8,342 research outputs found
A Cornish palimpsest : Peter Lanyon and the construction of a new landscape, 1938-1964
The thesis examines the emergence of Peter Lanyon as one of the few truly innovative British landscape painters this century. In the Introduction I discuss the problematic nature of landscape art and consider the significance of Lanyon's discovery that direct description and linear perspective can be replaced with allusive representational elements by fusing the emotional and imaginative life of the artist with the physical activity of painting. Chapter One concentrates on the period 1936-8 when Lanyon was taught by Borlase Smart, a key figure in the St Ives art colony between the wars. Chapter Two examines the influence of Adrian Stokes and the links between Lanyon's painting and the theories developed in books such as Colour and Form and The Quattro Cento. Chapter Three analyses the period 1940-45 when Lanyon was directly influenced by the constructivism of Nicholson, Hepworth and Gabo. I look closely at their approaches to abstraction and assess Lanyon's relative position to them. The importance of Neo-Romanticism and the status of St Ives as a perceived avant-garde community is also addressed. In Chapter Four I discuss how Lanyon resolved to achieve a new orientation in his art on his return from wartime service with the RAF by synthesising constructivism, and traditional landscape. The Generation and Surfacing Series demonstrate his preoccupation with a sense of place, a fascination with the relationships between the human body and landscape and his struggle to find a technique and style that was entirely his own. His sense of existential insideness is discussed in Chapter Five through an examination of the work derived from Portreath, St. Just and Porthleven - key places in Lanyon's psychological attachment to the landscape of West Penwith. In Chapter Six I examine Lanyon's attachment to myths and archetypal forms, tracing the influence of Bergson's vitalist philosophy as well as his use of Celtic and classical motifs. Chapter Seven is a discussion of the malaise evident in Lanyon's work by 1955 and the impact of American Abstract Expressionism at the Tate Gallery a year later. In the summer of 1959 Lanyon joined the Cornish Gliding Club and Chapter Eight looks at how this necessitated a dynamic, expanded conception of the landscape and a re-thinking of relations within the picture field. The ability to dissolve boundaries encouraged him to break down distinctions between painting and construction so that abstract sculptural elements were now assembled into independent works of art. Finally, Chapter Nine assesses Lanyon's overall position in relation to his early influences and to St Ives art as a whole, his response to new directions in art coming out of London and NewYork in the early 1960s and the importance of travel as a stimulus for further realignment in his artistic and topographical horizons. His pictorial inventiveness and vitality remained unabated at the time of his death and would undoubtedly have continued to be enriched by travel abroad and contact with new movements in modem art on both sides of the Atlanti
The withdrawal of being and the discursive creation of the modern subject - an examination of the movement form being to non-being through a consideration of Heideggerean and Arsitotelian notions of being
This work considers what it means to 'be' human and seeks to show that it is in the activity of 'being' human that our individual identity lies, because this is the activity that determines what we are and what we will become. Aristotle asked the fundamental metaphysical question, "is a human being idle by nature?" and concluded, from his realisations concerning the dynamic nature of reality, that he is not. Accordingly, the metaphysical vision of 'beinghuman' that Aristotle articulated, which is considered and applied in this work, in contrast to the static notions of being presented by Heidegger and Christian scholasticism, presents an understanding of man as a potentially dynamic and internally active being, capable of maintaining himself by bein~ attuned to reality and thereby contemplating God. It seems most timely to explore Aristotle's understanding of 'being-human' because much postmodern thought seems to be concerned with locating the 'self, or explicating its disappearance in terms of an emancipation from form, or as the exposure of some form of illusion that has kept us all living the lie of selfhood. However, the 'absent' postmodern self finds a place in Aristotle's metaphysical vision, because not only did Aristotle recognise the significance of actively 'being' human, he also recognised that through deprivation and incapacity some forms of being can go out of existence or become something else. And it appears that our postmodern form of unconscious existence constitutes such an altered form, determined according to a deprivation of actively 'being', i.e., by 'non-being.' The determining movement of 'non-being', which emerges from the ontological gap created by failing to 'be', is considered throughout this work, particularly with regard to developments in language and technology, because it is through our single-minded engagement in external productive activities, which are incidental to 'being-human', that we have avoided the inner contemplative activity that inheres in human 'thinghood'
Making Sense of Ayahuasca Non-Sense: A critical study of UK groups consuming a psychoactive plant mixture and their struggle to find religious meaning
