Sympathy for the Scientist: Re-Calibrating a Heideggerian Critique of Metaphysics

This paper attempts to develop an ethico-aesthetic framework for enriching one's life and ethical outlook. Drawing primarily from Nietzsche, Foucault, and Heidegger, an argument is made that Heidegger's understanding of this issue was mistaken. The ontological crisis of modernity is not the overt influence of mathematics as a worldview over poetics and more traditionally aesthetic approaches. It is the rampant mis-and over-application of abstraction within one's view of the world while denying the material realities of life as we live it. This runaway abstractive worldview leads to the misapplication of mathematics and other sciences which in turn facilitate the dehumanization of life and those within it. When we try to solve the real problems of our material human lives through overly abstractive means, then we arrive at inauthentic arguments that fuel popular disdain for philosophy as irrelevant and nothing more than the purview of the elite. The goal is a recalibration of the argument toward addressing the denial of materiality within Modernism

Resonances: The sound of performance

It is a hot summer night in August 2013, as the audience gathers near the entrance of the large Gray Hall at the south side of the former coal mine Göttelborn (Germany). The sun has set, and there is only the gray light of dusk in the performance space inside, streaming through the large glass façade, falling onto a small array of stones laid out on the floor. Additional light from a video projector streams over the stones, and a tiny figure of a dancer is seen crawling over rocks, moving in the strange, a-syncopated rhythm of jump cuts. Slowly the sound of rocks scratching against a stone surface begins to be heard, it will remain the only sound for a while, then Japanese instrumentalist Emi Watanabe steps into the empty space with her flute

Sounds of Waitakere: Using practitioner research to explore how Year 6 recorder players compose responses to visual representations of a natural environment

How might primary students utilise the stimulus of a painting in a collaborative composition drawing on a non-conventional sound palette of their own making? This practitioner research features 17 recorder players from a Year 6 class (10–11-year-olds) who attend a West Auckland primary school in New Zealand. These children were invited to experiment with the instrument to produce collectively an expanded ‘repertoire’ or ‘palette’ of sounds. In small groups, they then discussed a painting by an established New Zealand painter set in the Waitakere Ranges and attempted to formulate an interpretation in musical terms. On the basis of their interpretation, drawing on sounds from the collective palette (complemented with other sounds), they worked collaboratively to develop, refine and perform a structured composition named for their chosen painting. This case study is primarily descriptive (providing narrative accounts and rich vignettes of practice) and, secondarily, exploratory (description and analysis leading to the development of hypotheses). It has implications for a range of current educational issues, including curriculum integration and the place of composition and notation in the primary-school music programme

'Constellations of singularities': the rejection of representative democracy in Coney's Early Days (of a better nation)

This article reflects on two specific performances of Coney’s Early Days (of a better nation) (2014); an interactive piece of theatre which invites its audience, in role as three fractious regions of a post-revolutionary nation, to make a series of decisions to avert the pending crisis and unify the country once more. Running out of money, medical supplies and food, and with inadequate security to protect their remaining sources of power, decisions need to be made quickly on how to act and it is down to the audience to build or reject institutional structures of governance through which such decisions might be made. In both performances I attended, such institutional structures were either rejected or abandoned, providing a lens through which to examine the widespread scepticism of political institutions and democratic forms of representational governance that currently pervades Europe. In this article, I will reflect on how my affective experience within Coney’s theatrical framework illuminated, for me, certain limitations of the trend in current political and philosophical theories to turn away from the authority of representative democracy towards a vision of disparate and singular acts of resistance

Re-Discovering Aesthetics

The beginning of the 21st century has seen the renewed use of aesthetics as a critical and interpretive method within various discursive spheres. Particularly, and unsurprisingly, this move has been most pronounced in the discursive systems of philosophy and the artworld. It is to this more specific re-discovery that the authors in this journal address their arguments

L'art pour l'art or l'art pour la vie?: an analysis of the historical avant-garde manifestos

This thesis examines the European Avant-Garde manifestos of the early twentieth century. The goal of this work is to determine, from an analysis of this primary material, the intentions of the historical avant-garde with regard to the autonomy of art. In accordance with the European Avant-Garde International Research Project coordinated by the University of Edinburgh, this thesis attempts to review the framework for study of the avant-garde established by Peter Burger in his Theory ofthe Avant-Garde of 1974.The manifestos selected for examination belong to the movements of German Expressionism, French Cubism, Italian Futurism, the Russian avant-garde, Dadaism and Surrealism. This range covers all those movements that Burger labels the "historical avant-garde". Whilst, in formulating a theory of avant-gardist intention, Burger focuses on Dadaism, early Surrealism and the Russian avant-garde "after the October revolution," this work aims to reformulate Burger's theory so that it may be applied equally to all movements of the historical avant-garde.In addition to establishing the intention of the avant-garde movements towards art's relationship to the social and political world, this thesis attempts to identify the extra-aesthetic implications of such objectives. Whether the movements were heralding a revolutionary doctrine of Tart pour la vie in line with Burger's theory, the traditional doctrine of Tart pour Tart, or were merely an instinctive reaction to advances in technology, their designs arguably impacted upon the direction taken by society and politics. The critical social theories of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Jiirgen Habermas are examined with respect to this extra-aesthetic impact

The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal

Vpliv aktivne vizualizacije na sposobnost pomnjenja besedne definicije pri dijakih

The era of visual communication influences the cognitive strategies of the individual. Education, too, must adjust to these changes, which raises questions regarding the use of visualisation in teaching. In the present study, we examine the impact of visualisation on the ability of high school students to memorise text. In the theoretical part of the research, we first clarify the concept of visualisation. We define the concept of active visualisation and visualisation as a means of acquiring and conveying knowledge, and we describe the different kinds of visualisation (appearance-based analogies and form-based analogies), specifically defining appearance-based schemata visualisations (where imagery is articulated in a typical culturally trained manner). In the empirical part of the research, we perform an experiment in which we evaluate the effects of visualisation on students’ ability to memorise a difficult written definition. According to the theoretical findings, we establish two hypotheses. In the first, we assume that the majority of the visualisations that students form will be appearance-based schemata visualisations. This hypothesis is based on the assumption that, in visualisation, people spontaneously use analogies based on imagery and schemas that are typical of their society. In the second hypothesis, we assume that active visualisation will contribute to the students’ ability to memorise text in a statistically significant way. This hypothesis is based on the assumption that the combination of verbal and visual experiences enhances cognitive learning. Both hypotheses were confirmed in the research. As our study only dealt with the impact of the most spontaneous type of appearancebased schemata visualisations, we see further possibilities in researching the influence of visualisations that are more complex formally. (DIPF/Orig.