Aesthetic Implications Research Articles

Cine-film, Film-strips and the Devolution of Colonial Photography in The Gambia

In the 1940s colonial administrators in the Gambia Colony hired local photographers to provide a vernacular window into colonial policies, procedures and successes. The political and aesthetic implications of their still photography were structured by forays into forms of visual expression that customarily lay beyond the bounds of the portrait studio – especially cine-film and film-strips. This photography inaugurated a political consciousness of colonial devolution within the administrative hierarchy. Even though Public Relations Office photography was clearly based within the bounds of government in the Gambia, it was a heterogeneous practice. Far from being a teleological tool of the state, colonial administrative photography in the Gambia was actually less stable, more innovative and significantly possessed of political and aesthetic power as to lead to its own demise.

Shakespeare and Chinese Performance at the Folger Shakespeare Library

Shakespeare and Chinese Performance at the Folger Shakespeare Library Erika T. Lin Shakespeare and Chinese Performance at the Folger Shakespeare Library The Folger Shakespeare Library’s recent exhibition, “Imagining China: The View from Europe, 1550–1700” (September 18, 2009—January 9, 2010), offered a fascinating glimpse into the history of intercultural exchanges. Curated by Timothy Billings with an interactive touchscreen video installation by Alexander C. Y. Huang, the exhibition usefully underscored the profound distance between sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury views of China and those most prevalent today. Viewers learned, for instance, that China was known in Shakespeare’s day not for porcelain but for musk deer, and that Europeans made an effort to learn the Chinese language, rather than the reverse. By portraying early modern Europe as foreign and unfamiliar, the exhibition destabilized modern racist assumptions that posit the centrality of the West and the naturalness of its cultural beliefs. The exhibition also successfully undermined the popular notion that globalization is a recent phenomenon. A chronological table incorporated into the video kiosk taught viewers that the first documented performance of Shakespeare in Asia took place in 1619, when employees of the Dutch East Indies Company staged a version of Hamlet in Indonesia. Another display case featured rare editions of The Orphan of China, Voltaire’s 1755 adaptation of a Chinese play that was later revived in English for David Garrick at Drury Lane. Most relevant for readers of Shakespeare Bulletin, however, are the exhibition’s contributions to understandings of modern performance. The video installation of excerpts from recent Sinophone stage and film productions of Shakespeare’s plays offered a number of useful interventions in common narratives about cultural difference. (Those who missed the exhibition can view some of these amazing performances at Shakespeare Performance in Asia, http://web.mit.edu/shakespeare/asia/ , co-edited by Alexander C. Y. Huang and Peter Donaldson.) By carefully juxtaposing particular selections, Huang’s contributions to the Folger exhibition challenged essentialist ideas about Chinese and Western modes of dramatic [End Page 188] representation and gently drew attention to spectators’ potential complicity in these discourses. Because the political and aesthetic implications of these performances can be seen most clearly in the clips from the comic film Chicken Rice War (2000), I will begin by discussing these excerpts in more detail, before moving on to show how similar concerns informed the other video selections. Chicken Rice War revolves around a conflict between two Singapore- Chinese diaspora families whose teenage children land the title roles in an English-language production of Romeo and Juliet. When both sets of relatives attend the culminating performance, the ensuing scene evokes visions of Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle: hostilities between audience members, expressed loudly in Chinese during the show, finally come to a head when the star-crossed lovers kiss on stage. Mistaking fiction for reality, one family accuses the other of trying to steal their recipe for chicken rice by having daughter “Juliet” seduce son “Romeo.” The resulting fight brings the play to a standstill and is only resolved when the young male lead chastises his parents for their breach of decorum. That his speech takes place in English is significant. Literacy in the conventions of representational theatre is here imagined as essentially Western. The parents, unable to appreciate this dramatic mode, continually interrupt the performance event and eventually destroy the suspension of disbelief required for it to work. Instead of acquiescing to such Eurocentric performance paradigms, however, other selections from Chicken Rice War undermined both their centrality and their validity. The film opens with the Chorus, here part of a frame narrative, holding a reporter’s microphone and speaking a witty revision of the Prologue to Shakespeare’s play. He is interrupted by an outraged woman, apparently his supervisor, who accuses him of being incomprehensible: “What are you saying?” she cries in Singaporean colloquial English. “Do you think Mr. Tan in Ang Mo Kio can understand you? When I told you not to speak in Singlish, I didn’t ask you to sound like Shakespeare! Do it again! Do it again!” Immediately thereafter, the film cuts to a woman in modern dress giving more of the back...

