Everyday Aesthetics

Przysługujący widmom wywrotowy, niemalże rewolucyjny potencjał został odsunięty oraz zagubiony poprzez pozbycie się tej kontrowersyjnej kategorii z terytorium metafizyki i zbyt pośpieszne odesłanie jej do przestrzeni badań nad literaturą, sprowadzając ją jedynie do roli użytecznego, bezpiecznego narzędzia interpretacji.

Książka Andrzeja Marca odzyskuje niepokojący charakter widmontologii i ponownie wprowadza widma do myśli metafizycznej. Czym nawiedzona i przeniknięta jest tradycyjna metafizyka, co właściwie ją dręczy, nie daje spokoju oraz nieustannie podmywa jej stabilność?

Kategoria widma Derridy posłużyła Marcowi przede wszystkim do rozważań nad charakterem współczesności i przeobrażeń, jakie dokonały się w obrębie myśli ponowoczesnej. Współczesna kultura, zdaniem Marca, stała się miejscem powstawania widm, nieustannie powracających z przeszłości. Uznając, że nie jesteśmy już w stanie tworzyć utopijnych wizji przyszłości, autor stara się zdać sprawę z widmowego charakteru współczesnej kultury, analizując m. in. strategie vintage, retro, nurt no future w kulturze lat 70. czy nurt fantastyki naukowej w literaturze.

This paper has been published in a somewhat different form in Meg Harris Williams' "Aesthetic Conflict  and its Clinical Relevance." - Karnac, 2018.

It outlines the various "knife-edge" defenses the infant mind must struggle with in the face of the emotional impact of the mother's beauty, particularly when there is no absolute guarantee of this being reciprocated.
An attempt is made to disambiguate this vulnerability from those which call into play defenses against (Kleinian) unconscious envy.
Both serve to protect the internal good/beautiful mother from destruction, in the infant mind.
One aspect of Narcissism, not usually emphasized, is the lack of conscious awareness of one's rejection of love and beauty when offered by another.
Instead, the narcissist remains almost totally merely conscious of his or her own feelings of being rejected, especially aesthetically.

This study examines the complex relation between spatial experience and aesthetic experience. It is argued that spatial experience specifically in the context of everyday spaces makes it possible to experience them aesthetically as well. A wide selection of research ranging from environmental and philosophical aesthetics to architectural theory, psychology, human geography, and other relevant disciplines is employed in order to achieve a more detailed picture of how spatial experience is formed in the first place. This experience is described mainly in terms of phenomenology but is then related to other ways of understanding experiences and their prerequisites.

Different notions of space and spatiality and a more comprehensive articulation of the relation of perception to spatial experience, sensory perception, and how senses contribute to spatial experience are in the focus of attention at the beginning of the study. Different experiential layers that can be distinguished within the space which is closest experienced are explored. Interaction with environment is discussed and the notion of preaesthetic is presented to clarify the relation between the two different types of experiences. Following this, the notion of preaesthetic is studied against eminent notions such as aesthetic attitude and aesthetic engagement that show elements that have traditionally been considered to either lead to or define aesthetic experiences.

This study shows that the effect that spatial experience has on revealing aesthetic potentialities in everyday environments is far more complicated than has previously been understood. Due to its contingent qualities, spatial experience sometimes leads to "failed" aesthetic experiences even in situations where there is obvious aesthetic potentiality. Even though there are some overlapping qualities in spatial and aesthetic experiences, they cannot thus be equated, as has more or less been done in different branches studying the topics of art and architectural experiences, for example. In the final part of the study, some possible directions for future research are pointed out and the application possibilities of these new developments in aesthetic theory are presented by short case studies, in which a closer look is taken into a chosen set of urban everyday spaces.

