Horror Vacui Research Articles

Discussing discarded models: an integrative teaching resource

This study proposes a kind of teaching resource adaptable to different levels of teaching and training objectives that allows the introduction of contextual issues and concepts of history and the nature of science while providing tools for learning modeling and integrating different kinds of knowledge. A controversial case from science history was sought to develop an integrating teaching activity. The case to find must be one that confront at least two different models to solve a scientific problem or a technological one. Torricelli’s theory vs. horror vacui theory as it was modified by Galileo result a useful case to take as content for the teaching activity. Groups of students must argument in favor and against each of theories or models. The proposed activity introduces future teachers in the student’s role, considering that they will play the teacher’s role when they use similar activities with their future students. Moreover, it trains future physics teachers to integrate modeling, history and nature of science.

Horror vacui w królewskim mieście. Mirakularne przestrzenie Lublina w XVII-wiecznych i XVIII-wiecznych księgach cudów miejskich

Horror vacui – an aesthetic category specific to visual arts is a metaphor for the Old Polish books about miracles discussed in the article. It reflects both the mosaic and multiplicity of old miraculous collections, as well as their dynamic reception, because each time these texts lead to a different face of ancient culture and show diverse aspects of the past. This metaphor in the context of miraculous books and the city from which they come from also reflects the multitude of both Lublin religious texts related to Lublin’s holy places, as well as the places themselves – depositories of images, relics and miracles. Miracle books are considered valuable material for research on the history of religiosity, medicine, culture and mentality; they are fascinating practical texts. The multitude of preserved records prompted the researchers to formulate a thesis about the “miracular sensitivity” characteristic of ancient culture. The miraculous books, although studied in many aspects, especially in terms of religiosity, were not analyzed in terms of connections with the space they refer to, for example, one city. The subject of this article is the specific relationship between miraculous records, printed or handwritten, or descriptions of religious miracles (added to literary works) with the place – the city of Lublin in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Horror Vacui: Racial Misalignment, Symbolic Repair, and Imperial Legitimation in German National Socialist Portrait Photography

<i>Horror Vacui:</i> Racial Misalignment, Symbolic Repair, and Imperial Legitimation in German National Socialist Portrait Photography

Physical Mechanisms Underpinning the Vacuum Permittivity

The debate about the emptiness of space goes back to the prehistory of science and is epitomized by the Aristotelian ‘horror vacui’, which can be seen as the precursor of the ether, whose modern version is the dynamical quantum vacuum. In this paper, we suggest to change a common view to ‘gaudium vacui’ and discuss how the vacuum fluctuations fix the value of the permittivity, ε0, and permeability, μ0, by modelling their dynamical response by three-dimensional harmonic oscillators.

Autohtoni elementi u kulturi stanovništva istočnog dela rimske provincije Dalmacije / Autochtonic elements in the culture of the population of the eastern part of the Roman province of Dalmatia

Autochtonic elements in the culture of the eastern part of the roman province of Dalmatia considers next elements: decorative motives on the grave monuments, as are motive of rope and spiralae, jewllery of older prechistoric tradition, and chains with the ivy lieaves as iterpretatio romana of some unknown native god with the roman Dyonisos, and appereance on the grave monuments as are geometric human figure and decorative elements, loosing of proportion and bad proportion in the releief fields, horror vacui and imatation grave cippi on the grave stelae. All of those appereances are visible in the culture of population of the eastern part of roman province of Dalmatia in the period from II to beginning of IV century.

Review: The Masjid in Contemporary Islamic Africa

Review: <i>The Masjid in Contemporary Islamic Africa</i>

Urban Landscape and Horror Vacui, spectacularity of a distorted perception

Urban Landscape and Horror Vacui, spectacularity of a distorted perception

Urban Landscape and Horror Vacui, spectacularity of a distorted perception

In this paper, the very original urban landscape perception caused by the emergency after the 2020’ New CoronaVirus Pandemic event will be discussed and analyzed. Most of the approaches conducted on social media and on the newspaper have pointed to putting in evidence the spectacular empty cities “as never seen before”, which thing is absolutely correct and underlines a unique condition otherwise almost impossible to experience. In fact, the total lock-down caused by the emergency made it impossible to move from a view of the urban landscape to another, where most of the people were able to see such an emptiness only for their own town, maybe just for their own neighbourhood and maybe just from some lucky windows. The global condition will be watched only composing together the pictures exhibited online and in the newspaper. But … … … A specific set of images, created in the days of the emergency will comment and describe the content of the paper.

The construction of lyric-self and nihilism. Baroque notions and Kierkegaard’s philosophy in Nostalgia de la muerte by Villaurrutia.

