Visual Arts

This paper was delivered as the keynote address at a conference at the University of London on 19/6/2026. It examines a key aspect of André Malraux’s theory of art – his argument that art endures not through a power of timelessness, as Western culture has believed since the Renaissance, but through its power of metamorphosis. “Metamorphosis,” Malraux writes “is the very life of the work of art in time, one of its specific characteristics”. The paper also contrasts Malraux's thinking with (...) the position of traditional aesthetics (such as analytic aesthetics) which has effectively ignored this issue. (shrink)

The question of whether or not art is essentially a representation of reality has long been a bone of contention among philosophers of art – especially in the major branch of that discipline called the analytic philosophy of art, or analytic aesthetics. This paper argues that art - visual art, literature or music - is never essentially representation. The argument is based on the thinking of André Malraux in "The Voices of Silence".

One might naturally suppose that philosophers of art would take a strong interest in the idea of creation in the context of art. In fact, this has often not been the case. In analytic aesthetics, the issue tends to dwell on the sidelines and in continental aesthetics a shadow has sometimes been cast over the topic by the notion of the “death of the author” and by the claim, as Roland Barthes put it, that the author is only ever able (...) to “imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original”. This paper explains the understanding of artistic creation developed by the French art theorist André Malraux in his well-known book The Voices of Silence. Malraux argues that the true artist is involved in a creative act in the full sense of the term – creation ex nihilo – despite the debt he or she often owes to other artists. The paper also comments briefly on possible reasons why traditional post-Enlightenment aesthetics has said so little about the topic in question. (shrink)

Between medieval sapienza and the duty of silence...because it can be harmfull for other, takes care to transmit and inform in a cultural way.

The purpose of this essay is to explore the nature and role of art as a human phenomenon from a broadly cognitive perspective. Like science and religion, art serves to mediate the unknown, at once to embrace and to defend against the fundamental mystery of existence. Thus, it may challenge the status quo while generally serving to maintain it. Art tracks the individuation of subjectivity, serving the pleasure principle, yet is appropriated by the collective’s commitment to the reality principle. While (...) science and religion close in on serious answers to fundamental questions, art opens up possibilities toward playfulness, uselessness, imagination, and arbitrary whim. Though art has no unifying definition, meaning, or intent through time and across cultures, it remains important to people, both to do and to enjoy. It serves to counterbalance the naive realism of science, the “rationality” of modern society, and the literalism of text-based religion. While its allegiance is divided, its most worthy intent is to aid us to confront and negotiate the great mystery revealed to us in consciousness. (shrink)

Letter to a friend : Creative Thinking and Intuition Letter to a friend about creative thinking and intuition (art, writing, philosophy, science, etc ).

Do you remember January 2020? In a Danish newspaper a cartoon appeared. The Telegraph said, "The cartoon, published in Jyllands-Posten on Monday, depicted a Chinese flag with the yellow stars normally found in the upper left corner exchanged for drawings of the new coronavirus." The Chinese embassy in Denmark said that the cartoon crossed the acceptable boundaries for freedom of speech. Apparently the Chinese people were upset. The cartoon was by Niels Bo Bojesen. The Danish prime minister said that Danes (...) had freedom of expression, including freedom to draw, and apparently there is a long tradition of satirical drawings in Denmark. I saw some reactions online from Chinese people, reminding the world of Danish capitulation to German Nazis, if I remember correctly. You can imagine how the Danes must have talked. "Of course the Chinese can draw but do they have ideas?” “Bobo has ideas.” “A Chinese flag with a virus instead of the yellow stars. That is an idea.” “Bobo is the conceptual artist. The Chinese merely have the technical artist, Yuyu Fang or whatever.” “Is a technical artist actually an artist?” “The Chinese have not yet reached the stage of the concept.” “They have come far quite fast, but not far enough." I went to a Chinese restaurant in Manchester at the time. It was my favourite. It has been shut down now. Anyway, I ordered my usual food but it was strange. There were all these delicate white pieces in the rice. I had to pick them out one by one. I was not happy! Then I remembered all the swans in Hans Christian Andersen and Isak Dinesen (also known as Karen Blixen - I have my own sea story, by the way: The Pirate Cook. “It is not as good as Dinesen.” “Nowhere near as good.”). I did not order this dish but they gave me swan fried rice. You can imagine the Danish reaction upon reading this: "No! No! No! BOBO'S CORONAVIRUS FLAG versus SWAN FRIED RICE. This is horror!!!!" (My new publication is not appearing on my PhilPapers profile yet. If you want to know what is in my stream of consciousness, it is this: Should it not be appearing by now? Should it not? Should it not? Check it again! Check it again! Look: Christian List's new paper is in the new publications section. Mine is not there. Where is it? It's title is, what is it? what is it? Kundera and paradox of analysis, something like that. I can just imagine the reaction. "It is not as good as List's publication." "No, no, definitely not. But at least I understand it." "Oh yes, we must be fair these days and concede that we understand it, whereas we do not understand List." "But we feel, we feel List is better." "Feelings matter." Welcome to Swan Fried Rice level!!! You want some more stuff, 11.43: if List is so good, why does he not explain in plain English how to cure these people of this way of thinking? He's a pessimist, I think. A German philosophical pessimist. "They are what they are. I don't work on stuff like that." That's surely the examination question! And can any of them do modus ponens and how to ensure that they can?). (shrink)

