Aesthetic Reflection Research Articles

Heterogenic nature of guerrilla gardening

ABSTRACT For some time now, researchers from various academic disciplines have been engaged in the study of green guerrilla gardening, a grassroots activity involving the planting of vegetation in public spaces. In essence, they view it as a social movement with the objective of reclaiming control of public space and modifying its functionality. However, Author identifies a greater diversity within this movement, which he categorises into four basic types of activity: gardening, activism, art and farming. Each of these categories can be further subdivided into distinct areas of focus, including the beautification of urban spaces, the promotion of social change, the provision of food sources, the advancement of education, and the fostering of community building. The diverse nature of guerrilla gardening allows it to fulfil a multitude of roles and objectives. It can therefore be concluded that the phenomenon is heterogeneous, and that the term used to describe it should be understood more broadly in order to encompass this range of activities. Empirical research is increasingly indicating a discrepancy between the practice of gardeners and the expectations of theorists. For example, the use of military terminology, while humorous, can be seen as an overly optimistic expectation of the actions of these often humble gardeners, while emphasising an activist (political) stance. Furthermore, the author notes that research on guerrilla gardening lacks in-depth aesthetic reflection.

조선 후기 善息齋 鄭持淳 畫論의 心學的 경향 연구

The late Joseon Dynasty was a time when Yangming Simhak's way of thinking, which sought to recover the suppressed sincerity within the framework of Confucian thinking that had to be warm, kind, gentle, and quiet, was established and a new view of art and painting that placed emphasis on the heart was conceived, and during this period, there was a strong tendency that Yangming Simhak's thoughts spread centering around the recognition of paintings by the writers of the Soron (少論) faction. In other words, this phenomenon influenced the thinking and epistemology of reality by the writers of the Soron faction, enabling them to maintain very elastic and flexible thinking, and they emphasized personal emotions and individuality while insisting on creative theories that found answers on their own. In this context, Jeong Ji-soon(鄭持淳), a writer of the Soron faction, promoted the importance of mind and origin as the main premise of creation and the recovery and conversion to one's own mind and the mind of the subject, broadening the range of aesthetic consciousness and providing an opportunity for new aesthetic reflection.

Acoustic Depth

Summary Acoustic depth is an elusive indicator that touches the world of emergencies, or perceptual focus, in a peculiar way. The realm in which these forms of recognition operate indeed links media theory to perception theory and aesthetic reflection. Expressions such as acoustic scene, sound depth or sharpness, or acoustic image when discussing the receptive forms of various microphone models, are just a few cases where imaginative synthesis translates the sense of phenomena arising from the resistance of sensory properties to the structures of linguistic formalization. The language of media is full of these references, which seem to refer to a common sense that emerges in the differentiation of perceptual channels, but is rarely made explicit in a clear manner. To understand acoustic depht’s nature, we can use the concept of emergence: every time we hear a sound, that acoustic process is always surrounded by a myriad of small sounds that interact with it. The notion of emergence can be applied to anything present in the surrounding environment. It can be applied to any configuration that breaks the homogeneity of a perceptual field. So, we can analyze the complexity of this synthetic formation by tracing it back to increasingly simpler synthetic planes. When talking about composition, synthesis, and association, it has already the results of compositional operations and which provided the ultimate or primary material – either term suffices, depending on the direction we choose to take. These are essential factors in spatial orientation processes, but they are structurally opaque: we’ll work on three examples taken from classical music, ethnomusicology, and hearing aids.

The beauty of nature in a teleological perspective

In this work we will focus on the relationship between aesthetic reflection and teleological reflection based on Kant’s concern for the inclusion of beauty in the idea of nature as a system of ends, as expressed in §67: “Even beauty in nature, i.e., its agreement with the free play of our cognitive faculties in the apprehension and judging of its appearance, can be considered in this way as an objective purposiveness of nature in its entirety.” Admitting such a possibility requires addressing at least two issues: The possibility of a teleological approach to aesthetic judgments. This will lead us to determine to what extent the aestheticjudgment of natural objects can also be considered from the teleological faculty of judgment. Here we will show aesthetic reflectionas a propaedeutic for teleological reflection; 2. Beauty in the external relationship between the beings of nature. We will address the location of beauty in the total set of nature as a teleological system in which the human being is a member. We will put beauty in reference to the idea of interest, the ultimate end and the final end of nature

