Artifice

Au début des années 1950, les recherches de José Bernhart et Jean
Wilfrid Garrett sur le système de diffusion stéréophonique donnent
lieu à la première diffusion stéréophonique à la radio : celle de la pièce
de théâtre radiophonique, Une larme du diable, pièce de Théophile
Gautier, le 19 juin 1950. Pour bénéficier d’une écoute stéréophonique,
les auditeurs devaient disposer de deux postes de radio, réglés sur deux
chaînes différentes. L’adaptation radiophonique de la pièce par Jean
Forest est mise en ondes sous la direction artistique de René Clair.
« Par quels artifices aurait-on pu représenter au théâtre des êtres, des
choses, ou des substances aussi dénués de pesanteur et qui ne prennent
corps que grâce au prestige de la poésie ? Il a fallu attendre jusqu’à ce
jour pour imaginer ces artifices, et c’est la radio qui nous en fournit
le secret ». René Clair voit dans la radio quasiment le seul média permettant de mettre en scène l’imaginaire et la poésie d’Une larme du
diable. Les images sonores se multiplient et s’enrichissent grâce aux
techniques d’enregistrement à l’aide d’une tête artificielle pour la captation, suivi d’une diffusion stéréophonique à la radio. Les différents
espaces sonores traversés pendant la pièce viennent se superposer à
l’espace domestique de l’auditeur, et l’ensemble forme ainsi ce que
l’on pourrait définir comme une cospatialité sonore. D’autres formes
de cospatialité sonore sont aussi présentes dans les étapes mêmes de la
création d’œuvres de théâtre radiophonique : de l’écriture à la prise de
son et la mise en espace des sources radiophoniques, mais aussi dans
l’espace même de la « scène imaginaire » de l’auditeur. Cette étude se
propose ici de décrire les modalités techniques d’enregistrement à la
radio et de diffusion sonore stéréophonique ouvrant à la cospatialité
sonore.

This essay examines the use of camouflage, artifice, and abstraction – as strategies of surface-play – by Mickalene Thomas, a contemporary painter. Many scholars have focused on Thomas's use of painting materials (e.g. enamel, rhinestones, glitter) that locate her work within discourses of consumer culture and beauty in hip-hop aesthetics. While providing a different orientation to the look through the black queer gaze, the author argues that Thomas's method (e.g. photography, collage-painting, installation) and use of materials signify the surface of her work as a corporeal topography of black interiorities. Camouflage, artifice, and abstraction reveal interiorities hidden in plain sight. The first part of this article examines camouflage and artifice as porous surface-play, while the second part turns to a discussion of abstraction in Thomas's work as a method that pushes the boundaries of representation and abstractionism.

This article rethinks concepts of the simulational and the simulacral for popular digital culture. It plays concepts of the modern world as hyperreal against the more modest, pragmatic, but vital, insights of game studies into the literally simulational nature of computer media and videogames. Through a reading of Deleuze’s essay Platonism and the Simulacrum, taking the GameBoy Advance game Advance Wars 2 as a case study, and proposing the significance of automata, it suggests ways of thinking about the artificial and simulacral character of contemporary technoculture and its devices, not as the implosion of reality, but of its production.

I demonstrate here how Aristotle’s teleological conception of nature has been largely misunderstood in the scientific age and I consider what his view might offer us with regard to the environmental challenges we face in the 21st century. I suggest that in terms of coming to an ethical understanding of the creatures and things that constitute the ecosystem, Aristotle offers a welcome alternative to the rather instrumental conception of the natural world and low estimation of subjective experience our contemporary techno-scientific culture espouses. Among other things, I consider how his conception of orexis and eudaimonia (happiness or, as I prefer here, “the flourishing life”) might be extended to include the eco-system itself, thus allowing us to better understand the moral meaning of nature. I conclude with a look at the way in which modern phenomenology re-addresses the fundamental Greek concern with ontology, meaning and human authenticity. I consider the ways in which phenomenology reasserts the value of direct human experience that was so important to Aristotle; and I consider how this view, and that of Deep ecology, may help us to experience nature - and all of Being for that matter - in a more authentic, meaningful and altogether ethical light.

