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Hungarian art-historian, essay about a medieval fresco recently discovered in the apsis of the Inner City Church of Budapest.
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The goal of this article is to answer what looks like a simple question. In what extent can we discuss music in video games the same way we discuss film music? What do these two have in common and how do they differ? Both are closely interconnected to image. Within the context of a cinematography, its “moving images“, the screen or a TV. Video games dominate TV screens as well (in the case of consoles) and more often, they appear on our personal computer screens. Some theories refuse discussion about these media on the same level because in fact, they really are two different phenomenons whose deffinitions should not be confused. But when we closely look on how music works within them, we cannot deny some of their intersections. But then again, a spectator is not a player and viceversa. In this article we create a basic frame for an analysis of this relationship, comparethe functions and effects of both media in the context of their musical parts, confront them with the notions of interactivity and immersion and thus we pose yet another questionsfor additional study.
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“How should I move forward?” you might ask yourself, as you stand at the threshold confronted by the darkness ahead. Many of us learn from an early age to fear the unfamiliar or the unknown. If the unknown is without light, it can become unjustifiably terrifying. How you approach the unknown is unique, as your first encounter with anything can only really be as an individual. Staring ahead into the black void of “How it is” you may wonder whether to move ahead at all. “How it is” simultaneously embodies the unknown and the familiar. The darkness contained in the structure mimics both the architecture of the turbine hall and a shipping container. “It’s fine!” you reassure yourself. What can possibly be inside? “How it is” is only complete when you, the viewer, enter the black hole”1. The work by Miroslaw Balka, a Polish artist, is a windowless room 13 m high and 30 m long that is designed to create absolute darkness inside. In the Turbine Hall of the TATE Modern, one walks up a ramp into a container like room.
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How Persona 4’s Young Adult Fiction Communicates Japanese Values
Life is Strange, INSIDE, Oxenfree—all these video games represent a seemingly entirely new genre. Young Adult videogames diverge from the male, gloomy grown-up stereotypes and replace them with adolescent protagonists in their coming of age stories. Their commercial success seem to validate their endeavors. However, YA narratives are hidden in plain sights for many years within JRPGs. Shin Megami Tensei – Persona 4 (short Persona 4 or P4) is a cultural ambassador. This paper examines how the game’s procedural rhetoric in combination with its Young Adult story advocate in favor of specific Japanese values. The time structure of P4 reinforces a longterm orientation and requires strategic planning as well as tactical flexibility. So-called “Social Links” represents Japan unique take on collectivism. Each link encapsulates a small YA narrative and offers different benefits to social-active protagonist. Finally, grinding mechanics reflect the notion of repetition-based learning. Japanese schools teach through engaging with developing several solutions to a singular problem. The same holds true for the grinding process. All these elements combined create a game rhetoric promoting these aspects of Japanese culture
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The prolific activity of Mr. Alexa Visarion may be inspiring and disarming at the same time; his path in the creative world stands as a reminder that barriers of any kind are to be overcome by hard work and by allowing oneself to develop as freely as possible. As theatre and film director he’s known especially for Ahead of the Silence (1978), Luna verde (2010) and Năpasta (1982), but has directed seven films and written a number of scripts. During his life-long career he directed over 100 plays in Romanian theatres and abroad. In 1985, he directed Stark Young’s translation of Anton Chekhov’s play, Uncle Vanya, at the Actors Theatre of Louisville (Mainstage) in Louisville, Kentucky.
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This article compares the narrative representation, and more specifically the identity (de-) construction, of the main character in the novel The Handmaid’s Tale and in the first season of the eponymous series. To do so, I draw on the concepts of transmedial narratology as elaborated by Thon (2015, 2016) and Ryan (2014), that stresses that some narratological concepts originally applied to literary texts (as for example storyworlds, characters, the distinction story/discourse) are useful to analyze narrative representations in other media as well. One of the principal means in literature to represent the inner world of a character is the interior monologue. How is the interior monologue used in both the novel and the series? How does this use influence the plot in both media? And does the medium in any way determine the use of the interior monologue? Furthermore, I connect the narrative representation of the main character to the principle of remediation and demonstrate that her portrayal is inextricably linked to the medium in both series and novel.
