Listening and Drawing: Methodologies Towards Emplacement

This practice based PhD develops processes of embodied listening and experimental drawing as multi-sensory, emplaced methodologies to articulate new approaches to the contemporary practice of drawing. Through creative interactions with the historically significant and visually iconic sites of Golden Gully in Hill End, New South Wales, Australia; and the village of Langshi in Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China, this project examines how drawing and listening can generate an awareness of perceptual, cultural and social emplacement. My practice initiates a dialogue with visual paradigms evident in painted and poetic responses to these places from the Australian 20th century landscape and Chinese 12th to 13th century shanshui traditions. From these departure points, the practice responds to the material reality of Golden Gully and Langshi in the present. My engagement with these places is inflected by my context as a migrant, female artist of Chinese heritage practicing between cultures in Australia and internationally. The contextual specificity of this position in the practical research reinforces an approach to these places as constituted of many possible relations. Through experimental process-based interactions with these places, I develop four embodied listening methodologies of Touch, Space, Durations and Sounding. These methodologies address the specific perceptual conditions generated by my engagements with these places. They facilitate the analysis of drawing with sound feedback and malleable paper ‘mediators,’ which act as conduits shaping my perceptual and physical interactions with these places. The drawing properties of surface, gesture and line, are extended through the intersubjective experiences of listening and innovated by the spatial and temporal fluidity of sound. Sound feedback compositions, paper mediators and video works from creative interactions with Golden Gully and Langshi, are used to mediate further experimental interactions with the exhibition space. Through drawing and listening as methods of exploring ongoing relationships with places, contemporary drawing is extended as an enactive process that can generate manifold senses of perceptual emplacement

21st International Congress of Aesthetics, Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media, Book of Abstracts

The Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade and the Society for Aesthetics of Architecture and Visual Arts of Serbia (DEAVUS) are proud to be able to organize the 21st ICA Congress on “Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics: Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media”. We are proud to announce that we received over 500 submissions from 56 countries, which makes this Congress the greatest gathering of aestheticians in this region in the last 40 years. The ICA 2019 Belgrade aims to map out contemporary aesthetics practices in a vivid dialogue of aestheticians, philosophers, art theorists, architecture theorists, culture theorists, media theorists, artists, media entrepreneurs, architects, cultural activists and researchers in the fields of humanities and social sciences. More precisely, the goal is to map the possible worlds of contemporary aesthetics in Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa and Australia. The idea is to show, interpret and map the unity and diverseness in aesthetic thought, expression, research, and philosophies on our shared planet. Our goal is to promote a dialogue concerning aesthetics in those parts of the world that have not been involved with the work of the International Association for Aesthetics to this day. Global dialogue, understanding and cooperation are what we aim to achieve. That said, the 21st ICA is the first Congress to highlight the aesthetic issues of marginalised regions that have not been fully involved in the work of the IAA. This will be accomplished, among others, via thematic round tables discussing contemporary aesthetics in East Africa and South America. Today, aesthetics is recognized as an important philosophical, theoretical and even scientific discipline that aims at interpreting the complexity of phenomena in our contemporary world. People rather talk about possible worlds or possible aesthetic regimes rather than a unique and consistent philosophical, scientific or theoretical discipline

Sturdy steeds, autumn wind, apricot flowers, spring rain : a literary stylistic approach to the lyrics of Li Yu and Li Qingzhao