Carel Fabritius left behind few but important works of art. We are concerned here with the View in Delft, and attempt to make two points about it. The first is that this small painting manages to break away from the classical perception of perspective, an endeavor informed mostly by new findings in the field of optics of the time. The second point, theoretically related to the first, stresses compositional elements that would bring View in Delft closer to a meditation on (...) the fleetingness of life, making it a "town-scape" vanitas. (shrink)

Diaristic, mixed notes on: John Ruskin's The Poetry of Architecture (1837) and Modern Painters (1885); Caravaggio, Victorian Aesthetes, G.K. Chesterton, and Tacita Dean; Jay Fellows' Ruskin’s Maze: Mastery and Madness in His Art (1981); Slavoj Žižek at Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, New York, USA, April 23, 2009, “Architectural Parallax: Spandrels and Other Phenomena of Class Struggle”; “Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice”, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, March 15-August 16, 2009; Janet Harbord, Chris Marker: La Jetée (...) (2009); The Politics of the Envelope, Princeton Envelope Group (PEG), ARC504, Princeton School of Architecture, Princeton, New Jersey, USA, Friday, May 8, 2009; Rhode Island School of Design, Degree Project Reviews, Division of Architecture & Design, Providence, Rhode Island, USA, May 16, 2009; etc. (shrink)

Essay on the modern artistic ego as sponsored by the exhibition, "Gustav Courbet," February 27-May 18, 2008, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, USA. A version of this essay appeared in Gavin Keeney, "Else-where": Essays on Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011 (CSP, 2011), pp. 191-98.

Essays and documents in support of the works of Gaialight - DOCUMENTS: The Passion of Jeanne d’Art (2007) - Letter to Gaia (2007) - “Art as Such”: This is Not Pop ... (2008) - Writing Toward Darkness (2009) - Scarlett Words: Light America (2009) - The Darklight Elaboration (2010) - The Darklight Elaboration: Zeitgeist or Episteme? (2010) - Cam Girls (2011) - Brooklyn Buzz (2011) - Brooklyn Buzz: The Semi-divine Metropolis (2011) - Reconnaissance: Light War, Mass Surveillance, Video Games (2011) (...) - First Cause (2011) - Met Ladies (2011) - When Cam Girls Met Ladies (2011) / OUTTAKES (2007): 15 Questions About Editioned Art Photography (2007) - A Few Awkward Questions for Francesca Woodman (2007) - October Revolution (2007) . (shrink)

An essay on non-discursive forms of knowledge that inhabit art photography. A version of this essay appeared in Gavin Keeney, "Else-where": Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011 (CSP, 2011), pp. 209-26.

Review of “The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art 1910-37”, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, November 25, 2011-March 4, 2012. A version of this essay appeared in the Appendices of Gavin Keeney, Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture (CSP, 2014), pp. 153-57.

Since the stone age humankind has created masterworks which possess a mysterious quality of solidity and grandeur or monumentality. A Paleolithic Venus and a still life by Cezanne both share this monumentality. Michelangelo likened monumentality to sculptural relief, Braque called monumentality 'space', and Hans Hoffman, himself one of the masters, called monumentality 'pictorial depth.' The masters agreed on the import of monumentality, but none of them left a clear explanation of it. In 1943 Earl Loran published his classic book on (...) Cezanne's pictorial structure but, as I demonstrate, his explanation was misleading. This book provide a clear explanation, as did an earlier book by Robert Casper. This book also traces some history of monumentality with reproductions. It also explains how some painters achieved monumentality and how a student can attempt it. Pictorial space is created in the tension between pairs of opposing planes. Opposing planes pull against each other, each containing the other, paradoxically, within the flat surface of the canvas. Sculpture also can be 'plastic': opposing masses pull against each other, each containing the other and creating tension in the space which lies between them. Painting has other aspects like subject matter, expression, style and technique but pictorial space does not depend on these. Monumentality moves us profoundly and apparently has done so since the Paleolith. Using patients' vignettes, I show that there are profound parallels between the structure of a monumental work of art and the structure of an evolving personality. In Winnicott's words, such a personality has 'depth ... an interior space to put beliefs in ... an inside ... a space where things can be held ... the capacity to accept paradox [to contain opposites] ... room and strength ... and originality and the acceptance of tradition as the basis for invention'. A monumental painting also meets this description. I argue that monumental art provides a visual portrait of an evolving personality just as myth, as Freud and Jung both showed, provides a narrative portrait of an evolving personality. An evolving personality is perhaps humankind's most important creation; an underlying purpose of both myth and art is to help us achieve it. I demonstrate in this book that monumental art represented the evolving personality since at least 35,000 BC. Thus to understand monumentality is to better understand the personality and its history. (shrink)

