Glimpse

Although the writing of Estonian novelist Eduard Vilde has been described as feminist in asserting women’s right to individuality and equality, Mari, the protagonist in his 1916 novel Maekula Piimamees (Milkman of the Manor), does more than merely defend her standing alongside the male characters. An analysis based in Derridean differance reveals that she is instead a trickster character who delivers dramatic irony that subverts the norms of latefeudal Estonia, which would otherwise write her as dutiful wife and subservient maid. This becomes apparent through the novel’s ‘here-and-there’ narrative logic, which is apparent in a Bakhtinian threshold chronotope that underpins characterisations that reflect Merleau-Ponty’s constitutive liminality to form Mari as self-aware and self-confident in juxtaposition to the oblivious and anxious personalities of the male characters.

In the following article, the author examines the audiovisual design of Theo Angelopoulos’ filmmaking practice. The emphasis is on the close analysis of sequences and larger entities. The approach creates a heightened sensitivity to matters of analysis that cover similarities and differences, as well as causal and empirical reflections. The aim is to create a web of associations for these perspectives and perceive a wider approach for Angelopoulos’ films. The meaningful appropriation of various theoretical points of views requires sufficient correspondence and dialogical proneness to an understanding of the conceptual, formal and aesthetic legitimacy of his films. The approach consists of understanding Angelopoulos’ audiovisual design as a central force in the cinematic table of arrangements, and the aesthetics in the process of structuring expression.

Artists try to communicate precise ideas or concepts about certain social or political problems in order to change their context and surroundings. In this research the focus is on examples of Mexican Electronic artworks which specifically generate stages of communication. The methods applied to study these artifacts were observation, interview and analysis of certain art works and then selectively comparing different artists and their artistic works to understand, with the help of an adequate qualitative research approach, as to how the art communicated with human viewers. We concluded that communication of an abstract image could lead to different meanings. Interpretation depends on the cultural context of the viewer, age and nationality, among other important factors. Nonetheless all Mexican electronic artists studied in this research have a positive message for society, including justice and the preservation of environment and several related inspiring ideas.

This paper entails the issue around total visibility of media vs. paradoxically invisibility of “real world.” From Kant onwards it entails that it is impossible to know the world in its totality, it is a transcendental idea that cannot be cognized, “thing in itself” (noumeno); therefore, its representation is at the mercy of the illusion or fantasy. The immanence of the world and its representations have been transposed by the infinite range of possibilities -replicants and mutants- of the media (permanent presence, “without death”). To paraphrase of Borges's idea (Aleph), the media are the non-objective object that resides in the basement of the house of “Carlos Daneri,” “the place where they are, without being confused, all the places of the world,” “multum in parvo” (= much in a small place) according to Cusano cited there, the media are so powerful with their convictions to be able to cover everything that happens at the same time and in uninterrupted sequences, producing active realities even before they were possible, resulting an ontological naturalization similar to oblivion, alienation, etc. to cover the nothingness. Maybe it is that the media are nothing but fascinating and hallucinatory ways of producing “aesthetic truths,” are such fictions powerful that end up preventing us from discerning with clarity and distinction, things among themselves and between their representations, between the truthful (Sachverhalt=facts) and false representations, etc.?

The article presents a phenomenological approach to the analysis of work experience from the notion of context of meaning and context of experience in finite areas of meaning in the work of Alfred Schütz. From this approach, a three-dimensional analysis of the world of work (Wirkwelt) is proposed, where work is simultaneously considered as a structure, as a social action and as an intersubjective environment. With this, it is sought to deepen a better understanding of the heterogeneous phenomena of the world of work.

Self-imaging has become a ubiquitous part of global networking and selfies have an impact on visual culture and portraiture, since they challenge the aesthetics of self-representation. The differences between a self-portrait and a selfie are not solely in the manner they are produced but also in the way they are structured, distributed and acknowledged by society. A self-portrait is not the same as a selfie; there is a difference in their origin. The definition of a selfie, given by the Oxford dictionary, is a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media. While the definition of self-portrait is “a portrait of an artist produced or created by that artist.” The aim of this paper is to describe the way self-representation has changed in relation to the media, its distribution and consumption. In this case, the speed of the information flow does not allow for a long contemplation, the seduction of the selfie lies in the attraction towards the ephemeral and overexposed, the hyper realistic version of a person. The mass reproduction of objects, images included, is the trace of modernity; it has become a global cognitive process. Nevertheless, the postmodern legacy is the rapid production and disposal of stories and meaning. The selfie has served as an attempt to answer some questions about the changes within an esthetic experience, where time is important in order to discriminate diverse layers of significance.

This article aims to analyze the relationship between human beings and artificial intelligence through the movie “Marjorie Prime,” released in 2017 during Sundance Film Festival. Martin Heidegger's thoughts on Dasein and human nature and derived studies from Alan Turing's perspective on Artificial Intelligence and Humanity, as well as perspectives on posthumanism and transhumanism and their social implications, will be contrasted in order to discuss alterity and its presence in artificial intelligence. Hence, in this article we ask how it is possible to understand the alterity found between Marjorie, the protagonist of the film, and a holographic artificial intelligence created with the purpose of replacing her deceased husband, Walter. This study will begin with assumptions about the question of technology in the Heideggerian conception of Dasein and Being, as well as the view of technology as a current mode of being in postmodernity. Our methodology combines a bibliographical review and also an analysis of the audiovisual content previously quoted.

