On March 1, 2020, Greece closed its borders, denying refugees the right to seek political asylum, a reaction to Turkey’s decision to strategically refuse its role as gatekeeper to the European Union. A few weeks later, Italy, France, Belgium, and Spain closed their borders as the global COVID-19 pandemic spread. China had already closed its borders a few wee…
This book came about as a major dissemination output of the BlueHealth Project (https://bluehealth2020.eu), a large, integrated interdisciplinary research project carried out under the European Union Horizon 2020 Research Frame-work Programme between 2016 and 2020. The project took an international and innovative, interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral approach to heal…
Thinking sound is an activity. Thinking with sound; thinking about sound; thinking through sound: these are all modalities of living with sound as a physical, vibrating reality. Because sound is matter in motion — resonating and reverberating — it resists conceptualization as an object or as a static concept. It cannot be held in a container but rather …
Struggles over naming our epoch of climate change – Anthropocene? Capitalocene? – are symptomatic of the growing recognition that ecology and economy can no longer be separated: that indeed, they have always been impli-cated in one another. For flm studies, this recognition necessitates adding to early ecocritical concerns with what flm does, a renewed inquiry into how …
In the 1890s, the eccentric American businessman Franklin Webster Smith proposed grand new ‘National Galleries of History and Art’ for Washington, DC. A rendering of his imagined project has the vertigo-inducing scale of the architectural proposal that was destined from its inception to remain unrealized (Figure 1.1). Imagine that you stand at the he…
The composer Sir James MacMillan has called music ‘the most spiritual of the arts’, and for many people, both religious and non-religious alike, this rings true.1 But what do people mean by ‘music’ and ‘spiritual’ in this context, and what is the nature of their perceived relationship? Do certain kinds of music more readily afford spiritual experiences than others? What …
Questions of time and concepts of temporality have increasingly been moving into the focus of current research. A broad timeframe is covered in the publication Temporalität in Kunst und Kunsttheorie seit 1800 [Temporality in Art and Art Theory since 1800], ed-ited by Thomas Kisser in 2011. It reflects and discusses the problem of time in images across epochs – by analysing the role of time i…
In Sacred Music in Secular Society, Jonathan Arnold highlights a strange phenomenon: ‘the seeming paradox that, in today’s so-called secular society, sacred choral music is as powerful, compelling and popular as it has ever been’.1 The explosion of new media through the internet and digital technology has created a new, broader audience for ‘the creative art of Renaissance polyphony …
Even today the academic world often rejects the different manifestations of contemporary popular culture as a source of study in many subjects of the humanities. In the fields of history and archaeology its role is, however, fundamental to the framework of research into cultural reception. In this respect, as defined by Sonna and Illarraga (2016: 9-10):Cines, series, películas, …
Part 1 of this collection enables readers to immerse themselves in a generous cross section of weird and wonderful written materials. All these constituents relate to the thirteenth-century French tour de force typically called “Our Lady’s Tumbler.” To set the stage, the opening subsection offers a brand-new, heavily annotated translation of the poem and the exemplum re…
This masterly account of Leonardo da Vinci and his vision of the world has long been recognized as the classic treatment of the Renaissance giant, offering unparalleled insight into Leonardo's intellect and vision at every stage of his artistic career. Martin Kemp, one of the world's leading authorities on Leonardo, takes us on a mesmerizing journey through the whole span of the great man's li…
From classical to hard rock, and jazz to hip hop, music is constantly evolving, but many of the basics have stayed the same. Understanding these basics is key to becoming a successful musician and well-rounded music lover. Music Theory 101 covers everything novice musicians and lifelong learners need to know, including: -How to read sheet music -Understanding the construction of chords a…
From July 5 to 7, 2021, the second “Tsinghua Area Studies Forum” with “Areas of the World and the World in Areas” as its theme, was held by the Institute for International and Area Studies (IIAS) at Tsinghua Univer-sity in Beijing. One hundred and forty-four scholars from 13 countries and 36 universities and research institutions aroun…
Explore the beautiful and complex world of art! Too often, textbooks obscure the beauty and wonder of fine art with tedious discourse that even Leonardo da Vinci would oppose. Art 101 cuts out the boring details and lengthy explanations, and instead, gives you a lesson in artistic expression that keeps you engaged as you discover the world's greatest artists and their masterpieces. From col…
Cities and water have a love-hate relationship (Feldman 2017). This is especially true of rivers in many cities in Asia, which, like cities in the rest of the world, owe their locations to rivers and the trading opportunities and water sources these rivers provided. In recent years, cities across China have been beautifying and extending their waterfronts, and cities as diverse as Singapore and…
Thus, the fictional ‘Doctor Nosidy, scientist, mesmerist, thought- reader, and electrician’, begins his experiments into communicating with the ‘brain- ether’ of the ancient Egyptian dead.2‘The Strange Discovery of Doctor Nosidy’ is the first of several short stories that make up a collection of tales entitled The Story Hunter: or tales of the weird and wild (1896) by the B…
We hear a band strike up festive music. We see street vendors selling their wares from carts lining a city street. A man and boy, holding hands, walk past the vendors. As they recede into a distant crowd, a pair of young men, both in Western suits and tarbooshes, stroll into and out of the frame. Two riders—one in a dark galabiya and t…