This paper proposes a synthesis of mathematical logic, quantum ontology, and aesthetics to overcome the current crisis of nihilism. Drawing on Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, the author argues that the Universe (the Absolute), as a formal system, requires an "External Gaze" to perceive its own completeness. Humanity is defined not as a biological accident, but as a necessary network of non-algorithmic interfaces — a "Multiple Singularity." Through the lens of Quantum Field Theory and the "mind-stuff" concept, the paper explores how Art (...) acts as a universal pendulum, synchronizing individual consciousnesses into a unified celebratory gaze of the Absolute upon itself. This framework provides an ontological foundation for restoring human dignity against technocratic reductionism. (shrink)

Recentes estudos em história da ciência têm apresentado indícios de que é impossível estabelecer uma clara distinção entre estudos de óptica e de perspectiva linear quando nos referimos aos séculos XVI e XVII. Embora a perspectiva linear lidasse com a representação geométrica do espaço numa superfície bidimensional, estava, entretanto, estreitamente ligada a questões relativas à natureza da visão humana. Devemos considerar que, naquela época, o termo perspectiva era a tradução latina da palavra grega optikè, denotando a visão direta e distinta (...) que, para os gregos, revelava as coisas. Seu significado coexistiu com outros que designavam a técnica pictórica e, para distingui-los, era comum opor a perspectiva "comum” ou “natural” à perspectiva artificialis dos pintores. Essas diferentes expressões de perspetiva relacionaram-se de diferentes maneiras, cobrindo um largo espectro de possibilidades. Contudo, à medida em que se encerrou o século XVI, essas duas expressões de conhecimento passaram, gradativamente, a se referir a diferentes disciplinas. Parte desse processo esteve ligado às novas práticas matemáticas em que a óptica, a geometria e as artes buscaram redefinir seus campos de investigação, considerando questões de ordem teórica ligadas à visualização e à representação do espaço. Neste artigo, apresentamos alguns aspectos da estreita conexão entre perspectiva naturalis e artificialis, tendo por base um conjunto de documentos relativos à óptica e à perspectiva linear publicado nos séculos XVI e XVII. (shrink)

A pretending-to-be paper, a logbook with some notes for a future, more elaborate, interpretation of one of the most complex and stratified cinemas out there. 8 1/2 by Fellini has been read, seen and enjoyed in many different ways, yet I believe there is something else that dwells within it and that awaits to be theoretically explored. Nevertheless, this is the path that, in the future, I would like to develop: 8 1/2 accounts for the incessant and contradictory flow of (...) existence, and the subject's desperate attempt to bring order to it; but perhaps the answer is to let the confused roller roll its way, accepting the incomprehensible vortex of existence. (shrink)

This essay examines the collapse of traditional narrative structure within realist painting and positions Structural Omission as a framework for making that collapse visible. For centuries, storytelling — in literature, visual art, and culture — has relied on the arc Aristotle defined: beginnings, middles, and ends. Roland Barthes disrupted the author’s control by exposing the “hermeneutic code,” while Joan Didion chronicled the fragility of narrative as a way to contain lived experience. My work builds on this intellectual lineage but departs (...) from the idea that wholeness could ever be restored. Structural Omission is a framework originated by Deborah Scott that structures representational painting around omissions as compositional architecture — load-bearing absences that reveal the limits of perception, narrative, and knowing. It names a deliberate design strategy: paintings planned with intentional voids that disable the expectation of resolution, confronting the limits of both maker and viewer. In a cultural moment dominated by AI-generated completeness and seamless digital storytelling, this framework challenges realism to remain honest about what cannot be seen or known. It offers a post-certainty realism: precise, perceptually rigorous, yet built around absence as structure rather than accident. (shrink)

Structural Omission, originated by Deborah Scott, is a framework in contemporary realist painting that addresses the limits of observation, perception, and knowing. It is not an abstract theory but a practice formalized through three principles—Ground (Perceptual Limits), Structure (Structural Incompleteness), and Consequence (Narrative Without Resolution). It organizes painting around what can be seen and what remains beyond reach, holding the known and the unknowable together. This paper defines Structural Omission as an epistemological framework that repositions realism after the collapse of (...) certainty. By connecting art practice to the philosophical problem of incomplete knowledge, it proposes that absence within representation can operate as load-bearing structure rather than deficiency. Drawing on thinkers such as Michael Fried, Jacques Rancière, Roland Barthes, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the text argues that Structural Omission offers realism a conceptual survival strategy in an era of algorithmic completion and digital closure. (shrink)