This paper begins by tracing a path through salient developments in semiotic theory regarding the visual. It examines the political functions of cultural and discursive semiotic systems through which graphic images and gestures are appraised, interpreted and given significance: it is not about what they mean, but rather how they construct meanings and how such meanings accrue importance. I consider the simultaneous material and social nature of both vision and representation. My primary focus is with the visual and social performance of the image of Che Guevara as derived from Alberto Korda's famous 1960 photograph, El Guerrillero Heroico. Using this image as a heuristic in the case of Che Guevara's image in East Timor during the time of Indonesia's dictatorship and independence struggle, I will outline how the performative aspect creates a space of " ethical possibility " through visualizations. I will tease out anthropologist Alfred Gell's (1997) radical notions of the agency of art and explore the possibilities of Donald Preziosi's (2003) elaboration of Roman Jakobson's addition of a fourth sign type, namely artifice. The inclusion of artifice is underwritten by an understanding of A. J. Greimas'(1987) semiotic square as a way to introduce complexity into binary or dual forms. I posit the square is as a dynamic, fractal-like construction. Building on this foundation, I articulate possible connections between artifice and the notion of the virtual as described by a philosophers and academicians from C.S. Peirce to Rob Shields, as a contribution to this theorizing and explore its relevance to the Che image phenomenon. Overall, it is the desire to find ways to speak about the Guerrillero Heroico's social and political activity and resonance that drives the theoretical contributions in this piece.

I would argue  in favor of a new invisibililty. Now silence doesn’t mean necessarily death. Claiming a new invisibility does not mean to go back to the closet but continuing Santiago Santiago’s demand for more subtility and less confrontation in our strategies facing at the same time a growing conservative visibility and the necessity of dialogue with other subjects in a public sphere. The confrontation politics was won by the right. Identity politics has been used more and more successfully for religious fundamentalists and narrow nationalists. Where it is expected a confrontation, a fight, to turn around and change position.

En el vasto campo de los estudios sobre el afecto y entre las múltiples posibilidades para considerar su importancia en este ensayo, sitúo, en un primer momento, el contexto del giro afectivo (affective turn). En un debate presente en la academia norteamericana –pero sin que se restrinja a ella–, este giro permitió ampliar el campo de debate con un renovado interés por los afectos, dentro del cual optamos por la lectura de Deleuze y Guattari, cuyo posicionamiento plantea al arte como el centro de su reflexión; lo cual los diferencia de tantos otros trabajos. Paralelamente al interés teórico por el afecto en el campo del arte, acompañé la emergencia o la aparición del temido afecto y de términos cercanos, como circuito afectivo y red afectiva, la importancia de la amistad, etc. entre los jóvenes realizadores brasileños que comenzaron a realizar sus primeros largometrajes en los últimos años. Por lo tanto, fue como una reacción a algunas de esas películas, en especial a aquellas marcados por una experiencia queer, constituidas por rupturas de las hetero y homo normatividades, fuera de la tradición naturalista que coloca al artista como testigo, cronista o fotógrafo de su momento y de su sociedad, que fuimos a buscar en algunos autores latinoamericanos una perspectiva que pudiera ayudarnos a comprender una puesta en escena del afecto a partir de una estética del artificio.

Rene Eugenio Seifert é PhD em Administração pela Universidade de Birmingham – Inglaterra, mestre e bacharel em Administração pela Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR). Ele é professor do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Administração (PPGA) e do Departamento de Gestão e Economia (DAGEE) da Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná (UTFPR). Na presente entrevista realizamos um diálogo com o Prof. Dr. Rene Eugenio Seifert buscando tratar, ainda que de forma breve, sobre sua trajetória acadêmica e profissional, sobre a mudança em seu interesse de pesquisa e a interface entre saberes e práticas em formas não convencionais de organização.

