Artistic Self-expression Research Articles

Развитие творческого мышления студентов в процессе преподавания скульптуры

This article addresses the issue of the lack of creative thinking among master’s degree students in sculpture departments at universities in China. Combined with teaching practice, the article puts forward countermeasures to solve the problem of lack of creative thinking and emphasizes the importance of cultivating students’ creative thinking ability in sculpture teaching practice. Among these measures, whose effectiveness has been confirmed through teaching practice, are: encouraging student initiative, emphasizing independence in creative exploration, ensuring interdisciplinary training, integrating various art forms, and enhancing student self-discipline. Additionally, the author highlights the need for reforming the sculpture curriculum and updating the teaching methodology. In the context of modern art education, it should not be limited to the development of a specific set of skills but should instead stimulate students’ imagination and creative pursuits to meet society’s demand for creative art products. Cultivating of students’ creative thinking is not solely the responsibility of teachers; it requires active participation from the students themselves, ultimately leading to the formation of an independent artistic style and personalized artistic self-expression.

Using theory knitting to conceptualize social phenomena in the design and evaluation of dance programs for people living with Parkinson’s disease

Dance programs for people living with Parkinson’s disease (PwPD) offer participants an opportunity to exercise, engage in artistic self-expression, and form new relationships. While it is understood that the social dimension of dance programs for PwPD contributes to dancer satisfaction and program sustainability, the social mechanisms instrumental to program success are under-examined. Engaging with theory from wider disciplines, or “theory knitting” can help program designers and evaluators examine the mechanisms and contextual factors that make classes socially meaningful with greater detail and specificity. This study identified and examined three theoretical frameworks that program planners and evaluators could use to conceptualize social engagement in dance for PwPD contexts and inform practice. Each theory was assessed for fit using the T-CaST theory comparison and selection tool developed by Birken et al. (2018). As an example, we used anthropologist Victor Turner’s (1970; 1977) theory of liminality and communitas to identify five key areas for fostering a sense of social connection in dance for PwPD contexts: (1) selecting a meaningful dance space (2) creating a joyous atmosphere (3) marking entrance into the liminal time and space with rituals (4) embodying liminality and anti-structure and (5) inverting power relations and embracing fluid roles.

Recreating Fantasy: Fan culture in fan-made merchandise and advertising on Chinese social media

Fandom has long been recognized as a dynamic and participatory culture. In the context of Chinese social media Weibo, this study investigates the fan-made merchandise and advertising landscape within the pop culture fan community, and explores how fan producers and consumers interact in the creation, promotion, and acquisition of fan-made merchandise by delving into the intricacies of product design, advertisement composition and its impact on audience feedback. With data collected from text analysis, the result of regression and statistic results show that fan producers exhibit a strong preference for merchandise featuring specific character images, emphasizing the ornamental aspects of their creations. Advertisement posts on social media serve as platforms for artistic self-expression, while the consumers prioritize concise product information. This dynamic interaction fosters collaborative value creation in the modern fan community, offering participants a chance to modify and add onto the original content as well as construct their own identity.

