Perspectival generation in/within the Sala della Pace: broadening the viewfield of spatialised images

It is everyday experience to look at a picture on a wall, (or on a computer screen) from a position that is out of alignment with its perspective, and then make a mental adjustment so as to allow for and ignore the distortion which results. To understand the limits and problem of this compensation it is necessary to look at works where there is an explicit attempt to relate the space of an image and the space in which the image exists. One such exemplar is the Sala della Pace, painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1338-40. The Sala della Pace may be of particular value today in helping us understand and evaluate the rapidly developing capacity of digital technology to represent dense visual and spatial information. Through Lorenzetti’s amalgam of multiple zones of extromissive generation within the images of the Sala della Pace, Lorenzetti‘s work suggests a potential compositional technique that subverts the reduction of spatial representation to a singular point of perspectival generation by broadening the viewfield in which to receive and construct multiple spatialised images. It is the aim of this paper to explore spatial concepts in Lorenzetti’s painting that may inform the way in which we conceptualise the spatial representation of both real and fictive space in/within images

Revisiting digital technologies: envisioning biodigital bodies

In this paper the contemporary practices of human genomics in the 21st century are placed alongside the digital bodies of the 1990s. The primary aim is to provide a trajectory of the biodigital as follows: First, digital bodies and biodigital bodies were both part of the spectacular imaginaries of early cybercultures. Second, these spectacular digital bodies were supplemented in the mid-1990s by digital bodywork practices that have become an important dimension of everyday communication. Third, the spectacle of biodigital bodies is in the process of being supplemented by biodigital bodywork practices, through personal or direct-to-consumer genomics. This shift moves a form of biodigital communication into the everyday. Finally, what can be learned from putting the trajectories of digital and biodigital bodies together is that the degree of this communicative shift may be obscured through the doubled attachment of personal genomics to everyday digital culture and high-tech spectacle.Keywords: genomics, biodigital, bodies, spectacle, everyda

Art, public authorship and the possibility of re-democratization

The subject of this study is a large public art project by German artist Jochen Gerz, which was part of the urban regeneration program The Phoenix Initiative in Coventry City, 1999-2004. The study presents a short historical backdrop to Gerz’s work by way of defining ‘public authorship’ of which the Coventry project is one example. It extends the literature on contemporary countermonument by assessing Gerz’s artistic strategy in using a monument to exploring the conditions of public culture and possible shape of a cultural public sphere in the contemporary city. The public art project lasted over five years and was a mechanism by which the political issues at stake in the public life of Coventry, particularly the socio-historic conflicts that are constitutive of its civic identity, were articulated. The study argues that public authorship succeeded in identifying some crucial coordinates in the political constitution of public culture in Coventry, but in the face of competing civic rhetoric and new urban policy initiatives, the project remains an open inquiry. This study concludes by identifying some critical lines of inquiry for future studies in art’s critical role in the public sphere

Strategic Design through Brand Contextualization

Providing meaningful customer experience is at the core of any successful business activity. Brands can function as vehicles to bundle the ingredients of experience together and give them structure by which consumers are able to understand and interpret products and services. To complement the technical and functional reality and experience, brands create particular narratives around products and services, within the realm of their use experience. This paper aims to contribute to understanding of strategic design and brand contextualization by looking thoroughly into a research-driven student project. The product-service design assignment given to seven teams of four to five post-graduate students was to design a new bike-sharing system, serving the sustainable urban mobility needs of the city of Gothenburg in Sweden. The task was accompanied by a request to create a fictive brand case and specific brand narrative, based on a thorough analysis of pre-selected existing brands. The paper discusses how the teams crafted their brand narratives and how different design and service elements were used to create specific and meaningful brand experiences. In addition to the contribution of the paper to design research and practice, we present a process that might be more widely useful for the education of strategic design and brand management

Digital Death: The Failures, Struggles and Discourses of the Social Media Spectacle

Celebrities have always capitalized upon various media to give voice and substance to their own mute causes. From Live Aid to PBS fundraisers, they have utilized their public personae to support the downtrodden, sick and underprivileged. However, in December of 2010, when Alicia Keys and over a dozen other celebrities banded together to raise money for World AIDS Day by eradicating their Twitter and other social media profiles, their much-hyped campaign to raise one million dollars fell short of its goal by nearly half. This paper explores the discourses surrounding the Digital Death Pseudo-Event, and the effects of the disjuncture between the real and digital self when the Celebrity Spectacle is moved from traditional media to the social sphere. Consumer awareness of that gulf ultimately precluded the Digital Death campaign\u27s ability to succeed, not only as a fundraiser, but also as a media spectacle. Ultimately, such revelations point to the inherent natures of social media to promote a certain type of celebrity spectacle that does not conform uniformly to the celebrity of traditional media

Landscape History and Theory: from Subject Matter to Analytic Tool

This essay explores how landscape history can engage methodologically with the adjacent disciplines of art history and visual/cultural studies. Central to the methodological problem is the mapping of the beholder � spatially, temporally and phenomenologically. In this mapping process, landscape history is transformed from subject matter to analytical tool. As a result, landscape history no longer simply imports and applies ideas from other disciplines but develops its own methodologies to engage and influence them. Landscape history, like art history, thereby takes on a creative cultural presence. Through that process, landscape architecture and garden design regain the cultural power now carried by the arts and museum studies, and has an effect on the innovative capabilities of contemporary landscape design

Sub-creating Arda (2019), edited by Dimitra Fimi and Thomas Honegger

Book review by Dennis Wilson Wise of Sub-creating Arda (2019), edited by Dimitra Fimi and Thomas Honegge