This essay challenges the expectation that painting should provide catharsis or narrative closure. It argues that resolution does not guarantee truth and that representational art can hold its power without offering emotional payoff or moral clarity. Structural Omission is a framework I originated that structures representational painting around omissions as compositional architecture — load-bearing absences that reveal the limits of perception, narrative, and knowing. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s idea of cruel optimism and Jacques Rancière’s view of art as a reconfiguration (...) of the visible and the sayable, I position painting as an active structure that makes limits visible rather than compensating for them. In a culture fatigued by spectacle and meaning overload, this approach resists false wholeness and builds a different kind of stability: form without resolution. (shrink)

Tarkovsky recognizes these differences, saying that there is a contradiction with Lem's initial idea, because he was interested in the problems of inner life, spiritual problems, so to speak, and Lem was interested in the collision between man and Cosmos. In an ontological sense of the word, in the sense of the problem of knowing and the limits of this knowledge - it is about that. Lem even said that mankind was in danger, that there was a crisis of knowledge (...) when man did not feels ... This crisis is growing, a snowball, takes the form of various human tragedies, including scientists. (shrink)

Le film est un drame psychologique se déroulant à bord d'une station spatiale en orbite autour de la planète Solaris. Les trois membres de l'équipage ont des problèmes psychologiques. Le psychologue Kris Kelvin est envoyé là pour évaluer la situation, mais il fait face aux mêmes phénomènes mystérieux que les autres. Pour Tarkovsky, le conflit existentiel exposé par Lem n'était que le point de départ du développement de la vie intérieure des personnages. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.11405.49129.

from sensation to imposition of media tought.

Anemia, the syntoms of a great disease in the heart of society.

nevrosity for the dense social relations in urban context.

for a better literature, to understand literary tradition in Portugal.

semiology of social and global transformations on public relations and, by consequence, of human intimacy.

One after Other, Legionella and Covid have marked everyday life on Portugal and on the world in the last two-there years, creating a kind of vão (bay), rebaixamento, in the moeur of society and individuals.

Science fiction and futuristic reality beyond the Self.

actor progressing social life and scale on screen.

This article examines whether meaningful human authorship can survive full post-generation delegation to a generative AI system: a condition in which a human originates a concept, directs and iterates on its generation, evaluates and selects a result, but performs no subsequent modification of the output. The author’s earlier article, cited in the references, proposed a five-dimension agency framework for evaluating Zero-Edit practice. The present article takes a different approach: it examines the authorship question through five external approaches (Deng; Anscomb; Fritz; (...) Militsyna; Huang et al.), none of which was developed with full post-generation delegation as its central case. These approaches are not treated as equivalent tests: Anscomb supplies a theoretical analogy, while the others are assessed according to their distinct analytical aims. The analysis applies these approaches to the author’s own Zero- Edit practice as a boundary case, using primary sources rather than secondary summaries. It distinguishes creative agency, expressive control, and execution; engages two substantial counterarguments through first-person case evidence; and tests the practice against one of its own weaker instances, allowing that case to count against the thesis where warranted. The case does not establish authorship under any single framework. Under Deng’s approach, the conception is thin under Factor One, while Factor Two shows some iteration but does not establish the degree of control exercised over the generative process. The central finding is therefore that sufficient expressive control remains undemonstrated across these factors. Huang et al.’s standard reveals a separate evidentiary finding: without contemporaneous records of prompts, rejected outputs, and iteration, a Zero-Edit authorship claim cannot be demonstrated through process evidence and rests instead on retrospective self-report. (shrink)

Among the extant masterworks of Roman art, there is probably none that has generated more scholarly debate than the Portland Vase over the interpretation of its elegant frieze. No fewer than forty-four different theories attempting to interpret the scenes on the vase have appeared in the last 400 years. In the main, the theories fall into two categories, those relating the frieze to Greek myth, and those linking the figures to Roman personages. Moreover, there is no consensus whether the frieze (...) is two separate scenes or one continuous story. The obstacle to interpreting the frieze is that all but one of the figures lack identifying attributes. This paper will demonstrate (1) that in lieu of standard iconography, a synthesis of visual and literary tropes in the form of hidden letters, that is, cryptograms, tells the viewer how to read the frieze; (2) that scene A of the frieze illustrates specifically lines 26-30 of Catullus 64 by visually rendering the epithets and tropes used in those lines; (3) that visual reproductions of other tropes in Catullus 64 further substantiate the relationship between frieze and poem; (4) that scene B of the frieze is an intentional aberration from the poem; (5) that there is a complex and unfinished interaction between scenes A and B which the viewer must complete; and (6) that in the final analysis, the frieze duplicates both the theme and central structure of Catullus 64.10 . (shrink)