How we make sense of ourselves, and the cosmos is an ongoing concern, guided by the people we meet, environments we exist within, and plants we consume. Having spent over a year observing forty-nine participants within three UK-based ayahuasca churches, it is clear that the psychoactive 'brew' ayahuasca creates intense changes to how individuals think about themselves and the world they live in. At the heart of the ayahuasca experience are non-sensical hallucinations and visions, which often exist outside of perceptual understanding, leaving individuals feeling lost in an unknowable universe. As we will come to see, making sense of non-sensical ayahuasca experiences requires individuals to negotiate multiple 'common-sense' views of reality. Taking a view that mind is something that happens within life, this ethnographic study uses participant observation, interviews, conversations, personal diaries, and my experiences as an ayahuasca tourist to detail how making sense of reality is also an act of making oneself. In so doing, I argue that ayahuasca hallucinations and visions function as a source of ongoing mental innovation, facilitating preferred views of reality throughout these psychoactive churches. Critically, we will see how frequent ayahuasca consumption engenders in-depth beliefs in the supernatural, and in particular, devotion to the goddess Ayahuasca, who functions as the unchallengeable road to knowing oneself and reality. Acting as an otherworldly guide, the immaterial goddess Ayahuasca plays a key part in how individuals convert non-sensical experiences into sense, while providing practical advice for how to achieve salvation. Problematically though, positioning the universe and oneself as predominantly supernatural tends to erode beliefs in the physical world, leaving these churches with incoherent views of reality, and at the periphery of everyday social life. As such, church doctrines seem increasingly unable to cope with life outside of their groups, and thus, tactically stigmatise competing views of reality as sinful and individuals espousing such heresies as under the control of malevolent demonic beings. Not surprisingly, this binary belief in a good and evil cosmos is a powerful regulatory force dictating what reality is within these churches, and who church members can claim to be
Constructing Cassandra: The social construction of strategic surprise at the Central Intelligence Agency 1947-2001
This dissertation takes a post-positivist approach to strategic surprise, and examines the identity and internal culture of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) through the lens of social constructivism. It identifies numerous social mechanisms that created and maintained four key, persistent attributes of the CIAâs identity and culture between 1947 and 2001. These features are: 1) homogeneity of personnel; 2) scientism and the reification of a narrow form of âreasonâ; 3) an overwhelming preference for âsecretsâ over openly-available information; and, 4) a relentless drive for consensus. It then documents the influence of these elements of the CIAâs identity and culture in each phase of the intelligence cycle (Tasking, Collection, Analysis, Production and Dissemination), prior to four strategic surprises: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979, the collapse of the USSR, and al-Qaâidaâs terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. It concludes that these key aspects of the CIAâs identity and culture created the antecedent conditions that allowed these four strategic surprises to occur, and thus prevented the CIA from fulfilling its mandate to âprevent another Pearl Harborâ. This conclusion is supported by contrasting the majority views at the CIA prior to these events with the views of âCassandrasâ (i.e. individuals inside or outside the Agency who anticipated the approximate course of events based on reasoned threat assessments that differed sharply from the Agencyâs, but who were ignored or sidelined). In so doing, this work shifts the burden of proof for explaining strategic surprises back to the characteristics and actions of intelligence producers like the CIA, and away from errors by intelligence consumers like politicians and policymakers. This conclusion also allows this work to posit that understanding strategic surprise as a social construction is logically prior to previously proposed, entirely positivist, attempts to explain or to prevent it
Ecological Uncivilisation: Precarious World-Making After Progress
Responding to the proposition that learning to live in the Anthropocene involves learning how to die, this article problematises the modes of world-making upheld in some of the contemporary proposals for the global reorganisation of societies towards just, socio-ecological transitions beyond the techno-fixes of geoengineering, green growth, and their attendant ideals of progress. Specifically, it critically examines one such proposal that, inspired by process philosophy, has proven deeply influential in Chinaâs recent shift in ecological (geo)politics: the idea of an âecological civilisationâ based on principles of ontological relationality, democratic responsibility, and a new alliance between the sciences and the humanities. The article argues that while such a project rejects the substantive values of modern progress, its regulative notion of civilisation retains the modern story of progress as a mode of valuation and therefore reinscribes imperial, colonial values at the heart of ecology. In response, the article suggests that learning to die in the wake of ecological devastation requires making life outside the modern coordinates of progress, which is to say living without the ideal of civilisation. Seeking to expand the political imagination at a time of socio-ecological transformations, it calls for âecological uncivilizationâ assa permanent experimentation with improbable forms of world-making and methodologies of life that envisaged thanks to ongoing histories of decolonisation and not in spite of them; that strive to live and die well but not always better
Mandatory detention and treatment of drug users in Malaysia : The implications for the principles of human rights
The research framework is founded upon a critical analysis of the extent to which the legal process involved in the mandatory treatment and rehabilitation of drug users in Malaysia is consistent with the principles of human rights according to the national and international human rights instruments; the Malaysian Constitution and the UDHR respectively. The mandatory treatment is based upon the principles of punishment rather than rehabilitation. The arrest and detention of these drug users, which are salient features of the legal process raises the issue of serious violations of the human rights principles. To fulfill the true objective of the government's Drug Intervention Programme (DIP) through treatment and rehabilitation at Puspen centres, by reducing drug dependency and preventing relapse, treatment must be consistent with the principles of human rights for it to be effective. Data and information were gathered from empirical research through the application of various qualitative