Arts — Open Access Journal

This article explores the visual abundance found in a number of early projects by Leinweber, Yamasaki and Hellmuth (LYH) and Minoru Yamasaki and Associates (MYA), which stands in stark contrast to the austere character of architectural form during the interwar period. Although Yamasaki received his architectural training in the 1930s, he was neither a true modernist, nor a fully postmodern architect. His aesthetic, and his firm’s work, lies in the interstices between these two distinct architectural moments, in company with contemporaries Edward Durell Stone and Paul Rudolph, among others. The work of these architects embraced a kind of visual and formal excess but stopped short of approaching the playful linguistic games of postmodern architecture. With themes of visual and material excess in mind, I examine two early commissions from the U.S. federal government that put into play ideas of global exchange, power, and extravagance in architecture as the United States emerged as a major world power in the aftermath of World War II, including the U.S. Consulate in Kobe, Japan (1954–1955) and the Federal Science Pavilion at the Seattle World’s Fair (1962). Full article

Displays of art in public or private spaces have long been of interest to curators, gallerists, artists and art historians. The emergence of gallery paintings at the beginning of the seventeenth century and the photographic documentation of (modern) exhibitions testify to that. Taken as factual documents, these images are not only representative of social status, wealth or the museum’s thematic focus, but also contain information about artistic relations and exhibition practices. Digitization efforts of previous years have made these documents, including photographs, catalogs or press releases, available to public audiences and scholars. While a manual analysis has proved to be insufficient, because of the sheer number of available data, computational approaches and tools allowed for a greater access. The following article describes how digital images of exhibitions, as released by the New York Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 2016, are studied with a retrieval system to analyze in which artistic contexts selected artworks were presented in exhibits. Full article

Historiography and archaeological research have traditionally defined mosques mainly as religious spaces or places to pray, without further specifications. This simplification has usually dominated the analyses of mosques, while other uses or functional aspects of these buildings were put aside. The scarcity of material information available for years to approach these buildings, together with the dominance of the more monumental examples—such as the great mosque of Córdoba—provoked that analyses about other more modest mosques were scarce or almost inexistent. However, in recent decades, the proliferation of real estate building activities has led to the recovery of many new and fresh archaeological data related to other mosques different from the Friday ones. Specifically, in Córdoba, the volume of information recovered has been enormous, and concerns not only mosques as isolated buildings, but also their urban environments, construction processes, and evolution along the centuries. Therefore, in this paper, we offer a summarized overview of the state of the arts about research on mosques in al-Andalus, presenting the main problems and limitations of the topic until now, and also the case of Córdoba and the main results achieved there as a reference for further actions to be undertaken in the rest of the territory. Full article

A work of Vietnamese art crossed the million-dollar mark in the international art market in early 2017. The event was reluctantly seen as a sign of maturity for Vietnamese art amidst many problems. Even though the media in Vietnam has discussed the problems enthusiastically, there is a lack of literature from Vietnamese academics on the subject, especially from the market perspective. This paper aims to contribute an insightful perspective on the Vietnamese art market through the lens of art frauds. Thirty-five cases of fraudulent paintings were found on the news and in stories told by art connoisseurs. The qualitative analysis of the cases has shown that the economic value of Vietnamese paintings remains high despite the controversial claims about their authenticity. Here, the Vietnamese authority seems indifferent to the problem of art frauds, which make the artists more powerless. While the involvement of foreign actors in the trading of Vietnamese art does not reduce the intensity of the problem, it seems to continue to drive the price higher. The results have implications on the system of art in Vietnam, the current state of art theft in Vietnam, and the perception of Vietnamese people on art. Full article

This article examines violent protest in art museums. There is a long history of art museums being used as sites of protest. As spaces full of meaning, they represent ideal locations for people to try to shape the present and the future. From peaceful demonstrations to terrorist attacks, the current risks of protest to art museums is high. Motivated by ideological, political and social reasons, these protests include those that specifically target art objects within the art museums, as well as others that use the sites as stages on which to protest. This article is based predominantly on secondary sources; however, it also uses empirical research data collected by the author during observation research at art museums in London in March 2017 and July 2017. The article begins by considering why art museums attract so many protests. It argues that as ‘sites of persuasion’, art museums can be battlegrounds on which people look to shape how society is constructed and perceived. It then examines contemporary and historical case studies in Brazil and the UK to help our understanding of violent protests and the challenges they pose to art museums. Following this, the article proposes that as art museums are important sites of persuasion, there must be more awareness of the threats they face from violent protests in order to shape crime prevention approaches. The article finishes by arguing that although protests can be highly problematic for people involved with art museums, the ongoing appeal of these spaces as sites of protest shows the significance of art museums as important locations of cultural meaning. Full article