Nach einer kurzen Erörterung der Frage, inwieweit Spektakel zur Populärkultur zu zählen seien, wird zentral das Thema der Gewinnung von Wissen bei der Rezeption von Spektakeln behandelt. Ästhetisches Erleben, so die These, ist wesentlich körperliches Erleben, und bezieht sich wesentlich auf körperlich-sinnliches Wissen. Spektakel als Unterhaltungsangebote werden nicht nur kognitiv-rational, sondern gleichermaßen sinnlich-affektiv angeeignet. Vor allem das bezeichnet "aisthesis" als sinnliche Erkenntnis.
Konkreter wird die These mit Intepretationen von Richard Dyer belegt, die die Effekte nicht-sprachlicher, nicht-begrifflicher Dimensionen von Filmen demonstrieren. Farben, Bewegungen, Rhythmen, Räume, Musik und Schauspieler*innen-Images wirken über affektive Codes auf bedeutungsgeladene Stimmungen hin - etwa auf die Erzeugung "utopischer" Energien.

Il ripensamento della società contemporanea passa attraverso un nuovo umanesimo in cui “facendo arte” insieme gli individui si riconoscono come comunità sulla base di principi e valori condivisi. Mettendo a fuoco un concetto di arte inteso come esperienza (J. Dewey) e come cura, in linea con le teorie dell’Everyday Aesthetics e con la teoria dell’“artification” dell’etologa Ellen Dissanayake, il lavoro si propone di tracciare alcune linee interpretative che, a partire dalle criticità emerse con l’emergenza sanitaria del coronavirus, valorizzino l’arte come strategia per fare comunità.

In uno dei momenti più memorabili de El Eternauta, l’extraterrestre “mano” riflette sul significato artistico di una caffettiera. Stando dentro la finzione, le idee del “mano” vengono messa a confronto con la concezione dell’artisticità diffusa di Banfi, con le riflessioni di Simmel, Bloch e Adorno sul vaso e con la teoria del design di Norman.

In one of the most unforgettable moments of El Eternauta, the alien ”mano” thinks about the artistic meaning of a flip coffee pot. Being inside the fiction, the alien‘s ideas are put in comparison with Antonio Banfi’s concept of widespread artisticity, with Georg Simmel’s, Ernst Bloch’s, and Theodor W. Adorno’s thought on the vase, and with Donald Norman’s design theory.

Gegen die scharfen Grenzen, die in der ästhetischen Forschung und Theorie meist zwischen Wahrnehmen, Erfahren und Erleben gezogen, skizziert der Aufsatz aus der Perspektive empirischer Kulturforschung ein Modell, das diese Elemente ästhetischer Interaktion als 'Module' eines Prozesses versteht. Sinnliches Wahrnehmen, Mikroerlebnisse, Reflexion, körperliche Selbstwahrnehmung, Wissenserwerb, Vergleichen, Versprachlichung und Kommunikation können sich auf die unterschiedlichste Weise verbinden. Während die Forschung zu einer hierarchischen Ordnung neigt, die versprachlichtes Reflektieren und verbale Kommunikation zum Maßstab des Aufsteigens vom Wahrnehmen über das Erleben zur eigentlichen ästhetischen Erfahrung nimmt, fokussiert empirische Kulturforschung mit ihrer Aufmerksamkeit für die sinnnlich-körperlichen Dimensionen gerade die Vielfalt und Beweglichkeit in der Verknüpfung der Elemente eines Prozesses, der vielleicht am besten unter dem Oberbegriff ästhetischen Erlebens zu beschreiben ist.

Georg Bertram recently argued that a consistent and accomplished philosophy of art should consider not only the specific nature of art, but also its value as human practice. Moreover, he resorted to artistic improvisation in order to illustrate a characteristic aspect of the constitution of artworks: the self-referential relations implied in the artworks and shaping the artworks do not result from an alleged closure of the artwork’s form, but are negotiated locally, in relation to each individual artwork. Following this line of reasoning, and while offering arguments both in the context of contemporary analytical aesthetics as well as in reference to Michel De Certeau’s philosophy of everyday life and to philosophy of art of the Turin philosopher Luigi Pareyson, I will defend that “art” may be a particular way to look at and to develop human practices and that the link between human practices and art is provided by improvisation.
Improvisation is not only a particular artistic technique. Improvisation incorporates and genetically shows the specificity of autonomous art as well as the value of art, that is, the link between human practices and art as a specific human practice. Indeed, as I will explain, art both derives from and is a particular way to improvise (upon) human practices, i.e. to develop them in unprecedented and valuable ways. Accordingly, improvisation, as a specific artistic procedure, will be understood as that kind of artistic production in which the human practices art is based in come, as it were, exemplarily to the fore. Hence, improvisation can be understood as the paradigm of art as human practice: as I shall suggest, art begins with, and ends in, improvisation.

