Saudade

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Arte e Ciência do VidroI am a Japanese student studying in Portugal. One of the first experiences I had here fascinated me, intrigued me, and continues to do so. It is the complex emotional experience known as SAUDADE. I identified myself with that complex emotional state because it is in many ways similar to a Japanese concept, Mujo-kan. A few words would not be able to convey the meaning of the word but it could be translated as “Transience” and “Emptiness”. In my work I wanted to interpret and express the meaning and the experience of Saudade. I intended to create a work that would speak to that feeling, SAUDADE, as I experienced it. This work was composed by separate objects that were gathered together to form a designed interior space. I found a suitable space to do this, used the processes of glass blowing, cold working, torch working, and enamelling to create elements of my installation. I found two cognitive scientists working with the Gulbenkian Institute of Science who helped me understand how such a complex feeling as SAUDADE originates in the brain

Supporting Learning in Art History – Artificial Intelligence in Digital Humanities Education

In recent years and especially in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, digital distance learning increases. But for academic students, the selection of adequate learning materials for educational purposes is becoming more and more complex. This marks only one starting point where the use of artificial intelligence (AI) offers additional value. AI has a great potential to enhance and support research and education in the field of digital humanities (DH). As international organisations have just expressed their thoughts on the subject, AI is the topic par excellence and will decisively shape the future development of educational processes

The appeal and acceptability of necroheritage tourism

Necroheritage is a cultural asset that is defined by its association with death. Necrotourism, often considered a subset of both dark tourism and cultural tourism, is focused on areas like cemeteries, crypts, catacombs, and death festivals. Tourists have many different reasons and motivations for their interest in the wide variety of different necroheritages. Local residents also have opinions on what type of necroheritage is acceptable as a tourism product. This thesis aims to reveal what types of necroheritage attract tourists, and also what types of necroheritage locals deem appropriate for tourists to enjoy. With these objectives in mind, a quantitative research method was used with an online survey of 132 diverse respondents. The findings show that “heritage” and “unique” oriented necrotourism sites hold larger appeal for tourists, while “gloom” oriented sites are not as desirable. Locals were found to be generally open to death festivals, historical tombs, and cemeteries at touristic locations, with some hesitancy exhibited at burial grounds still being used in modern day.O necropatrimônio é um bem cultural que se define pela sua associação com a morte. O necroturismo, muitas vezes considerado um subconjunto do turismo sombrio e do turismo cultural, é focado em áreas como cemitérios, criptas, catacumbas e festivais da morte. Os turistas têm diversas razões e motivações para seu interesse na grande variedade de diferentes necropatrimônios. Os moradores locais também têm opiniões sobre que tipo de necropatrimônio é aceitável como produto turístico. Esta dissertação tem como objetivo revelar que tipos de necropatrimônio atraem turistas, e também que tipos de necropatrimônio os moradores consideram apropriados para os turistas usufruírem. Com esses objetivos em mente, métodos de pesquisa quantitativos e qualitativos foram usados junto com uma pesquisa online respondida por 132 participantes. Os resultados mostram que os locais de necroturismo orientados para o “património” e “único” têm maior apelo para os turistas, enquanto os locais orientados para o “macabro” não são tão desejáveis. Verificou-se que os moradores geralmente estão abertos a festivais da morte, túmulos históricos e cemitérios em locais turísticos, com alguma hesitação exibida em relação a cemitérios ainda usados para funerais nos dias atuais

Christian Kitsch: A Preliminary Examination of Christian Materialism through Theological Aesthetics and Cultural Politics

As a massive phenomenon animating the world of cultural politics, kitsch sensibility emerges in Western Christian materialism as a means to easily mediate genuine, if sentimental, expressions of religious devotion. Scorned by others as the manipulation of “bad taste,” reverence through kitsch in contemporary religious art would be better taken to reflect a crisis in modern religious thought. This thesis employs the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar to argue that modern Christian kitsch is the active mistaking of poor theological quality as a source of beauty, which is primarily felt as the sensibility of losing dynamis. Its evolution through late capitalism conveys an irreversible yet inevitable mutation of faith, understood by Slavoj Žižek as the “suspension of belief” in contemporary Christian consumerism and artful practice. Anticipating the restoration of quality is a reorientation of the imitatio Christi for the articulation of a new theological aesthetics