A transtirretina (TTR) é uma das várias proteínas conhecidas por sofrerem alterações conformacionais e formarem agregados e fibras amiloides insolúveis e altamente estáveis que se acumulam nos tecidos extracelulares causando doenças. A amiloidose senil sistémica, a polineuropatia amiloidótica familiar, a cardiomiopatia amiloidótica familiar e a rara amiloidose seletiva do sistema nervoso central são as principais patologias em que a TTR está implicada. Embora o transplante de fígado e o medicamento Tafamidis sejam usados como abordagens terapêuticas, atualmente não há cura ou tratamento totalmente eficaz para as amiloidoses da TTR e várias estratégias terapêuticas têm vindo a ser desenvolvidas visando as diferentes etapas do processo de formação de fibras. A desagregação de oligómeros e fibras amiloides é uma dessas estratégias. Para selecionar eficientemente compostos com esse efeito é necessário desenvolver um protocolo específico de screening que consiga identificar e caracterizar a interação desses compostos com as fibras. Com este objetivo três protocolos diferentes de formação de fibras de TTR tipo selvagem foram estudadas para selecionar e caracterizar o protocolo de formação de fibras mais relevante e apropriado. Adicionalmente a técnica STD NMR (diferença de transferência de saturação por ressonância magnética nuclear) foi selecionada e usada para estudar a interação da doxiciclina, composto conhecido por desagregar fibras amiloides de TTR mutante, com fibras de TTR tipo selvagem, e um ensaio de dispersão dinâmica de luz foi desenvolvido e utilizado para caraterizar o efeito deste composto na desagregação de fibras. Os resultados demonstraram que o protocolo de formação de fibras induzidas pelo calor possui algumas vantagens sobre os outros protocolos mas requer uma melhor caracterização. A STD NMR foi aplicada com sucesso na caracterização da interação da doxiciclina com as fibras de TTR tipo selvagem, indicando os resultados que a doxiciclina interage de modo diverso com amiloide de TTR tipo selvagem formado em diferentes condições experimentais. O ensaio de dispersão dinâmica de luz permitiu a caracterização do efeito da doxiciclina nas fibras ao longo do tempo e demonstrou que a doxiciclina desagrega fibras amiloides pré-formadas de TTR tipo selvagem. Palavras-chave: Amiloide, transtirretina, doxiciclina, desagregação de fibra

The Poetics and Politics of Withdrawal: cultural negotiations of dynastic change in seventeenth-century China

This thesis explores modalities of withdrawal by individuals from educated elites in seventeenth-century China when faced with the catastrophe of dynastic transition. Examining how withdrawal was enacted, manipulated, and negotiated through cultural productions, it attempts to show that this process led to new forms of withdrawal that went beyond the pre-established norms and models for the life of such “remnant subjects” in a new dynasty. Drawing upon various literary and artistic sources, three case studies are examined: Qi Biaojia’s 祁彪佳 (1602-1645) Garden of Mountain Yu and his midnight-suicide staged in it; Gong Xian’s 龔賢 (1617-1689) dark-toned landscape and cultivation of his bamboo thicket garden; and Dong Yue’s 董説 (1620-1686) obsession with dreaming and writing, and his boating life as a wandering monk during his later years. The case studies consider the correspondence between each figure’s cultural practices and their individualized way of withdrawal by developing the concept of a “mediate landscape”. In Qi Biaojia’s aesthetic appreciation of his private garden, he seemed to have projected his theatrical spectatorship as a drama critique onto his garden. He saw the garden elements, visitors, and sometimes even his alter ego, as spectacles or actors on the stage of garden, during which he could enjoy a capacity for simultaneous impassioned participation and dispassionate viewing. Upon the fall of Nanjing, Qi drowned himself in the garden lake in the middle of the night—his poetic self-killing is particular in terms of its theatrical characteristics, which can be observed not only in the dramatic gesture of his actual suicide but also in his actions prior to the act. In Qi Biaojia’s case, the theatricalized garden is the mediate landscape that stages his political death, which I see as one modality of withdrawal, as well as the poetic farewells performed by the “theatrical self” of the garden owner. Gong Xian’s landscape paintings feature a heavy accumulation of ink and dense composition of elements, both of which actualise the substantiality of his landscape. Although dark and sombre, his thematic depiction of “a thousand peaks and myriad ravines” represents his ideal landscape, one opposed to the common expression of frustration and sorrow usually shared in the representation of landscape by Ming remnants, while the “solitary household” in it indicates an ideal of lived withdrawal. In this case, I regard the substantial landscape as the mediate landscape by which Gong’s ideal of withdrawal is accomplished in both the paintings and reality: the solitary homes in deep mountains depicted in his paintings echo his own gated and bamboothicket garden at the foot of the mountain. Attracted by the changefulness of dreams, Dong Yue recorded his own dreams and constructed an imaginative Land of Dreams through systematic writing, which stabilised a therapeutic withdrawal from the harsh realities of the time. After dynastic change, with the assistance of Buddhist thinking, Dong came to realize how his previous cultural practices on dreams contradicted with the nature of dreams, which lies in the mutability of illusions. Understanding that only unobstructed movement and transformation could lead to his ideal withdrawal, in his late years Dong began a self-initiated exile on a boat. In this case, the transient world of dreams acts as the mediate landscape that leads eventually to Dong Yue’s withdrawal on a rootless boat. The conclusion summarizes the thesis from two perspectives: the poetics and politics of individual escape; and the way space and the body were imagined in the mediate landscape. Finally, it explores several significant issues arising from the case studies with a view to shedding new light on a number of binary relations – including the illusory and the real, obsession and self-cultivation, and the manifest and the hidden – that have informed discussion of the Ming-Qing transition

