Actor & Avatar: A Scientific and Artistic Catalog

What kind of relationship do we have with artificial beings (avatars, puppets, robots, etc.)? What does it mean to mirror ourselves in them, to perform them or to play trial identity games with them? Actor & Avatar addresses these questions from artistic and scholarly angles. Contributions on the making of "technical others" and philosophical reflections on artificial alterity are flanked by neuroscientific studies on different ways of perceiving living persons and artificial counterparts. The contributors have achieved a successful artistic-scientific collaboration with extensive visual material

When Kumbhakar Swallowed a Dead Dog : A Diasporic Rendering of the Reamker

Part performance, part lecture-demonstration, and part modern ritual, When Kumbhakar Swallowed a Dead Dog is a postmodern interpretation of an episode of the Reamker, the Cambodian version of the Indian epic Ramayana. In this written thesis, I lay out the foundational material for my work, consisting of a summary of the epic’s narratives and interpretations pertaining to its structure and symbolism, as well as an overview of three major dance theatre forms in Cambodia: shadow puppet theatre (sbaek thom), all-male masked dance-theatre (lkhon khol), and classical court dance (robam kbach boran). An account of the methodology employed and creative process follows, in which I include influences related to the contemporary climate change crisis, black and white cinema, and my experiences studying Cambodian dance theater forms. I conclude with a description and a short analysis of the performance, its impact on audiences, and relevance for my current choreographic practice

Free to Play: An Analysis in Aesthetic, Ethical, and Religious Movements

In this dissertation, I investigate five forms of play with reference to freedom and constraint in order first to ascertain what relationship holds between play and liberty and then to see how the activity of play - and the attitude of playfulness - might contribute to a full and flourishing human life. To do so, I turn to an interdisciplinary set of figures, including Erik Erikson, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Blaise Pascal, Plato, and the contemporary scholars of improvisation Gary Peters and Danielle Goldman. It is my contention that the dialectical interrelation of liberty and limitation constitutes the essence of play and that the free engagement of constraints is a proper feature of eudaimonistic ethics. Instead of being regarded as a dispensable disposition, then, playfulness should be upheld alongside traditional virtues as a trait worthy of deliberate cultivation in adulthood. Seeking to enact the claim that boundaries give rise to expansive possibility, I provide a firm structure for this study and organize my analysis according to Søren Kierkegaard's conceptions of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious spheres of existence. Liberty and limitation appear differently under each of these categories. Further, their forms change depending on whether they are viewed in light of children's play, videogames, gambling, puppetry, or improvisation, the iterations of play and playful identity under consideration in this study. Learning about the apprehension, negotiation, and appreciation of boundaries that occurs in play grants us a more nuanced understanding of play as a fundamental component of a good life. At the same time, this project affords the chance to reconsider the nature of freedom and constraint, and to reimagine what it means to be at liberty

Coraline

Coraline (Henry Selick, 2009) is stop-motion studio LAIKA's feature-length debut based on the popular children's novel by British author Neil Gaiman. Heralding a revival in global interest in stop-motion animation, the film is both an international cultural phenomenon and a breakthrough moment in the technological evolution of the craft. This open access collection brings together an international group of practitioners and scholars to examine Coraline’s place in animation history and culture, dissect its politics, and unpack its role in the technological and aesthetic development of its medium. More broadly, it celebrates stop motion as a unique and enduring artform while embracing its capacity to evolve in response to cultural, political, and technological changes, as well as shifting critical and audience demands. Divided into three sections, this volume’s chapters situate Coraline within an interconnected network of historical, industrial, discursive, theoretical, and cultural contexts. They place the film in conversation with the medium’s aesthetic and technological history, broader global intellectual and political traditions, and questions of animation reception and spectatorship. In doing so, they invite recognition – and appreciation – of the fact that Coraline occupies many liminal spaces at once. It straddles the boundary between children’s entertainment and traditional ‘adult’ genres, such as horror and thriller. It complicates a seemingly straight(forward) depiction of normative family life with gestures of queer resistance. Finally, it marks a pivotal point in stop-motion animation’s digital turn. Following the film’s recent tenth anniversary, the time is right to revisit its production history, evaluate its cultural and industry impact, and celebrate its legacy as contemporary stop-motion cinema’s gifted child. As the first book-length academic study of this contemporary animation classic, this volume serves as an authoritative introduction and a primary reference on the film for scholars, students, practitioners, and animation fans. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com

