The anthropomorphic imperative: a historical analogy

In a cultural setting in which the imitation of nature continues to be regulated by the ambitious project to cancel the dividing line between the natural and the artificial, man continues to find space for his replicative fantasies, even at the cost of breaking cultural boundaries and taboos. On the other hand, as shown in the historical analogy, this ambition, aimed not only at a partial reproduction but a true replication, seems to exhibit developmental contours that lead to the same final results in terms of disillusionment and subsequent abandonment

Values of the Human Person. Contemporary challenges

Contemporary knowledge is centered on the research on human dimensions. Philosophy should particularly appeal to values in the process of understanding the human nature. The valuable “becoming” of each human person requires growing ever more aware of his/her personal identity and of his/her role in this lifetime. In ethics, especially, values suppose moral choices or criteria on which a moral behavior is based. Max Scheler based his ethical theory on the distinction between goods and values. The “goods” are things to which we attach some physical worth, and the “values” are the object of emotional perception, of the “sentiment of value” and of the place they have in the hierarchy of values. Even if the human being attributes a certain worth to individual things, he/she is always searching for a universal value, which should exceed the contingency of that thing. This universal validity is a kind of ideal measure of the value of all empiric realities and it is articulated by a normative rationality. It forms a system of universal norms that contribute to the foundation of critical axiological judgments. What values are the most enhanced by our post-modern society? Are they the same as during the modern period? What would distinguish them from the values of other cultural periods of humankind? How do we react to the new challenges generated by technological progress and the media? How do the classical disciplines such as philosophy, religion, anthropology, and art respond to these new challenges? And how could they help us to better adapt the writings of certain significant personalities to the modern and contemporary culture? These are only a few questions this volume will address. It contains a large number of articles by authors from various countries and continents: philosophers, and theologians, as well as researchers in medicine, anthropology, and new scientific technologies. As the variety of topics is impressive, we tried to organize them into three thematic parts: “Part I: Fundamental Human Values. Contemporary Challenging Globalization,” “Part II: New Axiological Challenges in Technologies and Scientific Thinking,” and “Part III: Cultural and Spiritual Personalities: Possible Answers to Our Contemporary Changes.” In the following pages, we shall make a short presentation of each article in order to facilitate a quick familiarization with the entire volume

Portfolio of Creative Work

This portfolio of creative works consists of four projects dealing with the concepts of nostalgia, desire and kitsch in late capitalism. The projects are composed of two films, Rex and I?, and two interactive installations, and Information Superhighway respectively. Rex explores the cultural icon of the dinosaur and its use as a simulacrum in contemporary society. It does this through a soundtrack composed of sound bites from various documentaries from the past contrasted with a video displaying images of the dinosaur from the past and present, accompanied by generative spoken word poetry. I? delves into the history of consumerism and examines the link between identity and emotional well-being in postmodern culture through the genre of cyberpunk. Madonna’s Material Girl is nested between a soundtrack created using gritty synths and accompanied by a video using commercials from the past, commercial-like footage of the present and 3D animation. Listening Machines comments on the use of anthropomorphism and cuteness in product design through an interactive installation where participants engage with anthropomorphised speakers with unique personalities. Information Superhighway investigates the surreal nature of the internet and the disconnect between cyberspace and the physical world. It explores this through an interactive installation which uses a twitter bot that generates random sentences based off databases of recent tweets, the use of sculptural devices such as an interactive cloud and ambient sounds generated from early computer start up noises. These works have been realised through the use of SuperCollider, MaxMSP, Blender, Logic Pro X and Final Cut Pro X. In this commentary I will expand on the theory that inspired these projects and explain the realisation of each of them