The Temple of Dendur stands grandly in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 1). Reflecting pools and cool tan-marble floors stylishly evoke the Nile and its surroundings; an enormous semi-translucent ceiling remains a relic of 1970s mod-ernism; a vast wall of glass looks out to Central Park and E. Eighty-Fourth Street. All frame the Egyptian temple’s relocation to the former Sackler …
In approaching this introductory text, I am struck by the difficulty of a begin-ning. When painter Emilio Vedova was teaching at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice and one of his pupils would be paralysed in front of the empty canvas, he would dip a brush in the paint and lash it against the white surface. Was the pupil facing the void, and was Vedova’s gesture int…
This edition is a result of a longstanding collaboration between two cen-tres of applied drama, theatre education and research: the Department of Drama for Life, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa and the Department of Arts and Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. From 2017 to 2021 this collaboration has included stude…
an Dynasty (1260-1368) tsa-chii drama^j|j known as "p'ing-fankung-an chli jf-fcL'i* J3$c j^>\ * °r "plays of judgment reversal," all ofwhich feature double trials in which the verdict of the first judge isoverturned by that of the second. In the sense that these plays consti-tute a distinct group within the subgenre of kung-an chli '£ JjL ^£1] or"courtroom p…
Computational drama analysts is the field of research that attempts to model, analyze, and interpret dramatic texts using computational methods. It is part of larger field of computational literary studies and, even more broadly, the digital humanities. Computational drama analysts is part of the current boom in quantitative data analysts methods including machine learning and artificial intell…
The German-speaking television market is considered the third largest in the world, after the US and China. It has 72 million viewers, 37 million television households and 22 trillion euros in annual revenue (Eichner and Esser 2020, 190). As in other areas of society, a radical transformation has been unfolding across this television market for …
In March 2014, podcaster and comedian Adam Carolla initiated a crowd-funding campaign designed to “save” podcasting. A company called Per-sonal Audio LLC was suing Carolla for infringing on a patent—a “system for disseminating media content in serialized episodes” (Nazer 2018)—that it claimed gave the company exclusive rights over the very practice of distributing audio via a podcas…
This is the first volume of the story of a tiny theatre company in a distant part of the UK that operated like a political cell; or alternatively, of a political cell that operated as a theatre company.A39 Theatre Group came into being because of the great Miners’ Strike of 1984–85. It embraced the label ‘agitprop’ as a badge of honour. A39 was moti…
The PhD in Design at Politecnico di Milano was established in 1990, exactly 30 years ago. It was Italy’s first PhD Programme on the topic, and its leading figure was Ulm School of Design former teacher and director Tomàs Maldonado. Its original name was “Doctoral Programme in Industrial De-sign and Visual Communication,” which showed the discipline’s traditional legacy as b…
At a time when graphic novels have expanded beyond their fan cults to become mainstream bestsellers and sources for Hollywood entertainment, Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels serves as an exhaustive exploration of the genre's history, its landmark creators and creations, and its profound influence on American life and culture. Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels focus…
Czerny’s closeness to Beethoven, and his extraordinary musical abilities, have tendedto encourage confidence in him as a reliable source of information about Beethoven’sexpectations for the performance of his music. But despite his obvious reverence forBeethoven’s works, closer scrutiny suggests that he adopted a progressive rather thancuratorial position towards them: perhaps his concern…
According to a widely held view in 20th- Century aesthetics, a music work is equivalent to the performances that conform to a certain score? And this notion complies with at least three requirements of a satisfactory ontology of the music work, or so it seems?1Thus, although a Beethoven manuscript would command a very high price, it is not very interesting as a unique phys…
Taking the advice of my inner Don, I decided to attend the sym-posium, “Don Giovanni and Casanova,” which is held every year in a different Italian city, this time in Venice. I go there with a young Polish woman, Emilia, a student of mine from many years ago. She is almost fifty now but is still as playful, and sometimes as acerbic, as she once was. The thea…
More than two hundred years ago, a theater journal from Hamburg reviewed a performance of The Marriage of Figaro. Its author was probably Bernhard Anselm Weber, a composer and music director. The evening’s entertainment left a deep impression on Mozart’s fellow musician:It is just as one would expect from Mozart: great and beautiful, full of new ideas a…
Philosophy tends to relegate senses to the realm of phe-nomenology and experience. By contrast, critical the-ory has gradually eroded the holy opposition between knowing and sensing to the extent that new speculative trends are now seeking to rebuild it. While the social sciences endeavour to frame sensing within socio- historical geneal ogies, …
In 1958, Suzuki Seitar? was a 35-year-old, lower-ranking, critically unrec-ognized contract director at Nikkatsu studios, despite the fact that he had already made fifteen feature-length program pictures. When he changed his professional name from “Suzuki Seitar?,” his birth name, to the more flamboyant “Suzuki Seijun,” no one in the press or film industry seems to …
The importance of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair cannot be overstated. Three days of music on a New York farm in August 1969 generated an ethos and a mythology (Denisoff, 1986); but was it merely a media contrivance? Depends upon who is asked. The importance is self-evident; the reason is elusive.Throughout the 1960s, popular music became increasingly reflec…