The present work is an interpretation of Nostalgia de la Muerte by Xavier Villaurrutia based on some interconnected philosophical concepts from the Baroque, Idealism and Nihilism, notions that conceive the subject (lyrical ego) as locked in itself, without the possibility or the need of coming into contact with the outside. These notions threaten the integrity of the subject and support its reconstruction regardless of the outside world. The work of the mexican poet is influenced by the concepts of horror vacui (Pascal) and the monad (Leibniz); it shows affinity with the idea of the subject as an absolute and as nothing (Hegel), and with the dialectical constitution of the subject in times of nihilism (Kierkegaard).

‘Horror Vacui’ in the Oxygen Sublattice of Lithium Niobate Made Affordable by Cationic Flexibility

The present review is intended for a broader audience interested in the resolution of the several decades-long controversy on the possible role of oxygen-vacancy defects in LiNbO3. Confronting ideas of a selected series of papers from classical experiments to brand new large-scale calculations, a unified interpretation of the defect generation and annealing mechanisms governing processes during thermo- and mechanochemical treatments and irradiations of various types is presented. The dominant role of as-grown and freshly generated Nb antisite defects as traps for small polarons and bipolarons is demonstrated, while mobile lithium vacancies, also acting as hole traps, are shown to provide flexible charge compensation needed for stability. The close relationship between LiNbO3 and the Li battery materials LiNb3O8 and Li3NbO4 is pointed out. The oxygen sublattice of the bulk plays a much more passive role, whereas oxygen loss and Li2O segregation take place in external or internal surface layers of a few nanometers.

Brevi cenni sul rapporto tra turismo e letteratura italiana

"Brief notes on the relationship between tourism and Italian literature. Using literary sources, the essay covers three points in the relationship between Italians and holidays: the first is the transition from vacation to tourism; the second from summer vacation as a moment of rest (mainly in the countryside) to vacation as an opportunity for fun (mostly at the seaside). In addition to these two, we have a third point: in the second half of the Twentieth century, holidays become a mass phenomenon, no longer elitist as they had been until the first half of the same century. They become something possible for most Italians who, especially in August, leave the cities empty. This historical-sociological parable is revisited through literary testimonies that go back to the roots of the mother literature, the Latin one and then it resumes its path, interrupted in the High Middle Ages, around 1300 in conjunction with the first literary testimonies (the triad Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio). The vacation phenomenon, intended as staying for the summer months in a villa more or less outside the city walls, finds its maximum expression starting from the 16th century with the Renaissance villas of the aristocracy, until it meets the aspirations of the small nobility and of the upper middle class in the 18th and 19th centuries. Crucial testimony is Carlo Goldoni's “Vacation Trilogy”, a triptych of three comedies that actually constitute a single text portraying the vacation phenomenon as a status symbol far from the motivations of previous centuries (vacation as a moment of peace, ‘’otium’’, rest). During the Nineteenth century, holidays are associated with tourism (especially in the thermal baths and in the mountains), while from the Twentieth century, the favourite option is the seaside. However, another change will characterize the use of leisure in the Twentieth century: the birth of mass tourism. With brief literary notes, we try to explain how in Italy holidays have now turned into something with anxiety-inducing traits, especially among young people and not only, in an almost spasmodic search for fun (with Dionysian and Bacchic traits) at the expense of original motivations (rest, leisure, “otium”) in a relationship in which the “horror vacui” seems to have ousted the “horror pleni”. Keywords: vacation, tourism, holidays, literature, Italy. "

Horror Vacui as an Heuristic Principle of the Contemporary Phenomenon of Saturation with Background Music

We are experiencing a generalization of music in all contexts, including the commercial, social and labor, to the point that sound has invaded the public space. Music has a great communication capacity and effectiveness in generating emotions and attitudes. Thus, music has been used as a persuasion tool in advertising and as a formula to produce positive responses in individuals. However, its excessive presence suggests there is a current tendency or need to fill the entire space with sounds, with no space for silence. In this work, we present this phenomenon as a manifestation in modern societies of the "horror vacui", a Latin expression that means "fear of empty space", whose origin is in the philosophical paradigm that denied the emptiness in nature and was later applied in art history to describe ornate works, without gaps, like those of the Baroque. We propose this parallelism as a research method in musical communication.

Infoxicación: el horror vacui del siglo XXI

Horror vacui es una locución latina cuyo significado es terror al vacío. En psicología puede llegar a ser una afección de la mente que se denomina cenofobia: temor patológico al vacío.