Fashion is an aesthetic practice which concerns the ordinary sphere of our life: it is associated with everydayness and it is a source of endless aesthetic experiences. The purpose of this paper is to validate a new perspective on fashion based on Wittgenstein's later aesthetic conception. In Philosophical Perspectives on Fashion (2017), Matteucci introduces the idea of combining the Wittgensteinian concept of "form of life" with fashion. In accordance with this thesis, the paper aims at showing how fashion is constituted as a "form of life". Specifi cally, I shall argue that fashion is an "aesthetics form of life" which structurally employs a language of an aesthetic type-one with a specifi c grammar (or set of rules) of its own. I claim that there is in fashion a contact point between the grammar of language and socially encoded aesthetic responses: fashion follows slavishly its own grammar, through its cyclical seasonality, while at the same time tending to creatively reinvent itself. Thus, anyone who daily commits to the practices of fashion acquires sensitivity to its rules, contributing to a social dialectic of identifi cation/diversifi cation typically belonging to fashion itself. Finally, on the basis of the claim that fashion is a "form of life", and indeed since fashion is primarily an aesthetic practice, I claim that Wittgenstein's aesthetic notions can coherently be related to fashion as well: concepts such as 'aesthetic reaction', 'gesture', and 'correctness' will be shown to be crucial to an analysis of the aesthetic phenomenon of fashion.

Come è possibile accostare l’estetica, ovvero lo studio dell’arte e del bello, alla vita di tutti giorni? Eppure nell’attuale dibattito anglo-americano questa locuzione ossimorica sta prendendo sempre più consistenza teorica nell’ambito di una nuova disciplina, l’Everyday Aesthetics. Il libro si propone di presentare, per la prima volta in lingua italiana, questo recente campo di indagine, intrecciando le ricerche anglo-americane sull’Everyday Aesthetics e quelle europee sull’estetizzazione del reale. Da queste analisi appare evidente che l’estetica ha ormai cessato di essere una filosofia riferita a uno specifico oggetto di studio (arte bella), ed è diventata un paradigma transdisciplinare, aperto alle pratiche della vita di ogni giorno (cura del corpo, cibo, moda, design). Tuttavia tale ampliamento di orizzonti verso la quotidianità non deve volgersi a una bellezza superficiale e consumistica, come spesso accade, ma all’acquisizione di una consapevolezza corporea (aisthesis) capace di guidarci verso scelte più responsabili e di indurci ad avere maggiore cura di noi stessi, degli altri e dell’ambiente in cui viviamo.

This chapter looks at street art and its relationship to peace efforts. Specifically, it examines how street art is used as a medium to express the concerns, needs and wants of societal groups whose everyday lives are affected by decisions made at (and by) higher political levels, but whose voices remain marginalised and/or silenced. The fact that this type of artistic intervention takes place in the street means that its message is by definition accessible by a large audience. Depending on the circumstances of each case and the severity of the situation faced by everyday actors, street art interventions may not only manifest instances of injustice or mistreatment, but may also lead to the transformation of the situation through collective action (mobilisation, protest, manifestation). The chapter looks at a few examples where street art has had this type of effect.

