RCAAP Repository

Welcome to the new edition of the Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts. In this new number, our first from our 13th year, fosters our editorial view of the journal: a thematic dossier – around sound art – that deepens the research on our focus-areas and CITAR’s Strategic Plan (2020-2023), as well as works on complimentary sections: the Audiovisual Essays and the Reviews (books, in this issue). JSTA maintains its devotion to research in the fields of artistic research, finding new paths and new ways of researching art. It follows also the strategic guidelines for indexation and metadata support.

The present research study deepen knowledge on the viewpoints of future primary education teaching professionals regarding issues associated with the educational system and its creative capacity. A study was carried out with 216 students undertaking the Primary Teaching Degree of the University of Granada. Participants were required to develop a conceptual photograph which reflected their thoughts regarding weaknesses of the educational system. The resultant pieces served as a research tool following the performance of formal and content analysis. The future teachers identify weaknesses classified in two broad spheres. The first refers to issues of a political or institutional nature which affect education at a general level. The second refers to teaching methods and education at a more localised or specific level. This is a line of work in art education that serves to stimulate a critical view of the educational system in the training of future teachers.

This article adopts an ethnographic approach to describe a learning experience aimed at making visible the works of African and Afro-descendant artists among undergraduate Visual Arts students at Universidad Veracruzana (in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico). From a decolonial perspective, an analysis is conducted of how their knowledge has increased in terms of Africa and its diaspora, the contemporary art of African artists, the work of Afro-Mexican artists and the gaps in their education regarding knowledge of the African continent and the history of Afro-descendance in Mexico. Furthermore, an exploration is made of the terms in which they have reflected about how blackness is represented in art, the place occupied by Africa and its diaspora in their education and how they relate to the ethnic category “Afro-descendant” with which, in some cases, singular processes of Afro-Mexican ethnogenesis were triggered.

Virtual reality is a technology and media that has evolved dramatically in the last decades. Undoubtedly, the medium has developed its own dynamics and narrative characteristics, due to the possibility of interaction and the ability to allow the viewer/user to focus on different levels of action. In this research, the relevant narrative characteristics in virtual reality are described based on a literature review. Secondly, a sample of online experiences of 360º virtual reality, or cinematic virtual reality (CVR), are analyzed to determine the characters and possibilities of narrative features presented. This analysis can help establish parameters and guidelines for the creation of virtual reality and 360º immersive contents in heterogeneous audiovisual and multimedia fields. The results show both the narrative and aesthetic possibilities of the analyzed videos and their technical and expressive possibilities, in terms of the ability to integrate narrative structures, as well as content in the use of innovative formal resources. In this sense, 360º immersive video becomes an added value of considerable dimensions.

“Master of Voice” is a temporary program of Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam) that united artists of different backgrounds who shared voice-based practices. Often considered as a medium in art history, the (non)human voice has been identified as a discipline in its own right. The book Master of Voice (Coburn, T. et alt., 2020) presents the artworks and reflections arisen during a two-year-long period of research based on collective learning and experimentation. The human voice is mainly approached through gender and technology, gushing from a multiplicity of bodies, freed from Western social norms. Editor Lisette Smits shares a vivid reflection about the role of contemporary artists and the range of their voices in our post-industrial society. The book emphasizes the agency of the voice and accordingly, its potential as a political and social tool.

This commentary focuses on the cinematic and intellectual work of Miguel De, expressed through The Kiss and its accompanying essay. The objective here is to problematize some of the historical and technocultural connections raised by the essay, and to frame De’s experimental essay film within a wider tradition of (mostly European) film-making who has as its main aim a troubling of the notion of “pornography”. This troubling is often done through a double deployment of vision: the audience is shown a named something, but maybe not what they were expecting to see, and it is through the disconnect between the naming and the showing that the connections between sexuality, obscenity and carnal resonance are made apparent and contingent. However, as these acts of troubling circulate within the contemporary technological capitalist mediasphere, they quickly become a locus for a potential site of capture, normalization and redeployment of power relationships.

In-depth review of posthumous publication V.F. Perkins on Movies, edited by Douglas Pye. It's a path through the British film critic's thoughts and main objects of desire, enhancing the importance of an almost invisible style, elegant mise-en-scène and a subtle rapport to material reality. The filmic worlds of namely Max Ophüls, Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray and Frederick Wiseman are looked at with the analytical precision (the "dagger-gaze") that this film critic's writing deserves. Bazinian realism, the auteur theory and cinema as a kind of "gestural vocabulary" are also highlighted in this reading of Perkins's critical art.

This article investigates to what extent it is possible to establish an image philosophy to read digital images, in this specific case, applying the concepts in the areas of glitch art. For this, we sought, through a systematic literature review, general definitions about the terms of the image and developed a possible approach for reading digital images that have intrusive aesthetic data from the operation of technical apparatus. The study takes place as a theoretical reflection that does not aim to “solve” all the questions about reading images, but it can bring up the possibility of interpreting the images that inhabit the digital universe.

Following Marisa Alves Pedro’s video essay as a roadmap, this brief analysis explores some narrative and aesthetic features of Marco Martins’ film, How to Draw a Perfect Circle.

This second issue of 2021 is especially devoted to Arts Education. With a thematic dossier, guest-edited by Catarina S. Martins and Pedro Alves, this edition brings to the front a very urgent and significant problem in education: how to teach art and how to develop and sustain art schools. In a rapidly changing world, these problems must address the digitization of our daily lives, as well as its mechanisms for (art) teaching. Moreover, being a side subject in the world of elementary schools and universities, it is even more important to study and research the ways that arts education can change education as a whole, allowing future citizens to be more aware of their worlds.