All interpretations of the Portland Vase frieze to date have failed to see, much less explain, a crucial figural attribute in the frieze, one that proves to be both explicit and explicatory, and whose location and appearance secures the identification of not one but, indeed, three figures. Furthermore, the attribute lies at the heart of a distinct schema of figural grouping and arrangement which has also gone unheeded in previous treatments of the Portland Vase frieze. By dint of this previously (...) unknown attribute, one can straightforwardly read the opening scene of the frieze using the attributes therein provided, but the opening scene only. To complete the task, a second methodology–that which I laid out in Arion in 1992–is a categorical sine qua non. One can, as I have already shown, successfully navigate the entire frieze using the second methodology alone but, as so many others have shown, not contrariwise. These new findings–the attribute and figural plan–are clear proof that the artistic vision of the Portland Vase was purposefully executed in a two-part program. (shrink)

Sarah Kane’s play 4.48 Psychosis presents a powerful account of mental illness (MI) that spotlights the intense struggles of the play’s protagonist. This work centres on examining mental illness via dramaturgical art, arguing for Kane’s portrayals of MI within 4.48 Psychosis as representing a radical—yet fitting—medium for encouraging societal analysis that shifts MI from an enduringly private sphere into the public, collective domain. 4.48 Psychosis (aka 4.48) as a performance is interrogated through a joint sociological-psychological lens: a Goffmanian analysis bolstered (...) by a philosophical-informed approach. Three interlinked sociopsychology themes are revealed: Isolation, The End, and Distortion and Medicalisation. Employing Foucault’s theories on power, knowledge, and the medical gaze, findings elucidate how medicalised discourses (re)shape and control the experience and treatment of MI. Led by Research in Drama Education’s emphasis on learning through theatre as a socially and emotionally engaged process, practical implications for theatre-art as a critical medium facilitating wider societal recognition and detailed understandings of MI are put forward. And—these are validated through examination of existing community mental health engagement initiatives that have utilised 4.48. Subsequent implications for blended sociopsychology theory and interpretive analysis underpinned by transdisciplinary research approaches are spotlighted for their value in generating new avenues of mental health understandings for the psychology-psychiatry disciplines and beyond. (shrink)

Philosophy of art, reflective practice of art and painting, meta-philosophy, meta-philosophical methods.

This paper explores how second-wave ubiquitous music (ubimus) practices can reanimate Hong Kong’s military and colonial histories, which have become absent in urban development. By transforming archival cartographic data of Hong Kong’s wartime sites into laser-etched discs to generate layered sonic textures, the paper introduces an evolving sound art project—Rings… Through Rings (2025)—aiming to reactivate the collective consciousness of the city’s historical sites. Through this project, participants become “audience-performers” who shape the sound via physical gestures and interpretive playback using turntables (...) and laser-etched discs. The work integrates sonic elements such as field recordings, composed material, ensemble improvisation, and real-time electronic music, all dynamically responding to audience actions, thereby treating physical heritage as an open and recursive becoming through ubiquitous musical practices. Lastly, this paper reflects on the social and cultural implications of this approach, arguing that ephemeral data, embodied listening, and open participation constitute an alternative ontological configuration of ubimus as memory, understood as an evolving, participatory practice of sonic recollection. (shrink)

Beginning with an unsolicited letter to Barnett Newman written by the Indian modernist F. N. Souza, this essay seeks to reframe our understanding of the decline of modernism. Art-historical consensus holds that, as the 1960s progressed, modernist art was swept aside by demands for political engagement to which it could not adapt. Souza's letter complicates this. On one hand, it criticizes Newman's latest paintings for expressing modernist values such as autonomy, transcendence, and universality, for amounting to the claim that ‘colour (...) is ethics’. But on the other, rather than abandoning such concepts, as did most advanced art in the 1960s, Souza demands another, political modernism, one capable of grounding itself in reflection on the movement's historical complicity with colonialism and racism. This was a difficult project, and I reject the view that it was inherently progressive; indeed, I draw out the reactionary attitudes to which it could all-too-easily lead. Souza's desire, by 1969, to move beyond these without abandoning the historicity of modernism positions him closer to Newman than his letter suggests. Both proceeded, in ways that refuse the schematic alternatives of traditional art history, by making work that addressed political reality through the reflexive critique of modernism itself. (shrink)

A Report on an Art Workshop held at the Maker Space in Edinburgh Future Institute on 3 December 2024. This led to the creation of a collaborative artwork by Goro Murayama and Miranda Anderson, along with the workshop participants, including Eeva Holt (EFI Postgraduate Experience Advisor), Mara Strang (EFI Interdisciplinary MA), Jimmy Turner (the Binks Hub) and Aisha Zealey (EFI Interdisciplinary MA). Supported by Peter Bentley (Maker Space), Jennifer Williams (Utopia Lab), and attended by Masahko Hara (Institute of Science Tokyo). (...) -/- Video Link of filming of Art workshop below; filmed for Anderson and Murayama by Ezra Coarse (Napier University) and with music by Hiroyuki Koide. (shrink)

