Reproducible Medium Research Articles

Gabriel García Márquez's Lost cumbiambas : Distant Listening and Instrumental Creativity in GGM's Literary Archive

Abstract: Boleros, guarachas, and other popular music rhythms resonate across Gabriel García Márquez's work. Despite this, only a few mentions of cumbias appear in his novels, letters, short stories, and other writing. The present study analyzes the changes in Gabo's capacity to listen to cumbias and cumbiambas in his work across time. I show that, in early work, cumbia appears as an event incapable of producing semiosis, and Gabo is unable to fully listen to it. This inability gradually shifts, however, towards a listening for cumbia as sameness when reproduction technologies like film and vinyl make Caribbean music widely available and desirable. Analyzing GGM's columns for the newspaper El Universal (1948) and personal correspondence about the documentary Un carnaval para toda la vida (1961), I read Gabo's shifting attention to cumbia as a result of what I call "distant listening," a listening practice and positionality in which the authorial I perceives certain sound events as alien, thus preventing sound from entering the literary archive. Cumbia elicits GGM's attention when Caribbean music becomes available in reproducible media such as film and vinyl. Cumbias on vinyl help him produce what I call a "reproducible authentic," associated with a letrado listening positionality that listens for generic features in cumbia. That is, a cumbia that represents an authentic cultural manifestation using reproducible media such as vinyl records and film while maintaining the properties of a non-semiotic event.

The Landscapes & Material Culture of Empire

Tobah Aukland-Peck’s essay offers a fascinating inquiry into empire through posters and seashells, seemingly mundane objects tied to a complex history of travel, advertising, oil, and empire. No longer solely the domain of Romantic painting wistfully imagining the expanses of empire under the guise of a serene landscape, this paper focuses on an aspect of material culture not often studied. Aukland-Peck argues that the “bucolic” domestic landscapes pictured throughout a number of posters advertising Shell’s enterprises neglected to depict the ravages wrought on the landscape by empire and capital in an effort to achieve material and corporate gain at a moment of Britain’s anxiety about its own status. Focusing on posters with their catchy phrases designed to foster interest in Britain, Aukland-Peck shifts our way of thinking about the proliferation of empire towards the innocuous nature of cost-effective, reproducible media. The “visual responses to war within the pastoral nostalgia”, as so poignantly articulated by the author, point towards the dialectical constructions laden within the imperial geography of empire and its visual culture. The presence of a peaceful landscape reveals a dialect of destruction; through visions of the countryside, the absence of imperial geography becomes present; and the relationship between the metropole and colony, as well as urban and rural, continue to be co-constitutive.

Simple method to generate calibrated synthetic smoke-like atmospheres at microscopic scale.

Artificial smokes focusing on macroscopic or fluid properties of smoke have been available for a long time. This paper presents a simple method to generate fully customizable smoke-like atmospheres at microscopic scale (i.e. considering their constituent particles as discrete elements) using a different approach. Synthetic, reproducible media can be generated combining monodisperse microspheres with known geometrical and optical properties conveniently parameterized. The method is presented as a proof-of-concept, highlighting the design decisions along with their implications. Practical issues such as aerosol nebulization, particle carrier selection or the features of the medium chamber where the smoke-like atmosphere is to be tested are analyzed. A comparison between methanol and ethanol as carriers for polystyrene microsphere nebulization is also made. The method could be the seed for the obtention of standard reference media for calibration or standardized characterization of not only smoke detectors and exhaust smoke sensors but also other instruments relying on optical properties of dispersive media (dust in PV panels, public lighting, etc.).

Contingencies of display: Benjamin, photography, and imagining the medieval past

This essay examines Walter Benjamin’s historical dialectic of cult value and exhibition value through the prism of the history of the photography of medieval sculpture. The technology of reproducible media can offer, on the one hand, images that claim historical authenticity in the presentation of medieval sculpture, and, on the other hand, a subjective point of view that emphasizes the presentness of that object over its historicity. By contextualizing the long history of the photography of medieval sculpture around Benjamin’s thesis, larger issues centering on reception and visuality emerge – issues that are current in recent discourses of art history and medieval studies.

Reproducible media in the early fifteenth century, mostly Italian

The fifteenth century embraced reproducible multiples with a concentrated zest and variety never before seen. The processes allowed for the production of objects, sometimes hundreds or thousands of them, that were largely indistinguishable from one another: plaquettes, portrait medals, engravings, printed book and type design; cartapesta and terracotta Madonna and Child sculptures, the re-emergence of small bronzes, or, slightly later, etchings, or glazed terracottas that could be assembled in any number of arrangements (not to mention earlier traditions in woodcut prints and coins). Many of the reproducible media types had proliferated for a decade or more before Gutenberg's successful machine was introduced around 1450. It would seem that some of these media, or more precisely the multiples milieu in which they emerged and thrived, facilitated the printing press's ultimate success. What do these objects reveal about the contemporaneous dynamic between art and the ‘market’ for art, between patron and artist, between the audience and the ‘aura’ of the original?

Introduction: The authority of likeness

Waiter Benjamin's essay ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ has itself developed both an aura of originality and the familiarity brought about by frequent citation.1 By electing to paraphrase Benjamin with the title of this collection, Bart Thurber and I intend to characterize our vision for these texts as one mediated but not overwhelmed by contemporary concerns. Calling the period customarily known as the European Renaissance and Baroque ‘an age of mechanical reproduction’, we wish to highlight the astonishing shifts effected by the broad development of reproducible media between 1450 and 1700.2 Focusing on the medal and the print, we have sought to reframe discussions of these media by assembling essays addressing the novel manner in which they transformed — and to some degree produced — the genre of portraiture.