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Andrei Șerban was born in Bucharest in 1943. In 1969, after graduating (in Radu Penciulescu’s directing class), he received a scholarship at La MaMa Theatre in New York, followed by an astonishing international career in theater and opera. He worked in more than forty countries. In the USA, he was associated with Robert Brustein’s American Repertory Theatre Company and worked in many famous theatres and Operas in New York, Seattle and Los Angeles. Back to Romania after 1989, he was the artistic and executive director of the National Theatre in Bucharest between 1990 and 1993, but his international career continued. His Fragments of a Greek Trilogy – Medea, at „La MaMa”, 1972; Electra, at the Sainte-Chapelle, in Paris, 1973; The Trojan Women, at „La MaMa”, 1974, reunited in a trilogy at „La MaMa” (1974) and, then, in 1990 at the National Theatre in Bucharest, are considered the most original staging of the Greek tragedy at the end of the 20th century. Between 1992 and 2018 he was Professor at Columbia University, New York. Many volumes were dedicated to his work as a stage director. He published the autobiographical volume O biografie (2007, Polirom).
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The gospel songs of Ralph Stanley offer solace by means of identification with the singer’s losses and struggles, but they also offer a metaphoric framework of journey and homecoming found in many folk and country songs. The framework gives shape and meaning to the troubled aspects of life that make up much of the content of bluegrass songs, sacred and secular. Referencing Kenneth Burke’s early theories of rhetorical identification and symbolic appeal, this study reads the inclusion of gospel songs in stage and recorded performance as a secularized means of self-definition: singers and listeners are linked as people with common origins and destinations. While expected themes of repentance and faith run throughout these gospel songs, the progressive form of home that is lost and then recovered sets up a secular analogy to the story of sin and redemption so common in American Protestant Evangelicalism. By scattering these songs throughout a bluegrass performance, the journey toward home becomes the pathway by which all the troubles of betrayal, heartbreak, conflict, and hard times are borne and transformed. In place of creed or practices of piety, all are invited to find common purpose in the experiences of disappointment, regret, and loss in the knowledge that they are on the “Long Journey Home.”
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The present interview with Cristina Modreanu focuses on her project Comedia Remix, a project meant to revive the Bucharest Comedy Theatre’s archives and present them in new formats to the contemporary audiences. The project consists of an exhibition, the publishing of a bi-lingual catalogue of the exhibition, a documentary and a series of conferences based on themes inspired by the research. The project places the evolution of the art of theatre in the larger context of ‘60,’70 and ‘80 decades from a cultural, sociological and anthropological perspective. The curator discusses the evolution of the project, the methodologies employed and the relationship between critics and curators in the current context of cultural journalism.
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Political street art and slogans appear as visual markers of the shifting, complex discourses of power struggles, marginality, and countercultures that establish a new reality which must be seen and heard. As an art form, it is largely connected to and inspired by the existing social conditions. In the era of crisis, the central Athens of bygone years is now a terrain of conflict and metamorphosis, and the city’s walls are screaming a thousand stories. In other words, city walls are the canvas, and social conditions are the paint in a gallery of untold stories. Redefined symbols, decomposed stereotypes, re visioned aesthetics, and antiracist slogans are the tools for the transformation of walls into social diaries. In this light, street art is examined as a form of social diary, a visual history of marginalized and minority groups. Street art captures the need for self-expression in a changing environment, and street artists actively participate in the production of culture in the micro level by consciously contributing to the need for urban re-visions.