Un libro che racconta in presa diretta quel mondo di confine dove la tradizionale arte di arrangiarsi finisce nelle fitte trame della malavita. Dal 1998 al 2011 Jason Pine, newyorkese, ha condotto la sua indagine sul campo, vivendo fianco a fianco con i maggiori protagonisti della scena neomelodica campana (cantanti, compositori, giornalisti, impresari) e condividendo la loro quotidianità tra case discografiche, emittenti pirata e feste private (matrimoni, battesimi, comunioni). Per penetrare la facciata folklorica che i protagonisti spesso volutamente offrono a questo «forestiero», l’autore diventa «uno di loro», in veste di regista di videoclip musicali e di pubblicità per le reti locali, associandosi a un boss-impresario. È così che, imparando a decifrare l’universo linguistico, gestuale e valoriale dell’ambiente, Pine ricostruisce il groviglio di legami e interessi che innerva quella zona di contatto tra marginalità sociale e criminalità organizzata, in cui centinaia di giovani sono disposti a scendere a compromessi con la camorra per inseguire un’opportunità di successo, convinti che non esistano alternative e attratti dall’assenza dei vincoli di un lavoro subordinato. In quella zona grigia, in cui Pine stesso gioca una parte ambigua, come i personaggi che osserva, le cosiddette economie formali, informali e illecite si ingarbugliano e l’arte di arrangiarsi, travalicando il semplice «tirare a campare», diventa una strategia di autodeterminazione per sfuggire, attraverso la creatività, alle prospettive di una vita precaria offerte dall’economia politica dominante.

Abstract: Nourishment stands apart from other physiological events: whilst we normally exercise discretion in relation to bodily functions, food consumption takes place in public. We dine, snack and nibble in front of others, and the imagery associated with food takes on the manifold of meanings—religious, cultural, historic and so forth. Gastronomic practices unite or divide people, and as such are a powerful communication tool. As the twenty-first century confrontational stance between fast food and family meal traditions intensifies, we investigate fast food’s visual imagery and its ability to attract consumers. Keywords: Fast food, visual imagery, semiotics of gastronomy, Peirce, Porphyry *** Resume : La nutrition se distingue d'autres evenements physiologiques: alors que normalement nous exercons avec discretion les fonctions corporelles, la consommation d'aliments a lieu en public. Nous mangeons, prenons une collation et grignotons devant les autres, et l'imagerie ...

By showing how geometric overshot coverlets can be understood in relationship to the global economy and within politicized cultural movements, Falls and Smith demonstrate how these erstwhile domestic, utilitarian objects explode the art/craft dichotomy, belong to a rich narrative of historical art forms, and tell us far more about American culture today than simply representing a nostalgic past, particularly with regard to ideas about race, class, nationalism, women’s labor, and the separation of private versus public spaces.

See research exhibition catalog (Fold/Unfold) here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1548165727/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i3

The paper aims to focus on everyday life in prison following a double perspective, a historical and a contemporary one. First, the historical phenomenon of prison graffiti will be investigated in connection with one case study: the graffiti in the prisons of the Holy Office in Palermo. Subsequently, the effect of making art in today's prisons both on space and on inmate life will be taken into account. The overall aim of this twofold reading is to show to what extent making art in prison can be seen as a strategy of activation of those relational and familiarizing processes which bestow an aesthetic value on everyday life.

Fragments: the Apocalyptic Everyday presents a body of work body that attempts to deal with the problems of the contemporary moment. Through the employment of a number of parallel installation strategies:, creating constellation of objects that exploit the power of materiality, gesture and abstraction to draw attention to the apocalyptic nature of present moment.

Answering the call for worker flexibility this body of work presents an ever evolving series represented here through a photographic documentation of installations, sculptures painting and the studio; at once artwork and research material, here organized in chronological order.  The written component, structured as a series of alphabetical entries touches on methodology and analysis of work in relation to my urban environment, current events politics and philosophy as it relates .

In India the concept of "folk culture", "folk literature", "folk art form" and other forms of many indigenous folk cultures seem to be considered not aesthetic but quaint, due to the dominance of "classical" art forms which are valued more. One can witness the dearth of qualitative understanding of the experience of beauty in these actions and objects which are not considered as art objects or artistic performances in Indian context. A theoretical perspective which tries to understand these genres and even ritual forms is also rare. In the contemporary academics, many scholars both from the Indian tradition and non-Indian traditions are attempting to understand a different kind of aesthetics that the art forms of these people express. Thus, in this paper, I claim that understanding indigenous art is possible using theories of everyday aesthetics rather than through other special theories of aesthetics. While not arguing for a relative view of aesthetics, this paper uses the ideas of everyday aesthetics and beauty to understand art in folk and cultural contexts in India.