methods: these include a case study, direct observation, semistructured and unstructured interviews with key stakeholders, focus group with former drug users and an analysis of case files. Findings revealed that the legal process of funneling 'suspected drug dependants' into treatment involved a series of breaches of the fundamental human rights principles that could not be justified. The scope of police powers with regard to the arrest and detention of 'suspected drug dependants' has been widely abused and such exercise of power has been without proper statutory safeguards to protect the rights of these individuals from such arbitrary arrest. Unnecessary prolonged period of detention have led to grave infringement of individual liberty whilst conditions of confinement and failure to provide medical assistance and medication-assisted treatment particularly during withdrawal symptoms have amounted to inhuman, cruel and degrading treatment. Lack of due process including denying the right to legal representation has caused severe legal implications upon the drug users. As a consequence, the flaw in the legal system has deprived them of their constitutional rights and in contravention of
the international human rights principles. Recommendations are proposed for an immediate reform to the drug policies and procedures with paramount consideration towards a more humane and effective treatment
Further remarks on modern sepulture : Twenty years of cemetery studies and eight core questions defining cemetery research
This paper reviews cemetery publications over the last twenty years and considers current trends and new directions. In these two decades, cemetery research has included contributions from the humanities, social sciences and sciences and its inter-national reach has expanded substantially, echoing the expansion in geographic scope of death studies. The study of cemeteries has also benefited from a spatial turn within a number of disciplines: within death studies, conceptions of âdeathscapesâ or ânecroscapesâ has expanded the range of questions asked of all locations where death is encountered. The paper is ordered using eight core questions that can be asked of any kind of space used for the interment of the dead either as a full body or as cremated remains: how do we define this space?; how has this space come to be?; what does this space mean?; what does this space look like?; how is it used?; what do we express through this space?; how is the space managed? and how is this space valued? The review indicates that the field of cemetery studies is intrinsically interdisciplinary, where nuance of meaning and degree of significance is best captured in the interstices between and interplay of separate discipline traditions, themes and methods
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What Are Bob and Alice saying? [Mis]communication and Intermediation Between Language and Code
Natural language interfaces enable intuitive conversational interactions with computational devices, whilst rendering the inner workings of these technologies opaque. However, such interfaces can also produce events of miscommunication between computers and their human users, which draw attention to the nonhuman logic operating inside the black box. This essay examines one such instance of miscommunication: the case of âBobâ and âAlice,â a pair of chatbots developed by Facebook that were shut down in 2017 because they started conversing in a language of their own. It takes this story as an occasion to examine the constitution of linguistic senseâand what happens to language when it is translated into code and back again. An excavation of the historical development of code demonstrates that it is fundamentally imbricated with language, thereby complicating any distinction between human and machinic ways of encoding the world. Nevertheless, speech, writing and code can each be seen to operate according to different discursive regimes that constitute what N. Katherine Hayles characterizes as distinct âworldviews.â The essay will consider Bob and Aliceâs idiosyncratic linguistic behavior from the perspectives of these worldviews, to show how sense is separated from non-sense in each discursive context. It will then compare the botsâ use of language to the practices of noise music, Dada poetry and high-frequency trading. Placing Bob and Aliceâs output in this broader context allows us to conceive the subject of language in non-humanistic terms, and to conceive their âmiscommunicationâ not as an error, but as a creative act
Artificial Frontiers, Simulated Indigeneity: Western Big-Budget Open World Games and the Settler Colonial Imaginary
This dissertation studies Western big-budget video games of a genre often referred to as âopen world.â By tracking the concept of the âfrontierâ as a settler colonial (and later neoliberal) signal for space that invites access, I argue these games are both expressive of and cater to settler and neoliberal cultural anxieties regarding extermination and desires for accumulative dominance. Furthermore, these games exhibit their settler colonial and neoliberal ideologies through their narratives, gameplay mechanics, and productive contexts. That exhibition of ideology comes in several formulas of settler and neoliberal cultural production identified by various fields of scholarship. This dissertation, drawing from Indigenous studies, video game studies, post-colonial and Marxist theory, studies the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, Assassinâs Creed 3 and the so-called âUbisoft formulaâ generally, as well as Horizon Zero Dawn to argue a few central points about big-budget Western open world games: (1) they are what I call artificial frontiers, and as such are the preeminent entertainment of settler colonial cultural mores and the sustained eliminative and accumulative logics of those moresâ historical frontierism; (2) they reveal, reflect, propagate, accommodate, and assuage settler colonial anxieties and desires; (3) they exhibit (though attempt to obscure) the genocidal logic and exploitative relations of Western settler colonialism and neoliberalism; consequently, to some extent this dissertation argues the video game industryâs social function shows the compatibility of settler-influenced neoliberalism with fascist ideology
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