Glimpse

In this paper we offer some considerations about the Anthropocene as the period in Earth’s history marked by the presence of the human being as a geological factor, which is especially apparent when considering the products of urbanization: paved roads and night-time illumination when the Earth is viewed from space. Both factors show the scale of human presence on Earth and the corresponding impact on it as our environment. Building on these factors, we reflect on the relationship between art and the consciousness of the anthropocenic character of the epoch. The main point is that the contribution of art to localized or particular ecological changes as well as to changes in the way we think and behave thereby makes both art and human nature ecological.

Chilean poet, visual, conceptual, environmental artist, and filmmaker, Cecilia Vicuña, revalorizes the ancient Incan technology of quipu as a gathering of originary emptiness. In this empty core our essential connectedness can be realized. Vicuna’s complementary dialectic of openness and interdependence is theorized by North American philosopher, Murray Bookchin, as an ecology of freedom in which human being becomes aware of itself as nature’s own self-expression. This paper wonders the role of art in today’s field of intensifying ecological crisis and economic injustice and suggests that it may only be the art and activity that requires our participation in order to effectuate itself that has the power to heal our calcified discrete identities and return us to our evolutionary origins in an ecology of interdependence.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the way in which art can disrupt the subject’s everyday experience of the world and self. The proposal starts from the hypothesis that art offers experiences of embodied disrupted reality, and this statement is based on the parallelism between certain artistic experiences and certain psychological conditions that are known as dissociative disorders (concretely, depersonalization and derealization), which challenge the subject’s sense of reality and self, and lead the subject to experience some level of detachment and a sense of loss of familiarity with respect to the world and the self. These aspects are also particularly felt in immersive environments. Immersive technologies (virtual and augmented reality) offer an important laboratory for perception and sensoriality, taking into consideration the embodied basis and the first-person perspective of the user-experimenter. In this context, art offers a series of strategies that allow the user to undergo a shift in experience, affecting the sense of embodiment and reality. To explore these notions, I refer to some phenomenological implications of the experience of dissociative disorders and the interrelation between art, technology, and dissociative disorders. Finally, I offer an analysis of three artistic interdisciplinary projects (“Systems,” by Briand, “Labyrinth Psychotica,” by Kanary, and “Decelerator Helmet,” by Potthast”), taking into account the particular ways of embodiment and sense of reality they trigger in the user. Based on the parallelism between art and dissociative disorders and its dialogue with immersive technologies, this article aims to contribute to a phenomenology of embodied disrupted reality from art.

This article examines how the human perception of knowledge is structured in the empirical world. It is often argued by scientists that facts in this empirical world can be perceived, which makes us believe that this world is an objective world. However, the human way of making sense of the world is individual and embodied, which causes the creation of an individual world for every human: a body-world. The empirical world is in this case a shared space for multiple bodies that agree on the causality of certain events and objects in that space. Every body-world therefore has its own partial perspective on the knowledge in this shared space, which is formed by the physiology of the body, the cultural background, and the identity of the person. The theater has the power, through the techniques of re-enactment and disruption, to give its audience insight in other situated knowledges from different partial perspectives. It can therefore connect different situated knowledges and create ecological knowledge: the awareness of the connected network of knowledges that is produced in various body-worlds on what is happening in the shared space. Only then can we emancipate knowledge and embrace the various partial perspectives that this shared space of body-worlds has to offer.

The neglect of environmental reporting in television programming in Nigeria has led to a predicament. As global interest and attention mounts, with the Western media playing a positive and vital role in how the environment can impact the lives of people now and in the future, television stations in Nigeria fail to play a constructive role in enhancing public understanding by communicating information on the environment. Consumers of news and society in general do not seem to understand the broad challenges posed, particularly by the impact of indigenous stone crushing, an activity that is fast becoming a thriving business venture in recent years for many people. This study seeks to examine the role and the frequency of coverage of television environmental news reporting in Jos city, particularly in relation to public perception of indigenous stone crushing by women in Jos city. The study is anchored in the Agenda-setting Theory and the Perception Theory, which explains how people make sense of the words and images they get from the media. The paper provides a content analysis of three television stations in Jos city and a focus-group discussion on public perception of environmental reporting in television programming. The study shows that there is an increasing depletion of rock formations, endangering indigenous culture and the aesthetics of Jos city, even while the rocky formations serve as high altitude points for broadcast masts and satellites. There is also an increasing inability to restore the environment in terms of land reclamation and other restorative or protective actions. It recommends that television stations should provide the platform for discussing and understanding issues that are germane to the environment through improved, forthright, and high-quality environmental reporting.