Aging of the Mandible and Its Aesthetic Implications

Facial aging is a dynamic process involving the aging of soft-tissue and bony structures. In this study, the authors demonstrate how specific bony aspects of the mandible change with age in both genders and what impact these structural changes may have on overall facial aesthetics. Facial bone three-dimensional computed tomographic scans were obtained from 120 Caucasian subjects (60 women and 60 men). Our study population consisted of 20 male and 20 female subjects in each of three age categories (20 to 40, 41 to 64, and > or = 65 years). Edentulous patients were excluded. The following measurements were obtained: bigonial width, ramus breadth, ramus height, mandibular body height, mandibular body length, and mandibular angle. The data were analyzed with one-way analysis of variance and two-tailed t tests, with results considered significant at a value of p < 0.05. There was no significant change with regard to bigonial width or ramus breadth across age groups for either gender. Ramus height, mandibular body height, and mandibular body length decreased significantly with age for both genders, whereas the mandibular angle increased significantly for both genders with increasing age. These results suggest that the bony elements of the mandible change significantly with age for both genders and that these changes, coupled with soft-tissue changes, lead to the appearance of the aged lower third of the face.

A ética na literatura: leitura de "Mineirinho", de Clarice Lispector

O presente estudo aborda o texto "Mineirinho", de Clarice Lispector, buscando a partir dele depreender uma visão da constituição do sujeito à luz de alguns aspectos da psicanálise. A leitura analítico-interpretativa identifica os procedimentos estilísticos e temáticos que alicerçam o texto, desvendando suas implicações éticas e estéticas. Ao comentar a morte de um bandido pela polícia carioca nos anos 1960, a autora põe em xeque afirmações ideológicas tidas como inequívocas e subverte categorias políticas e sociais que se querem absolutas. No horizonte da interpretação proposta, o texto problematiza, ainda, as noções de normalidade e loucura, bem como as relações entre história social e trajetória individual.

The Use of Mitten-Shaped Thin Abdominal Flap for the Coverage of Extensive Compound Dorsal Hand Defect in a Pediatric Patient

Background: Severe hand trauma in small children has special social, psychological, aesthetic and functional implications that mandate comprehensive treatment strategies. Because of the miniaturized size of the limbs and the incautiousness of the little kids, the injury tends to have a substantial severity and extent. Moreover, the physicians will encounter considerable difficulties while attempting the reconstructive task and implementing the post operative care, also owing to the tiny structural components and the uncooperativeness of the toddlers. Aim and Objectives: To reconstruct the severe hand injury in Pediatrics by using the abdominal flap was an efficient and safety method. Materials and Methods: This report describes an 18-month-old boy who sustained 3rd degree contact burn over his left dorsal hand with multiple extensor tendon loss, joint and bone exposure, and large skin defect due to autonomic cup-sealing machine injury. He received abdominal flap transfer for wound coverage in conjunction with immediate tendon and lateral bands reconstruction using tensor fascia lata graft. A whole body spica was used to prevent premature detachment of the limb from the abdomen donor site during the two weeks period of immobilization. A special ”mitten like” flap design was utilized, which served to ensure a stable limb anchorage and enable maximal contact surface between the two parties with minimal enrollment of unnecessary donor tissue. An optimal thinning of the flap thickness can be achieved without safety concern. The flap was divided two weeks later and two more surgeries were conducted subsequently to separate the syndactylous fingers. A reasonable final functional result was obtained without significant donor site morbidity. The rational and technical details as well as the special measure of postoperative immobilization were described in this article. Results: No flap partial necrosis or total necrosis was found in each surgery including of reconstructive and division operation. No donor site co-morbidity was noted. Three hundred eighteen days after abdominal flap surgery, or 155 days following complete flap division, no significant complication related either to the donor or recipient sites and an acceptable functional performance is achieved. Conclusion: The method of traditional abdominal flap transfer, is easy to execute, highly accountable, vastly flexible and versatile in flap design, and would be particularly valuable for young aged individual.