Contemporary Kitsch: An examination through creative practice

This exegesis examines the theoretical concept of contemporary kitsch within a creative practice that incorporates sculptural and installation art. Kitsch is a distinct aesthetic style. Once designated to the rubbish bin of culture, kitsch was considered to be low class, bad taste cheap fakes and copies (Greenberg, 1961; Adorno & Horkheimer, 1991; Calinescu, 1987; Dorfles, 1969). I argue, however, that this is no longer the case. This research critically examines the way in which contemporary kitsch now plays a vital and positive role in social and individual aesthetic life. Although there are conflicting points of view and distinct variations between recent cultural commentators (Olalquiaga, 1992; Binkley, 2000; Attfield, 2006) on what kitsch is, there is a common sentiment that “the repetitive qualities of kitsch address . . . a general problem of modernity” (Binkley, p. 131). The research aligns the repetitive qualities to what sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991) refers to as “dissembeddedness” (1991) or “the undermining of personal horizons of social and cosmic security” (Binkley, 1991, p.131). The research investigates: how the sensory affect of sentimentality imbued in the kitsch experiences, possessions and material objects people covet and collect, offer a way of the individual moving from disembeddedness to a state of being re-embedded; and locates the ways in which the artist can facilitate the re-embedding experience. Through this lens it is demonstrated that kitsch has become firmly rooted in our “lifeworlds” (Habermas, 1971), as an aesthetic that reveals “how people make sense of the world through artefacts” (Attfield, 2006, p. 201) and everyday objects; that the sensory affect of sentimentality on connections to possessions and material objects that contemporary kitsch offers is shared across cultures and societie

Chapter Brand Identity e nuovi media. Il caso studio del Platinum Jubilee

The 43rd UID conference, held in Genova, takes up the theme of ‘Dialogues’ as practice and debate on many fundamental topics in our social life, especially in these complex and not yet resolved times. The city of Genova offers the opportunity to ponder on the value of comparison and on the possibilities for the community, naturally focused on the aspects that concern us, as professors, researchers, disseminators of knowledge, or on all the possibile meanings of the discipline of representation and its dialogue with ‘others’, which we have broadly catalogued in three macro areas: History, Semiotics, Science / Technology. Therefore, “dialogue” as a profitable exchange based on a common language, without which it is impossible to comprehend and understand one another; and the graphic sign that connotes the conference is the precise transcription of this concept: the title ‘translated’ into signs, derived from the visual alphabet designed for the visual identity of the UID since 2017. There are many topics which refer to three macro sessions: - Witnessing (signs and history) - Communicating (signs and semiotics) - Experimenting (signs and sciences) Thanks to the different points of view, an exceptional resource of our disciplinary area, we want to try to outline the prevailing theoretical-operational synergies, the collaborative lines of an instrumental nature, the recent updates of the repertoires of images that attest and nourish the relations among representation, history, semiotics, sciences

Contemporary Art in Japan and Cuteness in Japanese Popular Culture

This thesis is an art historical study focussing on contemporary Japan, and in particular the artists Murakami TakashL Mori Mariko, Aida Makoto, and Nara Yoshitomo. These artists represent a generation of artists born in the 1960s who use popular culture to their own ends. From the seminal exhibition 'Tokyo Pop' at Hiratsuka Museum of Art in 1996 which included all four artists, to Murakami's group exhibition 'Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture' which opened in April 2005, central to my research is an exploration of contemporary art's engagement with the pervasiveness of cuteness in Japanese culture. Including key secondary material, which recognises cuteness as not merely something trivial but involving power play and gender role issues, this thesis undertakes an interdisciplinary analysis of cuteness in contemporary Japanese popular culture, and examines howcontemporary Japanese artists have responded, providing original research through interviews with Aida Makoto, Mori Mariko and Murakami Takashi. Themes examined include the deconstruction of the high and low in contemporary art; sh6jo (girl) culture and cuteness; the relation of cuteness and the erotic; the transformation of cuteness into the grotesque; cuteness and nostalgia; and virtual cuteness in Japanese science fiction animation, and computer games. Director of Studies: Toshio Watanabe Supervisors: David Ryan and Omuka Toshihar

I love you to death : the voice of the woman artist : sex, violence, sentimentality

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (p. 114-117).At a dinner party in Durban after the opening of Come, a 2007 exhibition of Michaelis MFA students, a woman asked me about my work. When I told her it was "the bullets", by way of description (One Hundred Bullets With Your Name On Them), she said something along the lines of "oh, that's so fascinating, I really had thought a man had made them"

Merchandising as a strategic tool to enhance and spread intangible values of cultural resources