THE WORLD OF VASTSELIINA ESTATE IN 1913

The main subject of this article is a photo album created by ReinholdKarl von Liphardt Jr, an outstanding representative of the BalticGerman landed gentry in Estonia in the first half of the 20th century.In the early 1990s, the director of the “Bildarchiv Foto Marburg” ofthe Art History Institute of the Phillips University Marburg, Mrs.Brigitte Walbe made the duplicates of the photographic materialsfrom the collection of the Baltic German historian and genealogistGeorg von Krusenstjern available to the author of this article.The article classifies and analyses the 181 photographs pastedin the photo album which, with the highest degree of certainty,can be attributed to Reinhold Karl von Liphardt Jr. (1864–1940), theowner of Raadi, Vastseliina and several other estates. Judging by the
 photographs in the album, it can be concluded that von Liphardt usedphotography as a means of enriching his emotionally saturated lifewith yet another means of artistic self-expression. The photographstaken in the period from the winter of 1912–1913 to the winter of1913–1914, convey an inordinate amount of visual information aboutthe landscape, architecture and society in the Vastseliina manor.Reinhold Karl von Liphardt’s photo album presents a series ofchronologically consecutive images and it is similar to a poetic “diaryin pictures”. Reinhold Karl von Liphardt used photography as aperfect means of documenting his ecocultural environment. Hislandscape photographs are characterized by great attention to detail.The cultural and sociological significance of the rural scenes in thephotographs is further increased by the presence of local people inthem. The Seto ethnic group lived in the estates of Reinhold Karlvon Liphardt and, thanks to their ethnographic uniqueness, drewthe attention of an educated landlord.The photos with individual and group portraits of therepresentatives of the Seto ethnic group are not only vivid evidenceof the Estonian culture in the first decades of the 20th century, butalso striking works of art, whose power of expression elevates themconsiderably above the emotionality and artistic effect of ReinholdKarl von Liphardt’s lyrical landscapes and idyllic family portraits.

Dynamics of Figurative-Stylistic Evolution of Solo Arrangement of the Folk Song (From «Zharty, kokhannya, lyubov ta zhenykhannya» / «Jokes, Love and Marriage» to «A my nashu slavnu Ukrayinu rozveselymo!» / «We Will Cheer Up Our Glorious Ukraine!»)

The article highlights the dynamics of the movement of artistic thought of the Ukrainian community in 1900–1918 on its way to the first attempt to form its own independent state. The data is provided on the settlement and number of Ukrainians in the specified period is intended to show a large-scale panorama of the development of the most common genres of music making in everyday life, because the universally recognized feature of the Ukrainian mentality as cordocentric already conditioned the desire for artistic self-expression, music and singing. The author’s attention is focused on the genre of arrangement Ukrainian folk songs for voice with instrumental accompaniment, which created a powerful folklore wave associated with the trends of increased national self-determination and democratization of the aesthetic foundations of Ukrainian art. The policy of the russian tsarist culturists of that time was aimed at spreading the so-called «Little russian surrogate» – encouraged the publication of artistically inferior songs that had humorous, entertaining, love-sentimental, burlesque or frankly vulgar content. However, the purposeful patriotic activity of such artists as M. Lysenko, K. Kvitka, K. Stetsenko, O. Koshyts, B. Yanovsky, Yа. Stepovy, F. Kolessa, O. Nyzhankivskyi, D. Sichynskyi, S. Charnetskyi caused a significant evolution of the genre of solo arrangement and raising it to the high level of a vocal miniature / romance, defined by the purely Ukrainian musical term «solospiv» ≈ «solosиng». The evolutionary growth significantly affected the topic of the genre, when songs of civic pathos, full of pride for the heroic past and the desire for national self-determination and statehood, began to gain national popularity.

The Rhymes of Zhina Movement; Content Analysis of Revolutionary and Protest Music of Iran 2022

The Zhina movement that erupted following the death of Mahsa Zhina Amini, under custody for allegedly wearing her headscarf incorrectly, is Iran's most prolonged and pervasive movement since the 1979 revolution—repeatedly referred to as a revolution by the actors who participated in the movement as well as political analysts. This movement has had many cultural, social, and political influences. Music as a critical cultural manifestation, artistic self-expression, and an integral part of people's daily life both affected the movement and was impacted by it. This article takes a closer look at the protest and revolutionary songs published since the beginning of the Zhina movement in September 2022. Using a qualitative content analysis approach, it explores the contents published during the movement concerning meaning-making, collective imagination, and representation of Iran's social and political situation. Ten main themes were extracted, including oppression, resistance, the conflict between good and evil, the connection between previous social movements, representation of slogans, symbols, and victims, woman and embodiment, homeland, nations and ethnicities, religion, action request, and desired future vision.

