RCAAP Repository

This review of Monica Gagliano's book Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants presents the author's unconventional scientific approach to plant ecology as a human-plant collaborative endeavour. As Gagliano's personal encounters with plants supported by indigenous wisdom changed her way of doing science, the scientist learned to think out and away from the conventional box of scientific determinism and abstraction from the subjective experience. Gagliano's journey led to groundbreaking scientific discoveries in acoustic communication with plants, probing their consciousness and capacities to listen, learn and remember. This book is an important contribution not only to the field of plant bioacoustics but also to any kind of academic work, revealing that a transformative knowledge lies in collaborative ventures with nonhumans as conscious subjects in their own rights. Learning by listening with plants, a common practice in indigenous cultures, is certainly a way to engage an active dialogue with nonhuman intelligences, but we must be willing to open our minds and transcend the view of plants as objects of scientific materialism.

When it comes to strategies governing contemporary technological culture, the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) paradigm is as pervasive and automatic as technology itself. Taking from Michel de Certeau’s distinction between the concepts of strategy and tactics, Ksenia Fedorova analyses a series of transdisciplinary artworks in which computerized operations affecting and transforming human experience are tactically disrupted in order to question technological interfaces mediating HCI. Exposing crossdisciplinary experiments in which affects and deffects are part of the algorithm, Tactics of Interfacing shows precisely in what measure and weight art and technology may contemplate natural and artificial glitches of both human nature and machinic code.

Julião Sarmento’s body of work crosses artistic disciplines and fields. The artist resorts to film and video as a means to reach the artistic expression of an idea, open to an infinitude of interpretations. This audiovisual essay looks at the way Julião Sarmento works with moving images, focusing in three main perspectives: the word, the (feminine) body and rhythm. We conclude that each one of Sarmento’s works builds a system of codes, of communication, that opens new understandings of the human relation with the ‘real’.

Networking in current music education and models, projects and platforms are a means for recovering the importance of music education as a part of artistic education. Music education has value in itself, both in the international and European context, not only from an instrumental or interdisciplinary perspective, but also as a critical reflection on reality, forming an integral part of society which cannot be removed. Art, due to its non-instrumental nature, constitutes a source of living standards and allows the development of the human sensibility which contributes to the acquisition of skills related with perception, and which make up valuable tools for the cognitive process of the science. Networking projects through music education contribute to diverse cultural thought, which places value on European cultural heterogeneity through music, promotes cultural integration and diversity of tastes beyond prevailing and homogenising musical trends.

This is an introduction to a special edition of JSTA dedicated to the myriad forms of sonic connections and audible expressions. We approach three dimensions of sound in an artistic context: auditory specificities, performance dimensions, and computational listening. Sound is a complex phenomenon present in everyday life and dwelling between conscious and unconscious processes. A universe contained within itself, where every sound event has the potential to be considered aesthetic material, contributing to the proliferation of creative approaches. These specific conditions have potentiated an outbreak of sonic art genres and expressions. Listening as an epistemic process has been subjected to successive changes pushed by computation and the breeding of computational media. This essay points to visions and approaches to sound as a specific field of knowledge that can arise from, lead to, or be used as a tool of world-building.

Music performance anxiety is an acknowledged condition amongst musicians from early learning stages to professional levels. Anxiety experienced in uncontrolled levels translates into the development of physiological and psychological symptoms that impair performance skills and may, ultimately, lead to post-traumatic stress disorders and drop-out of music-related activities. This paper focuses on teacher’s voices to justify the need for inclusion of anxiety management training in music schools’ curricula as means of promoting well-being, coping with stress-inducing situations, and boosting growing musicians’ performative experiences through positive pedagogies. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to four instrument teachers of a Portuguese institution of specialized artistic education to collect data about previous experiences, conceptions, and ways of teaching MPA managing. The importance of integrating coping strategies in pedagogical practices, its obstacles and benefits, alongside suggestions for conceiving viable intervention projects in schools were discussed by the interviewed and hereby critically presented with respect to existing literature.

This short piece analyses Pedro Afonso’s video essay on Roy Andersson’s Complex Image, an aesthetic style based on the tableau shot. It proceeds by scrutinizing the relationship Andersson’s aesthetic maintains with painting, slow cinema and political ideology, three aspects connected with realism, one way or the other. By focusing on the operative word “complex”, instead of “image”, this text claims that the Complex Image is not strictly pictorial; that long shots do not necessarily equate with slow cinema; and that there is a strong political engagement alongside an undeniably creative form.   

This article analyses an audiovisual essay created around the exhibition Julião Sarmento. Film Works, that took place in Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Porto in 2019. This exhibition reunited 10 works in film and video produced by the Portuguese artist in different moments of his career. Following the audiovisual essay’s structure, I will approach three thematic obsessions transversal to Julião Sarmento’s work, as a reflexive proposal about a gaze phenomenology (or a vision’s perversity), regarding dispositives that involve the moving image. Particularly, in what concerns the problematic of desire. These are: (1) The constant work of language (the real, the symbolic and the imaginary); (2) The fragmented body (the conscience/disassembling of voyeurism); (3) The rhythm (exposing the matter of time in favor of a deceptive aesthetics).

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.