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Abstract: Through the lens of ugliness, the purpose of this Master’s thesis is to explore a potential model of a new unrestricted aesthetics. I, hereby, refer to an aesthetics beyond its canonical order, an individualistically-driven scheme of standards or perhaps no standards at all. All can be simplified with Eco’s quote on the opposition of the beautiful and the ugly: ’A beautiful nose shouldn’t be longer than that or shorter than that, on the contrary, an ugly nose can be as long as the one of Pinocchio, or as big as the trunk of an elephant, or like the beak of an eagle, and so ugliness is unpredictable, and offers an infinite range of possibility’. While the aesthetics of beauty has already positioned framework of rules in regards to proportion, symmetry, and harmony, the aesthetics of ugliness has no particular guidelines and limitations whatsoever. Unlike the beautiful, what we perceive as ugly doesn’t have its lawfulness, because for a long time in the history of art, ugliness was just the opposite face of beauty. As a consequence, the ugly embodies a big category of undetermined standards in visual arts and culture, which leads to it becoming a large unmapped territory of boundless autonomy. The ugly is in that context the key to facing and unleashing our phenomenological fears of bleak dark deformed realities that lie unchallenged and unaddressed on account of ugliness’ taboo status. Thus, when familiarised, I believe ugliness in art has a powerful impact, a quality that we have to yet begin to understand to get a full image of ourselves, for if we rely on beauty, as we did for such a long time in history, we are depriving ourselves of a true holistic proportion in art.
Keywords: art, man, ugliness, new, aesthetics, beauty, artist, time, image, Dada, history, context, different, body, personal, culture, transform, political, philosophy, standard, perspective.
Published in RUNG: 10.05.2024; Views: 5; Downloads: 0
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Abstract: Mobility, in the sense of freedom of persons choosing to move or reside in a state in which they have no prior citizenship, was one of the four original “freedoms” defined in the treaty that ratified European Union member states in 1957.1 In the past decade, this particular freedom, the freedom of movement, appears to have become significantly eroded. Mobility in the sense of migration, that is, mobility of persons for reasons of residency or employment, has become a point of contention among member states that it has divided more than unified, with measures affecting immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers featuring at the core of recent electoral agendas. Certain member states’ deterrence of the mobility of migrants from outside the EU has resulted in the return to protocols and practices of controlling movement into and out of sovereign territories, among the most conspicuous of which has been the re-establishment of a – by now largely defunct – network of nation-state borders. And while the reappearance of new walls, barricades and barbed wiring alongside certain nation-state borders since the mid-2010s have made headlines, there have been other measures with less press and physical visibility that have been set in place to manage and enforce mobility.2 The photographic identity document, meaning a document of state-issued identity certification, has become one such mobility management measure.
Keywords: cultural history, migration studies, history of art, history of visual culture, media archaeology, media studies
Published in RUNG: 12.02.2024; Views: 465; Downloads: 0
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Abstract: In an era of total surveillance, being in possession of a biometric ID document can still result in denial of one’s basic civil protections and human rights. The discovery of systematic errors in state-implemented facial recognition programs—such as in recognizing faces of color (Joy Buolamwini)—suggests the failure of current practices of global intelligence and mobility. This paper offers an archaeological investigation of the contemporary photo ID document. Returning to its invention in the 1920s, it examines the issues of conjectural knowledge (Carl Ginzburg), embodiment or tact (Béla Balázs) and the optical unconscious (Walter Benjamin) behind early “physiognomic” media.
Keywords: History of Science, History of Visual Culture, History of Art, History of Photography, Migration
Published in RUNG: 13.01.2023; Views: 968; Downloads: 0
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Keywords: recovery, art, innovation, culture, creative
Published in RUNG: 03.02.2021; Views: 2249; Downloads: 0
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Keywords: counterculture, data freedom, open culture, hacktivism, privacy, democracy, education, artistic practice
Published in RUNG: 25.11.2020; Views: 2672; Downloads: 23
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