The philosophical context of media shifts is found in production details that occur during a cusp period of media change, when an older medium is supplanted by a newer one. The purpose here is to remove media barriers that stand between the thing-in-itself and the mediated knower. The point is not to mediate, but, first, to unmediate through detailed analysis and practice, then to immediate. The point is not to embody one’s self in media, but to disembody today’s reader trapped in Renaissance perspective. Visual tropes of Renaissance title-page frames, for example, set a pattern of participation that transforms the reader from an active to passive viewer. The Renaissance printed book is a building in which a text is stored. The architecturally-positioned reader enters through a portal on the first page. A medium is best understood from the inside, by doing rather than observing, accepting that theory arises from praxis. If we were to shed mediated communication, what would our attitude towards the natural world be? A media epoché that suspends mediated communication would be uncomfortable for those who had become dependent on such media. Heidegger and Derrida claim that it is necessary to cross out (sous rature) the printed word “Being” (“Being) because it is “inadequate but necessary.” But all words are inadequate and necessary. A text has two simultaneous and contradictory aspects: textual autonomy and intertextuality. The inability of the printed page to capture Heidegger’s meaning is not a failure of typography or language, but the consequence of pretentious typographical trickery.

The purpose of this article is to present some central phenomenological remarks that are pertinent to the ongoing debate concerning mediatization theory. There are two extreme views in this discussion. First, proponents of mediatization theory argue that late modern (Western) societies are increasingly dependent on media and their logic. Second, some scholars see “mediatization” as an umbrella term for loosely connected descriptive studies of present-day media culture. This article introduces a third view of the topic. According to the argument presented here, the concept behind mediatization theory is valid but erroneously defined in terms of dependence relations of cause-effect type. To overcome this, mediatization theory should rely on Ingarden- and Searle-style social ontology and use ground-consequent dependence as its main explanatory tool. This approach also proposes that re-mediation and social institutions created by re-mediation are the characteristics of a mediatized society.

In this phenomenological analysis I weave together the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Heidegger while considering course pedagogy. I examine how pedagogy has been shaped by twentieth century events and how the residual language and discourse continue to prevent us from developing liberatory practices.

In the age of technology, electronic devices are not only tools but also means of communication. Some particular manifestations of communication have been thoroughly successful; such is the case of the so-called "meme.” The article proposes to analyze the phenomenon, considering the “meme” from Peirce’s pragmatist phenomenology (phaneroscopy). All different perspectives seem to direct our attention to the meaningful aspect of expression of the “meme,” and thus, we will discuss the different implications that distinguish the social media concept, through a phenomenological analysis, from its biological concept counterpart.

In the following exposition, we distinguish between the experience of viewing a single cinematographic shot from the experience of viewing a sequence of shots and a whole film. Both experiences together comprise the full-fledged cinematographic experience, but, they are very different from each other. Our focus here is on the experience of viewing a single shot. Obviously, the theoretical concern with the film as a global narrative process tends to minimize the importance of the single shot in itself; yet, the analysis of the basic experience of viewing a single shot allows use of the concept of aesthetic illusion, which is basic for understanding cinematographic effects, a main theme in current film and media studies. In other words, full comprehension of the cinematographic experience demands taking as first and foremost the local, non-narrative experience of viewing a single shot. Anything else comes after that.

This paper examines the phenomenon of (understanding) music in relation to time and time-consciousness based on the philosophies of Augustine, Brentano and Husserl. They analyzed music, or more precisely, the melody of tones and rhythm in their theories of time and time-consciousness, because the process of perceiving music uncloaks the phenomenon of time-understanding.

The neuroscientific proposal known as "Hypothesis of the Predictive Brain" [HPB] is contrasted with other hypotheses, specifically, the “Hypothesis of the Features Recognizer Brain” [HFRB]. The main advantages of HPB and its overall rationale are grounded in the concept of the “active brain,” and its relation to human action. This account appears in Andy Clark’s action-oriented version of this HPB. My aim is to show that this notion of the active brain produces a concept much closer to the Marxist idea of the phenomenological experience of the individual and social action; it helps us to further deepen our understanding of living beings, and has strong implications. I conclude that HPB is a sound hypothesis, inescapable and, especially in its action-oriented version, valuable to the cognitive sciences and philosophy, as well as to any other human activity.