The design of cultural and environmental goods can aim at valorising both material and immaterial cultural heritage at different scales. Specifically, the merchandising product, which is often the victim of production stereotypes, can instead collaborate with a disruptive force in the construction of the non-ephemeral “sense” of a visit. It is, in fact, able to spread complex contents in scientifically correct and comprehensible ways for different targets, condensing the immaterial patrimony into (small) new, low-cost and rich-in-meaning artefacts. This case study, proposed as evidence of such an approach, pertains to a research and teaching activity that was developed in 2017 with 230 university students of design, with the aim of setting up a collection of dedicated merchandising products for a regional talc mine Ecomuseum. The challenge involved narrating the material culture of the location through products that were philologically coherent with the context, but new from the language, functionality, productivity, user involvement and economic accessibility points of view. The resulting projects are, at present, being screened by the Ecomuseum in order to select the most significant for future production. In conclusion, the activity was shown to be potentially scalable and repeatable in other contexts, in which design can valorise an intangible heritage of immense value through products that, inserted into a more extensive strategy of valorisation of the cultural heritage, are within the reach of all

Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990

‘Postmodernism’ was the final instalment of a 12-year series of V&A exhibitions exploring 20th-century design. It examined a diverse collection of creative practices in art, architecture, design, fashion, graphics, film, performance and pop music/video, which the curators, Pavitt and Adamson (V&A/RCA), identified under the common theme of ‘postmodernism’. The exhibition assessed the rise and decline of postmodern strategies in art and style cultures of the period, exploring their radical impact as well as their inextricable links with the economics and effects of late-capitalist culture. The exhibition comprised over 250 objects, including large-scale reconstructions and archive film/video footage, drawn from across Europe, Japan and the USA. It was the first exhibition to bring together this range of material and to foreground the significance of pop music and performance in the development of postmodernism. Pavitt originated and co-curated the exhibition with Adamson. They shared intellectual ownership of the project and equal responsibility for writing and editing the accompanying 320-page book (including a 40,000-word jointly written introduction), but divided research responsibilities according to geography and subject. The research was conducted over four years, with Pavitt leading on European and British material. This involved interviewing artists, designers and architects active in the period and working with collections and archives across Europe. The research led to the acquisition of c.80 objects for the V&A’s permanent collections, making it one of the most significant public collections of late-20th-century design in the world. The exhibition was critically reviewed worldwide. For the Independent, ‘bright ideas abound at the V&A’s lucid show’ (2011). It attracted 115,000 visitors at the V&A (15% over the Museum’s target) and travelled in 2012 to MART Rovereto, Italy (50,000 visitors) and Landesmuseum Zürich, Switzerland (70,000 visitors). Pavitt was invited to speak about the exhibition in the UK, USA, Poland, Portugal, Ireland and Italy (2010-12)

Absurd Romania: revisiting Tristan Tzara and Eugène Ionesco

“Absurd Romania” revisits Romanian history and politics, and their intersection with the literary scene out of which both Tzara and Ionesco emerged, in order to better situate the diverse roots of European modernism and transnational avant-garde. I examine how their radical aesthetics developed in response to the specific political issues and cultural debates, which animated and inspired Tzara, Ionesco and their contemporaries. In the first chapter, I show that the writings of literary critic Titu Maiorescu and playwright I.L. Caragiale, two important exponents of a specifically Romanian ironic mode of cultural criticism, are highly relevant for an understanding of Tzara’s and Ionesco’s aesthetics. By revealing the points of contact between Ionesco’s cryptic forms and Caragiale’s seemingly more traditional dramaturgy, Chapter Two showcases the important aesthetic mutation at work in the theatre of the absurd. In Chapter Three, I document Tzara’s affiliation to a Romanian tradition of left-wing radicalism and engaged symbolism. The final chapter demonstrates that Ionesco’s theatre dramatizes a problematic Romanian modernity fraught with identity/cultural anxieties and political extremism. Ionesco’s aesthetics is both a continuation of the avant-garde project towards a critique of the ideology of language and a formal resolution of Romania’s identity qualms. Tzara and Ionesco’s forms, I argue, have deep roots in a Romanian tradition of social criticism which makes surprising use of irony in order to articulate conflicting visions of the nation