The article focuses on the aerodynamic experiments of Petr Vasil’evich Miturich (1887–1956), in particular his so-called letun, a project comparable to Vladimir Tatlin’s Letatlin, but less familiar. Miturich became interested in flight during the First World War, elaborating his first flying a...
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The article focuses on the aerodynamic experiments of Petr Vasil’evich Miturich (1887–1956), in particular his so-called letun, a project comparable to Vladimir Tatlin’s Letatlin, but less familiar. Miturich became interested in flight during the First World War, elaborating his first flying apparatus in 1918 before constructing a prototype and undertaking a test flight on 27 December 1921—which might be described as an example of Russian Aero-Constructivism (by analogy with Italian Aeropittura). Miturich’s basic deduction was that modern man must travel not by horse and cart, but with the aid of a new, ecological apparatus—the undulator—a mechanism which, thanks to its undulatory movements, would move like a fish or snake. The article delineates the general context of Miturich’s experiments, for example, his acquaintance with the ideas of Tatlin and Velemir Khlebnikov (in 1924 Miturich married the artist, Vera Khlebnikova, Velemir’s sister) as well as the inventions of Igor’ Sikorsky, Fridrikh Tsander, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and other scientists who contributed to the “First Universal Exhibition of Projects and Models of Interplanetary Apparatuses, Devices and Historical Materials” held in Moscow in 1927.
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2 years ago
Birgit Capelle
Birgit Capelle
Institution: University of Bonn; North American Studies Program; Department of English, American, and Celtic Studies;
Email: bcapell1@uni-bonn.de
This article explores the epic poem Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) by Gary Snyder and a Song/Chin dynasty Chinese landscape painting. I illustrate how the poem and the painting, together with Henry David Thoreau’s autobiographical narrative A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849...
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This article explores the epic poem Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) by Gary Snyder and a Song/Chin dynasty Chinese landscape painting. I illustrate how the poem and the painting, together with Henry David Thoreau’s autobiographical narrative A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958), form a complex web of intertextual and intermedial references. All four works, I argue, tell similar narratives of spiritual journey and paths through mountain and river landscapes; all four speak of moments of heightened awareness in the sense of Buddhist “no-mind” (Chinese: wu-shin; Japanese: mushin). I show how they converge in exhibiting ontologies of non-substantiality, emptiness, and becoming. Taking the philosophies of Zen Buddhism and Taoism as a theoretical frame, I argue that the American transcendentalist and Beat works poetically and narratively convey relational rather than substantialist views of Being and life. They depict the world as a dynamic and open field of tension between two non-oppositional forces from which we as subjects are not essentially separate in a dualistic way. I substantiate my argument by drawing on the French sinologist and philosopher François Jullien, who refers to the Chinese understanding of landscape (“mountains and waters”) in his critical treatment of (European) philosophy’s centuries-long subject-centered epistemology and substantialist “ontology of Being.”
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2 years ago
Dhaneshwar Shah
Dhaneshwar Shah
Institution: School of Art and Design, Wuhan University of Technology,
Email: dhaneshwar005@yahoo.co.in
Welcome to New York in the 1960s! “Art and Design in 1960s New York,” a key component of Amanda Gluibizzi’s Doctor of Philosophy research at the “Graduate School of The Ohio State University,” has been first published in the UK and USA in 2021 by Anthem Press, and the book is now available...
