approaches folded time, creating Cubist chronologies. Fechheimer adapted the philological focus of her Berlin School contemporaries to create an ahistorical, anti-teleological grammar of ancient Egyptian art which espoused an artistic affinity between the Egyptians and the Cubist movement. Eisenstein, who held a copy of one of Fechheimer's books in his personal library, took a similar approach in the development of his critiques of historical allegory. This paper looks specifically at two shots of a sphinx during the bridge sequence in the 1927 film October to demonstrate how they correspond to Fechheimer's views on Egyptian art and also function peculiarly within the film. Ultimately, I aim to demonstrate how the interpellations of the sphinx demonstrate a particular critique of historicity that Eisenstein later expands upon in his Ivan the Terrible films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I demonstrate how Barbara Guest's experiments in visual poetry were influenced by Frederick Kiesler's architectural designs: both artists, inspired by Surrealist poetics, sought to build visionary structures that took shape on the page but moved beyond it. Following Kiesler's 1965 death, Guest published a poem in 1968 inspired by Kiesler's "Galaxy" structures, titled "Homage", and included a shortened version in Durer in the Window (2003). Kiesler composed a number of works under the name "Galaxies", all of which shared an interest in merging architecture with other art forms, including sculpture, mobiles, drawing, and painting. In "Homage", Guest was less interested in describing Kiesler's "Galaxies" than in building a commensurate architecture of the page, dependent on the spatial arrangement of lines and stanzas, the visual impact of white space, and the reader's imaginative navigation of both. Putting Kiesler's "Galaxies" and Guest's "Homage" in dialogue illuminates a model of inter-arts reception as co-creation or what Kiesler called "Correalism" that depends on the spatial dimensions of the poetic imagination. Both works can be understood as open, mobile, "museums without walls" that anticipate the future by inviting dynamic collaboration and future transformation. Finally, I argue that the relationship between these works models the kind of affiliation important to experimental women artists and poets such as Guest, affiliations that helped form an En Dehors Garde "in the shadow" of the avant-garde. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Public Art is the property of Shanghai Fine Arts Publisher Ltd. co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Bajo Palabra: Journal of Philosophy is the property of Bajo Palabra: Journal of Philosophy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Although interest in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) from researchers and consumers continues to increase, many BCIs lack the complexity and imaginative properties thought to guide users toward successful brain activity modulation. We investigate the possibility of using a complex BCI by developing an experimental story environment with which users interact through cognitive thought strategies. In our system, the user's frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) measured with electroencephalography (EEG) is linearly mapped to the color saturation of the main character in the story. We implemented a user-friendly experimental design using a comfortable EEG device and short neurofeedback (NF) training protocol. In our system, seven out of 19 participants successfully increased FAA during the course of the study, for a total of ten successful blocks out of 152. We detail our results concerning left and right prefrontal cortical activity contributions to FAA in both successful and unsuccessful story blocks. Additionally, we examine inter-subject correlations of EEG data, and self-reported questionnaire data to understand the user experience of BCI interaction. Results suggest the potential of imaginative story BCI environments for engaging users and allowing for FAA modulation. Our data suggests new research directions for BCIs investigating emotion and motivation through FAA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short essay makes inquiries and observations about how Norman O. Brown understands the confluence of poetry and prophecy, especially concerning the sorts of language he associates with "prophetic" poetry. Specifically, the essay attempts to identify more clearly the particular features of the diction of prophetic poetry, as Brown conceives it, and how it relates to the expressive substance of his own diction in the innovative critical texts he produced. The diction of Brown's own "prophetic" texts can be at once libertine and bossy, silly and imposing, initiatory and constraining. The alternation in Brown's texts between didactic assertion, libertine refrains, and borrowed scraps of obscure patois, embodies the violent oscillation of prophetic language, as Brown conceives it, which veers between elevated and vernacular registers of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crossing centuries Lives in a drop of water, Anguillulae Aceti and Fresh-water Hydras; living dead frogs, ten feet tall fleas and well-trained flies; bow-tied chemists, barker-like scientists and Scientia… a whole popular science series that borrows the name from a luna park stand. In aiming at the objective visualization of a pure phenomenon, scientific film is supposed to be free from any history, any tradition, any (linguistic) heritage, any intertextuality. It is surprising to find out that it is not always true. By the “instructive amusement” imperative which first popular science series borrowed from Positivism, it seems then to get the grips with some survivances of dusty fairground stands, of maravigliosi optical games, of evolving cabinets de physique. Can scientific film show how cinema has remediated its ancestors? Can it teach us something about the unsuspected love of the 1920s avant-garde for the past, about their “dialectical” tension?