My theme is ‘life-writing’, understood as the shaping of one's life through the contemplation of values, although this activity is mostly unreflective. To become an art so that one's life can be shaped in greater accord with clearly held values, this process must become reflective. These values have an inescapably ethical dimension, because as we necessarily poetize our surrounding world, we contribute to our personal and communal ethos the character that arises from the culturally shaping power of guiding ideals. Even the immoralist cultivates life within an ethos where obscure feelings connect with some thing or other, whereby certain aims will then appear more valuable than others.

To understand how we cannot help but shape our lives according to dimly or clearly intuited values, I compare Coleridge’s primary imagination, the ‘shaping spirit’ ‘necessary for all human perception’ with Kant’s ‘blind though indispensible function of the soul, without which we would have no cognition at all, yet of which we are scarcely ever conscious’. With Coleridge, we find in imagination an impulse to connect profound but obscure presentiments and ideas with our surroundings. This impulse propels great art and everyday aesthetics alike. Whether we pursue merely what attracts us, or seek value beyond this, all lives are freely shaped, without excuses, as the existentialists say, but not always in the most pellucid consciousness. Our choices inevitably engage us in the poetic art of life-writing. Cast in medias res, we necessarily improvise. But this is no argument against lives being moral-aesthetic works, spontaneous compositions in value.

The scope and range of human aesthetic preferences have been discussed recently from the perspective of their role in advancing sustainability in contemporary societies. Philosophical and applied studies in environmental and everyday aesthetics seem to support the idea that knowledge and awareness cause changes in aesthetic values. Aesthetic sustainability as a concept has recently been developed to show why certain objects, artefacts, and landscapes become valued more highly over time. Instead of discussing the temporality of aesthetic values only in terms of historical styles, trends, or tastes, as has traditionally been the case, the concept focuses attention on the deeper layers of aesthetic appreciation, bringing together aesthetic, ethical, and cognitive values. Aesthetic sustainability is introduced here as a conceptual tool that provides insight into how human aesthetic preferences and choices function. It is also pointed out how the sphere of aesthetics is an important part of the human capability to imagine more sustainable futures.

Music is a powerful cultural medium. The volume explores the varied roles that music plays in human culture and society, and its unique symbolic and communicative properties. Contributors discuss Richard Wagner, Bob Dylan, John Cage, Eric Burdon, and Igor Stravinsky. From electronic and inner-city DIY to world music and rock concerts, the book looks at music’s part in creating the human sense of place, space, transcendence and identity. Philosophers, cultural thinkers, and sociologists collaborate to explain the exhilaration and fascination that human beings experience when they listen to music.

Table of Contents

Volume Foreword vii
Chapter One Introduction: Philosophical and Cultural Theories
of Music
Eduardo De La Fuente and Peter Murphy

Chapter Two Modern Hermeneutics and the Presentation
of Opera
Agnes Heller

Chapter Three Algo-Rhythm and Mello-dy: A Consideration of
the Relationship Between Technology and the Embodied
Performance of Music
Daniel Black

Chapter Four Bob Dylan Ain’t Talking: One Man’s Vast Comic
Adventure in American Music, Dramaturgy, and Mysticism
Peter Murphy

Chapter Five Music and Religion: Reflections on Cultural
Secularization
David Roberts

Chapter Six Prophet and Priest, Ascetic and Mystic: Towards
a Cultural Sociology of the Twentieth Century Composer
Eduardo De La Fuente

Chapter Seven Collective Effervescence, Numinous Experience or
Proto-Religious Phenomena? Moshing with Durkheim,
Schleiermacher and Otto
Mark Jennings