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Welcome to New York in the 1960s! “Art and Design in 1960s New York,” a key component of Amanda Gluibizzi’s Doctor of Philosophy research at the “Graduate School of The Ohio State University,” has been first published in the UK and USA in 2021 by Anthem Press, and the book is now available to acquire on major websites. Anthem Press is a leading independent academic, professional, and trade publisher with a strong international and interdisciplinary focus in the established and emerging social sciences, business/law, and humanities fields of study. The Rail’s art editor is Amanda Gluibizzi, who is the co-founder and co-director of the New Foundation for Art History, as well as the author of the book titled “Art and Design in 1960s New York.” She is a well-known art historian, researcher, and associate professor. She has a background in history, education, teaching, and publishing, as well as a specialisation in modern and contemporary art and design. Two of her notable research talks and papers are “Design Systems: What Not to Include” at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston and “Making New York Understandable”: Revolutionary Proposals for a City in Crisis-Design, History, and Revolution at Parsons New School in New York. The author takes a broader view of New York’s “Visual World” in the 1960s. The author uses a formal approach to explore the relationship between art and design and highlight their mutual influence, which has been overlooked throughout history. The author employs ethnographic and multidisciplinary methods throughout the book to highlight the art and design experiments and challenges in 1960s New York. The author examines design and art side-by-side to explore how their relationship manifests itself. The author included quotations and excerpts from journals, books, magazines, newspapers, interviews, and film scenes, in addition to diverse analyses of visuals and literature cognate to art and design. This research-based book gives readers an opportunity to take a look back with curiosity at the art and graphic design of 1960s New York.
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2 years ago
‘In the Theatrical World our talk is all of holidays.’ So opened one of Hearth and Home magazine’s gossip columns in July 1897. The holidays taken by London’s late-Victorian West End theatre stars attracted regular press coverage and formed a regular subject of letters between actresses, act...
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‘In the Theatrical World our talk is all of holidays.’ So opened one of Hearth and Home magazine’s gossip columns in July 1897. The holidays taken by London’s late-Victorian West End theatre stars attracted regular press coverage and formed a regular subject of letters between actresses, actors and their friends. The narratives of hard work and public service that had played a significant role in improvements in the theatre industry’s reputational and cultural status prompted a secondary narrative around rest: a widely shared understanding that rest was necessary to counter the impacts of the ongoing on- and off-stage labour undertaken by stage stars. Together newspaper accounts and correspondence capture both industry-focused concerns about the maintenance of the strong physical and mental health required to sustain a theatrical career and social disquiet around the changing world of work more widely and patterns of overwork and exhaustion. In this essay I consider a range of press accounts and correspondence to consider how evidence of stage stars’ holidays can extend our understandings of the professional culture of the late-Victorian theatre industry and theatre’s contribution to wider social and political ideas surrounding work and rest, and physical and mental health.
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2 years ago
Thalia Allington-Wood
Thalia Allington-Wood
Institution: unstated
Email: info@res00.com
The history of a garden is a narrative constructed on the basis of factual evidence, but also shaped by shifting ideological pressures and historical circumstances over the long durée of its existence. The study of the reception or afterlife of a particular garden allows us to see how it changed ov...
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The history of a garden is a narrative constructed on the basis of factual evidence, but also shaped by shifting ideological pressures and historical circumstances over the long durée of its existence. The study of the reception or afterlife of a particular garden allows us to see how it changed over time, was reformulated by its visitors, and how these changes have influenced its subsequent interpretations.1 Despite this widely shared understanding, the afterlife of the Sacro Bosco at Bomarzo has received little critical attention, though its complex historiography was inseparably tied to political and social shifts in twentieth-century Italy.
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2 years ago
This essay re-examines the once promising idea that style analysis can provide an independent source of insight into an artifact's non-stylistic context. The essay makes explicit the consequences of treating collective style as such a source in archaeology and anthropology of art, and further develo...
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This essay re-examines the once promising idea that style analysis can provide an independent source of insight into an artifact's non-stylistic context. The essay makes explicit the consequences of treating collective style as such a source in archaeology and anthropology of art, and further develops a new framing for the idea that avoids the criticisms largely responsible for the decline in theoretical interest in the epistemic import of visual style analysis since World War II. This re-framing proposes that inference from style to context is permissible on those occasions when a collective style signals by its morphology its suitability to serve a certain function. And it does so because it prescribes publicly certain modes of behavior or spectatorship. Furthermore, the public nature of the signaling may be such that it allows even uninitiated spectators to get a sense of it and thus to gain access to some of the motivations and norms informing the collective's form of life.