In 1964, the artist Alejandro Jodorowsky and the writer René Rebetez edited and launched Crononauta magazine in Mexico, proposed as a science fiction publication, and in which artists and writers such as Manuel Felguérez, Roland Topor, Fernando Arrabal, and Raquel Jodorowsky participated. As part of the artistic movements that were later denominated as « rupturistas » by the country’s art historiography, the magazine represents both an experiment and a thought model articulated around the connection between aesthetics and knowledge and its possibilities regarding the transformation of reality. It consists of an encounter between the so-called « Panic Movement » of which Jodorowsky was a founder and a notion of science fiction developed by Rebetez, which resulted in the privileging of the hybridization of divergent spaces and times. Through collage, understood as a mechanism of extraction and appropriation of contexts, and the use of a literary method authored by French writer Raymond Roussel, which produces novelty from repetition and doubles, Crononauta’s avant-gardism poses the disolution of the limits between present, past, and future in the possible transformative continuity between reality and fiction.The purpose of this article is to analyze how the aesthetic elements are intertwined with the political and social project of the magazine, a chaotic and ambiguous proposal with references ranging from Surrealism to the Utopian Socialism of the 19th century. In this respect, Crononauta’s position before the future uses science fiction as an aesthetic weapon akin to prophecy, destined to transform reality. It is similar to other avant-garde artistic developments like the « efímero pánico » – cousin of happenings – that would collapse distnictions between the proper of reality and the other of fiction : to apocaylptically end one world in order to birth another.

In his mature literary work, Hylé II, written in German between 1933 and 1958, the former Berlin Dadaist Raoul Hausmann looks back on his years of exile in Ibiza; the article proposes a genetic study of the unfinished self-translation into French of Hylé II. The analysis reconstructs how the self-translation initiated in 1937 evolves soon after into a form of free rewriting, and jeopardises the completion of the German project, before being abandoned around 1945. This failed attempt is to be understood first of all as a crucial stage in Raoul Hausmann’s development as a bilingual writer after the war, when he chose France as his new homeland. The French self-translation must also be examined in relation to the core project of Hylé II, namely the production of a textual form in motion. Reintegrating the self-translation within the original text, in a late phase of its genesis, is one of the many textual strategies used by Hausmann to destabilise the traditional notion of text, a gesture closely akin to the attacks of the historical avant-gardes on the category of work (œuvre) and the institution of art.

In the 1920s the quattrocento Italian painter Paolo Uccello was appropriated as a precursor of Surrealism in the French surrealist discourse, a process that continued and became international in the 1930s. The (positive) reception of Uccello among avant-gardes such as Surrealism was distinctly different from his contemporaneous (rather negative) reception among art historians. In several places the surrealist perception of the artist prefigures post-modern views, not least when it comes to Uccello’s playful and experimental attitude to perspective. The standard was set by the surrealist poet Philippe Soupault in 1929 in an art historical treatise inspired upon a surrealist worldview. Reviewing this and other written sources, this article also briefly discusses three examples of artistic responses to Uccellan aesthetics, by Salvador Dalí, George Hugnet and René Magritte.

