Search results for "Esthetics"
showing 10 items of 761 documents
It's Sad but I Like It The Neural Dissociation Between Musical Emotions and Liking in Experts and Laypersons
2016
Emotion-related areas of the brain, such as the medial frontal cortices, amygdala, and striatum, are activated during listening to sad or happy music as well as during listening to pleasurable music. Indeed, in music, like in other arts, sad and happy emotions might co-exist and be distinct from emotions of pleasure or enjoyment. Here we aimed at discerning the neural correlates of sadness or happiness in music as opposed those related to musical enjoyment. We further investigated whether musical expertise modulates the neural activity during affective listening of music. To these aims, 13 musicians and 16 non-musicians brought to the lab their most liked and disliked musical pieces with a …
Bridging Art and Mathematics: Introduction
2017
There is a long history of interdisciplinary discussions on the relations between science, mathematics, geometry, art, aesthetics, and artistic praxes. These discussions remain active and pertinent today: the aforementioned relations are explored in various scientific communities, journals, and at conferences. Globally, numerous scholars and artists share a common interest in combining creative thinking, intellectual curiosity, and aesthetic sensibility in their work. Various experts working in different scientific and technological fields are inspired by phenomena that combine mathematical and artistic qualities. Respectively, several contemporary artists, graphic designers, craftsmen, and…
From art after Auschwitz towards a sociology of disrespect of Buchenwald
2017
The aesthetic works of the Frankfurt School receive little attention by contemporary sociology. However, the article shows the relevance of aesthetic theory for a critical understanding of the social world. Therefore, we introduce the contradictions presented by critical theory of society especially after Auschwitz and we ask ourselves about how to conceive the inconceivable when the tools of Enlightenment are intrinsically guilty. Finally, we propose a mosaic of aesthetic sociology of disrespect as an option to overcome the paradoxes of Auschwitz. This procedure is related to the artistic production around the concentration camp of Buchenwald.
Cinematic cruising: Reel imagination and real experience for pleasure on the high seas
2021
The experiences of cruise ship passengers are influenced by cinematic representations and intensified and (re)produced by cruise operators. This paper conceptualises cinematic cruising as a phenomenon of reel and real spaces between imagination and experience for pleasure on the high seas. To date, the influence of cinematic representations on the experience of cruise passengers has not yet been studied in detail. To address this, our argument builds on the comparability of cinemas and cruise ships. They share similar characteristics as modern and postmodern places, as heterotopias, and as places of dreams. Both are places of illusion, places of compensation, and places where one can escape…
Animal liberation, American anti-terrorist culture and Denis Hennelly’sBold Native
2016
ABSTRACTSince its birth in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the animal liberation movement has attempted to expose the transnational, global character of speciecism and institutionalised forms of exploitation. Within the American panorama, however, the “war against terror” following 9/11 had such a profound effect on (radical) activism at a legal and legislative level that the movement found itself in the position of having to reassess their focus, leading to theoretical and aesthetic responses to anti-terrorist rhetoric. The aim of this article is (1) to examine the manner by which anti-terrorist rhetoric affected the movement and how the movement appropriated such rhetoric to re…
Political Shakespeare and the Blessing of Art
2018
This text attempts to detail the functions and effects of some of Shakespeare's aesthetic strategies, and to determine their relationship to ideology. While this is critical territory that cultural materialists and new historicists have extensively mapped, the current text avoids the preferred methods of enquiry that these lines take. Rather than giving focus to the containment strategies of a dominant ideology, my investigation proceeds via a close reading of certain elements from Act 5 of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. I attempt to demonstrate that meaning in the play is determined and encompassed within the self-reflective and dissimulating structures of Shakespeare's art. I su…
The Great Departure: Rethinking National(ist) Common Sense
2012
This article argues that, in order to overcome the national(ist) common sense that continues to haunt everyday political and scholarly interpretations of mobility, scholars need not diagnose nationalism with greater vigour, but should rather move beyond facile diagnoses of nationalism. The article calls for a meticulous tracing of relations and practices of emplacement and displacement that ubiquitous national(ist) interpretive frames both co-opt and exceed simultaneously. The argument is elaborated on the basis of an analysis of historical articulations of emplacement and displacement in Latvian understandings of ‘the good life’. The article pays particular attention to the ways in which t…
Placentofagia: moda, mit czy terapia?
2018
The article describes the increasingly popular phenomenon of placentophagy. It is becoming more and more common in the First World countries of the West, where a woman can take her placenta home after delivering a baby. It is forbidden under the Polish law. The first part of the text focuses on the origins of placentophagy, the reasons for its popularity and for showcasing motives for which people eat parts of their own bodies. The text explores opinions confirming the positive impact of placenta consumption and the medical evidence refuting the majority of these theses. The second part of the article is in turn focused on practices of treating placenta in traditional culture and the reason…
Relation of Cute/Kawaii Aesthetics and Beauty in Street Art Production
2012
As an independent visual expression, street art won its position in urban culture at the beginning of the 1990s. Different techniques used to present ideas, such as spraying, stencilling, putting up stickers or paste-ups, doing site specific interventions and so on, allowed artists to develop them more carefully and with a particular sense of the public space. Since 2008 and Lewisohn’s study Street Art; The Graffiti Revolution, street art has been the subject of academic research on many occasions. However, the issue of cute/kawaii features in street art has not yet been the subject of extensive research. This paper attempts to find out in what kind of relation within street art discourse w…
Urban Space and Gender Performativity in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and Cora Sandel’s Alberta and Freedom
2018
In this article, I discuss the combination of city life and gender performativity in two Norwegian classics, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (2016) [Sult, 1890] and Cora Sandel’s Alberta and Freedom (1984) [Alberte og friheten, 1931]. These are modernist novels depicting lonely human subjects in an urban space, the first one featuring a man in Kristiania (now Oslo) in the 1880s, the second one a woman and her female acquaintances in Paris in the 1920s. I interpret and compare the two novels by focusing on their intertwined construction of gender performativity and urban space. Gender norms of the city life are critical premises for how the subjects manage to negotiate with different options and obstac…