We created space to reclaim time … and that time made extra(ordinary) space

ABSTRACT Within the concept of extra-space, this article aims to explore the meaning, relevance and consequences of the project HODO and the installation ‘The Resting Assembly’ as part of the official Portuguese student representation at the Prague Quadrennial 2023. In close relation to the cultural context of the project, the underlying ideas of time, space, and place are used to develop the methodological approaches, aims, intentions and decisions that guided the project. Based on these relationships, the article proposes to understand this project under the category of event which guides a way of thinking about scenographic contexts toward their amplification in contemporary practices, while furthering the theoretical dimension of the project. The article intends to describe how the idea that a specific (manifest expression of) time, its suspension or the act of pausing, is initiated by this project/object/performance as a form of agency and aesthetic reflection, contributing to an interrelation between time and space. In this sense, the project is studied as a space–time entity that can open up new possibilities in the Portuguese context of artistic creation and research in the field of scenography.

Исправльше почитаите: Заметки о комментариях писцов, редакторов и читателей на страницах древнерусских рукописей

The author analyzes inscriptions by scribes, editors, and readers in the pages of four Old Rus manuscripts of the 11th–13th centuries in which mistakes (by themselves or by other scribes) are commented (RGADA. Tip. 91; RNB, Q.п.I.16; RNB, Q.п.I.15; RNB, Pogod. 71а). The extra-texts analyzed demonstrate that the copying and the usage of books not always were mechanic processes. On the contrary, inscriptions demonstrate linguistic and aesthetic reflection and significantly contribute to our knowledge of the history of the language.

Geopoetic Image as a Cultural Token, Process and Result of Aesthetic Reality Modeling

The research field of geopoetics as the theory of studying creative forms and ways of human interaction with the geographic space, the multidimensional concept shaped by the syncretic perception of reality, is expanding dynamically in the aspect of space interpretation and modeling. Such research prism facilitates addressing projective meanings of the modeled reality, studying geopoetic image as a cultural sign, process and result of aesthetic display and representation of reality. Taking into account the relevance of the problem, the authors of the article set a goal to investigate the semiotic triad of St. Petersburg, the emotional component of the axiological model and its semantic transformations: Petropol’ - Petrograd - Leningrad, that permits to present a multilateral description of geopoetic image modifications. The research logic is dictated by the fact that the conceptualization of space in its various manifestations is associated with the study of the territory as an object of aesthetic reflection. The study analyzes creative embodiment of a particular toponym in its dual rational and emotional essence as a fact of verbal art. Transformation and treatment of geopoetic image meanings of St. Petersburg based on the spheres of urban semiotics are analyzed in the aspect of giving new meanings and semantics to the place in the context of spatial and cultural historical relations and models. The authors argue that geopoetic image is a special representation of geographical space in its historical and cultural, value and semantic nature and fusion in their unity. The existing territory can be presented as a compact axiological model through the “prism” of socio-cultural values, signs and symbols. Actualization of the palimpsest concept based on the combination of textual layers, research of peculiarities of structural meaning modeling enable addressing the reconstruction of the semiotic system and variant semantics of “city mirror” texts.

Поэтика прозы Вячеслава Иванова конца XIX-начала XX в.: художественная философия и открытие эстезиса

This paper is the study of the early philosophical prose of the Russian symbolism theorist Vyacheslav Ivanov during the period of the 1880-s–1900-s. This issue has been understudied and requires approach based on interdisciplinary methods. The materials from the writer's archive and publications reflecting the development of his prose, characterized by a synthesis of philosophical, religious and artistic principles characteristic of the poetics of Russian symbolism, are analyzed. The materials analyzed include early prosaic sketches of Ivanov, fragments of his so-called Intellectual Diary, religious, philosophical, literary and critical essays, articles and other works. Emphasis is placed on the principles of forming a metaphysical discourse, as well as the genre dynamics of Ivanov’s early prose, which can be characterized by essay type of writing and the increasing importance of the philosophical parts. These works are compared to his prose of the early 1900-s published in the “Vesy” journal. It is concluded that Ivanov’s prosaic manner is characterized by the poetic and cultural discourse and his thesaurus is based on the metaphysical language of images. The important components of this discourse include principles of ancient aesthetics of thought and the revitalization of text via various metaphors. A vital role is played by esthesis as one of the methods of philosophical perception and aesthetic reflection of the sensual world. The texts of the Old and New Testaments and the Christian tradition prove to have an essential impact. The influence of works by Aristotle, Plato, B. Pascal, J. W. Goethe, V. Solovyov, F. Nietzsche on the development of metaphysical language of Ivanov’s prose is noted. The conclusion is made that the author’s early prose is the result of attaining an individual style, reflecting the phenomenology of the symbolist consciousness.