North-American cyberpunk’s recurrent use of high-tech Japan as “the default setting for the future,” has generated a Japonism reframed in technological terms. While the renewed representations of techno-Orientalism have received scholarly attention, little has been said about literary Japanese science fiction. This paper attempts to discuss the transnational construction of Japanese cyberpunk through Masaki Gorō’s Venus City (Vīnasu Shiti, 1992) and Tobi Hirotaka’s Angels of the Forsaken Garden series (Haien no tenshi, 2002–). Elaborating on Tatsumi’s concept of synchronicity, it focuses on the intertextual dynamics that underlie the shaping of those texts to shed light on Japanese cyberpunk’s (dis)connections to techno-Orientalism as well as on the relationships between literary works, virtual worlds and reality. Full article

After European audiences had first contact with anime in the late 1970s, animated co-productions between domestic producers and Japanese studios emerged in the early 1980s, playing a lead role in standardizing anime aesthetics and hence contributing to the broader development of anime in Spain and other major European markets. These pioneering co-productions fostered the arrival of Japanese studios to the European broadcasting scene. However, its real impact on the popularization of anime is subject to debate. Appealing to a European audience, these series lacked some of the most recognizable features associated with anime as a larger medium. Nonetheless, in some of these animated productions there was an underlying animesque flair in the shape of conventionalized elements, character design, facial expressions, rhythm, camera action and tropes. Neither entirely domestic nor fully Japanese, these hybrid productions set up a ‘bridge’ between European and American animated visual language and anime mainstream features, thereby shaping the collective idea of what anime is for the first generation of viewers in Spain and Europe. Full article

Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin synthesized a modern crystallized interior within their Capitol Theatre design (1920–24) in Melbourne. The Capitol’s auditorium, a mine-like cavity, houses a constructed landscape, elucidating the link between architecture and geological references. Ornamented with prefabricated stepped plasterwork, the auditorium is inserted with opal-coloured light technologies. Through the concept of the “constructed landscape”, this article traces the garish luxury elements found within the Griffins’ Capitol auditorium to understand the design associations between Paul Scheerbart’s Expressionist writings on crystal-glass iconography and William Le Baron Jenney’s symbolic crystal cave. The Griffins’ architectural contribution to the Australian entertainment industry conveys both Jugendstil garden effects and Mesoamerican echoes through its elaborative prismatic ridges. Owing to its transcendental opal allusions, the Capitol’s auditorium shows a constructed landscape model and constitutes a form of garish luxury, exemplifying early Australian glamour. Full article

Nobuhiro Suwa, often called “the most French of Japanese directors”, has a complex relationship with European cinematic modernity. His two feature films H Story (2001) and A Perfect Couple (2005) can provide useful case studies, as they were created in dialogue with two key references of that modernity: Hiroshima mon amour (1959, Alain Resnais) and Journey to Italy (Viaggio in Italia, 1954, Roberto Rossellini), respectively. Both films tend to confront and gloss their previous pairs, but they are also continuations of their concerns and their aesthetical discoveries. The presence of intertextuality elements connecting those films, as well as the use of myse en abyme structures are deeply analyzed in this article to attain a greater understanding on how this process of transcultural dialogue works. Besides, both films exemplify different ways of developing the references on which they are built, namely deconstruction for H Story and reconstruction for A Perfect Couple. Full article

The transcultural consumption of Japan-derived popular media has prompted a significant amount of academic research and teaching. Instead of addressing globalization or localization as such, this article investigates the interplay of anime research and the institution of Japanese studies outside of Japan, addressing recurrent methodological issues, in particular, related to representation and mediation, intellectual critique and affective engagement, subculture and national culture. The inclination towards objects and representation in socio-cultural as well as cinema-oriented Japanese-studies accounts of anime is first introduced and, after considering discursive implications of the name anime, contrasted with media-studies approaches that put an emphasis on relations, modalities, and forms. In order to illustrate the vital role of forms, including genre, similarities between TV anime and Nordic Noir TV drama series are sketched out. Eventually, the article argues that the study of anime is accommodated best by going beyond traditional polarizations between text and context, media specificity and media ecology, area and discipline. Full article