Makeup: A Genderless Form of Artistic Expression Explored by Content Creators and Their Followers

Since the fifteenth century, makeup has been gendered and has been ongoingly advertised as such through the ubiquity of modern media. However, with the emergence of newer notions of makeup as expressed by Instagram makeup content creators, the notion of makeup as an art has permeated the media, influencing individuals who follow and/or are exposed to such notions. Furthermore, it is also unreasonable to claim that makeup is gendered, since the notion of gender itself has never been clearly defined. Therefore, makeup instead should be regarded as a genderless form of artistic self-expression. By exploring the history of makeup, conducting phenomenological research on Instagram makeup content creators, and utilizing Butler’s (1988) notion of gender performativity, Negrin’s (2008) writing on gender border crossings, and Kim’s (2013) discussion of everyday reflexivity through the media, I shall discuss why makeup should be regarded as a genderless form of artistic expression. Not only that, but I will also explore ethical consumerist makeup brands, as displayed on the Instagram makeup content creators’ posts, and the notion of “cruelty-free,” and how these notions are related to the post-modernly perceived genderless aspect of makeup.

ARTISTIC FREEDOM, CENSORSHIP AND SELF - CENSORSHIP IN THE FILM INDUSTRY OF LATVIA

The concept of censorship associates with authoritarian regime; however, it is not unequivocally, i.e., also in a democratic country there may be obstacles that create barriers for artistic self-expression and limit the artistic process by stimulating the topicality of self-censorship. Also, in Latvia the parliamentary democracy creates legal framework that formally excludes the ideological censorship of creative process and artistic creativity. Simultaneously, the society’s attitude towards artistic expressions, as well as dominant ideologic values among various groups of society and within the country may create critically condemnatory or supportive framework for certain expressions of art. The main aim of this article is to find out how the artists of today comprehend and explain manifestations of artistic freedom, censorship, and self-censorship in Latvia nowadays. Eighteen in-depth interviews involving the Latvian directors of the films were conducted in the framework of FARP “The art of nationalism: Social solidarity and exclusion in contemporary Latvia”. In general, the study (1) reveals multi-shaped manifestations of censorship in the creative activities and dominant conditions in which it forms; (2) allows to follow up the sources of self-censorship for artistic activity, and (3) draws conclusions on the conditions and barriers of creative freedom in Latvian society.

Exploring Liminal Aesthetics: the “Glitchy and Decayed” Worlds of Vaporwave, Semiotic Assemblages, and Internet Linguistics

"Exploring Liminal Aesthetics: The “Glitchy and Decayed” Worlds of Vaporwave, Semiotic Assemblages, and Internet Linguistics. The topic of online identity formation in the realm of computer-mediated communication is nothing new. However, what does stand out, especially in recent years, in the larger framework of Internet-based sociolinguistic practices (David 2010; Williams 2006), is a much-needed exploration of various new microcultural aggregates. Some of these niche-genres are frequently encountered on YouTube, while others are primarily short-lived Instagram or TikTok community-driven trends. In essence, this paper states the belief that it is precisely these relatively contemporary microcultural trends that manage to accurately take the pulse of a new, post-pandemic world. Moreover, since many of these forms of artistic self-expression can be understood through a Cultural Sociolinguistic lens (Cotrău, Cotoc, and Papuc 2021), a translation of their particular symbolic meanings can only help decipher the increasingly chaotic, hypersubjective, and “semiotic assemblages” (Pennycook 2017) that individuals seem to be inhabiting and creating. Thus, the current paper aims to offer an analysis that ties together an array of only seemingly disparate elements, namely: cultural economy, creation and consumption of online cultural artefacts, and an affective processing that ties real-life traumatic events to the creation of particular cultural trends - liminal aesthetics and vaporwave, paired with a fascination with all things “glitchy and decayed” (Loignon and Messier 2020). Keywords: online identity, sociolinguistics, Internet linguistics, multimodality, vaporwave, liminal aesthetics, semiotic assemblages "

Witness to War: Enlisting The Creative Process in Working Through Trauma

A brutal war in Ukraine brings the author back to the beginning of her life as a hidden child during the Second World War in Ukrainian territory under Soviet and Nazi occupation. She examines the long-term effects of war trauma on her life and her choices, and analyzes how the experience shaped her identity, her character, and her professional aspirations as a psychoanalyst and artist. With words and brush strokes she addresses a series of current crises that can be retraumatizing for survivors, namely, an assault on American democracy, a perilous pandemic, and vicious war crimes in Ukraine. These catastrophes are depicted in four oil paintings which capture the terror of war through juxtaposition of past and present images. Artistic self-expression allows for the working through of traumatic experience; In that respect, art functions as a type of reenactment which offers opportunities for mourning and repair.