Stage Unity of D. Lider’s Plastic Concept of Scenography and S. Danchenko’s Theatre Direction

The purpose of the study is to highlight the stage unity of the plastic concept of D. Lider’s scenography and S. Danchenko’s theatre direction, to characterise the original concept of the image of the performances, their uniqueness of artistic solution. The research methodology is to apply the functional and typological method to consider the scenographic activity of D. Lider as an innovative form of artistic creativity in the context of the formation and development of the direction of effective scenography, as well as to assess its significance in the development of scenographic vocabulary of the Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theatre. The art method is used to analyse the scenographic solution of the performances directed by S. Danchenko and to identify the main conditions and principles of scenographic solutions, compositional techniques and components of D. Lider’s scenography, as well as to determine their influence on the artistic image of the productions. An axiomatic method helped consider Danylo ider's worldview prerogatives in the context of the peculiarities of the formation of his philosophy and artistic and aesthetic position as a master of effective scenography. The novelty of the study. The article comprehensively examines the stage unity of the plastic concept of D. Lider’s scenography and S. Danchenko’s theatre direction in the context of the formation and development of the scenography of the Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theatre. Conclusions. As a philosopher of theatre, D. Lider’s scenography is not guided by any prescribed rules, and it is impossible to judge it by means of a defining judgment, by imposing certain already known categories on his scenographic vocabulary. The scenery created by the master testifies to an innovative form of the sublime that allows for the acquisition of creative energy – D. Leader sought to overcome the dictates of sensual perception of reality in order to reflect the essential, hidden characteristics of existence. The associative connection and drawing parallels between the actual problems of the present and the problems of a literary work as the basis for deep philosophical and aesthetic reflections introduced by D. Lider is the basis of Ukrainian stage art of the twenty-first century.
 Key words: Danylo Lider, Serhii Danchenko, director, theatre, scenography.

After flight. Visions from London Heathrow

This paper uses creative methodologies to explore the future of relations between art and flight. Responding to the conditions of the pandemic, I take Heathrow Airport, which is near my home, as an observable and symbolic landscape inflected with art’s mobilities but also a window onto changing times. I draw on material gathered within the constraints of the lockdown walk – diary notes, photographs, correspondence – as well as theoretical framings that include planetary social thought, evidentiary forms of materialism and aesthetic reflections on the modern ruin. I ask: what axioms and assumptions about art and flight are unsettled by this landscape? What is revealed about relations between art and the planetary? And what possible futures does it offer artists striving to square internationalism with ecological consciousness?In the context of a climate crisis, the deserted airport is suggestive of a catastrophic future that reads as an allegory of fossil fuel dependence. Yet the complexity of disentangling art from flight, an inherently carbon hungry mode of transport, should not be underestimated – it will need to negotiate not just the terrain of environmental impact but also the artistic identities, exhibition models and curatorial personas that have flourished under the conditions of cheap flight.

Watery Hauntings: A Glossary for African Philosophy in a Different Key

ABSTRACTIt is no secret that philosophy was historically established as the endeavor of white men and that this history continues to underpin and inform the workings of the institutionalized discipline in contemporary university spaces. The discipline’s inherent preoccupation with the universal rather than the particular, the abstract rather than the material, has rendered philosophy particularly obtuse for certain kinds of thinking, and oblivious to large currents of political and aesthetic reflection that have shaped contemporary intellectual engagement with our world. In this article, the authors’ aim is to read the epistemic erasures/foreclosures/violences associated with African philosophy differently, to ask whether it can change key. The article discusses Black African women’s creative work as theory or as philosophy done on different terms. The creative text that the authors center in this regard is the poem bientang (2020) by Black Afrikaans writer Jolyn Phillips.

Aesthetic Pragmatism and Feminism of Jane Addams

This article aims to contribute to the recognition of Jane Addams' aesthetic reflections. Her reflections extended pragmatism by anticipating some themes of Dewey’s aesthetics and some of its current aesthetic derivations. Addams broke down the barriers that separated art and life with the practices at Hull House in which immigrants of different ethnicities and women had an active and leading part. She thus expanded the social meaning of some of the avant-garde art movements that influenced her, such as the Art and Crafts Movement, by trying to make aesthetic sensibility a part of the everyday life of Hull House’s neighbors. In this way, she anticipated current everyday aesthetics, but without diluting the artistic specificity. Art transfigures events through poetics, allowing us to transform our lives through the values that are the common heritage of humanity. In Addams, we find a social aesthetic that sheds light on some of the problems of contemporary theories, expands the considerations of the artistic movements of her time, and contributes to reflections on the vital importance of aesthetics.