Previous studies on classification of fine art show that features of paintings can be captured and categorized using machine learning approaches. This progress can also benefit art psychology by facilitating data collection on artworks without the need to recruit experts as raters. In this study a machine learning approach is used to predict the ratings of RizbA, a Rating instrument for two-dimensional pictorial works. Based on a pre-trained model, the algorithm was fine-tuned via transfer learning on 886 pictorial works by contemporary professional artists and non-professionals. As quality criterion, artificial intelligence raters (ART) are compared with generic raters (GR) created from the real human expert raters, using error rate and mean squared error (MSE). ART ratings have been found to have the same error range as randomly chosen human ratings. Therefore, they can be seen as equivalent to real human expert raters for almost all items in RizbA. Further training with more data will close the gap to the human raters on all items.

The following essay intends an approach that comprises a combination of aesthetics, history and philosophy to reproduce the perception of certain elements of image contradictions in contemporary times. It discusses the concepts of phantasmagoria and apparition regarding technical and memory images and will be presented contemporary examples that contribute to the understanding of those types of images as irrefutable components in the fields of current ontology and epistemology.

After initially framing the contemporary crisis of art criticism in neo-Adornian terms, the article offers a review of the historical and philosophical foundations of art criticism coming mainly from the perspective of Jena Romanticism. Based on the latter, it traces a sound distinction between art criticism and other kinds of discourse about art. Finally, it makes critical comments on art journalism and contemporary discourses that favor public mediation in lieu of reflection, but that have nevertheless occupied the social space of art criticism.

Melodrama’s adaptability is a direct cause of the way in which it can also be transmedial, transgenre and transnational, finding new ways of expression outside of the classic confinements of Hollywood’s excesses. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Manbiki kazok, also known as Shoplifters, is an example of a film that belongs to the melodrama category, but that explores the pathos and feeling that are characteristic of the genre in a way that not only is it not divorced of the political but contains within itself a fierce rebuke of the pressures of a capitalist society that underlines its emotional burden.

Shoplifters is a 2018 feature film directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda. It is about a family with no blood ties living in a low-class neighbourhood in Tokyo who find a girl locked at a balcony in the cold day after day. Understanding that she is being mistreated by her parents, the Shibata family decide to take Yuri in. The audiovisual essay The Invisible Family analyses Shoplifters according to three key concepts of melodrama: house, family and society. Each one of them, introduced by a quotation, is composed of three diptychs with scenes from the film. The small and cluttered houses in Shoplifters constrict the characters and render their inner selves visible. As the Shibata fall apart throughout the film, their care and respect for each other grow deeper. Shoplifting and using others are unacceptable in society. However, these are carried out by the Shibata, because their income is not enough to provide for the family. It is, thus, urgent to improve work regulations, to provide more and better employment opportunities and to support families. All in all, the conflict emerges within the family, gathered in a house which suffocates them and pressured by a society which not only imposes rigid norms of respectability but also makes the weakest invisible.

Ana Vaz, born in Brasília, Brazil, in 1986, is one of the most notorious Brazilian experimental filmmakers working today. Her films were shown at festivals and institutions such as: Berlinale Forum Expanded, New York Film Festival, TIFF Wavelengths, Cinéma du Réel, Flaherty Seminar, Tate Modern, Palais de Tokyo, Jeu de Paume,  etc. Her body of work narrates stories hidden in lost memories of colonial landscapes. By exploring multi-temporalities, her films reflect the borderland experience – be it the borders between Brazil and Europe; art gallery and movie theater; poetry and cinema, or between humans and non-humans. In addition, her movies are the result of meaningful dialogue with the greatest thinkers of our time, such as: Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida, Viveiros de Castro, David Kopenawa, João Guimarães Rosa, and Clarice Lispector. Departing from a pedagogy of "walk and listen”, we invite readers to explore  Ana Vaz's counter-cinema.

Five years ago, in a volume charting a ‘formerness’ for the Global West, I proposed a shift from institutional critique to infrastructural critique. This was described as a shift from a critique of the enabling container for a certain discourse or performativity of citizenship (institution) to an embodied critique that necessarily owed more to praxis. Thus the direction was towards a critique based on contingent ruptures, with the interpretation and activation of these ruptures the source of political meaning. The immanence of such an approach registers in the sense that it works with desires that are latent in the infrastructure, thus broadly conceived.  It is the notion of infrastructure as a mode of thinking that favours the concrete over the abstract - concrete that is immanent to real abstraction – that I would like to develop in this article, concentrating on the epistemic and political relations between infrastructure and critique.  

The article examines various forms of immanent critique. Following forms of critique in Kant and Hegel, it highlights how contemporary approaches to immanent critique within the tradition of critical theory fail. Idealistic residuals regularly prevent critical thinking from holding on to immanence. Historico-philosophical, but also anthropological assumptions are particularly relevant here. Finally, an alternative to the existing forms of critique is outlined, which strengthens pluralistic concepts, and detaches the idea of immanence from an in itself homogeneous internal perspective of critique.

In the moment of the first lockdown, in double confinement - of the social and the self - a pursuit took place. With Malabou’s words and a camera, searching for the Lazaretto was a process to derive and rediscover a place and a moment. A form, as film, as essay.  In the open air.

This article comprises excerpts of the book:  Moten, F. (2019). All that Beauty. Letter Machine Editions.