Come entrare e leggere l’opera pittorico-visiva di Giancarlo Pavanello (Carlo Pave)?¹ L’arte di Pavanello — più concretamente le sue tavole qui esposte (loghismoí e Apocalisse), più che la concisione e la precisione di un haiku — è come uno zuihitsu nipponico, che significa letteralmente “seguire il pennello”, o seguire il filo di ciò che è sfero-grafico, in un flusso e riflusso inarrestabile di scrittura, spontaneamente, senza intenzionalità oggettiva, raccogliendo liberamente, ma senza trascurare un certo rigore concettuale, pensieri, eventi o dettagli (...) risibili che irrigano la sua poetica visiva. (shrink)

Loghismoí (“intoxicating or bewildering thoughts”—that is, thoughts, feelings, and memories that assail the mind, often arising without prior warning); Evagrius Ponticus (346–399/400 CE); the Book of Revelation; Jesus Christ (1st century); and Giancarlo Pavanello—all, in different ways, speak to those of us who are visually unseeing, or who have become so. Some of these terms, works, proper names, or aesthetic-spiritual experiences may, perhaps, be almost unknown or of little relevance to many of us gathered here. What matters, however, is that (...) each of them, in its own way and in its own time, can be understood as a kind of speleologist of the human spirit: each has mapped the anatomy of the soul—its virtues and its flaws—not as an accusatory denunciation, but through the force of word and gesture, in order to illuminate the lives of their contemporaries. (shrink)

This article examines the notion of discursive culture in industrial design by analysing entrepreneurial initiatives developed by graduates of the Industrial Design programme at the National University of La Plata, Argentina, between 2009 and 2019. Industrial design education in Argentina has historically emphasised project-based learning and creative autonomy. Yet, graduates increasingly face the challenge of positioning themselves within entrepreneurial ecosystems marked by economic uncertainty and shifting labour markets. This tension provides fertile ground for understanding how design knowledge and entrepreneurial logics (...) intersect. The research adopts a qualitative approach based on 28 in-depth interviews with graduates and the study of eight entrepreneurial cases embedded in the Buenos Aires design ecosystem. Through these narratives, the article investigates how graduates negotiate the cultural values of design practice in relation to the pragmatic demands of business development. The findings highlight three central dimensions. First, the systemic role of products within entrepreneurial projects, where artefacts function not only as market goods but also as cultural mediators. Second, the articulation of professional practice with life projects, showing how entrepreneurship becomes entangled with personal trajectories and aspirations. Third, the influence of the local socio-productive environment, which shapes opportunities, resources, and symbolic recognition. By introducing the concept of “discursive culture” into the analysis of design practices, this article contributes to bridging design studies, cultural discourse theory, and entrepreneurship research. This framework underscores the symbolic, cultural, and communicative dimensions of design beyond its technical and commercial functions. In doing so, it expands the discussion of design’s role in contemporary societies, particularly in Latin American contexts where design, culture, and the economy are deeply interwoven. (shrink)

In this chapter we introduce thinking about thinking as a method that can be used to inspire creative adventures in education and human service work. Thinking about thinking may be familiar to people involved in these fields. For example, there is extensive interest and active engagement in developing, teaching, using, learning from, and researching many types of thinking including reflective, reflexive, diffractive, critical, creative, philosophical, ethical, practical, instrumental, evidence-based, computational, design, and systems. In this chapter we build on and expand (...) the ways that thinking often takes place in education and human services and we foreground other possibilities for thinking in these fields. We describe and demonstrate thinking thinking experiments, and we report on what we learnt and the lessons for thinking in and about education and human service practice. We make the case for making space and having a dedicated place for thinking about thinking in education and human services work. This space and place for thinking should include thinking about the ways that thinking and practice in these fields are not typically thought about or done. It should also be a space and a place for actively engaging with the ever-growing and inexhaustible possibilities of thinking. We propose ‘thinking placements’ as a way of making this space and as a place for this thinking. We also argue that our ventures in thought inspired the assemblage of arts-based methods that we explore in ‘Creative Adventures in Education and Human Services: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3’. We suggest that thinking about thinking may spark similar creative adventures for readers of this chapter. (shrink)