Утраченные и обретённые музыкальные жанры, формы и образы, как наследие замечательного композитора Эдуарда Николаевича Артемьева

This article discusses listening to music suitable for sound perception and the associated changes in paradigms or ways of thinking that so often occur when we move from visual to auditory perception. The distinction between historically accepted and rejected sounds is used to show how the placement of sounds in our subconscious has shaped the form of listening in life. The experimental music of the 20th century, especially the music and reflections of Eduard Artemyev, opened the doors to our subconsciousness with the synthetics of sound, and at the same time weakened the visual paradigm of intellectual knowledge. In this article, sound perception is considered as a place where artistic practices coincide with certain theoretical problems centered on sound. First, the centrality of sound is considered, and music and sound art are discussed in relation to space. This perception is extracted by looking at contrasting pairs of examples. Pairs consist of an analytical and visual presentation of the main issue of sound-perception. It is an excellent tool for exploring the relationship between philosophy, science, psychology and human cognition. Next, the sound track of the work while listening to outstanding sequences, sound-perception focuses on the specific relationship of the image and the picture. It embodies the state of sounds, when the smallest impact can lead to a radical change in the established order, overcoming the bifurcation point. Non-traditional materials and approaches in music give a new round of development and understanding in contemporary art, prompting a rethinking of what an artistic image could be. Regardless of the artistic picture, which, in turn, the author wanted to convey. This is the key to sound-perception as a tool of knowledge. The article ends with a statement about the need for aesthetic reflection, taking into account the consequences of these profound transformations.

BERTOLT BRECHT AND SLOBODAN SCHNEIDER: WAR. RELIGION. WOMAN. THEATER

Global issues fixed in the diachrony of world culture by the concept of "war", as well as modern methods of its aesthetic interpretation, are seen today as extremely promising for Ukrainian literary studies, which is now actively rethinking how and through which models the artistic representation of modern military events should take place and their reflection in experience/living.
 The article offers a comparative literary analysis of B. Brecht's plays "Mother Courage and Her Children" and S. Schneider's "Snake Skin", in which, in the setting of the Thirty Years' War in Europe of the 17th century. contains deep ethical and philosophical reflections on the war as such and aesthetic reflections of two outstanding European playwrights on the war events of which they became contemporaries.
 If B. Brecht’s play has many literary interpretations, including in Ukraine, S.Schneider’s play is being interpreted by Ukrainian literary studies for the first time. The intentions and artistic resources of both texts are compared through the conceptual series War – Religion – Woman – Theatre. In interpretation B. Brecht’s war is horizontal-processual and geographically dispersed, in S. Schneider’s she is cyclical and permanent, localized in a closed topographical and mythological space.
 It is illustrated how playwrights conduct a dialogue with the world cultural tradition regarding religion/faith as a factor in modern war, the peculiarities of female figurative potential and female (not)subjectivity in aesthetic interpretations of war belonging to the 20th century are revealed, B. Brecht’s "epic theater" is compared and S. Schneider’s symbolic and allegorical theater. The study complements the problematic field of modern humanitarian reflections, activated by Russia’s full-scale attack on Ukraine in February 2022.

Arrebato. La revancha de las imagenes

This essay analyzes the collision between the technological and cultural elements in the Spanish film Arrebato (Iván Zulueta, 1979), to present the film as an aesthetic reflection on the abrupt irruption of audiovisual representation (cinema, television...) to the center of Spanish social life during its Transition to democracy. The political transition is subsumed by an aesthetic transition that results from the progressive convergence between the political system changes and late capitalism. As a result of this novelty, Arrebato transforms into terror the cultural inability to deal with an iconic pluriverse that has liquidated the centrality of written culture. The protagonists of the film are fascinated and involved in an aesthetic transition, an iconic turn, where the images that previously had a symbolic value are now self-referential. On the material basis of the analogic image, Zulueta anticipates the aesthetic and cultural concerns common to immaterial digital reproduction systems.