Spanish Islamic military architecture shows an attempt at the systematization of works, techniques, and defensive elements, commencing in the era of the Umayyad Emirate and Caliphate up to the North African Empires (Almoravids and Almohads). This article presents an analysis of the constructive techniques and systems employed in the fortified architecture in al-Ṭagr al-Awsaṯ; that is, the Medium Frontier Territory of al-Andalus, called Marca Media, between the 8th and 13th centuries. The fortification of the borders was an objective of the Umayyad Emirate and Caliphate, as well as of the new kingdoms of Taifas and the Almoravid and Almohad Empires. The buildings were designed not only to defend a territory but also as a way of demonstrating the political power, and thus they were used as “state propaganda”. The triumph of the Islamic State over different groups, the advance of the Christian conquest, the decline of the Caliphate, and the invasion of the Almoravids and Almohads were situations that modified the definition of borders, the strategies of defense, and the organization of cities and territories. Therefore, the construction of fortifications acted as a mirror reflecting the social, political, and economic circumstances, whose changes depended on the real possibilities, knowledge, celerity, or technological evolution of the time. As such, these constructions permit an analysis of not only the building techniques, but also the people who carried them out, showing in their remains the social implications and organization of work from the master builders down to the quarry workers. This article presents the organization and technical knowledge of construction through a selection of cases studies, including watchtowers, castles, city walls, and fortresses. Full article

This paper explores the rise and fall of Cyberpunk influences in California’s Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay area circa 1988–93, in prevalent technologies, industry, by artists and in enthusiastic magazines thriving there. Attentive to the Cyberpunk novelists, an animating spirituality of the time also looks to Timothy Leary and Marshall McLuhan. Full article

This essay argues that William Gibson’s 2003 novel, Pattern Recognition, rejects the stylistic and formal trappings of cyberpunk that he himself helped create in the 1980s in order to reformulate the movement’s aesthetics of participation for the 21st Century. This participatory aesthetic is structured by a set of temporal concerns: A past made ever more available through information technology and yet ever more materially irrecoverable, a present subject to increasingly rapid change and therefore briefer and more difficult to interpret, and a bleak future of inevitable capitalist commodification. Within this temporal vortex, Gibson’s protagonist finds compensatory solace in her ability to see patterns and thus develop strategies by which to value objects and people in new ways. She learns how to care, and what to care for. From this analysis of Pattern Recognition, the essay tracks this aesthetic into Guerrilla Games’ 2017 Horizon: Zero Dawn—a popular entry in a medium that promises participatory involvement on a new scale. Full article

This paper examines 2.5-Dimensional musicals, or theater adaptations of anime/manga/videogames. As the genre has been gaining popularity in Japan since around 2007, criticism on the genre began to appear. What they uncritically assume is that the pioneer of the genre was the theater adaptation of Prince of Tennis first produced in 2003, and the unique mise-en-scène that attempts to recreate the “world” of the original, including the characters, setting, and the characters’ extreme skills of tennis, is a hallmark of the genre. However, such a view fails to consider the fact that these are actually merely characteristics of a subgenre of 2.5-Dimensional musicals represented by Prince of Tennis and other similar shows. This paper argues that another show, namely the theater adaptation of the videogame Sakura Wars, first produced in 1997 and continuing to this day, actually presents a number of important questions and viewpoints that are useful and necessary to critically discuss the genre, such as how two-dimensional characters are materialized on stage, which role audiences play in that process, how 2.5-Dimensional musicals can be contextualized within conventional theater genres rather than a part of “media mix” strategies, and tension between the local and global in their production and consumption. Full article

