Emotion and the Seduction of the Senses, Baroque to Neo-Baroque

Emotion and the Seduction of the Senses, Baroque to Neo-Baroque examines the relationship between the cultural productions of the baroque in the seventeenth century and the neo-baroque in our contemporary world. It asks the question: Is the baroque a recurring phenomenon that has returned in aspects of contemporary global culture, or is it something specific to the early modern period? It argues one of the common and central features of both styles is their appeal to emotion. This volume illuminates how, rather than providing rationally ordered visual realms, both the baroque and the neo-baroque construct complex performative spaces whose spectacle seeks to embrace, immerse, and seduce the senses and solicit the emotions of the beholder.https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mip_smemc/1006/thumbnail.jp

The Practice of Change

PhD dissertation submitted to Keio University Graduate School of Media & GovernanceOver the last century civilization has systematically supported a market based approach to developing technical, financial, social and legal tools that focus on efficiency, growth and productivity. In this manner we have achieved considerable progress on some of the most pressing humanitarian challenges, such as eradicating infectious diseases and making life easier and more convenient. However, we have often put our tools and methods to use with little regard to their systemic or long-term effects, and have thereby created a set of new, interconnected, and more complex problems. Our new problems require new approaches: new understanding, solution design and intervention. Yet we continue to try to solve these new problems with the same tools that caused them. Therefore in my dissertation I ask: How can we understand and effectively intervene in interconnected complex adaptive systems? In particular, my thesis presents through theory and practice the following contributions to addressing these problems: 1. A post-Internet framework for understanding and intervening in complex adaptive systems. Drawing on systems dynamics, evolutionary dynamics and theory of change based on causal networks, I describe a way to understand and suggest ways to intervene in complex systems. I argue that an anti-disciplinary approach and paradigm shifts are required to achieve the outcomes we desire. 2. Learnings from the creation and management of post-Internet organizations that can be applied to designing and deploying interventions. I propose an architecture of layers of interoperability to unbundle complex, inflexible, and monolithic systems and increase competition, cooperation, generativity, and flexibility. I argue that the Internet is the best example of this architecture and that the Internet has provided an opportunity to deploy this architecture in other domains. I demonstrate how the Internet has has made the world more complex but through lowering the cost of communication and collaboration has enabled new forms of organization and production. This has changed the nature of our interventions. 3. How and why we must change the values of society from one based on the measurement of financial value to flourishing and robustness. The paradigm determines what we measure and generates the values and the goals of a system. Measuring value financially has created a competitive market-based system that has provided many societal benefits but has produced complex problems not solvable through competitive market-based solutions. In order to address these challenges, we must shift the paradigm across our systems to focus on a more complex measure of flourishing and robustness. In order to transcend our current economic paradigm, the transformation will require a movement that includes arts and culture to transform strongly held beliefs. I propose a framework of values based on the pursuit of flourishing and a method for transforming ourselves. Reflecting on my work experience, I examine my successes and failures in the form of learnings and insights. I discuss what questions are outstanding and conclude with a call to action with a theory of change; we need to bring about a fundamental normative shift in society through communities, away from the pursuit of growth for growth’s sake and towards a sustainable sensibility of flourishing that can draw on both the historical examples and the sensibilities of some modern indigenous cultures, as well as new values emerging from theoretical and practical progress in science

From cyber-utopia to cyber-war: normative change in cyberspace

This dissertation analyzes a normative change in state perception and political action towards the Internet. This change is currently reflected in certain measures aimed at the exercise of control and state sovereignty in and over cyberspace. These include phenomena such as the total surveillance of data streams and the extensive collection of connection data by secret services, the control (political censorship) and manipulation of information (information war) as well as the arms spiral around offensive cyber capabilities to disrupt and destroy information infrastructures. States face a loss of control that they want to compensate for. The phenomenon of the perceived loss of control and the establishment of a norm of control (filter and monitoring technology) is equally evident in various democratic and non-democratic states, as various studies show. This militarized perception of the Internet is remarkable in so far as Western politicians used to perceive the same Internet technology in the 1980s and 1990s in a completely different way. Back then the lack of state control was seen as desirable. Instead of controlling and monitoring all aspects of the Internet, a "hands-off" and laissez-faire idea dominated political behavior at the time: the possibilities of democratization through information technologies, the liberalization of authoritarian societies through technology and the free availability of global knowledge. The idea of national control over communications technology was considered innovation-inhibiting, undemocratic and even technically impossible. The topic of this work is the interaction between state power and sovereignty (e.g. political control through information sovereignty) and digital technologies. The research question is: Which process led to the establishment of norms of control and rule (surveillance, censorship, cyber-war) with regard to the medium Internet? Furthermore, the question arises: What are the implications of this change in standards for the fundamental functioning of the Internet? The aim is to examine in detail the thesis of the militarization of cyberspace empirically on the basis of a longitudinal case study using the example of Internet development in the USA since the 1960s. An interdisciplinary and multi-theoretical approach is chosen from constructivist norms research and the Social Construction of Technology approach