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“The Latinisation” of the Romanian Church United with Rome. Vatican Documentary Contributions, 18th – 20th Centuries. The archival research performed in two different Roman institutions, Archivio Segreto Vaticano and Archivio storico di Propaganda Fide, was focused on identifying Vatican’s assimilation policies, i.e. latinisations, implicitly cultural and impacting on Romanian Church United with Rome’s architectural and aesthetic profile. The archival research clearly revealed that the unionist plans would always follow approximately the same theoretical frame, with the Wallachians in Transylvania being included in the Greek rite Eastern family, without being a chapter with separate theory and rules within the Catholic Reconquista of the East. The Congregation [for the propagation of Faith] records - documents that cover seamlessly about 250 years (1622-1821), refute the latinisation thesis, i.e. Vatican’s intention to unify the local Greek-Catholic rite of Eastern filiation, including its customs, ecclesiastical body discipline and religious holidays calendar, with those of the Roman Church. However, the dysfunction occurs in Transylvania, like in other countries, at the lower executive hierarchy level, as the unionist projects the high hierarchs in Rome designed theoretically were implemented with the help of local religious orders and zealous bishops of Latin rite. Such actions, unapproved officially in Rome, cannot be considered elements of a sustained latinisation policy, without which the results could have only been ephemeral. At construction level, without a general latinisation policy, the headquarters could raise no claims for formal regulations, clear constructive and plastic patterns to follow, similarly to the Council of Trent.
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“Collections and public monuments are the true teachers of a free people. They are not merely the teachers of practical exercises, but more importantly the schools of public taste.” Gottfried Semper’s quote (“Science, Industry and Art: on the importance of the World Fair from 1851”) perfectly describes the mission of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), an institution that inspired the foundation of similar museums throughout the world.1 The exhibition Art and Design for all, which has been staged at the Art and Exhibition Hall in Bonn before moving on to Budapest’s Iparművészeti Múzeum, tells the story of the V&A, from its roots in 1837 as the London Government School of Design, then becoming the South Kensington Museum from 1857. Retracing the history of European applied arts, the V&A managed to develop a transnational narrative of shared museology in a century of growing nationalism. Artistic, cultural, and scientific exchange was able to overcome borders in spite of a backdrop of revolution and warfare in the mid-19th century. The 1848 and 1849 revolutions had shattered class hierarchies on the continent. With its inclinations to the principles of free trade, one of England’s answers to the emerging class struggles was to make art and design accessible to all social classes. To achieve this aim, however, a larger segment of the public would have to be turned into active consumers.
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“Life-writing”, manifesting itself in the extremely personal character of the composition, is one of the most important features of Aleksander Nowak’s work, which clearly distinguish him from other composers. “Life-writing” conceals such creative inspirations as the methods and means of composing. Nowak very often draws topics or sound material of the composition from his own life experiences. At the same time, he hopes to achieve a certain type of energy or emotions, which will then to evoke the feelings that are similar to those accompanying the writing of the piece. The issue of conveying in the work any or more specific, though significant, emotions is therefore the first-rate issue. For this reason, in his works, the musical tradition is often combined with the popular and well-known music. A specific representation of the idea of “life-writing” are Nowak’s operas: Sudden Rain for soprano, baritone, mixed choir and chamber orchestra and two-act Space Opera for soprano, mezzo-soprano, countertenor, baritone, bass, mixed choir and symphonic orchestra.
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Hamlet has been frequently performed on the Czech stage, not only during the nineteenth century but also throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From 1905 until the end of his career at the National Theatre in Prague, Hamlet was also the mainstay of Jaroslav Kvapil’s repertoire. The aim of this paper is to concentrate on four productions of Hamlet at the National theatre in Prague in 1905, 1915, 1916, and 1920. In order to illustrate the critical reception of these four productions, the paper draws upon a range of period theatre reviews and critical commentaries. It attempts to show how directorial and acting choices have shaped the play in performance, by focusing in particular on Eduard Vojan’s renditions of Hamlet, set in different national contexts. Vojan (1853–1920) was one of the greatest Czech actors and performers of Shakespearean protagonists, famous for his deep, almost Protean insight into his characters. His portrayal of Hamlet (1905) still represents one of the best Shakespearean renditions on the Czech stage. Vojan discovered and skilfully interpreted Hamlet’s complicated character. His Danish prince was a lonely, sarcastic, and nonconforming individual opposing the world’s pettiness.