Sõnastades sõnatut / Expressing tacit knowledge

In his review of the Estonian translation of Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman, Urmas Lüüs, from the Estonian Art Academy, expresses his thoughts about the general position of ’material arts’ in the context of Estonian higher art education and the ways the book could help to cast new light on the forms of artistic self-expression that embrace making and skill besides conceptual ideas and design.
 In addition to materiality and technical skills, tacit knowledge is another very important concept addressed by Sennett. Lüüs provides some contemporary examples where tacit knowledge is studied. Some attempts to re-evoke tacit knowledge may not be successful, because they have been passed literally from hand to hand, but the knowledge has perished alongside the growth of industrial production, much like it happened in metal casting for sculptures.
 Lüüs points out that the book nicely pairs up with Jyrki Siukonen’s book Hammer and silence that was translated and published some years earlier and enjoyed very positive reception on behalf of art students. Both books show the way towards accepting the significance of (manual) skills in all types of creative activity.

Фольклорні мотиви українського романтизму Олекси Стороженка (на прикладі твору "Марко Проклятий")

The article aims to promote the works of the Ukrainian romantic writer Oleksa Storozhenko. The regional peculiarities of Ukrainian romanticism have been analyzed in the example of his work Marko Prokliatyi (Marco the Cursed). It was claimed that Ukrainian literature of the early XIX century contributed to the nation’s preservation during the statelessness of Ukraine.The freedom of the author’s artistic self-expression is found in his attention to mysticism, insanity, obsession, passion, addiction, and love. The author’s thoughts plunged into the unreal, delirium (illusions), dreams, fantasy, the demonic, and mysticism, and went deep into the subconscious and the spiritual world, while searching and idealizing God the Creator without denying the dualistic world order.Based on Ukrainian folkloric tradition and the use of the elements of Gothic and European literature, Oleksa Storozhenko depicts the travels of the eternal wanderer (Marco in the Ukrainian tradition), who is a werewolf, that is evil disguised as a man, and later, after the curse and for atonement (Christian idealism), he turns into a Cossack and takes part in the events of the XVII century and acts in the “here and now”.

Replicating a Therapeutic Art Group Protocol for Parents of Youth With Chronic Pain

Interventions for parents are important during intensive interdisciplinary pain treatment (IIPT) for youth. Therapeutic art reinforces parent strengths and promotes healthy coping during their child’s treatment. This study measured the feasibility of implementing a published, parent-only group-based therapeutic art intervention in an IIPT program, delivered by a Certified Child Life Specialist (CCLS) with training in therapeutic art. While their child participated in IIPT, forty-two parents participated in at least one therapeutic art group. Content rotated through four modules designed to promote reflection on interpersonal relationships, cultivate support, identify values, acknowledge personal struggles and barriers, and increase artistic self-expression (Pielech et. al., 2013). Following each group, parents completed measures of perceived satisfaction and helpfulness as well as open-ended questions for qualitative analysis. The mixed method design was used to provide depth to the understanding of these parents’ experiences. Supporting feasibility, the full intervention was replicated in a different setting with different providers. Parents attended 69% of sessions, reported little difficulty attending, and reported a high degree of satisfaction, helpfulness, and support. Following each group, parents completed measures of perceived satisfaction and helpfulness as well as open-ended questions. A mixed method design was used to provide depth to the understanding of these parents’ experiences.