This book is the first of a three-part series that focuses on how arts-based methods can be used to expand horizons for imaginative and ethical research and practice in education and human services. Each of the books are an assemblage of arts-based methods for creative adventures in education and human services. The chapters of the books describe, inhabit, and demonstrate the methods and document the multiplicities of insights, affects, and effects that emerged, and which include exploring the dynamically entangled relations (...) between people and contexts. -/- This book, Part 1, attunes readers in/to the adventurousness of the three-part series. It also includes chapters on theoretically informed creative/critical/collective/auto/ethnographic experiments in thinking, lip syncing, dialoguing on images, and making artworks. The chapters report on lessons from deploying these adventurous methods for creatively knowing and doing education and human services work. The methods also function as pedagogical spaces to inhabit, navigate, play with, play within, experiment with/in, and be productive and produced in, shedding light on how to generate spaces and find places for actively engaging with the ever growing, inexhaustible, energizing, exhausting, pleasurable, confronting, seductive, repulsive, and overwhelming possibilities of thought and action in education and human services. Readers are invited to engage with the chapters as research products to learn from and as works of art to escape into and find consolation, experience as a tonic, be invigorated, get inspired, feel joy, enter a pleasurable flow, see what sparks, and venture, play, wonder, create, and generate their own creative adventures in education and human services. -/- The three books (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) in this series are not organised around specific focused themes. Rather, each chapter in each book introduces and explores a method that is inhabited by the authors in a creative and speculative fashion to see what is generated. The Introduction/s and the 'Thinking Thinking' chapter in Part 1 are a good place to begin with each of the three books, and in turn, the 'Conclusion' chapter in Part 3 is a good place to close in reading each of the three books. The other chapters, however, are not in sequential order and accompany each other, and can therefore be read in any order. The authors invite readers to play and be adventurous with how they read, inhabit, and engage with the books. (shrink)

Unhappy is the land that needs an antihero for it is a land in crisis, without a clear morality, without truths. The antihero embodies competing values: on the one hand, antiheroes and antiheroines are born of a crisis; on the other, they exasperate it. Antiheroes could not exist without a crisis of values and worldviews. They reveal it through their very existence. To be an antihero, it is fundamental that the heroic model remains present, even in its absence. Brombert states: (...) ‘the antihero can exist only if the heroic model remains present in absentia, by preterition’ (Brombert 1999: 66). Antiheroes are still heroes, but decayed and controversial: while the heroes embody and defend their society’s values, antiheroes question them. Antiheroes would be heroes in a different kind of society, but the one in which they live rejects them, because they embody, show, and call into question its contradictions and controversies. Through Nietzschean concepts, such as the mask (Apollonian and Dionysian) and the Übermensch, the purpose of this chapter is to distinguish superheroes and antiheroes, with respect to their relationship to the concept of the mask, their society and their morality. The contemporary superhero’s reconfiguration will be traced and compared to similar events in The Dark Age of Comics of the mid-1980s. Comparing Dark Age antiheroes (Frank Miller’s Batman, Watchmen’s Rorschach) with contemporary films and comics like Marvel’s Civil War (2009 [2006-7]) and Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy (2005-12), it will be analysed how the perception of antiheroes and superheroes has changed. (shrink)

Superheroes are more than mere entertainment: like the mythological heroes they descend from, they carry symbolic, psychological, and philosophical implications, functioning as archetypes and iconic representations of the values and moral frameworks of their cultures. Yet the concept of the "superhero" is not immutable. While contemporary superheroes share certain traits with their Golden Age predecessors, their transformation over the decades has been profound, mirroring the evolution of Western society itself. The most radical turning point in the genre occurred during the (...) 1980s, a period of cultural and social crisis that saw the deconstruction of the "pure" superhero and the emergence of a darker, more violent and morally ambiguous figure: the antihero. This revolution — widely regarded as the most significant in the history of the genre — ushered in what is commonly known as the Copper Age, or Dark Age, of comics. From this point on, superheroes became more realistic, their relationship with society more controversial, and the symbolic implications of the mask more complex and layered. However, this transformation was not without precedent. Two decades before the landmark works of Frank Miller and Alan Moore reshaped the genre, Stan Lee — alongside Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and Bill Everett — had already begun challenging the established conventions of the superhero. During the Silver Age, Lee introduced a second generation of heroes that were fundamentally different from the DC demigods of the Golden Age: monstrous figures like the Hulk and The Thing, social outcasts like the X-Men, and struggling everyman characters like Spider-Man. These were superheroes burdened by psychological trauma, alienation, and conflict — not defenders of the status quo, but characters at odds with the very society they sought to protect. Lee's innovation lay in his commitment to realism. He wanted heroes without secret identities, heroes who paid rent, teenagers searching for their place in the world, ordinary families confronting extraordinary circumstances. Yet this growing realism carried an unforeseen consequence: the more human the superhero, the more visible and disturbing the nonhuman, monstrous dimension lurking beneath the mask. The experience of the mask — its psychological weight, its connection to trauma and duality — became a central and unsettling theme rather than a narrative convenience. This essay argues that Stan Lee's creations anticipated the defining characteristics of the antihero years before Moore's Watchmen or Miller's The Dark Knight Returns canonized them. By examining some of Lee's most iconic characters, it investigates whether the seeds of the Dark Age revolution were already present in the Silver Age, and whether Lee's heroes can legitimately be read as proto-antiheroes — complex, fallible, and deeply human figures who fundamentally redefined what it means to wear a mask. (shrink)