Afetos, Relações e Encontros com Filmes Brasileiros Contemporâneos, by Denilson Lopes, seeks to fill a gap in the bibliography of studies on Brazilian cinema during the past ten years, after the so-called “Cinema da Retomada” (“New Brazilian Cinema”), which was concerned with reconciling quality and commercial reach in the search for a public that was in decline at the end of the 1980s and all but lost in the period of Fernando Collor’s presidency. In the new moment, from the mid-2000s and onwards, a large part of the most daring production turned to a format that was independent from the large producers and their models.

Seeking to understand this change, the focus of the book, in its 10 essays, is the work of young directors who arrived between 2009 and 2016 at their first feature films, such as Eryk Rocha, Julia Murat, Clarissa Campolina, Leonardo Mouramateus, André Antonio, Uirá dos Reis, Guto Parente, Luiz and Ricardo Pretti, Pedro Diógenes, Marcelo Caetano, Petra Costa, and Gustavo Vinagre, among others. Their emergence coincides with the proliferation of the digital, of collaborative and collective processes, as well as the consolidation of the Tiradentes Film Festival as the main showcase for this generation. The book proposes a critical reading that is at the same time a wager and a reflection on what it means to be a young artist these days, pressured by the cultural industry and by the increase in the cost of living, who seeks through art other forms of creating and living together. For this purpose, the films are read through the lens of contemporary studies on affects, which constitute a theoretically diverse area that is well developed in the English-speaking world but little explored in Brazil, especially here, with respect to suggestions coming from Deleuze & Guattari, from queer studies, and from performance studies, among others. The present selection of essays was written in a way that could interest not only students, professors, and researchers of cinema, but also a wider audience interested in the debates on aesthetics, art, and culture.

La Décadence est un mouvement de la fin du XIXe siècle qui, à l’aune de la célèbre formule d’Oscar Wilde proche du paradoxe – « Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life »  –, élève l’artifice en valeur à part entière en pervertissant systématiquement toute mimesis. Se détachant nettement du positivisme, des élans progressistes, et par voie de conséquence de certains présupposés scientifiques à l’origine des démarches réaliste et naturaliste, les décadents déploient une écriture à la fois précieuse et déréalisante, orfévrée et artificielle. Et le terme d’artificialité qualifiant cette langue balance précisément entre le laudatif, lorsqu’on en considère la complexion raffinée, et le péjoratif, lorsque on constate que cette tendance à l’exacerbation des théories de « l’art pour l’art » entraîne un démembrement de la pensée, et à l’extrême une impuissance et une aphasie. Aussi notera-t-on finalement la tendance spéculaire (voire narcissique dans certains cas) de cette littérature convoquant sans cesse ses références – qu’elles soient textuelles, picturales, ou encore musicales –, retravaillant en profondeur une matière artistique de seconde main plutôt qu’inventer une manière qui soit véritablement sui generis.
Une nouvelle de Jean Lorrain, « Lanterne magique » tirée du recueil Histoires de masques (Paris, Ollendorff, 1900, p. 47-58), exploite de manière exemplaire la question de l’artificiel. Elle se présente sous la forme d’un dialogue apparemment conventionnel entre deux personnages correspondant à l’idéaltype du littéraire et du scientifique, échangeant quelque propos badins lors d’un entracte de la Damnation de Faust d’Hector Berlioz. Ils disputent la question du genre fantastique que la science moderne aurait laissé péricliter, par manque de fantaisie ou excès de rationalisme. Jusqu’à ce que, de manière inattendue, le personnage du scientifique prenne en charge une démonstration de l’omniprésence du fantastique. Guidant le regard du littéraire à travers le dispositif de jumelles braquées en différents endroits de la salle, six portraits de femmes  se succèdent comme autant d’images fugitives d’une lanterne magique. La réalité trompeuse des apparences est alors démasquée par l’effet de zoom. L’espace d’un instant les rôles sont inversés, le littéraire devient l’observateur et le scientifique le conteur : avec le secours des mots, l’œil décrypte peu à peu l’artificiel et la fantaisie des comportements et des mœurs sous l’aspect réaliste et naturel des images.