Tropes of solitude and Lu Xun’s tragic characters

Much ink has been spilled over how Lu Xun’s (1881–1936) political views inform his creative writing and how politics and literature are mutually implicated, but the aesthetics of his tragic narratives remains marginal in literary studies. Often lauded as the father of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun has not only made major contributions to the formation of literary realism but also put his unique vision of tragedy into practice. At the core of his tragic poems and narratives lie the tropes of solitude. The tragic is characterized, not by tragic incident, but by void thereof, by a state of speech-less solitude and nothingness (xuwu). The aesthetic implications of such a tragic vision are twofold. The creation and consumption of literature in China during the first half of the twentieth century focused on questions of the nation and society, but Lu Xun’s solitary characters in The Weeds ask fundamental existential questions while carving a space for a new genre of writing.

Generic Subversion in The Three Burials of Melquíades Estrada

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a contemporary, epic Western, which parodically reinscribes many of the formal and thematic conventions of the traditional Hollywood Western. From the standpoint of genre analysis, the present study dissects some of the film's principal strategies of generic subversion in order to gain a better understanding of the film's general aesthetic and political implications. Such strategies include the systematic use of estrangement, fragmentation, inversion, trans-contextualization and irony. This particular combination seeks to destabilize and denaturalize many of the ossified myths, codes, and conventions of the traditional Hollywood Western while simultaneously reaffirming an alternate model of social relations, one which is largely defined by traits such as solidarity and generosity (regardless of national origin), as well as a desire to understand and learn from each Other. Likewise, the film offers an indictment against the persistent problems of racism, instituti...

Of Epistemic Tools: musical instruments as cognitive extensions

This paper explores the differences in the design and performance of acoustic and new digital musical instruments, arguing that with the latter there is an increased encapsulation of musical theory. The point of departure is the phenomenology of musical instruments, which leads to the exploration of designed artefacts as extensions of human cognition – as scaffolding onto which we delegate parts of our cognitive processes. The paper succinctly emphasises the pronounced epistemic dimension of digital instruments when compared to acoustic instruments. Through the analysis of material epistemologies it is possible to describe the digital instrument as anepistemic tool: a designed tool with such a high degree of symbolic pertinence that it becomes a system of knowledge and thinking in its own terms. In conclusion, the paper rounds up the phenomenological and epistemological arguments, and points at issues in the design of digital musical instruments that are germane due to their strong aesthetic implications for musical culture.

Aesthetics of Unease: A Brechtian Study of Anna Deavere Smith’s Eyewitness Performance in Fires in the Mirror

This paper discusses the aesthetic and social implications of enacted eyewitness accounts. For Brecht, the principles of eyewitness performance served as a “basic model” for contemporary epic theater as a performed critique of social life, with the “Street Scene” (1940) and a camp scene (1939/40) as the paradigmatic sites of eyewitness acts. With Brecht and Smith, who superimposes these sites in her multi-media work on the Brooklyn Crown Heights Race Riots in 1991 (1992-94), the theatricality of eyewitness accounts, their “uneasy” aesthetics and acting technique, becomes crucial to understanding the present moment in culture. Concomitantly, enacted eyewitness accounts politicize and de-psychologize our understanding of their scenes. They are not about identity – what we are – but about personhood, about how we are as social creatures, in legal, aesthetic, and material terms.