Chapter Eight Music as a Space of Possibilities 129
John Rundell

Chapter Nine Some Suggestions for a Phenomenology
of Rhythm
Stuart Grant

Chapter Ten The Paradox of “Do-it-Yourself” in
Unpopular Music
Joseph Borlagdan

Chapter Eleven Musical Culturespeak and Cosmopolitan
Identities in Australian Multiculturalism
Graeme Smith

Chapter Twelve The Piano and Cultural Modernity in
East Asia
Alison Tokita

Chapter Thirteen Popular Music, Cultural Memory and
Everyday Aesthetics
Andy Bennett

Chapter Fourteen Everything is Dirt: Reevaluating the Place
of Cultural Status in Producing Aesthetic Attachment
Claudio E. Benzecry

Chapter Fifteen Musical Listening and Boundary-Work
Michael Walsh

În ultimul timp, alături de filosofie, o varietate de discipline socio-umane -de la sociologia artei şi studiile organizaţionale la analiza politicilor culturale şi managementul cultural - acordă atenţie esteticului, văzut ca o caracteristică a contextelor sociale cotidiene şi a vieţii organizaţionale. Multe demersuri au rămas, totuși, sub dominaţia paradigmelor pozitiviste şi funcţionaliste. Acest capitol examinează problema vieţii cotidiene în cadrul organizaţiilor bazându-se pe abordări recente care susţin, în schimb, o cercetare prin prisma principiilor estetice, dând chiar naștere unei noi sub-discipline numite „Estetica Organizaţiilor” sau „Estetica Organizaţională” (în continuare, abreviată EO). În prima parte, voi analiza principiile teoretice şi metodologice ale cercetării estetice a vieţii cotidiene în organizaţii punând accentul pe versiunea „tare” a EO, care reformulează ontologia organizaţiilor pe baza unor noi principii cu privire la natura acestora şi a experienţelor organizaţionale cotidiene. În a doua parte, voi ilustra noua abordare estetică a vieţii cotidiene în organizaţii prin două studii de caz, referitoare la modul în care esteticul mediază acţiunea şi performanţa organizaţională (Witkin 2009a, b), şi la beneficiile sau dificultăţile „strategiei artificării” în organizaţii (Saito 2012). Concluzia este aceea că abordarea organizaţiilor prin prisma principiilor şi conceptelor esteticii filosofice oferă noi moduri de analiză capabile să răspundă mai bine provocărilor teoretice şi practice actuale, atât din cercetarea organizaţională, cât şi din domeniile cultural, economic şi politic.

Denn ‚Ich’ ist ein anderes. Wenn das Blech als Trompete aufwacht, dann ist nicht ihm das anzurechnen. Ich bin beim Aufblühen meines Denkens zugegen, ich schaue ihm zu, ich höre ihm zu. Ich mache einen Strich mit dem Bogen: schon regt sich die Symphonie in der Tiefe. Es ist falsch zu sagen: ich denke. Es müsste heißen: ich werde gedacht.
Der Dichter kommt an im Unbekannten, und selbst wenn er seine eigenen Visionen schließlich nicht mehr begreift, so hat er sie doch geschaut. Mag er zugrunde gehen an seinem riesigen Sprung durch die ungehörten und unnennbaren Dinge: andere fruchtbare Arbeiter werden kommen und an jenen Horizonten anfangen, wo er selbst zusammengebrochen ist.

Arthur Rimbaud
Lettres du voyant

Der Dichter hat nur dies zu tun, dass er geheimnisvoll arbeitet im Hinblick auf das Niemals.

Stéphane Mallarmé

Unter einer Epiphanie verstand er (Stephan) eine jähe geistige Manifestation, entweder in der Vulgarität von Rede oder Geste oder in einer denkwürdigen Phase des Geistes selbst. Er glaubte, dass es Aufgabe des Schriftstellers sei, diese Epiphanien mit äußerster Sorgfalt aufzuzeichnen, da sie selbst die zerbrechlichsten und flüchtigsten aller Momente seien.

James Joyce,
Stephen der Held

A collection of essays on contemporary capitalism. The volume explores art and the new spirit of capitalism; visual culture and the experience economy; aesthetics and organisations; the art of fiscal management; capitalism and myth; and architecture in the age of aesthetic capitalism.