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2 years ago
This article investigates the role of the darkroom in the experiences of British amateur photographers who, between the 1880s and 1900s, chose to process their negatives themselves while travelling. It focuses, in particular, on the reasons underpinning the development of a network of facilities for...
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This article investigates the role of the darkroom in the experiences of British amateur photographers who, between the 1880s and 1900s, chose to process their negatives themselves while travelling. It focuses, in particular, on the reasons underpinning the development of a network of facilities for changing and developing plates available to tourists, and on how photographers’ engagement with this infrastructure expanded its function in ways that implicitly challenged dominant approaches to both photography and travel. It does so by examining the darkroom, first, as an alternative tourist bureau that put travelling photographers in contact with local knowledge, and second, as the site of a material culture that empowered photographers. These experiences demonstrate that close to the heart of these practitioners was not simply photographic mobility but, most importantly, photographic autonomy.
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2 years ago
Wearable energy harvesting methods have been increasingly researched over the past decade. Due to demands for finding suitable ways of powering wearable devices suited to garment contexts, yarn-based “components” gather increasing interest. However, the focus of textile properties of energy harv...
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Wearable energy harvesting methods have been increasingly researched over the past decade. Due to demands for finding suitable ways of powering wearable devices suited to garment contexts, yarn-based “components” gather increasing interest. However, the focus of textile properties of energy harvesting components often place emphasis on functional performance and limited elements concerning wearability; using terms such as “flexible”, “breathable” and “wearable”. Rarely, is there consideration for degrees of “comfort”, and “softness”. Yet, if such methods are to become integrated into wearable garments and worn on a daily basis, or even in niche contexts, the tactile experience requires attention. To address this, the following research details an exploration of softness of a polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) yarn-based energy harvesting method, amongst brain injury survivors where degrees of sensitivity can vary to extremes; accruing either reduced or heightened levels of sensitivity as a result of stroke, for example. Levels of softness have been defined and quantified from earlier samples responded to by stroke survivors. This has been formed into a chart and used in reference within the development process to refine and detail the methods used to improve the quality of softness in the process of knitting. In contexts, such as the knit lab, participant presence can be limited, yet feedback, especially on subjective matters such as softness, is critical to the development process. The method presented of grading softness in accordance with previous samples is seen to aid the researcher to analyse samples made in situ, within an iterative process of development. The paper focuses on providing conversations around technical data within the knit process to deliver soft and wearable energy harvesting textiles. This forms a part of a wider body of PhD research that explores the use of piezoelectric theory as a technological tool for recovery of upper limb deficits for stroke survivors.
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2 years ago
Weiwei Wang
Weiwei Wang
Institution: Science and Technology College Gannan Normal University,
Email: info@res00.com
Nowadays, art design majors are offered in all art colleges and universities in China, but the students and teachers of this major often do not have a deep understanding of art design, which hinders the folk art inheritance of Chinese art design students. This paper explains folk art and art design,...
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Nowadays, art design majors are offered in all art colleges and universities in China, but the students and teachers of this major often do not have a deep understanding of art design, which hinders the folk art inheritance of Chinese art design students. This paper explains folk art and art design, analyzes its characteristics, puts forward the problems of folk art inheritance in China, and puts forward the effective path of art design into folk art.
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2 years ago
The following pages are four out of the fifteen graphic pages ‘Papiers Voisins’, in my PhD thesis Reading in
Performance, Lire en Spectacle: The solitude of reading merged with the collective nature of an audience (2021).
Through my practices as a spectator, a participant of a performing art...
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The following pages are four out of the fifteen graphic pages ‘Papiers Voisins’, in my PhD thesis Reading in
Performance, Lire en Spectacle: The solitude of reading merged with the collective nature of an audience (2021).
Through my practices as a spectator, a participant of a performing arts works, a reader of performance
documentation and a choreographer I collect visual elements that I then assemble. This process is my way
of cultivating attention to what is active in documentations and attending to their contingencies. The texts
on this page provide the title and some references for each graphic page.
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2 years ago