Examples given in this paper deal with print media, but the argument applies to all media. These examples illustrate structural-linguistic principles, principles that may be extended to any medium. The approach is structuralist.The history of handwritten and printed texts in the West is an inseparable history of punctuation and lettering. Written and printed texts represent spoken language: letters are representations of segmental-phonemes (linguistically meaningful sounds); graphemic punctuation represents meaningful supra-segmental phonemes (intonation, pitch, pause, etc.).Alphabetical, graphemic representation in the West has through the ages developed many arbitrary systems of grammatic punctuation to show speech, but the semantics of speech representation remains under-developed. This is no less true of digital media as of print media. Digital print media are particularly vulnerable to ambiguity. Emoticons and emojis came about of necessity. Just as early-print punctuation was primarily invented by printers and printers’ devils, not scholars, so too emoticons are Silicon-Valley formalization of user-invented semantic punctuation. :-) becomes [smiley emoji] or [smiling alien emoji]. :-( becomes [frowning emoji] or [frowning alien emoji], and so on—and ambiguity is the hothouse of error and misreading that affects all media. We should not be surprised. It is said that a similar devil, Titivillus, caused medieval manuscript scribes to make errors in their copying.I am specifically interested in the ramifications of semantic punctuation on philosophical texts—above all, irony, though sarcasm, ridicule, double entendre, derision, mockery, satire, scorn, sneering, scoffing, gibing, taunting, acerbity, causticity, hate, trenchancy, etc., as well as positive expressions such as love, amusement, friendliness, approval, sincerity, etc. are also of semantic-punctuation representational importance. Does the failure of traditional written and printed tests to reflect, for the most part, semantic values handicap printed representational discourse? In fact, can the handicapped discussion of profound ideas be adequately represented graphemically and philosophical inquiry limited without representation of the full range of human linguistic communication?Representation of irony in print has long escaped writers and scholars. In the 17th century, John Wilkins in An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) proposed, among other semantic punctuations, an inverted exclamation mark (¡) to indicate irony: “That is terrific work¡” for a job poorly done. “What a lovely hat you have¡” said with sarcastic irony to someone sporting a ridiculous hat. (Later, an inverted question mark was suggested for ironic statement, ¿, but confusion with Spanish inverted question marks makes it a less attractive alternative).Wilkins’ term “philosophical language” refers to language as printed representation, not speech. His argument is an early reference to what I have elsewhere argued is the failure of “bookish philosophy” that has come to typify academic philosophy, for example, the gibberish of Heidegger, Derrida, post-structuralists, post-modernists, post-humanists, numerous analytic and “linguistic” philosophers, and many others.One possible way out of these difficulties is a process of mediation, unmediation, and immediation.

Post-market economies are driven by ownership or shareholding interests. We may consider ourselves to be living in societies driven by investment blocks - there is no doubt in our minds, given our awareness of the information blocks that compose media content, that the interests of these investment quarters in a globalized geo-economy is what determines how news is presented and consumed. What are the characteristics of investment-driven media scenarios? Our concept of media scenario differs from information dispersal models in brand capitalism and media franchise (Chomsky 2002; Golding et al 2012)? The disintegration of values of social responsibility in journalism is also apparent in the rise of investment driven journalism, with its absolute dependence on the mirror neuronal mechanics of social behavior, where the individual likes falling in with performance, and post-truth dialogue. But there are also options and limits of consensus within such discursive practice, and selective attention as the consumer betrays preference for information. We hypothesize that the new information media is a product of investment acts, and is fluid by nature, never innocent, and is always conditioned by local interest factors, and is as Barnett argues in a paper, a simulacrum of shareholder values (Barnett 2009).

The dialogue in this paper is aimed at reflecting the form of representation of The Other within the cinematography from the philosophical point of view. For this, we support our study in Ethics as the first philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. The questions that trouble this study are: What is otherness? Who is the other? Why is it necessary to think about otherness in cinematography?Here we reflect on the recognition of the Other, of the different individual, of the foreign. Cinema allows to recognize the existence of other subjects, from a double look, as spectators, but also as creators. What motivates the reflection of otherness from the human relationships that are interwoven, as well as the cultural character of all perception, referring to the notion of the other as interior to the field of being.

The purpose of this research is to show part of the Mexican electronic art scenario, which in many cases is produce with limited resources, low-cost materials and free and open source data and software. What characterized the most this artistic works is the concept and the main idea, which is related to the Latin American context, because of that, these works of art are unique. The main statement of this research is to find evidence of the importance of the concept despite the materials, more than the spectacle that some works could offer to an audience with unlimited resources. Through this, an analysis of Electronic Art as an expression of social conditions take place.

This keynote address is about the supply, maintenance and allocation of fungible, vulnerable human bodies—what American President Donald Trump would categorize as the shitholes of the world. Underlying our modern times is a large, unsolved problem about what is really going on in the world. I use the novel theoretical lens of Apartheid Studies to appreciate how we have neglected to read, recognize and call out the persistent circuits of apartheid that are at the heart of global capitalist modernity. Our contemporary age, built on interoperable digital networks, tends to reinforce global forms of apartheid. Apartheid Studies is a new field of studies that makes it possible to expose these circuits. Whereas human beings are human because we all possess a kind of strongly encrypted password which we reserve to give or not to give—so that we feel relatively protected and free to be what we want—this password protection has been eroded by institutions and powerful elites. Modernity itself, by its very nature, emerges when we start to share our passwords with strangers. Passing on the control of the passwords of our being to strangers causes global apartheid. Global capitalist modernity, expressed in invasive technology, generally undermines human beings’ sense of self, immunity, inviolability, indivisibility, and replaces it with social media and an internet of things which are predicated on sharing our privacy with strangers. I propose new emphases on restorative forensics and literacies that are appropriate to the task of generating a scholarship of the future that is ethical and opposed to systemic injustice, that exposes global exploitation, racism, deception, and corruption, and that promotes just worlds.