Loss Translated: Saudade in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop

In 1954, former U.S. poet laureate Elizabeth Bishop wrote in a letter from Brazil to Robert Lowell, a dear friend and fellow poet: With much love and saudades as they say here, a very nice word that seems to include all the sentiments of missing friends in one.” This insightful observation illuminates a concept central to Brazilian culture which has been designated one of the most difficult words to translate. Later, Bishop defined the idea as “the characteristic Brazilian longing or nostalgia,” which she “strongly associates with homesickness.” Bishop’s fascination with the concept, I argue, is more than that of a distant cultural observer. As her comprehension of saudade developed, the idea completely altered her own understanding of loss, home and even Bishop’s own art. This is evident, not only in her letters to Lowell, but also in her own poems and short stories about Brazil and her childhood in Nova Scotia. By understanding the role of saudade in the work of Elizabeth Bishop, scholars are able to comprehend not only the importance of this Portuguese concept in her own work but also the complexity of the poet’s cultural identity

Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Wentworth’s unconscious constancy ; and, “Nay, Mama, if he is not to be animated by Cowper!”: Jane Austen, William Cowper, and Marianne Dashwood’s evocative sensibility

In Persuasion, Jane Austen uses Frederick Wentworth, a fundamentally unique Austen hero, to revise the eighteenth century theories of mind she has relied on in her earlier novels. Specifically, her depiction of his memory both recalls and undermines Enlightenment traditions. In her first three novels, Austen depicts memories that function along the lines of theories set forth by John Locke and Samuel Johnson. Colonel Brandon, for example, manifests Locke's theory of association in his conscious, habitual connection of Marianne with his lost love Eliza. Brandon's melancholic recollections also align with Johnson's description of afflictive, unresolvable regrets that can continually invade the mind. Moreover, manifold Austen characters rely on Johnson's formulation of memory's primarily moral use; at pivotal moments in their development, characters as disparate as Marianne and Darcy look back on their past actions to assess their behavior, discover their shortcomings, and derive the impetus to change. Though Austen continues to employ these models in her depiction of Wentworth, she also subjects them to significant revisions that resemble depictions of memory by contemporary Romantic writers. Wentworth, locked in contradiction, attempts to expel painful regrets of Anne with a Johnsonian reliance on logic and industriousness. In the process, however, he continually reassesses Anne's past significance to him, violating the eighteenth-century conviction of memory's static fixity and invoking William Wordsworth's depictions of memories that can change and grow beyond their original contexts. Similarly, he engages in Johnson's process of reviewing and learning from his past behavior, only to evince a serious misremembering in the midst of his moral reform. This depiction of memory evokes Byron's work in the Turkish Tales, and it is characteristic of the novel, manifested in Mrs. Musgrove's unexpected surge of grief for her dead son, in Anne's "retentive feelings" for Wentworth, and in Wentworth's breakdown on the Cobb. Austen continues to rely on eighteenth-century models, but she revises them in ways that recall Romantic writers like Wordsworth and Byron. In Wentworth's character and in Persuasion as a whole, Austen engages in a unique experiment that utilizes and even amalgamates the divergent traditions. ...AND... Jane Austen's particular enjoyment of the poetry of William Cowper, though often treated as a critical commonplace, is rarely taken into account in discussions of her work. However, Austen's references to the poet in her novels suggest that Cowper, whether read aloud by Edward Ferrars or quoted from memory by Fanny Price, remained a serious influence, both in theme and in craft. In Sense and Sensibility in particular, Austen places Cowper at the crux of Marianne's cultivated sensibility and her relation to the outside world. Though Marianne's reliance on literary convention in her enacted sensibility is often treated by critics as proof of her affectation and of the ultimate inadequacy of her worldview, a closer look at Austen's evocations of Cowper's poetry in Marianne's habits and attitudes shows a more complex picture. While Marianne's habits and passions evoke a variety of literary precedents, an examination of the character's connections to Cowper offers a unique perspective on her connection to rural nature and on her responses to suffering. Austen's character "reads" and enacts Cowper's ideas not merely to form fallacious conclusions and indulge in deleterious habits, but also to enrich and expand her inner life. Ultimately, Austen uses Cowper's fond and nuanced description of a rural, domestic life in communion with nature to give Marianne the resources to handle dislocation and suffering, and she evokes his model of irreparably isolating pain in Marianne's breakdown, depicting her sensibility as a complex and ambiguous trait that can turn in upon itself to isolate her from others, can effect a larger protest against her disenfranchisement, and can ultimately give her the tools to heal