Photography and Social Life: An Ethnography of Chinese Amateur Photography Online

This dissertation explores the ‘middle-brow’ (Bourdieu, 1990) photography practices of contemporary Chinese people in the digital era and how they produce, circulate, and consume photographic images on and off the Internet. Through participant observation and interviews with Chinese photo hobbyists and professionals working in the visual-Internet industry based in London, Beijing, or in the virtual world, it asks how the marriage between photography and the Internet in China has been similar to, or distinct from, its counterparts in the rest of the world, consolidating a vernacular photo-scape that has emerged alongside China’s booming Internet economy and socio-economic transformation over the past forty years. The research further addresses the agencies of both individuals and images, which determine what people want from photography in today’s China and what photography wants from this new networked, mediated society. The dissertation moves across persons, communities, organisations, and real and virtual sites, making it a multi-sited ethnography that traces social relations and ‘the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space’ (Marcus, 1995: 96). The thesis presents a panoramic picture of the everyday practices carried out by Chinese amateur photographers, who are often imagined and categorised as the country’s middle class. The study focuses on two main aspects. The first is the activity of amateur photography, including the conspicuous consumption of photographic equipment and participation in relevant events, as well as social behaviours on and off of Internet photography platforms. The second involves the judgement and appreciation of photographic images on sites such as Tuchong, focusing on various kinds of aesthetic strategies around and within photographic images. The combination of the two has helped photo hobbyists in China to shape their values, career paths, and new identities in the context of digitalisation and the rise of social media

Proceedings of the 21st International Congress of Aesthetics, Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media

The Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade and the Society for Aesthetics of Architecture and Visual Arts of Serbia (DEAVUS) are proud to be able to organize the 21st ICA Congress on “Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics: Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media”. We are proud to announce that we received over 500 submissions from 56 countries, which makes this Congress the greatest gathering of aestheticians in this region in the last 40 years. The ICA 2019 Belgrade aims to map out contemporary aesthetics practices in a vivid dialogue of aestheticians, philosophers, art theorists, architecture theorists, culture theorists, media theorists, artists, media entrepreneurs, architects, cultural activists and researchers in the fields of humanities and social sciences. More precisely, the goal is to map the possible worlds of contemporary aesthetics in Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa and Australia. The idea is to show, interpret and map the unity and diverseness in aesthetic thought, expression, research, and philosophies on our shared planet. Our goal is to promote a dialogue concerning aesthetics in those parts of the world that have not been involved with the work of the International Association for Aesthetics to this day. Global dialogue, understanding and cooperation are what we aim to achieve. That said, the 21st ICA is the first Congress to highlight the aesthetic issues of marginalised regions that have not been fully involved in the work of the IAA. This will be accomplished, among others, via thematic round tables discussing contemporary aesthetics in East Africa and South America. Today, aesthetics is recognized as an important philosophical, theoretical and even scientific discipline that aims at interpreting the complexity of phenomena in our contemporary world. People rather talk about possible worlds or possible aesthetic regimes rather than a unique and consistent philosophical, scientific or theoretical discipline

Course Catalog 2012-2013

https://repository.wellesley.edu/catalogs/1140/thumbnail.jp