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Review of graphic art of Admir Mujkić, its basic artistic and semantic contents and layers (Exhibition in the Centre for Culture and Education in Tešanj, 11th May 2007). This author is known for small-format graphics, which are a kind of curiosity in contemporary artistic practices. Mujkić’s miniatures, despite their dimensions, are characterized by richness and universality of meaning.
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Jacques-Henri Lartigue and Henri Cartier-Bresso seem to be the most appreciated photographs for Alex. Leo Şerban. He use the oportunity of their exhibition to write an full of passion essay.
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In the period between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, musica poetica meant studying composition, i.e. Kompositionslehre (Mattheson). The origin of the term can be found in the writings of Nikolaus Listenius (Musica, 1537). The new vision of the pedagogy of music (drawn from the writings of Burmeister, Lippius, Nucius, Kircher, Bernhard et al.), was centered on the concepts of baroque aesthetics: rhetoric, the affect theory, the world of symbol, and allegory, the rhetorical figure. Perpetuated in the eighteenth century in rhetoric-oriented theories (supported by Walther, Mattheson, Scheibe), musica poetica lasts about two centuries in German music theory and practice.
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The Muzica journal – the only one specialized publication from the past century – during the historical decades, it has been submitted for a while to the political influences. Together with the cultural face of the pre-war (1916) and inter-war (1919-1925) periods, the political factor had a major influence of the post-war period (1950-1989). The acronym C-O-S-T characterizes the period in which the communism has transformed Romania into a “terror camp”. Thus, through Conformation the journal adopted the general political orientation, through Opposition it has declared the enmity towards old cosmopolitan influences, through Support promoted new musicians who rose up from the working class and through Transformation accepted the statute of the “new man”. The Muzica journal was – for decades – a cultural-political musical instrument in our country.
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Zadaća je arhitekture da nas inspirira i poboljšava kvalitetu našeg života. No, čest je slučaj da nas arhitektonski nacrti, koji sasvim dobro izgledaju na papiru ili osobnom računalu, u stvarnosti razočaraju. Uzrok tome je upravo opća dominacija vizualnog u današnjoj tehnološkoj i potrošačkoj kulturi, koja je prodrla i prožela čitavu arhitektonsku profesiju i obrazovanje. Stanje arhitektonske profesije danas je uvjetovano nametnutom “slikom – proizvodom”, kao i digitalnim medijima. Naime, naš se doživljaj svijeta oblikuje uz pomoć pet osjetâ, no najveći dio arhitekture danas nastaje uz pomoć isključivo jednog osjeta – osjeta vida.
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For half a decade, a global public has condemned the art of the Costa Rican conceptual artist Habacuc [Guillermo Vargas]; questioned his authenticity as an artist; and denounced his moral and ethical stance as a human being. He has received countless death threats by the public both in and outside international art communities. Worldwide blogs dedicated to his defamation exist in English, Spanish, Turkish, German, French, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Greek, Bulgarian, Danish, Romanian, and many other languages. In addition to the written word, vitriolic manifestations towards the artist appeared in various visual forms and performances. Together with the online petition composed of four million signatures, protestors demanded the artist’s removal as a participant in the 2008 Central American Biennial held in Honduras. Similarly, any local art professionals who spoke in defense of the artist—or any foreign institutions that economically supported art spaces exhibiting Habacuc’s art—were not spared scrutiny or threats. What could provoke such international outcry that, beyond criticism, sought complete expulsion of a Central American artist from his own artistic context? Habacuc’s installation Exposition #1 (2007), exhibited in Nicaragua at the Gallery Codice of Managua, is at the center of the controversy. The work is often referred to as “eres lo que lees” [you are what you read], but it is popularly identified with the vulgar phrase “starving dog art.”
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