Totalitarianism and Ukrainian Literature: Traumatic Memory and Revelation of the Past

The article highlights the topic of totalitarianism in Ukrainian literature, in particular, shows the traumatic memory and exposure of the past, which is interpreted differently by writers of different generations. Particular attention is paid to the causes of totalitarianism in Europe after the World War I and its impact on modern post-totalitarian cultures. Such cultures include primarily Ukrainian. Numerous social protests, revolutions, the war in Donbass are not so much the consequences of geopolitical conflicts as permanent attempts to return to the Ukrainian identity, to express national traumas, to identify cultural and human losses, which did not happen immediately after the collapse of the USSR. The problem of totalitarianism is also key in determining the specifics of its modern literary interpretation, because most works of art, which to varying degrees appeal to the reconstruction of the past, for the first time clearly verbalize those relevant topics that are still inconvenient and provoke misunderstandings among Ukrainians themselves.
 Today Ukrainian literature demonstrates a double stance against the totalitarian past. First, we read in it a steady protest against the socialist-realist heritage, embodied in the long search for inherent forms of artistic self-expression; secondly, modern Ukrainian literature resorted to a total revision of the consequences of cultural stagnation provoked by the experience of many years of totalitarian terror.
 The article reveals the connections between this regime and the art of speech, in particular the birth of the pseudo-artistic literary trend of the time - social realism. The author analyzes the peculiarities of the use of literature as a tool of propaganda. In addition, one of the main problems of modern research is the modern ways of artistic rethinking and the process of elaboration of totalitarian experience. In particular, it is about the cultural trauma of oppressed peoples in the Soviet period, which is related to human rights and freedoms, concentration camps, desecration of the myth of victory in World War II, denial of God, etc., which affects the behavior of modern societies and often provokes unpredictable in European politics.

Assessment of artists’ socioeconomic and working conditions: the empirical case of Lithuania

The main aim of this research is to explore existing methodologies for artists’ labour force and create artists’ socio-economic and creative conditions an assessment model. Artists have a dual aims in their creative working process: 1) income, and 2) artistic self-expression. The valuation of their conditions takes into consideration both sides: the factors related to income and the satisfaction for creative process and its result. The problem addressed in the study: tangible and intangible artists' criteria used for assessments creativity conditions.
 The proposed model includes objective factors (working time, income, etc.) and subjective factors (salary covering essential needs, self-satisfaction). Other intangible indicators taken into account: the impact on the common culture, social values, and the possibility to receive awards, to represent the country in the international market. The empirical model consists of 59 separate indicators, grouped into eight categories. The deviation of each indicator from the general evaluation allows identifying the strongest and the weakest components of artists’ conditions.

Country Music and the Problem of Authenticity

AbstractIn the small but growing literature on the philosophy of country music, the question of how we ought to understand the genre’s notion of authenticity has emerged as one of the central questions. Many country music scholars argue that authenticity claims track attributions of cultural standing or artistic self-expression. However, careful attention to the history of the genre reveals that these claims are simply factually wrong. On the basis of this, we have grounds for dismissing these attributions. Here, I argue for an alternative model of authenticity in which we take claims about the relative authenticity of country music to be evidence of ‘country’ being a dual-character concept in the same way that it has been suggested of punk rock and hip-hop. Authentic country music is country music that embodies the core value commitments of the genre. These values form the basis of country artists’ and audiences’ practical identities. Part of country music’s aesthetic practice is that audiences reconnect with, reify, and revise this common practical identity through identification with artists and works that manifest these values. We should then think of authenticity discourse within country music as a kind of game within the genre’s practice of shaping and maintaining this practical identity.