There have been misunderstandings regarding “narrative” in relation to games, in part due to the lack of a shared understanding of “narrative” and related terms. Instead, many contrasting perspectives exist, and this state of affairs is an impediment for current and future research. To address this challenge, this article moves beyond contrasting definitions, and based on a meta-analysis of foundational publications in game studies and related fields, introduces a two-dimensional mapping along the dimensions of media specificity and user agency. Media specificity describes to what extent medium affects narrative, and user agency concerns how much impact a user has on a narrative. This mapping is a way to visualize different ontological positions on “narrative” in the context of game narrative and other interactive narrative forms. This instrument can represent diverse positions simultaneously, and enables comparison between different perspectives, based on their distance from each other and alignment with the axes. A number of insights from the mapping are discussed that demonstrate the potential for this process as a basis for an improved discourse on the topic. Full article

Shakespeare’s plays have become the subject of filmic remakes, as well as the source for others’ plot lines. This transfer of Shakespeare’s plays to film presents a challenge to filmmakers’ auterial ingenuity: Is a film director more challenged when producing a Shakespearean play than the stage director? Does having auterial ingenuity imply that the film-maker is somehow freer than the director of a play to change a Shakespearean text? Does this allow for the language of the plays to be changed—not just translated from English to Japanese, for example, but to be updated, edited, abridged, ignored for a large part? For some scholars, this last is more expropriation than pure Shakespeare on screen and under this category we might find Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (Kumonosu-jō 1957), the subject of this essay. Here, I explore how this difficult tale was translated into a Japanese context, a society mistakenly assumed to be free of Christian notions of guilt, through the transcultural move of referring to Noh theatre, aligning the story with these Buddhist morality plays. In this manner Kurosawa found a point of commonality between Japan and the West when it came to stories of violence, guilt, and the problem of redemption. Full article

The influence of the cult television series Twin Peaks (1990–1991) can be detected in a wide range of videogames, from adventure, to roleplaying to survival horror titles. While many games variously draw upon the narrative, setting and imagery of the series for inspiration, certain elements of the distinctive uncanniness of Twin Peaks are difficult to translate into gameplay, particularly its ability consistently disrupt the expectations and emotional responses of its audience. This paper examines the ways in which the 2010 survival horror title Deadly Premonition replicates the uncanniness of Twin Peaks in both its narrative and gameplay, noting how it expands upon conceptualizations of the gamerly uncanny. It contends that Deadly Premonition’s awkward recombination of seemingly inconsistent and excessive gameplay features mirrors the ways in which David Lynch and Mark Frost draw upon and subvert audience expectations for police procedurals and soap operas in the original Twin Peaks in order to generate an uncanny effect. Furthermore, Deadly Premonition uses the theme of possession—a central element of the television series—to offer a diegetic exploration of the uncanny relationship between the player and their onscreen avatar. In these regards, Deadly Premonition provides a rare example of how the subversive uncanniness of Twin Peaks can be addressed through gameplay, rather than solely through the game’s narrative or representational elements. Full article

In a recent worldwide study on the nature, scope, and frequency of archaeological site looting, the vast majority of field archaeologists reported having had multiple encounters with archaeological site looters both on- and off-site. Despite the criminalization of looting in most countries’ domestic statutory schemes, nearly half of surveyed field archaeologists do not report looting activity to external law enforcement or archaeological authorities when they encounter it. The rationales for their actions—or inactions—are examined within a criminological framework, and field archaeologists’ perspectives on looters as “criminals” and “victims” are explored. The paper concludes with a consideration that the criminalization of looting creates an emergent duty to report among archaeologists, and how they choose to address site looting changes their role in and relationship to the trade in illicitly obtained antiquities. Full article

Choice poetics is a formalist framework that seeks to concretely describe the impacts choices have on player experiences within narrative games. Developed in part to support algorithmic generation of narrative choices, the theory includes a detailed analytical framework for understanding the impressions choice structures make by analyzing the relationships among options, outcomes, and player goals. The theory also emphasizes the need to account for players’ various modes of engagement, which vary both during play and between players. In this work, we illustrate the non-computational application of choice poetics to the analysis of two different games to further develop the theory and make it more accessible to others. We focus first on using choice poetics to examine the central repeated choice in “Undertale,” and show how it can be used to contrast two different player types that will approach a choice differently. Finally, we give an example of fine-grained analysis using a choice from the game “Papers, Please,” which breaks down options and their outcomes to illustrate exactly how the choice pushes players towards complicity via the introduction of uncertainty. Through all of these examples, we hope to show the usefulness of choice poetics as a framework for understanding narrative choices, and to demonstrate concretely how one could productively apply it to choices “in the wild.” Full article