Video installation as a creative means of representing temporality in visual data

This paper describes the use of video installation as a creative means of engaging audiences in visual research. A detailed image-based overview of the project, 1247 Days on Whymark Avenue, is also presented. This interactive video installation offered viewers a level of phenomenological immersion in the compressed temporality and asynchronous dialogue captured by this visual research project. This film is part of a larger research project on the longitudinal photo-documentation of urban life (Hansen & Flynn 2015a). The project uses repeat photography to study street art and graffiti as visual dialogue.     

先秦兵学与齐鲁文化

先秦时期,齐鲁兵学在地域文化中名列榜首。原因在于,这里战争发生的频率较高,使将帅们获得了丰富的实践经验,同时,齐鲁具有浓厚的思想文化传统,是“百家争鸣”的中心,其思想文化精英们长期形成了好学深思、长于辩论、乐于著述的优良传统,为兵家提供了得天独厚的沃土。齐鲁又具有着悠久而厚重的兵学传统,姜尚、管仲、司马穰苴、孙武、吴起、孙膑等构成了这一传统的系列星座。     

对本雅明文艺批评中"Aura"概念的梳理

“Aura”在本雅明的文艺批评中是一个非常重要的概念,本文采取文本细读的方式,对有关此概念的论述进行梳理,以对“Aura”进行多层次的界定,并以此作为契入点,来考察本雅明对现代艺术和古典艺术的看法。     

The exemplarities of artworks: Heidegger, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Shoes</Emphasis>, and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Pixar</Emphasis>

Heidegger’s essays “The Origin of the Work of Art” and “The Question Concerning Technology” provide a revealing insight into the importance of exemplarity to artworks. Originally the notion that exemplarity is essential to art is Kantian: As Kant puts it, since originality can produce “original nonsense, [beautiful art’s] products must be models, i.e. exemplary.” However, what Heidegger recognizes is that even if exemplarity allows us to take art seriously in spite of its excesses, it exposes the artwork to new dangers: on the one hand, to the “world withdrawal of the work” as occurs in consignment to the museum shelf, and on the other, to the conditions of Enframing as “challenging-forth,” under which art is taken as a means to an end—dangers which point to the division of artworks between “fine” art and “popular” art. Since Heidegger’s approach favors the former, we will try to gain new critical insight by considering his arguments in the light of a “popular” work that allows us to formulate an exemplarity of popular art as the necessary complement to that of traditional art. By means of an understanding of the exemplarities (in the plural) of artworks, we will be able to reconsider the significance of Heidegger’s notions of reliability, Enframing, and poiesis for our current technological conditions.

Women Creating Public Art and Community, 2000–2014

This narrative describes a series of 15 short‐term public art projects that were part of a program for women and girls in Lowell, Massachusetts, a mid‐size city in the United States. The projects were designed to give public space to women’s stories and perspectives by exhibiting their creative art in response to suggested themes. A few thousand women and girls representing diverse age and cultural groups created art based on their lived experiences. The organizers of the program met people in comfortable settings, tailored their art‐making approaches to particular groups, and used inclusive processes in developing and executing the program. Program successes and challenges were related to the organizational structure of the art projects, the annual themes and art media, the extent of outreach and support, the process of creation, and the impact of art exhibits. Using community psychology and feminist frameworks, authors reflect on the projects and their relevance across contexts, highlight key organizing strategies, and identify ways the project represents community psychology in action.     

Quiet beauty: problems of agency and appearance in evangelical Christianity

How does the cultivation of beauty interact with agency? In this article the author discusses the religious value of beauty for conservative evangelical Christians in the English town of Brighton. Building on the anthropological approach to art and agency developed by Alfred Gell, the author considers the manner in which the everyday of bodies, relationships and personal testimonies become implicated in a deferential semiotics in which meaning resides in the self but is not owned by it. Through this work, women engage with an on-going project of visibility and objectification that is often tenuous and difficult but is nevertheless compelling, as they seek to mediate the agency of God.     

Psychological and autonomic effects of art making in college-aged students

Background and objectives: Anxiety disorders comprise the most common category of mental illness among US young adults. Art making might be one method to help reduce anxiety, but the few studies investigating this have used only subjective measures of anxiety. Design: This study employed both subjective (self-reported state anxiety from the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory) and objective (heart rate variability) measures to assess whether 30-minute periods of art making reduced anxiety in 47 first-year college students prior to their final examinations. Methods: Students participated in free-form painting, mandala coloring, clay modeling, and control sessions. Results: Repeated-measures ANOVA with post hoc analysis revealed significantly greater pre- to post-session reductions in anxiety for all three types of art-making sessions than for the control session, as measured objectively. Measured subjectively, only free-form painting yielded a significant decrease in anxiety compared to the control session. Conclusions: Given the health benefits of anxiety reduction, further study is warranted to determine the duration of art making's anxiety-reducing effect.     

The two Bernard Berenson cousins: The interplay among immigration,culture, and narcissism

The lives of two 19th century cousins, both of whom changed their names to Bernard Berenson, are considered from historical and psychodynamic perspectives, using a psychobiographical method. The Jewish cousins immigrated separately to Boston from Lithuania in 1875 and 1882. One cousin, later calling himself simply B.B., became a world‐renowned art historian. The other Bernard became a misanthrope after feeling deeply humiliated by his cousin's family in Boston. Many biographies were written about the famous B.B. The only histories of his cousin Bernard were family stories, as he was the author's great‐grandfather. The intersecting lives of these cousins are discussed. Both men faced the challenges of immigration as well as intense anti‐Semitism and prejudice in each country in which they lived. These cultural and historical conditions interacted with the cousins’ narcissistic vulnerabilities. Their lives demonstrate different manifestations of narcissistic suffering, with B.B's being more consistent with the construct of a “grandiose narcissist” and Bernard's being more consistent with that of a “closet narcissist.” The life stories of these two cousins with the same name offers an intriguing instance of a complicated relationship among immigration, prejudice, and narcissism and case examples of the manifestation of how narcissistic suffering can influence lives.