While Googling “Aristophanes” on the evening of a day like any other in spring 2020 during the Covid-19 crisis, I stumbled upon a 25-year-old Taiwanese rapper, Pan Wei Ju (???), who had taken the name of the ancient Greek play-wright after seeing him in a dream. An online reviewer com-ments: “With feminist subject matter [and] obse…
A decade ago, it was still somewhat conventional to start a study by writ-ing how “esports is a novel phenomenon.” As we write this introduction in 2021, that is no longer true. Today, more than a thousand studies have been published on esports, including several books and special issues. Moreover, the work is no longer conducted purely in the “game studies” related fields, bu…
Watership Down, the 1978 British cel-animated feature produced, directed and written by Martin Rosen, and the bestselling 1972 novel by Richard Adams on which it is based are indeed relatively anomalous. The novel is often considered uncategorizable: an adventure story about rabbits that might be a comfortable bedfellow with the works of Beatrix Potter and other children’…
The computer science department at Stanford University offers a course called Computer Graphics: Animation and Simulation. Many departments at other universities have offered a similar course, including the University of North Carolina, University of California, California Polytechnic, and Carnegie Mellon. A title like Animation and Simulation will sound to some like a betra…
My experience with StarCraft could be mapped into three periods that represent the history of the game itself. I was introduced to real-time strat-egy (RTS) games when my cousin brought their copy of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (Blizzard Entertainment 1994) at my grandparents’ house. My brother and I got the game quickly after and, as most players from the early 1990s, I was playing es…
Within Western institutional thinking, the human is constituted through an abil-ity to speak, defined as the sole creature who holds language and consequently is capable of articulating, representing, and reflecting upon the world. Along with language comes the power of naming, of choreographing the semantic categories put in place, continually reproduced and negotiated to make sense…
Large?scale urban parks have been used as a concept for contemporary land?scape planning and design. These parks are intrinsically tied to the development ofcontemporary cities, the various conceptions of dynamic urban landscapes, and thesustainable, cost?effective, and process?oriented transformation of post?industrialsites.This book offers one of the first thorough analyses of contemporary la…
This report of a fire without serious casualties at Grenfell Tower in June 1979 assumes an entirely new and frightening meaning in the context of the tragic events of 14 June 2017, when a horrific cladding fire at the same tower caused the deaths of seventy- two people. Tucked into a folder of newspaper cuttings in the archives of the Royal Borough of Ken sington and Chelsea (RBKC), the articl…
Composer, pianist, editor, writer, and pedagogue Mario Lavista (1943-2021) was a central figure of the cultural and artistic scene in Mexico and one of the leading Ibero-American composers of his generation. His music is often described as evocative and poetic, noted for his meticulous attention to timbre and motivic permutation, and his creative trajectory was characterized by its intersection…
Empires are large. It is one of their signature qualities. As assemblages of different peoples and polities, empires link distant territories to each other by their very def inition: they are ‘large political units, expansionist or with a memory of power extended over space’; consequently, when studying empires, ‘[s]pace matters, size matters, and so does the character of space and size…
On March 1, 1954, the United States detonated its most power ful thermo-nuclear weapon, code- named “ Castle Bravo,” at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Situated to the southeast of Bikini, the populations of Rongelap Atoll, including people residing on Ailingnae and Utrik Atolls, watched in confusion as the sun seemed to rise in the west. On Utrik, Rijen Michael, eigh teen years ol…
The aim of this study was to pursue greater knowledge of vocal expressions in the borderland between speech and song through collaboration between researchers with different approaches, with a view to developing an interdisciplinary method for the analysis of such expressions. The research presented here is the outcome of the research project ‘In the Borderland between So…
The importance of music is difficult to overstate. As historian R W Malcolmson noted, it was the most accessible and democratic of the creative arts, with the ability to give expression to a range of fundamental emotions.4 From a different perspective, musicologist, Philip Tagg emphasised how music and dance are ‘particularly suited to expressing the affec…
Fox television show Glee (2009–15), a musical comedy about a crew of lov-able misfits and their high school glee club, was highly popular. The show had good ratings, attracted a large and intense fandom, enjoyed widespread merchandise sales—and produced huge music sales. Over the course of six seasons of cast recordings, Glee placed more than two hundred songs on the Billboard Hot 100, near…
Growing up in Boston, in the late 1970s, we saw Black motherhood as insepa-rable from Black Glamour. Our mother, Volora, a young R&B and jazz singer, and model had two types of photographs in our apartment, professional photographs of herself stored in a black leather portfolio with riveted han-dles and color polaroid images taken by our father, which lived in our family a…
In August 1969, a group of local Japanese martial arts masters in New York invited Ronald Duncan, a burgeoning Black1 American practitioner of the Japanese martial art of ninjutsu, commonly translated as the “art of stealth,” to exhibit his techniques as part of the second International Convention of Martial Arts hosted by Black Belt mag…