Interactive Sound Installation as an Implementation of Contemporary Communication Models

Digitalization, virtualization, commercialization, loss of integrity, polystylistics, liberation from any norms are the latest trends that determine the development of contemporary art. They influence the functioning of modern communication models that evolve in accordance with the achievements of technology and acquire mobility, variability and interactivity. Interaction between social processes and scientific and technological achievements is increasing, the essence of communication in the space of modern culture is being rethought, particularly, the boundary between the types of art is being levelled. The latter phenomenon leads to the emergence of new instruments and methods of artistic creativity and expands the possibilities of artistic self-expression. One of the promising areas of artistic exploration is the creation of sound interactive installations. This paper proposes a classification of communication models that are based on the analysis of interactive sound installations. The classification is based on determining the degree to which audiences actions influence the final sound result of the creative action. The paper claims that the parameters of the exhibition space are important components of the installation’s structure and form. A dialogue with nature by way of incorporating sounds of nature, their imitations, and interpretations in art objects is found to be a current trend in interactive sound installations.
 
 

We are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik

We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik is a large, illustrated monograph with no image of the iconic artworks for which Paik is most known. There are no walls of stacked televisions, no Buddha watching himself on TV. This collection of writings, from the Nam June Paik Archive (Smithsonian American Art Museum) and a range of international publications, are the reproduced formatting and facsimiles of the artist’s typewritten scores, essays, letters and handwritten journal entries, postcards and notes. The book is wonderful to browse as an aesthetic artifact but it is also a resource and record of a dynamic mind responding to a changing world from the late 1950s into the mid-1990s. The editor introductions to each of the thematic sections (Music and the Avant-garde; Transforming Video and Television; Culture and Politics; and Commentaries and Letters) provide an historical and cultural context for Paik’s writing. Paik’s writing, however, is deeply interdisciplinary, nonlinear and networked. No single text stays within the bounds of the topic heading. This makes for an exhilarating reading experience within a single text but is somewhat overwhelming to navigate as a collection in book form, despite a fairly comprehensive index. The reader, curious about Paik’s networked thought processes, would benefit from digital versions of the texts in a searchable and richly annotated database. But such a digital resource would miss the material expressions of the writing itself as presented in this large format book. The artifacts of Paik’s time-worn philosophical fragments, about the artist’s role in a world being reshaped by technology, have the feel of prophecy; messages of hope and warning addressed to our current moment.Paik was an interdisciplinary and cosmopolitan artist at a time when electronic media was bringing the world virtually closer together after a devastating war. With a background in music, philosophy and aesthetics, he made his name in Germany and New York in the 1960s with his Cage-inspired scores in the neo-Dada Fluxus movement. In the 1970s, inspired by McLuhan’s media theory and the democratic promise of television, Paik pioneered “video art” with works encompassing broadcast TV, single-channel video, video installations and (mostly unrealized) plans for experiments with satellite television. The notes, plans and writings in We Are in Open Circuits cover this extraordinary artistic growth. Paik was clearly ambitious, seeking out connections and opportunities to make his visionary ideas a reality. His writing shows an instinct for grand entertainment, often accompanied by humor, within a serious art world. For example, he writes: Nietzsche said a hundred years ago, God is dead. I say, now paper is dead, except for toilet paper. If Joyce lived today, surely he would have written his Finnegan’s wake on video tape because of the vast possibility for manipulation in magnetic information storage.Paik’s writing also shows a practical artist attending to technical details in his notes and plans for exhibition, as well as to details of the theoretical frameworks in his grant reports.We Are in Open Circuits contains Paik’s most prescient speculative essays about technology: “Global Groove and Video Common Market” (1970), “Media Planning for the Post-Industrial Age” (1974), “Random Access Information” (1980) and “Art & Satellite” (1984). “Expanded Education for a Paper-less Society,” typewritten in 1968, begins: Suppose a girl in Kentucky wants to study the Japanese Koto instrument and a graduate at UCLA wants to experiment with certain Persian or Afghanistan musical instruments. How would they do this? … The mailable television (i.e., video tape) would enable the individual lessons for many subjects to be given from anywhere to anywhere.The artist who coined the term “electronic superhighway” also aimed to “make technology ridiculous.” Technology was for him not just a new medium for artistic self-expression but a generator of a new conviviality and a participatory human culture, involving chance, indeterminacy, simultaneity and fun, along with technical rigor. We Are in Open Circuits shows how much of Paik’s art was woven with his philosophical thinking about what happens when we are all connected.