Introduction: Aesthetic Capitalism
Eduardo de la Fuente and Peter Murphy

1 From the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism to the Creative
Economy: Reflections on the New Spirit of Art and Capitalism
David Roberts

2 The Artefacts of Capitalism and the Objecthood of
Their Aesthetics
Vrasidas Karalis

3 The Aesthetic Spirit of Modern Capitalism
Peter Murphy

4 The Visual Experience Economy: What Kind of Economics?
On the Topologies of Aesthetic Capitalism
Anders Michelsen

5 Aesthetic Capital: Hermeneutic Speculation, Economic Themes,
and the Dismal Science
Ken Friedman

6 The Social Negotiation of Aesthetics and Organisational
Democracy
Antonio Strati

7 Neo-Modernism: Architecture in the Age of Aesthetic Capitalism
Eduardo de la Fuente

8 The Aesthetics of Fiscal Consolidation
Carlo Tognato

9 The Innovative Role of Art in the Time of the Absence of Myth
Dominique Bouchet

This article is a proposal to address visual mapping as a means to reveal the inter- relationships between a place represented, a place lived and a place perceived. A form of critical cartography called hybrid-mapping is used to interrogate the combined sociocultural and biophysical legacies of the continually changing land- scape. This approach expressly facilitates a focused interpretation of the everyday lives of urban dwellers and the nuanced connections between landscape, history and culture. Offering to a larger conversation about landscape representation, this arti- cle introduces, situates and analyses the application of hybrid-mapping in a crea- tive research project entitled Chinatown Invisible about Manhattan’s Chinatown. The Chinatown Invisible project uses hybrid-mapping to interrogate the quotidian practice of ‘making-do’ to adapt existing urban structures to fulfil everyday needs. Capturing and understanding making-do is vital because it sheds light on the ways in which residents informally claim space and how they shape the ongoing physical evolution of their neighbourhood, establishing their ‘right to the city’. Chinatown Invisible shows how hybrid-mapping unveils the dynamics between culture and landscape in an urban setting, bridging critical geography and landscape representa- tion to examine multiple ways in which we can interact with the processes of real, imagined and perceived space.

Der Beitrag stellt theoretische und methodische Ansätze vor, die in der Europäischen Ethnologie / Empirischen Kulturwissenschaft zur Analyse populärkultureller Phänomene verwendet werden. Grundlegend sind ein offenes Verständnis des "Populären" und flexible definitorische Ein- und Abgrenzungen von Populärkultur als Interaktionsphänomen. Ausführlicher wird auf Ansätze der britischen Cultural Studies sowie auf die ästhetische Dimension der Nutzung von Massenkünsten eingegangen.

Myth, religion, poetry, prose, painting and music attest to the fascination of reflections of the sun on the surface of the sea. For D.H. Lawrence, Henri Matisse and many others, the experience of sunlight on the sea gives vigour and vitality to life. This essay is a philosopher’s enquiry into the significance of this experience of the play of sunlight on water, an attempt to articulate the meaning of an experience that many people both need and cherish.
    The starting point is the beauty of reflections on the sea, the most perfect of all beauties, according to Schopenhauer. Inspiration is then drawn from ancient traditions – Greek, Indian, Chinese – that emphasised the unity of beauty, goodness and truth. The question addressed is what the beauty we find in sunlight on the sea shows about our understanding of the good life and of the way of things. In some sections, a parallel question is asked, by way of counterpoint, about the significance of a contrasting kind of beauty, the shadowy and subdued beauty that has been especially appreciated in Japanese culture.
    In the glistening surface of a sunlit sea, there is a metaphor and expression of aspects of the good life – happiness, spontaneity and intimacy with nature. In looking at this surface, we glimpse how we would want our relationship to the world to be. But reflections of the sun in water are also a metaphor or epiphany of reality. This is the world as it is prior to being subjected to human conceptual schemes and purposes. It is the world as an integrated whole of experience – a quicksilver, soft-edged, ephemeral realm whose source is a mystery. In the swirling, ever-changing and ever-merging reflections on the surface of a sea whose depths are invisible to us, there is a symbol of the way of things, of what Chinese thinkers called the dao.
    Sunlight on the Sea is an essay in phenomenology: an attempt to expose the meaning of a familiar experience of beauty. The essay tries to show how this experience, as expressive of the good and the true, is - in a sense deeper, perhaps, than Lawrence and Matisse intended - life enhancing.