Though there have been significant comparative studies on Edgar Allen Poe’s influence on Jorge Luis Borges, there has been very little written regarding Nathaniel Hawthorne’s and J. L. Borges’ common interests on the question of romance as a mode of artistic representation. Borges’ analysis of Hawthorne’s short story “Wakefield” reveals much about the commonalities these two authors share in their approach to fiction. It is not only Borges’ acknowledgement of his affinity to Hawthorne’s approach to fiction in this particular essay, but several of Borges’ short stories themselves provide further insight on the common threads these two short story writers share in representing fiction.

J. G. Ballard (1930-2009) and Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) were very much contemporaries. They closely shadow one another’s views, the one from an artistic, the other from a philosophical perspective, on the effects of technology, particularly media, upon human psychology. With the twenty-first century Baudrillard saw a media implosion as assuming critical mass. The media plays a role in the shaping of our apparent reality, but is itself only simulacrum, bearing no true resemblance to anything but subsuming everything in its voracious hunger for novelty. Ballard demonstrates the psycho-sexual dimensions of psychopathy resultant from becoming caught in a feedback loop, lost in the media labyrinth that has become inseparable from our determinations of reality. The actuality and the story constructed about it, now indistinguishable from one another, have become dangerous doppelgangers. The masters have become the slaves. Fear is exacerbated in the polis by manipulation through mass media, which condemns violence and at the same time lives upon it like a vampire. The psychopathy of the modern mediated subject is linked to an overstimulation by mass media, diffracted through the prostheses which have come to define the limits of our imagination.

Many forms of the religious life are shaped by a painful duality, whether that between the soul and God, the conditioned and the unconditioned, or the individual and the Absolute. But there exist philosophies and spiritual disciplines in which such dualities are deemed illusory and are to be dispelled in the quest for a more primordial or inclusive unity. In his Phenomenology of Spirit for instance, Hegel outlines both the origin of the apparent split between the finite self and the eternal, along with its resolution. Heavily informed by Hegel, the thought of John Dewey is also preoccupied with overcoming several longstanding philosophical dualities. The mission of this essay is to explore Dewey’s insights on art and religion in order to heal the divisions which so often accompany the spiritual life. I aim to both unpack and illustrate the relevance of Dewey’s mature thought by employing the one artistic medium he ignored: film.

Computer technologies are riding a golden trend in terms of innovation. New computer devices are emerging and they directly aim to extend the subject’s living body (Leib) beyond the natural limits of its mere flesh. Some of these devices can be used to recreate perceptual organs in other places of the world. Of special interest are teledildonic devices, remotely controlled dildos, which provide tactual sensations that simulate part of a subject’s body as being relocated in another place, enabling a subject to “connect” and to “play” with a second subject as if they were actually in the same place at the same time; in other words, to engage in remote sexual activity. Thanks to internet connectivity, it is now possible to have control of the actions of a distant dildo and to have, at the same time, tactual and visual feedback by way of sensors and 360-degree cameras mounted on the device. This technology has the potential to re-shape our living body and, in so doing, re-shape our affections as well as our perception of the world. Phenomenological and post-phenomenological analysis makes it possible to study the social, psychological, and phenomenological effects of such technologies.

The objective of this paper is to present an approach we will call, “critical art practice,” which we understand as an art form that raises awareness and generates community participation. In the case surveyed here we focus on the tree devastation in the city of Puebla, Mexico. The practical input of this proposal consists of designing “e-Tree,” a mobile app that allows users, through mobile phone images, to inform or share with others, in real time, information about excessively pruned trees or trees being cut unnecessarily in a specific location. The e-Tree app runs on Android devices, but it will be ported to iOS and Windows. It enables users to easily store and share photo images and facilitates the documentation of the location photographed and the capture date. Another feature of the app will show users the pruned trees nearest to their location and display pictures that other people have taken of the affected tree(s). These images may be downloaded, edited, and further disseminated. Moreover, users will be invited to intervene into the physical situation of the affected trees, and their actions and results can also be posted on the app. The theoretical framework employed in this critical art practice is based on The Force of Art (2004) by Krzysztof Ziarek, who engages with “critical art” and proposes a “power-free art.” The paper analyzes these theoretical frameworks of critical and power-free art theories and points to a way of conceptualizing the participative and “critical art practice” proposed here.