Dialectics and Hermeneutics of the Coexistence of Religion and Art

The article raises the question of understanding the phenomena of religion and art in their interaction through the prism of dialectical and hermeneutic methods. The syncretism of the origins of religion and art, and then the dialectic of their coexistence and interaction, became the basis of the contradictory integrity of religious and artistic forms of social consciousness and activity, which was previously partly the subject of aesthetic reflection. The comprehension of religious and artistic integrity in the philosophy of culture presupposes going beyond the categorical apparatus of aesthetics into the sphere of dialectics and hermeneutics, coupled with reliance on the categorical apparatus of ontology — space, time, movement, taken as the basic categories of philosophical understanding of religion and art.

Imagination and Körperzustand

The aesthetic reflection in the eighteenth century is deeply traversed by an experience perceived as capable of disrupting the disciplinary and cognitive system of early modernity: To feel the “own body,” that is, to feel its state of well-being or discomfort means to somehow modify from the inside the anthropological project of the Century of Enlightenment and to create the space and the lexicon of a modality of relationship (play, aesthetic illusion) that redefines the relationship with oneself and the context of construction of a future community. Whereas “Knowledge” and “Will” articulate the same strategy based on the relationship between the spiritual activity of a subject and the semiotic properties of an object, the orientation towards the condition of one’s own body defines in the play and in the aesthetic illusion the space of an imaginative reserve which is above all a reserve of time and mode of construction for a future sharing. Moses Mendelssohn’s thought constitutes the exemplary arrival point of an era of theoretical research that we are interested in investigating not only in terms of the solutions it has found for his time, but also in relation to the open problems, which continue to question our time.

Ästhetische Reflexion in nuce

Aesthetic Reflection in nuce. On the Almond in Medieval Literature and Culture, particularly in the Works of Konrad von Würzburg This article studies how almonds are utilised in medieval texts, images, and objects as a way of reflecting on aesthetic questions. To this end, it analyses (1.) the cultural and medical understanding of almonds in medieval Europe, (2.) the branch, flower, kernel, and shell of the almond in the Bible and in theological exegesis, (3.) the almond shape in Christian iconography and devotion, (4.) the pointed oval seal as object and metaphor. This paper shows that the almond as a plant, a fruit, and a form enables interactions between different discourses and senses and thus addresses fundamental aesthetic questions: sensory perception and its limits; the synaesthesia of tasting, seeing, and hearing; the relation between concealing and revealing; the dichotomy of respecting and breaking taboos; the question of substance and form; the link between material and ethical values. The almond thus represents a form of medieval aesthetic reflection in a nutshell.

Ciała Schulza

Bruno Schulz’s first body was flesh and blood. Like any body, it was a place of existence. The events of which it became part can be written out in a calendar. We see them in motion – in birth, in dying, in fatigue, in sex and laughter. The other body of the writer is present in his work. It is the body created by Schulz, reproduced and represented – dispersed in words and images. It is largely published. It becomes an object of aesthetic reflection. It seeks form for itself in the concrete corporealities of the represented world, but also in the unveiling of the style itself – in the heterogeneous, delicate expressions of sexuality and gender. The writer’s first and second bodies do not exist separately. They are not opposites, nor are they fully identical. One does not attempt to cannibalistically devour the other. Rather, they must be seen as two bodies always facing each other, touching, rubbing against each other, differentiating. The essay is taken from a Ph.D. dissertation on Schulz, Differentiating. The First and Second Body of the Writer, defended at the University of Gdansk on October 26, 2022, whose theme was the erotic and mournful bodies of the author of Cinnamon Shops.

Melodrama of Possessive Agency

In the last decades, streams within posthumanism and new materialism, have turned their attention to the phenomenon of agency. And they have done so in ways which open the phenomenon for social and cultural historical investigations, relevant for cultural studies and literary studies alike. This article uses a concrete case—the melodramatic novel Koloss by Norwegian author Finn Alnæs—in order to speculate on how a literary form can be seen to co-evolve—or in this case, clash—with fluctuations in the cultural history of agency. In the 1960s—the heydays of cybernetics—a discrepancy can be observed, between the nourishment of individualism in politics and advertisement, and the distribution of individual agency in the new emerging technologies of cybernetics, which pushed agency as a question in the forefront of a series of novels, Koloss included. However, the novel’s discussion of agency was ignored by the critics, as well as in the scholarly literature to follow. In an effort to get closer to the co-development of ideas of agency and aesthetic form, the article asks why this has been the case. Did the melodramatic form of the novel stand in the way of its aesthetic reflection on agency? And could the novel and its reception therefore be seen as an example of the existence of complex feedback-loops, between ideas of agency in a given culture and aesthetic form?