Although interest in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) from researchers and consumers continues to increase, many BCIs lack the complexity and imaginative properties thought to guide users toward successful brain activity modulation. We investigate the possibility of using a complex BCI by developing an experimental story environment with which users interact through cognitive thought strategies. In our system, the user's frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) measured with electroencephalography (EEG) is linearly mapped to the color saturation of the main character in the story. We implemented a user-friendly experimental design using a comfortable EEG device and short neurofeedback (NF) training protocol. In our system, seven out of 19 participants successfully increased FAA during the course of the study, for a total of ten successful blocks out of 152. We detail our results concerning left and right prefrontal cortical activity contributions to FAA in both successful and unsuccessful story blocks. Additionally, we examine inter-subject correlations of EEG data, and self-reported questionnaire data to understand the user experience of BCI interaction. Results suggest the potential of imaginative story BCI environments for engaging users and allowing for FAA modulation. Our data suggests new research directions for BCIs investigating emotion and motivation through FAA.

The sacred art of Jerzy Nowosielski, an outstanding Polish painter of the second half of the 20th century, is an example of the creative continuation of the Byzantine tradition in Poland, but also an embodiment of the debate with the painting tradition of the East and with the experience of the Church. Both in theory and in painting practice, the artist redefined the concept of the icon, attempting to expand its formula so that it not only spoke of the Kingdom, but also included the image of the earthly, imperfect reality of the pilgrim Church. In his designs of sacred interiors for churches of various Christian denominations, Nowosielski wanted to combine three theological disciplines and their respective ways of representation: Christology, sophiology and angelology. Beside a classical icon, called by the painter a “Christological-Chalcedonian” icon, Nowosielski demanded a “sophiological” icon, bringing into the space of a church an earthly, painful reality, traces of inner struggle and doubt - hence the presence of doloristic motifs in his icons. The “inspired geometry” also became a complement to the holy images; the artist noticed a huge spiritual potential in abstract painting, to which he eventually assigned the role of icon painting. The poetic concept of “subtle bodies” - abstract angels testifying to the reality of the spiritual world - drew from the early Christian theological thought, which argued about the corporeality of spiritual entities, from Byzantine angelology, the tradition of theosophy and occultism, but also from the art of the first avant-garde, especially that from Eastern Europe, which inherited the Orthodox cult of the image. Nowosielski’s bilingualism as a painter - practicing abstraction and figuration in tandem, also within the church - paralleled the liturgical practice of many religious communities using different languages to express different levels of reality: human affairs and divine affairs. The tradition of apophatic theology, proclaiming the truth about the “unrepresentability” of God, was also important in shaping Nowosielski’s ideas. For Nowosielski’s monumental art, the problem of the mutual relationship between painting and architecture proved crucial. The artist based his concept on the decisive domination of painting over architecture and the independence of monumental painting. His goal was the principle of creating a sacred interior as a holistic, comprehensive vision of space which leads the participants of liturgy “out of everyday life” and into a different, transcendent dimension, in which the painter saw the main purpose of sacred art. From his first projects from the 1950s till the end of his artistic practice Nowosielski tried to realize his own dream version of the “ideal church”. In many of his projects he introduced abstraction into the temple, covering the walls, vaults, presbyteries, sometimes even the floors with a network of triangular “subtle bodies”. Forced to compromise, he introduced sacred abstraction into murals, as accompanying geometries, or into stained glass windows. The interiors, comprehensively and meticulously planned, were supposed to create the effect of “passing through”, “rending the veil” - from behind which a new, heavenly reality dawned. In practice, it was not always possible to achieve this intention, but the artist’s aim was to create an impression of visual unity, a sense of “entering the painting”, of being immersed in the element of painting. Painting in space was supposed to unite a broken world, to combine physical and spiritual reality into an integral whole. When designing sacred interiors, Nowosielski used the sanctity of the icon, but also the pure qualities of painting which were to cause a “mystical feeling of God’s reality”. The aim of sacred art understood in such a way turned out to be initiation rather than teaching. In this shift of emphasis Nowosielski saw the only chance for the revival of sacred art, postulating even a shift of the burden of evangelization from verbal teaching to the work of charismatic art.