The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness

Is it possible to conceive of a Hello Kitty Middle Ages or a Tickle Me Elmo Renaissance? The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first reference to “cute” in the sense of “attractive, pretty, charming” to 1834. More recently, Sianne Ngai has offered a critical overview of the cuteness of the twentieth-century avant-garde within the context of consumer culture. But if cuteness can get under the skin, what kinds of surfaces does it best infiltrate, particularly in the framework of historical forms, events, and objects that traditionally have been read as emergences around “big” aesthetics of formal symmetries, high affects, and resemblances? The Retrofuturism of Cuteness seeks to undo the temporal strictures surrounding aesthetic and affective categories, to displace a strict focus on commodification and cuteness, and to interrogate how cuteness as a minor aesthetics can refocus our perceptions and readings of both premodern and modern media, literature, and culture. Taking seriously the retro and the futuristic temporalities of cuteness, this volume puts in conversation projects that have unearthed remnants of a “cult of cute”—positioned historically and critically in between transitions into secularization, capitalist frameworks of commodification, and the enchantment of objects—and those that have investigated the uncanny haunting of earlier aesthetics in future-oriented modes of cuteness

Blancanieves y los osos polares en la era del calentamiento global: una lectura de “My White Planet”, de Mark Anthony Jarman

Ambientado en una época en la que la globalización avanza a la par que el aumento de los peligros ecológicos, «My White Planet» (2008), de Mark Anthony Jarman, enarbola una subversión paródica de «Little Snow White» de los hermanos Grimm para evaluar la responsabilidad en que los seres humanos incurren al introducir cambios en el medio ambiente con repercusiones planetarias. Si los cuentos de hadas no reflejan miméticamente cómo los seres humanos habitan el mundo, sino que proponen intervenciones que conducen a una mejor adecuación entre los dos, sus reescrituras están dotadas de gran relevancia ética durante los períodos de mutación histórica cuando los modos antiguos ya no ofrecen orientación y el futuro parece incierto. El presente ensayo mostrará que Jarman recurre a los recursos del género de los cuentos de hadas para alentar una revisión crítica del mito del norte de Canadá y las múltiples formas de explotación que ha fomentado.Set in an age when globalization goes on a par with the rise of ecological perils, Mark Anthony Jarman’s “My White Planet” (2008) relies on a parodic subversion of the Brothers Grimm’s “Little Snow White” to consider the responsibility human beings incur when introducing changes in the environment that will have repercussions on the whole planet. If fairy tales do not mimetically reflect how human beings inhabit the world, but instead propose interventions that lead to a better adequacy between the two, their retellings are endowed with great ethical relevance during periods of historical mutation when the old ways no longer offer guidance and the future seems uncertain. The present essay will show that Jarman draws upon the resources of the fairy tale genre to encourage a critical revision of Canada’s northern myth and the manifold forms of exploitation it has encouraged

Coraline

Coraline (Henry Selick, 2009) is stop-motion studio LAIKA's feature-length debut based on the popular children's novel by British author Neil Gaiman. Heralding a revival in global interest in stop-motion animation, the film is both an international cultural phenomenon and a breakthrough moment in the technological evolution of the craft. This open access collection brings together an international group of practitioners and scholars to examine Coraline’s place in animation history and culture, dissect its politics, and unpack its role in the technological and aesthetic development of its medium. More broadly, it celebrates stop motion as a unique and enduring artform while embracing its capacity to evolve in response to cultural, political, and technological changes, as well as shifting critical and audience demands. Divided into three sections, this volume’s chapters situate Coraline within an interconnected network of historical, industrial, discursive, theoretical, and cultural contexts. They place the film in conversation with the medium’s aesthetic and technological history, broader global intellectual and political traditions, and questions of animation reception and spectatorship. In doing so, they invite recognition – and appreciation – of the fact that Coraline occupies many liminal spaces at once. It straddles the boundary between children’s entertainment and traditional ‘adult’ genres, such as horror and thriller. It complicates a seemingly straight(forward) depiction of normative family life with gestures of queer resistance. Finally, it marks a pivotal point in stop-motion animation’s digital turn. Following the film’s recent tenth anniversary, the time is right to revisit its production history, evaluate its cultural and industry impact, and celebrate its legacy as contemporary stop-motion cinema’s gifted child. As the first book-length academic study of this contemporary animation classic, this volume serves as an authoritative introduction and a primary reference on the film for scholars, students, practitioners, and animation fans. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com