Saturation Season: Inclusivity, Queerness, and Esthetics in the New Media Practices of Brockhampton

© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.Following the self-release of their Saturation album trilogy in 2017, American hip-hop group Brockhampton broke through to an international audience. The period of the trilogy’s release – known as “Saturation Season” – is notable for the large body of creative content the group produced and released online. In this article, the authors demonstrate how the group’s new media practices query the boundaries that separate amateurs and professionals, consumers and producers, and fans and artists, raising a range of questions concerning digitalization, (social) inclusion, and the democratization of culture. Emphasis is placed on exploring the contradictory effects of the digital turn in popular music.publishedVersio

Story of Use: Analysis of Film Narratives to Inform the Design of Object Interactions

Not only is using a product an experience, it is an interaction and it is narrative in nature. This work in progress paper describes the narrative theory background for this statement, in particular schemata theory and the concepts of agency, tellability and narrativity, then describes methods that are being used in the project to analyse film narratives and apply these to the design of tellable physical products

Folklore and Sociolinguistics

Folklore and sociolinguistics exist in a symbiotic relationship; more than that, at points—in the ethnography of communication and in ethnopoetics, for example—they overlap and become indistinguishable. As part of a reaction to the formal rigor and social detachment of Chomsky’s theoretical linguistics, sociolinguistics emerges in the mid-twentieth century to assess the role of language in social life. Folklorists join the cause and bring to it a commitment to in-depth ethnography and a longstanding engagement with artistic communication. In this essay, I trace key phases in the development of this interdisciplinary movement, revolutionary in its reorientation of language study to the messy but fascinating realm of speech usage. I offer the concept of performative efficacy, the notion that expressive culture performances have the capacity to shape attitude and action and thereby transform perceived realities, as a means of capturing the continuing promise of a sociolinguistically informed folkloristics

Cinema and Pragmatism: a Reflection on the Signic Genesis in Cinematographic Art

This article aims to discuss the importance and urgency of Charles S. Peirce's philosophy to understand the creative genesis of movie making. This is a reflection on the ontology and possible cinematographic epistemology through Peircean semiotics. Methodologically, we discuss the phenomenology of the Metropolis as a fulcrum for the development of a language and of an aesthetics such as the aesthetic dimension possible to be achieved within the language of cinema, by observing the hybrid character of such communication and the behavior of the movie makers in relation to those particular possibilities of aesthetics, and by emphasizing the importance of pragmatism in the materalization of a movie through a triadic thought, from the imaginary ideal at first, the try out of possibilities as a second stage, towards a definition of the idea, to the externalization and development of a movie as language. This triad has the Peircean categories – Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness – as its conceptual ground, and yet keeps many correspondences with the poetics of Aristotle, allowing, thus, a reflection between Peirce and the great Greek philosopher

Conditions Variable: Assemblage Theory and Systems Theory in Creative Practice

This dissertation will situate the twenty-first century phenomenon of Assemblage theory, which originated in the field of philosophy, within the last 100 years of creative practice. Drawing from Manuel DeLanda’s application of Assemblage theory, I will devise a means to discuss creative practice without reducing its analysis to ‘structured fields’ or ‘closed systems’. Rather, comparisons will be made between a system and an assemblage to illustrate how the two part ways, and find common ground. To better understand the way in which systems have been applied in artistic practice, an investigation of two major twentieth-century paradigm shifts will be examined. The first example is the Bauhaus school and its post-European formal offshoot in America, the New Bauhaus, and how it adapted its European predecessor’s principles of design. The second is the technological revolution, which engendered Jack Burnham’s Systems Esthetics, Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In light of these developments, I argue that a flexible, descriptive, Assemblage theory is needed to better articulate how art (the work and its making) functions within an expanded field of practice as it now exists. The adaptable and transmutable nature of Assemblage theory is also illustrated through example. In the process this dissertation will offer new ways to articulate and understand creative practice and propose a new strategy for art to be understood. Finally, I will employ Assemblage theory to analyze my own creative endeavours

Coaxing the Corrido: Centering Song in Performance

Published as McDowell, John Holmes. "Coaxing the Corrido: Centering Song in Performance." Journal of American Folklore, vol. 123 no. 488, 2010, p. 127-149. © 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.Drawing on ballad performances on Mexico's Costa Chica, I seek to isolate and identify a niche in the performance sequence that I refer to as "coaxing the corrido," an interlude during which ballad performers indulge in muted renderings of the next song to assure their control over its words and music. I argue that comparable episodes are most likely present in many or most of the world's performance traditions and that attending closely to them holds the promise of insights into the management of musical performance, the dynamics of artistic collaboration, and native modes of experiencing these art forms

Designing social play through interpersonal touch:An annotated portfolio

We present five design cases as an annotated portfolio, exploring ways to design for intimate, interpersonal touch and social intimacy in interaction design. Five key qualities are elicited from the cases, including novel connotations sparking curiosity; providing an excuse to interact; unfolding internal complexity; social ambiguity; norm-bending intimacy. The work highlights novel interaction design approaches fostering social play, turning participants into performers of their own narratives

Cosmopolitan designs and twentieth-century literary culture: "Colección los presentes" and the emergence of the professional writer

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--University of Kansas, Spanish and Portuguese, 1997.Literary cosmopolitanism, an esthetic mode whose proponents defined themselves oppositionally to regional, provincial, and revolutionary narratives, achieved a prominent position in Mexican letters at midcentury. One of the institutions most responsible for the new literary mode was a series of texts known as the "Los Presentes" collection. Beginning in the latter months of 1954, Juan Jose Arreola directed the publication of Carlos Fuentes's first collection of short stories, Los dias enmascarados; Elena Poniatowska's first novel, Lilus Kikus; and Tomas Segovia's first novel, Primavera muda. In addition to these three titles, Arreola published his own drama, La hora de todos, and the first installment of Alfonso Reyes's extensive autobiographical project, Parentalia. This study examines the role of Los Presentes in the struggle to establish cosmopolitanism as the dominant literary style of the period. The first chapter traces the general outlines of the cultural-literary field in Mexico at midcentury and provides an institutional history of Los Presentes. Chapter 2 begins with a close reading of the first three books published by Arreola and finishes with an examination of the subversive positions they take with respect to traditional formulations of the notion of mestizaje. In the third chapter, an analysis of Arreola's own drama and Reyes's autobiography illuminate the complex web of alliances and compromises that undergirded the editorial strategy of the series. Chapter 4 places the first Los Presentes texts into a broader context through an examination of two other novels written in 1954, Magdalena Mondragon's Tenemos sed and Ramon Rubin's La bruma lo vuelve azul. The fourth chapter concludes with a reading of critical reviews and essays by Los Presentes writers concerning other novels and the esthetic positions of the era