Psychopower and Ordinary Madness: Reticulated Dividuals in Cognitive Capitalism

Despite the seemingly neutral vantage of using nature for widely-distributed computational purposes, neither post-biological nor post-humanist teleology simply concludes with the real "end of nature" as entailed in the loss of the specific ontological status embedded in the identifier "natural." As evinced by the ecological crises of the Anthropocene—of which the 2019 Brazil Amazon rainforest fires are only the most recent—our epoch has transfixed the “natural order" and imposed entropic artificial integration, producing living species that become “anoetic,” made to serve as automated exosomatic residues, or digital flecks. I further develop Gilles Deleuze’s description of control societies to upturn Foucauldian biopower, replacing its spacio-temporal bounds with the exographic excesses in psycho-power; culling and further detailing Bernard Stiegler’s framework of transindividuation and hyper-control, I examine how becoming-subject is predictively facilitated within cognitive capitalism and what Alexander Galloway terms “deep digitality.” Despite the loss of material vestiges qua virtualization—which I seek to trace in an historical review of industrialization to postindustrialization—the drive-based and reticulated "internet of things" facilitates a closed loop from within the brain to the outside environment, such that the aperture of thought is mediated and compressed. The human brain, understood through its material constitution, is susceptible to total datafication’s laminated process of “becoming-mnemotechnical,” and, as neuroplasticity is now a valid description for deep-learning and neural nets, we are privy to the rebirth of the once-discounted metaphor of the “cybernetic brain.” Probing algorithmic governmentality while posing noetic dreaming as both technical and pharmacological, I seek to analyze how spirit is blithely confounded with machine-thinking’s gelatinous cognition, as prosthetic organ-adaptation becomes probabilistically molded, networked, and agentially inflected (rather than simply externalized)

Rituals, Our Past, Present & Future. Glimpses of Islamic Enrichment

A Muslim should be encouraged to comprehend the benefit and value behind every aspect of Islamic practice and wisdom, and not just practice their religion because they were told to do so. The products proposed in this thesis aim to achieve this by inviting and encouraging a Muslim to practice The Five Pillars of Islam while comprehending their value through the use of modern means such as Arduino technology, 3D printing and visual computing programing. I am provoked by the fact that the circle of Gulf-region Muslims I’m surrounded by, and have been exposed to since childhood, belong to one of two stereotypes: those against or afraid of change who force adherence to religious chapter and verse, or those straying further and further away from our religion’s rituals and traditions. Can the practice of religion, and the values that it teaches us, be made more accessible and engaging by incorporating the very technology that is often accused of distracting us from its practice

CITIZEN SCIENCE REVIEW: BAGAIMANA KECANTIKAN DIPANDANG SECARA PSIKOSOSIAL?

Kecantikan merupakan topik yang dibahas dalam keseharian, serta menjadi variabel yang menarik terutama dalam bidang psikososial. Penelitian ini membahas kecantikan yang dikaji dengan metode penelitian kualitatif citizen science review, data yang diambil berdasar common sense media daring Quora dan literature review jurnal ilmiah terkait. Sebanyak 67 data quora dengan 48 jurnal ilmiah dianalisis serta disintesis. Hasil penelitian memperlihatkan (a) 64% responden menyebutkan kecantikan merupakan subjektivitas, abstrak, dan multi-faktor, (b) kecantikan bagi wanita memiliki risiko tersendiri seperti, narsistik, catcalling, insekuritas, kecemburuan sosial, dan kecenderungan membandingkan diri dengan pencapaian individu lain, (c) wanita menginginkan kecantikan karena terdapat keunggulan atau keuntungan yang didapat bagi wanita yang berpenampilan menarik dan berwajah cantik. Keunggulan tersebut dinyatakan sebagai beauty privillage, (d) terdapat substitusi kecantikan yang ditemukan pada penelitian ini, hal tersebut berbentuk kepercayaan diri, self-love, dan self-worth, serta (e) kecantikan dapat berubah dengan perlakuan tertentu, dan seiring usia biologis wanita