Keeping It Private: The Impossibility of Abandoning Ownership and the Horror Vacui of the Common Law of Property

Keeping It Private: The Impossibility of Abandoning Ownership and the Horror Vacui of the Common Law of Property

Ownership and offices: the building blocks of the legal order

Ownership is not likely to stand out in most people’s minds as either the most central or the most illuminating case of an office. And, yet, I will argue in this article that the idea of ownership as an office is especially revealing of a tension between the concept of an office and the normative significance of offices in a legal order, a tension that property law resolves in a particularly revealing way with respect to ownership. The tension between the concept of office and its normative significance amounts to this: whereas offices are always capable of vacancy because they are impersonal positions of authority separable from the office-holder, the law abhors vacancies in principle. In earlier articles, I have explained how horror vacui motivates property law’s concern ‘to see that the office of ownership is filled.’ In this article, I will explain how and why vacancy in office amounts to a defect in the legal order itself – in brief, because vacancy undermines the effectiveness and, ultimately, the legitimacy of law as a system for allocating authority. I will argue that the potential for vacancy in offices combined with law’s horror vacui leads to possession as a default procedure for appointment to offices, in general, and the office of ownership, in particular.

A Cinema of Boredom: Heidegger, Cinematic Time and Spectatorship

Boredom, in cinema as well as in our everyday experience, is usually associated with a generalised loss of meaning or interest. Accordingly, boredom is often perceived as that which ought to be avoided. In Martin Heidegger's philosophical inquiry, however, boredom is posited as one of the fundamental existential dispositions that provide access to the possibility of philosophising. My contention is that boredom can be a tool for understanding spectatorship in cinema and, in contrast to the ordinary perception of boredom as something to escape, it can be a stimulus for reflecting on the images before us. To this end, I focus on Heidegger's tripartition of boredom – “becoming bored by something,” “being bored with something,” and “profound boredom” – and the ways in which these forms can be significant to cinema. I then consider boredom's potential for film spectatorship, differentiating between mainstream entertainment cinema as a means to evading boredom and less immersive forms of cinema which allow for boredom to remain present. On the one hand, “profound boredom” disrupts the potentially alienated relationship between spectators and spectacle-images by opening up a time which becomes long – something which Isidore Isou's On Venom and Eternity (Traité de Bave et d'Éternité, 1951) and, less manifestly, Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse (1962) and Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop, 1972) deliberately arouse. Thus, profound boredom can be a tool to criticise the spectacularised image in the cinema, promoting a pensive spectatorship. On the other hand, the escapism endorsed by mainstream narrative cinema can dialectically reveal the contemporary anxiety of horror vacui, therefore turning boredom into a means for investigating our relationship with time and the image. This article ultimately argues that boredom – that from which we daily try to shy away – has the potential to un-conceal the ways we understand and interact with moving images in the world we currently inhabit.

Fibs and fripperies: References to the real in digital illustration

Abstract This article considers the phenomenon of illustrators digitally mimicking traces of the handmade as ornament. It will explore whether these decorative tendencies are Adolf Loos' backward or degenerative tendency, or a generous contribution to our visual environment. It will ask why illustrators falsify the smudges, spills, textures and shadows of paper-based work within the digital workspace, what is gained and lost by doing so, and for whom? These questions will be explored in relation to interviews with two contemporary editorial illustrators and their work, to unpick the professional benefits of the phenomenon, coupled with a foray into theoretical perspectives on ornament. In this regard, the article will consider the benefit of treating ornament as labour, and also whether illustration is suffering from Herbert Read's horror vacui, in order to understand what happens when these terrifying empty spaces within images are filled with introduced artefacts. The discussion will also take skeuomorphism into account to explore the phenomenon, which then raises questions concerning illustration's 'usability'. The article draws upon wildly different perspectives and practices from other fields as it seeks to consider the pleasures and pitfalls of a richly-ornamented composition, and ultimately argues that making 'noise' can be seen as a generous, temporal and critical act.

Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz by Sarah Finley

Reviewed by: Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz by Sarah Finley Colleen R. Baade HEARING VOICES: AURALITY AND NEW SPANISH SOUND CULTURE IN SOR JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ, by Sarah Finley. New Hispanisms. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. 252 pp. $60.00 cloth; $60.00 paper; $60.00 ebook. Sarah Finley’s Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz makes a noteworthy contribution to our understanding of the various ways in which sound is manifest in the works of Mexico’s celebrated seventeenth-century nun poet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Finley’s exploration of Sor Juana’s aurality goes beyond interpretation of music metaphor and beyond explication of the poet’s engagement with the music culture of her time to include considerations of nonmusical sound disciplines such as the musical-rhetorical doctrine of musica poetica—which draws analogies between the composition of music and the composition of oratory or poetry—and the alignment of music, painting, and poetry in Sor Juana’s literary output. In Finley’s own words, her approach “draws out previously marginalized components of Sor Juana’s acoustical inheritance and results in new interpretations that attend to sonority’s intersections with significant themes in [Sor Juana’s] writing, including gender, agency, and authority” (p. 2). The first chapter, “Harmony,” examines representations of political order in Sor Juana’s occasional works and shows how in works such as loa 374 (1689; a loa is a form of allegorical play), the poet relies heavily upon the prevailing early modern understanding of the ancient philosophical concept of the music or harmony of the spheres. Finley affirms the importance of what she calls “Sor Juana’s Pythagoreanism”—that is, Sor Juana’s apparent adherence to the philosophical idea that the same mathematical ratios that are produced by musical intervals also govern the movement of the celestial bodies—in her compelling analysis of loa 384 (1692) (p. 43). Chapter two, “Resonance,” confirms Sor Juana’s familiarity with the writings of the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, convincingly demonstrating that his Musurgia universalis (1650; Universal musical art) and Phonurgia nova (1673; New mode of sound production) “were fundamental to Sor Juana’s acousticopoetic imagination” (p. 61). Finley’s reading of redondilla 87 (1689) highlights the ways in which the poem “exploits a lexicon shared by music and poetry to describe a painting” by means of a polysemic appeal to the senses of both sight and hearing (p. 74). The subsequent chapters, “Sound,” “Echo,” and “Silence,” assess ways in which such diverse Sorjuanian works as the villancicos for the Feast of the Assumption (1677) and El divino Narcisco (1690; Divine narcissus), an allegorical auto sacramental (a kind of religious theater specific to Spain), constitute defenses of female intellect and agency. A discussion of [End Page 451] the representation of literal music-making in Sor Juana’s villancicos—for example, the references to military bands in the fourth villancico from the Assumption cycle—will be of particular interest to musicologist readers. The book’s penultimate chapter, “Silence,” offers new insights into the meanings of soundlessness by considering the absence of sound in Sor Juana’s writings through the lens of the Baroque concept of horror vacui (fear of empty space). Finley argues persuasively that in works like Primero sueño (1692; First dream) and Respuesta a sor Filotea (written 1691, published 1700; Reply to Sor Philotea), Sor Juana reimagines the mechanisms of silencing and censoring “as alternative modes that challenged masculine dominance” (p. 183). Finally, the book’s “Coda” reveals “sound’s importance for conceptualizing and reimagining knowledge, power, and the (female) self’s place in the world” in the auditory imagery of Primer sueño (p. 186). To write in the field of sound studies is to undertake an interdisciplinary enterprise that brings with it the challenge of possessing expertise in multiple fields. This book rises admirably to the task on multiple counts; however, the musicologist reader may note an occasional lack of familiarity with certain terminology or an apparent unawareness of some aspects of music history. For example, the...

Unpacking the Packed. The Life and Future of Archaeological Collections

Due to the strong influence of heritological concepts and the concern for the future of heritage, an ever increasing accumulation of the past is taking place, as well as the unconrolled influx of cultural goods into museums. Consequently, an increasing number of museums expresses anxiety for the future of the collections stored in the already overcrowded depots.&#x0D; Concerning the large quantity of material, the archaeological collections form a special category, differing in the ways of collecting and the dynamics of growth of the number of objects in the museum funds. The existing approches to the collecting of archaeological record include the unpredictable annual increase and in itself present an untenable concept of long-term management of archaeological heritage. The consequence is the neglect towards the already collected material in the post-excavation phases, as the vital part of the “life” of archaeological objects. At the same time, the huge amount of inaccesible material points to the professional horror vacui, fear that a certain proof or trace will be lost from the process of understanding the past, or to the tendency to safeguard the imperative of preserving the heritage for the future generations. Due to the poorly regulated processing of archaeological remains the issue arises of how the traditions of collecting and organizing of artefacts influence the value assessment of archaeological record and formation of the images of the past. Bearing this in mind, the paper presents a critical assessment of the problem of long-term management of archaeological material and museum collections. The possible paths of changes in the practice of usage and redefinition of value of the “unpacked” archaeological heritage are also discussed.

Posthumane Selbstdarstellung und interaktive Gegenwartsflucht.

This article develops the hypothesis that the intensified self-portraying and self-exhibition so characteristic of many of today’s social-media practices do not correlate with intensified self-reflection but, on the contrary, indicate a tendency towards self-loss. However, it would be wrong-headed to blame the social networks for distracting from real life. Rather, it is the loss of reality in the real life of contemporary life-worlds that renders social networks an enticing narcissistic way out of an existential horror vacui manifesting itself in new ways within digital culture. In diagnostic terms we can speak of a cultural change towards a posthuman narration of the self. Three vectors of this posthuman narration of the self are distinguished: From word to number, from mechanism to automatism, and from option to obligation