The article aims at defining the specificity of dialogue in Sonata for two violins Op. 10 by Hen- ryk Mikołaj Górecki from the point of view of the performer. This piece, though created in the early period of the composer’s career, belongs to important examples of this genre in 20th century European music. With regard to the declared aim, various versions of the dialogue in this sonata were examined. The issue of dialogue in the discussed piece is presented in the context of the individual composer’s style. In order to address the core matter, the analysis of all three movements of the sonata cycle was carried out in terms of different forms of dialogue between the two violins. Górecki’s Sonata represents very interesting types of dialogic communication, conveying vari- ous emotional contents: from rivalry to harmony, from expression – sometimes utterly harsh – to joint reflection, from grotesque to contemplation. This piece features a rich sound coloring, which the Master achieves through sonoristic effects and extensive use of dissonant consonances and dy- namic contrasts. The piece shows also an excellent sense of the sound space in which the soloists perform. Spatial changes effects are achieved by means of, among other things, rapid shifts from the lowest registers to the highest ones. The “instrumental drama” is accompanied by colorful “dec- orations”, with a wide range of feelings typical of Górecki. The parts of two violins carry out a polyphonic narration. The voices of each “protagonist” receive a different reaction in their vis-à-vis, and in the last part they unite in an expressive, unrestrained dance movement. It is pre- cisely this variety of musical material and the dialogues of the soloists in different categories of perspectives that provide this piece with an intensity of empathic experiences, evoked both in lis- teners and in performers.

Artist Tetsu Takeda left Japan for America in 1986 and returned to Japan in 2011. Shortly after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Takeda started identifying himself as a "professional artist" and only doing "high art" by rethinking life and our role as human beings interfering with nature. Takeda is an eccentric collector of ocean rubbish flushed ashore by waves. In his tiny home studio, he creates various big-eyed rubbish creatures in diverse forms, shapes, dimensions, and colors in his unorthodox way reminiscent of Victor Frankenstein in this lab. For him, doing new artistic endeavors is a ritual of giving life—to "vitalize" rubbish—and inhabiting a reformulated society of nature, whether privately (in his home) or publicly (in galleries). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a selection of poems from Federico García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York (1929), to consider the ideology that underpins it. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s idea of the ‘political unconscious’, whereby every text can be read as a socially ‘symbolic act’, the author will argue that the poetic subject in Lorca’s New York poetry gives voice to a crisis of bourgeois selfhood, which is set against the backdrop of economic collapse and experimental aesthetic renewal that coalesced in the late 1920s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Hussein Chalayan's Memory Dress as a case study and applies content analysis on it so as to point out the similarities between the critical avant-garde method of Derridean deconstruction and avantgarde fashion design. A coding schema is utilized to standardize the content analysis conducted on the variety of styles of the Memory Dress. The study focuses on the design details of the Memory Dress such as the convertible high-stand collar, the shiny button, the vertical needle stitch, the horizontal double stitches and the chest patch pocket and studies each category separately under the Derridean concepts of intertextuality, trace and différance. The coding schema reveals the visual equivalence of each Derridean concept through the qualitative analysis conducted on the visual images of the garment. This way, the article explains an avantgarde garment's structure in relation to deconstructivist norms. With such intention, the article demonstrates how a garment structurally embodies and visually communicates the Derridean notions of intertextuality, trace and différance. By materializing abstract, philosophical terms on design details, and motifs, the article highlights the parallelism between postmodern critical thinking, and avant-garde creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frank Stanford was an Arkansas-based poet who produced a substantial corpus of poetry through the 1970s. His best-known work, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You (1977), narrates the ways that mass media technologies and state infrastructures shaped regionalism and social structure in the post-1945 rural US South. The afterlife of Stanford's writing has been subject to its own form of mediation: from Stanford's death in 1978 up until the present, a cult following has kept his work in print through communal practices—trading photocopied manuscripts, participating in marathon readings of Battlefield, and organizing Frank Stanford festivals. While the aura surrounding Stanford has often disassociated him from the structures and communities that shaped his writing, both his work and its legacy disclose the institutional, mediatic, and infrastructural forms that enable rural avant-garde poetic practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]