Atmospheres constitute an ordinary perceptual phenomenon that can become a new experience, as the former are more than the sum of single-sensory perceptual factors. Drawing on the terminological pair ‘subject’ and ‘object’ and its interdependencies, the atmospheric phenomenon can be approached in an essayistic fashion (and by means of applying an aesthetic focus in the broadest sense). In so doing, it becomes clear that the atmosphere serves as a condition for the emergence as well as actualization of special perception. Based on Gernot Böhme’s research and further studies, specific (ontological) determinants are identified and differentiated according to the definitional facets of the ‘and’, the ‘in-between’ and the ‘whereby’ or ‘in what way’. These considerations demonstrate to what extent perception precedes the separation of subject and object in that the atmospheric ‘whereby’ is responsible for creating tuned spaces and situations. Turning to the objects of perception and their concomitant ecstasies as well as to the subject of perception with its reception helps to clarify which components of an atmosphere work in what way. In this context, methods of exploratory involvement and participation (in the Parcours Commenté but even more so in the Aesthetic Fieldwork) gain in importance in order to explore atmospheres from a lifeworld perspective.

The space of Lina Bo Bardi's Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo in its history and at a moment by no means ordinary but that provided plenty of room for ordinary life to unfold:
“This is the architecture of freedom,” John Cage proclaimed, as the story goes, when walking along the square on Avenida Paulista under the museum’s building block in 1985. It is not surprising that this is Lina Bo Bardi’s favorite statement about the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), since few artists of the twentieth century positioned themselves so radically against aesthetic preconceptions and within the realm of everyday life as Cage did.
Lina Bo Bardi tested the outer limits of the idea of the open ground floor, of the building block suspended from a frame, and of the transparent interior. So fundamental to modern architecture, these three ideas have been manifested in the MASP in such a massive dimension that they exceed the scope of their initial idea.

This research project is a first-person, practice-led endeavour which contributes to the fields of both medical humanities and the sonic arts. Through a reflexive, auto-ethnographic process, employing a wide range of audio-visual methods, I set out to explore a range of possible creative strategies that might be available to the ‘artist in extremis’ – i.e. the artist working under conditions of illness, confinement, restriction or limited energy. This process was distilled down, over five years, to three conceptual vehicles in the form of vinyl records which sought to offer openings, strategies and responses to conditions of extreme limitation. 

From 2009-2014, the three vinyl record projects were developed by myself, an ex-broadcast filmmaker continuing to navigate a life under Chronic Fatigue Syndrome / Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (CFS-ME) since 1998. Each vinyl record project contains strategies across a given stratum of life of the ‘exhausted artist’. The project created a body of both methodological and practical outputs, aiming to bypass the exhaustion, poor cognition and pain associated with CFS-ME.

Through ‘triangulating’ a series of sonic projects, each of which was created in a ‘modular’ or ‘bricolage’ process, the resultant trilogy of interrelated 12” vinyl records created a kind of ‘cinema for the ears’. The recordings (with their sleevenotes and graphics) were subsequently published by both external record labels and also self-released via the University of the West of Scotland.

The Idioholism Vinyl Trilogy became an appropriate autoethnographic framework containing exercises towards a personal, ‘idio-holistic’ existence for a filmmaker who could no longer produce intensive film work. The expansive and attractive format of the 12” record, under the doctoral praxis, allowed for a more ‘modular’ approach and format than in formal filmmaking. As an ex-filmmaker who is now an exhausted artist, I postulate that a trilogy of vinyl records could hone and home the divergent media (i.e. soundtracks, spoken word, music, text, photography) – which, taken together, might have previously resulted in a complete film in my ‘past’ life.