The musicality of the visual music film

This thesis explores the concept and expression of musicality in the absolute visual music film, in which visual presentations are given musical attributes such as rhythmical form, structure and harmony. The role of music has, in general, been neglected when analysing visual music textually and if discussed it has been examined predominantly from the academic vantage points of art and avant-garde film theory. To adequately scrutinise these texts I consider it essential to look at them not only in terms of their existence as moving pictures but also to give equal weight to their aural aspect and to consider them in terms of specifically musical parameters. This thesis therefore seeks to redress previous imbalances by undertaking a close analysis of the expressly musical qualities of these texts. Drawing on the seemingly disparate areas of film theory, art history, music theory and philosophy, it takes an interdisciplinary approach to investigating the measurable influence that wider contextual, philosophical and historical developments and debates in these areas bore on the aesthetics of specific visual music films. By drawing on the analogy of the absolute in music to demonstrate how musical concepts can function across the disciplinary boundaries of music and film, the first half of this thesis illustrates how musical ideas can be applied both formally and conceptually to the moving image in order to elucidate the musical characteristics of the text. Using the notion of the absolute as a conceptual framework allows for a thorough overview of changing trends and aesthetics in music, film and art and the visual music film. The centrality of notions of the absolute to visual music is demonstrated through close analysis of films by Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter, Walter Ruttmann, Norman McLaren, James Whitney and Jordan Belson. The second part of this thesis concentrates less on the philosophical vestiges carried over from musical thought to the visual music film, instead focusing on the variety of techniques and technological developments that evolved in tandem with the visual music film, each simultaneously exerting an influence on one another. It explores the effect that colour processing had on not only the visual but the overall audiovisual structure of the visual music film through a textual analysis of Kreise (1933) by Oskar Fischinger. It also investigates how particular styles of musical composition dictated the development of specific technical processes such as painting directly onto the celluloid strip, in order to capture the syncopated and frenetic musicality of jazz music. The case studies here are Begone Dull Care (1949) by Norman McLaren and A Colour Box (1935) by Len Lye. Further to this, it examines how the technical processes of animated sound emerged in the search for a greater correlation between the visual and sound tracks of the visual music film through close analysis of Synchromy (1971) by Norman McLaren and the optical sound films of Guy Sherwin. Finally, this thesis marries the inquiry into technological innovation of its second half with the historical, aesthetic and philosophical concerns of earlier chapters by considering the work of visual music pioneer John Whitney. Focusing on his digitally produced visual music films, the thesis explores Whitney’s enduring concern with the unification of sound and image through the shared foundation of mathematical harmony

Mines-bodies: a performance ethnography of Appalachian coal mining

From November of 2003 to the present, I have gotten to know a group of primarily disabled coal miners in southwest Virginia. Their stories are powerful, poignant, and deeply embedded in the ambiguities of daily living with death in the mines. The complex web of social and kinship networks, body politics, and economic in/stability is wound around one substance, coal, and their daily doing of working in the mines, even as that same work has un-done these miners through severed limbs, dis-abled bodies, and the psychological wounding of watching loved ones become crushed in mining rock falls. Their richly-textured stories are often silenced under dominant narratives of Appalachians as either "simple and stupid" or "dirty and dangerous." This dissertation cross-connects the politics and poetics of southern Appalachian coal mining culture by asking: How is Appalachian coal mining culture in southwest Virginia performed as an intimate relationship with the body of the mines (or, the "mines-body")? I first ground the reader in the context of southern Appalachian cultural history, an abject and Othered region I figure as a postcolonial space. I then investigate miners' unique understanding of the mines as having a living body, character, and language. This configuration of mining space as a body is central to miners' conceptions of their work, the ways they negotiate and construct their own identities in relation to the mines, how they cope with the daily dangers of their work, and how they later deal with disability as separation from a community of other miners and from the mines with which they have formed a sustained relationship. The dissertation highlights women miners' narratives of subjugation, sexual harassment, and empowerment, in addition to the often silenced narratives of disabled miners with black lung who literally have no breath with which to speak against those who unjustly deny them compensation or disability status. iv My research culminated in the original live performance Out of the Dark: The Oral Histories of Appalachian Coal Miners (DVD archive included). I conclude with reflections on the collaborative process and impact of this embodied performance as scholarship and activism

Perspective: Gastronomy

This project is made possible with funding by the Government of Ontario and through eCampusOntario’s support of the Virtual Learning Strategy.https://doi.org/10.22215/fsmmm/bs03pubpu