We are already living in the apocalypse. Wars, nuclear threats, and environmental and humanitarian crises shape our present, with the Doomsday Clock now only 85 seconds from midnight. As Webley writes, “the apocalyptic mood has returned to haunt us. [...] It’s already here, if we choose to look; we can see it clearly” (2020, pp. 270-271). Among these threats, global warming and its resulting ecological disasters appear both imminent and inevitable. In response, dystopian fiction has gained traction across popular culture, (...) resonating with an audience that senses its proximity to collapse. Unlike utopias, which suggest an ideal but unrealizable world, dystopias feel disturbingly plausible. As Muzzioli notes, “it is not futile or trivial: we immediately understand that it concerns us closely” (2021, p. 26). This cultural trend is reflected in video games, where titles like Fallout, Deus Ex, and The Division portray fragmented societies and post-apocalyptic futures. Among these, Horizon and The Last of Us stand out for both their commercial success and narrative depth. In Horizon, players explore a 31st-century world where civilization has collapsed and been artificially reborn, marked by giant machine-creatures. The Last of Us presents a darker vision: a world devastated by a fungal infection, where humanity clings to survival. Both games engage directly with environmental discourse, offering a critique of contemporary society and a warning about ecological catastrophe. This essay explores Horizon and The Last of Us as reflections on societal collapse and the consequences of climate change, analysing their game worlds, protagonists, and antagonists within the framework of dystopian storytelling. (shrink)

A global, interdisciplinary dive into superheroes and their cultural power across media. -/- Offering a global and interdisciplinary perspective on the superhero genre across comics, television, and film, this book presents a diverse range of contemporary superhero scholarship. It combines close readings of iconic characters like Batman, Iron Man, and The Watchmen with critical analysis of broader cultural and societal discourses. -/- The volume explores how superheroes reflect and problematize ideology, the military-industrial complex, and notions of public and private responsibility. (...) Key themes include identity construction through secret identities and masking, as well as cultural and personal grief and trauma in relation to race and politics. Designed for students, scholars, and fans alike, this work reveals the enduring mainstream appeal of superheroes and their complex intersections with global popular culture. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence has long become a reality and presents us with new, complex ethical questions: How does AI reshape our understanding of humanity? Who bears responsibility for autonomous decisions? What are the implications of AI for media and culture, the world of labour, politics, sustainability, and surveillance? What impact does robotics have on human beings and psychological well-being? This volume provides concise answers and solid foundational knowledge on ethics in the context of apparently 'intelligent' machines. Through practical case studies, supporting (...) materials, and reflective questions, the book is ideally suited as a didactic guide for use in schools and higher education. (shrink)

Статья посвящена фигуре московского художника, полиглота и поэта-экспериментатора Вилли Мельникова (1962–2016) и совместному с автором выставочному проекту аудиолюменоскриптов «Тексто-ландшафты» (галерея S-Art, 2004). Опираясь на психоаналитическую оптику Жака Лакана, автор рассматривает изобретённые Мельниковым жанры — муфтолингву, слова-кентавры, лингвогобелены и люменоскрипты — как художественную практику, выстроенную вокруг нехватки в символическом порядке языка. Отдельное внимание уделяется введённому Мельниковым понятию «умолкнувшего языка», которое сближается с фрейдовским описанием вытесненного как не уничтоженного, а продолжающего действовать в скрытых формах. Сама выставка интерпретируется как психоаналитическая сцена, где три (...) несводимых друг к другу слоя — фотография, текст и музыка — образуют структуру, соответствующую регистрам реального, символического и воображаемого. Статья носит также мемориальный характер, приуроченный к десятилетию со дня смерти художника. // The article examines the Moscow-based artist, polyglot, and experimental poet Willi Melnikov (1962–2016) and the exhibition project of audio-lumenoscripts, "Text-Landscapes" (S-Art Gallery, 2004), co-created with the author. Drawing on the psychoanalytic framework of Jacques Lacan, the author treats Melnikov's invented genres — muftolingva (a portmanteau language), word-centaurs, linguistic tapestries, and lumenoscripts — as an artistic practice organized around a lack in the symbolic order of language. Particular attention is given to Melnikov's own concept of the "silenced language," which resonates with the Freudian notion of the repressed as not destroyed but continuing to operate in hidden forms. The exhibition itself is interpreted as a psychoanalytic scene in which three mutually irreducible layers — photography, text, and music — form a structure corresponding to the registers of the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary. The article also carries a memorial dimension, marking the tenth anniversary of the artist's death. (shrink)