At the Walls of Athens: What Remains?

In this contribution, the author takes as his starting point two paintings by Poussin on the subject of The Death of Phocion and their (aesthetic) implications for subjectivity and a contemporary politics. Focusing on the South African context, he makes use of the metaphor of the wall (or hedge), as representative of both the politics of oppression (in the case of Van Riebeeck’s hedge of bitter almonds in Kirstenbosch Gardens, Cape Town) as well as the politics of reconciliation (in the case of The Wall of Names in Freedom Park, Pretoria). The wall is consequently related to the transformative role of mourning in what he refers to as a politics that comes after—a politics that itself depends on a disruption of the traditional model of rational politics depicted in the Poussin paintings by the brightly-lit walls and buildings of Athens. In this regard the author defends an ethico-politics of unboundedness where the wall no longer primarily functions as a cipher of exclusion or a stable inside/outside but, in addition, comes to stand as a marker of the radical disruption of a politics founded in subjectivity. Here the author refers to the ongoing interruption of the South African political landscape by the return of the remains which highlights the significant transformative relationship between mourning and democracy.

Science's “New Garb”: Aesthetic and Cultural Implications of Redesign in a Cold War Context

<i>Science</i>'s “New Garb”: Aesthetic and Cultural Implications of Redesign in a Cold War Context

Thoughts on Creative Evolution: A Meta-generative Approach to Composition

Numerous composers have used evolutionary algorithms to create music and sound. Such techniques can navigate vast spaces of possible results in a directed search, and they can be applied to supervise virtually any generative process, and hence operate on a meta-generative level. Based on nine years of work in the field, as composer, musician, researcher and developer, the author gives his view on how evolutionary algorithms can be used as creative tools in the compositional process, and shares his experiences of how these systems can be designed to work well, from a composer's viewpoint. Their limitations, aesthetic implications and idiomatics are also discussed.

Septal abscess in a 14-month-old child: Diagnosis, management, and discussion of reconstructive options

Objectives : Highlight the importance of early diagnosis and treatment of septonasal abscesses to prevent life threatening consequences. Explain the aesthetic implications as well as the complications affecting nasal function in toddlers and preschool age children. Suggest reconstructive options and approaches to the pediatric nasoseptum after the deleterious effects of acute inflammation. Methods : Case presentation from a tertiary referral center. Literature review of contemporary and historic treatment of pediatric nasoseptal abscesses. Results : An open approach to nasal reconstruction is recommended with exposure of the caudal septum leaving the dorsal cartilage untouched in order to reduce the risk of nasal and/or midface growth retardation. Costal cartilage is the material of choice to reconstruct the nose because of its proportional growth with the native tissue. Conclusions : The foremost consideration in treatment of nasoseptal hematoma or abscess includes acute drainage and culture-directed antimicrobial medical management to avoid systemic complications. Affected children may require nasal reconstruction, preferably after the 4th year of life. Conscientious surgeons must have an awareness of nasal function, nasofacial development, potential graft donor sites, and subsequent psychological impact of delayed treatment. Our preference is the open approach with the use of autologous costal cartilage for structural reconstruction.

Taq Qian and classical Chinese paintings

Tao Qian–related paintings created in ancient China can be divided into three categories: paintings inspired by Tao Qian’s literary pieces; paintings inspired by his anecdotes; portraits for Tao Qian. These paintings have made Tao Qian a cultural icon representative of aesthetics of placid rural seclusion. This article aims to reveal the aesthetic implications of Tao Qian as a cultural icon by finding information about lost paintings taking inspiration from him or assessing the authenticity of relevant ancient paintings preserved in museums or collected by collectors.