'Images of Ecology' and 'Ecologies of Images'

Building on Guattari’s three ecologies – the mental, natural and social –, and recently emerging discourses in documentary theory on interactive media making, co-creation and polyphony, this presentation discusses both notions of ‘images of ecology’ and ‘ecologies of images’ to fathom the potential of mobile, networked documentary media assemblages to encourage multilogue, to affectively and cognitively embrace complexity and to instigate transformation. Taking a project which is currently work in progress – the transdisciplinary polyphonic artistic research Mind the Gap! –, tentative answers are suggested to the question of how to face a situation of intermingled crises: the crisis of representation in the representation of crisis. Guiding questions are: How can one raise alert to immanent ecological risks and at the same time co-creatively awaken a desire for a more sustainable world? How can one promote awareness of ecological topics when risk is immanent but often invisible and when fundamental transformations are vital, but when, at the same time, the complexity of matters thwarts responsible action-taking? The hypothesis underlying the approach of this paper is that interactive documentary media configuration bear the potential to face both crises, especially those configurations which are based on principles of co-creation, polyphony and multi-perspectivity. This openness, I will claim, does not only do justice to the entanglement of issues at stake, but it also teaches us to listen to and to consider various viewpoints as openers to possibility spaces for negotiation and solution finding rather than fixed resolutions. Still, meaningful engagement requires multimodal competences and literacies, involving system thinking, socio-emotional aptitudes, and a cognizance of the interwovenness of the symbolic, material, phenomenological and political dimensions of ‘images of ecology’ and ‘ecologies of images’ (cf. López 2020). Hence, Mind the Gap! combines mindfulness and self-reflection with competences of mobile media making and artistic self-expression as well as socio-emotional skills to encourage experiential and experimental learning. Participants are invited to use their smartphones to create visual haikus while mindfully being in Nature. Analogousue to the literary haiku, they take three images or short videos which are shared and negotiated on a co-creative website. This growing collection serves several functions: 1) it documents the title-giving ‘gap’ that we risk due to a loss of biodiversity; 2) it presents a creative strategy to cope with a situation which either usually remains abstract and far away, or which is overwhelming and often causes resignation; 3) it is meant as a point of departure to stimulate exchange and to form a community of concern for further action taking; and 4) from a methodological perspective, strategies are deduced for multimodal eco-media literacies, responsive listening and understanding. Discourses from various traditions are brought into dialogue: theories of interactive media are reconsidered through the lens of ecocriticism and environmental humanities; concepts of mobile media making and “emplaced interaction“ (Aston 2017) meet reflections on the epistemic dimension of documentary; and principles of co-creation are related to theories of self-reflexive mindfulness and nature observation, creative expressivity and agency.

Translating Surrealist Poetics

It can be argued that translations of Surrealist works entail obstacles and contradictions specific exclusively to this mode of literary production. What renders ‘Surrealist translations’ incomparable with other interlingual adventures of the literary avant-garde is the irreducible opposition between translation as a norm-governed, self-reflexive and intersubjective activity and ‘pure psychic automatism’ unconstrained by linguistic and cultural factors other than effectiveness of artistic self-expression. Hence, the translational mimesis involves mimicking the original creative process rather than its product. Indeed, the translators of Surrealist works have often no other choice than to take ‘unmimetic turns’ to convey the oneiric appeal, aleatoricity and figurativeness of the originals. Moreover, the translations of Surrealist works owe their distinctiveness to the neutralization of the opposition between foreignization and domestication in the sense established in translation studies. Their main task is rather to sustain the effect of defamiliarization and to recreate the unexpected clashes of entire semantic fields that animate Surrealist poetry. Of no less importance are the language- and culture-specific possibilities of recreating Surrealist ‘metaphors’ based on divergence and contradiction rather than correlations. Translation as a product of rational decision-making processes inevitably stumbles over the Surrealist metaphor born out of the irrational and coincidental.