Surgery and Perioperative Intralesional Corticosteroid Injection for Treating Earlobe Keloids: A Korean Experience

The aesthetic implications of ear keloids, which affect people of all races, are serious and the treatment of earlobe keloids is known to be difficult. The high rate of recurrence following excision alone has led to investigating various types of adjuvant therapy, including intralesional corticosteroid injection. We evaluated the efficacy of excision combined with perioperative intralesional triamcinolone acetonide injection for treating earlobe keloids of Korean patients. From 1997 to 2006, eighteen keloids on the earlobes of fifteen Korean patients were treated. The patient age ranged from 15 to 32 years (mean age: 24 years). All the patients were female and the keloids occurred after ear piercing. Preoperative intralesional triamcinolone acetonide (TA) injection was administered twice at a 1-month interval. Postoperative intralesional TA injections were given every 1 month for several months, depending on the patient's clinical progress. The follow-up period ranged from 4 to 42 months (mean: 18.5 months). After the surgery, TA intralesional injections were given 2 to 13 times (mean: 5.2 times). Of the treated keloids, eleven showed good results (61.1%) and three recurred (16.6%). No complications from the TA intralesional injection were observed. Among the various treatments for earlobe keloids, we suggest that excision with corticosteroid intralesional injection can be used as the first line therapy when considering its effect and economic advantage.

Algaetecture and Nonsterile

AbstractSteve Pike outlines a series of controlled experiments he embarked upon with microbiologist Conrad Mullineaux, which culminated in a final installation highlighting the potential of a microbiological‐responsive architecture at a human scale. With these experiments, Pike challenges the way in which we commonly understand ‘air’ as a sterile and empty space, exploring the aesthetic implications of it as a mass of densely colonised matter that reflects users' activities via their bacteriological traces. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

The Abstractness of Artworks and Its Implications for Aesthetics

entities such as propositions or theories.2 Just as the theory of relativity is necessarily about relativistic physical phenomena, and the proposition 'Socrates is wise' is necessarily about Socrates, so also is the film Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) necessarily about the fictional character Kane, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is necessarily about the characteristic musical contents of performances of that work, and Picasso's painting Guernica is necessarily about the town of Guernica. The relevant artworks could not be identified as uch independently of their necessary intentional contents any more than theories or propositions could be identified independently of their own characteristic necessary contents. At the same time, in the case of theories and propositions it is universally held that concrete linguistic expressions of them are only contingently related to the relevant propositional and th oretical contents, because of the conventional natur of natural languages. Hence, apart from a few extreme nominalistic doctrines, there is little or no theoretical temptation to identify theories or propositions with concrete linguistic items, because of the clear contingency of their relations. As Saul Kripke has taught us, genuine identity relations must hold of necessity, so that abstract theories and propositions cannot be identified with concrete linguistic entities that are only contingently related to them.3 Hence the status of propositions and theories as abstract entities that are necessarily related to their contents is secure, with no threat of theoretical conflict via a putative identification of such abstracta with the concrete linguistic tokens that express them. However, in the case of artworks, by contrast, it seems to be almost universally assumed that some artworks are indeed concrete entities, such The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66:4 Fall 2008 © 2008 The American Society for Aesthetics This content downloaded from 157.55.39.32 on Sat, 27 Aug 2016 04:25:47 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 342 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism as physical paintings or statues, and it is also widely assumed that the remaining artworks are types that have concrete artistic tokens as their instances, such as particular book copies or concrete musical performances. So in the case of artworks, it seems that we have a potential conflict. Though artworks seem initially to qualify as abstract entities having necessary contents, similar to theories and propositions, it is also widely held that either they or their instances are all concrete objects or events. Thus in the case of artworks we have at least a theoretically anomalous, if not paradoxical, situation: how should the apparent conflict between the abstract and concrete features of art-

New Music, Late Style: Adorno's ‘Form in the New Music’

ABSTRACT‘Form in the New Music’, which was originally published in a volume of Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik devoted to the issue of form, engages with most of Adorno's earlier essays on new music, modifying and developing those ideas. In it, Adorno maintains the important perspective that a focus on technique cannot transcend subjectivity, but he depends less on the achievements of the Second Viennese School than in some earlier articles. He also contemplates contemporary approaches to composition, particularly as expressed by György Ligeti, drawing out the wider aesthetic implications of these ideas. Furthermore, as in many of Adorno's writings in the 1960s, the author explores themes that were to become prevalent in the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory. In general, the essay exhibits the characteristics of Adorno's late style: it returns to ideas located elsewhere in the author's oeuvre, but does so with altered nuances, which create an incremental shift in perspective.

A Solder's Tale: Putting the "Lead" Back in "Lead Users"

A composer's view of the history of hardware hacking, contrasting the aesthetic implications of circuitry and software.

Speaking Volumes about Auto/biography Studies in Canada

THE TWO VOLUMES, Autobiography in Canada: Critical Directions, edited by Julie Rak, and Tracing the Autobiographical, edited by Marlene Kadar, Linda Warley, Jeanne Perreault, and Susanna Egan, demonstrate the vigour of contemporary auto/biography criticism in Canada. Published in Canada by Wilfred Laurier University Press in 2005, each book contains twelve essays by Canadian scholars, with an editorial introduction.' Although the only two authors to contribute to both collections are leading Canadian auto/biography scholar Susanna Egan and her respected younger colleague, the late Gabriele Helms, the citations and cross-references convey the sense of a lively and interactive scholarly community. While reading these essays on contemporary Canadian autobiography I attended a conference on Art and Authenticity, at which a fascinating discussion followed a paper on the recently discovered Mungo (School of Humanities, Australian National University, 2 November 2006). Traces of ancient people, men, women, and children, on the move, going about their daily life, were accidentally preserved they crossed a muddy area about twenty thousand years ago, in the form of four-hundred-and-fifty fossilized human footprints in the remote Lake Mungo region of Australia. Yet an art historian pointed out, the footprints are of a quite different order to ancient handprints on the walls of caves in Australia and elsewhere, where the hand was deliberately placed against the rock surface to make an imprint. The constitutes an act of communication with aesthetic implications, whereas the footprints are an incidental, though extraordinary, capturing of passing people with a quite different purpose, travel for hunting, ceremony, or some other reason. The autobiographical act is more like the than the fossilized footprint. The question, Footprint or handprint?; was on my mind I considered these Canadian essays, many which owe a strong debt to the collection edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Getting a Life: Everyday Uses ofAutobiography (1996). Smith and Watson themselves introduce the image of the fingerprint to indicate the vast possibilities of their project, without making a clear distinction between the print an accidental by-product of an individual going about daily life and the deliberate mark that an individual chooses to make upon a surface: We could have included discussions of bumper sticker subjects, of identity clothing, of hair. Once we got started on this project, almost everything presented itself implicated in the choosing, imposing, evading, or negotiating of an identity. Fingerprints were everywhere (18). Autobiography in Canada, edited by Julie Rak, examines how the field of auto/biography is developing specifically in Canada, discussing Canadian auto/biography only, whereas the essays in Tracing the Autobiographical range well beyond Canada's borders to consider life-writing from Palestine/Israel, works by Australian Aboriginal writers, and gypsy Holocaust texts, well emerging forms of life-writing on the internet. The essays in Tracing the Autobiographical all represent the work of female academics identifying feminist scholars. In introducing the essays in Autobiography in Canada, Julie Rak also gives prominence to feminist scholarship in autobiography criticism, although the critical perspective is somewhat broader and essayists include both male and female scholars. Rak leans more toward a footprint than a handprint conception of autobiography in that she sees more potential in cultural than in literary studies for productive development in Canadian autobiography studies. She also advocates continuing work in feminist autobiography criticism, work on trauma and culture, and on non-literary and mass-marketed texts. Rak sees the study of non-fiction discourse in auto/biography criticism as an effective way to engage with ideas about truth, representation and power in a broader social sense. …