Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050105

Authors: Kamil Lipiński

The article discusses the contexts and frames of presenting the film Pilate and Others directed by Andrzej Wajda by introducing intermedia tools for analysis and interpretation, especially its symbolic overtones. In Mieke Bal’s theoretical perspective, mise-en-scène is comprehended as a theatrical metaphor describing the staging of a visual narrative in between the contexts. The focus shifts from the contexts of Wajda’s film to the visuals that open the flashback and futuroscope, which accompany and interweave the main narrative. With the figure of “transposition” in mind, our concern is to analyze the literary and cultural contexts in the new staging of the urban environment. The main plot focuses on the martyrdom of Yeshua Ha-Nocri expressed in an allegorizing manner.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050104

Authors: Amy Bowman-McElhone

This article examines Mike Kelley’s Educational Complex (1995) and his culminating public artwork, Mobile Homestead (2005–2013), as speculative architectures that negotiate the fraught intersections of pedagogy, memory, and public engagement. While Educational Complex mobilizes the language of architectural models and dioramas to materialize “blanks” as forms of pedagogical repression and institutional affiliation, Mobile Homestead extends this inquiry into public space through a community-oriented artwork that simultaneously invites access and withholds subterranean, private zones. Situating these projects within discourses of socially engaged and public art, the article argues that Kelley stages a productive paradox: his sustained skepticism toward public art’s political agency is folded into works that nonetheless generate collective encounters, informal pedagogies, and disaffiliated publics. Read together, these speculative architectures reconceptualize failure, disobedience, and disaffiliation not as negations of public engagement, but as critical strategies for exposing institutional complicity while constructing alternative architectures of memory, play, and social relation. By repositioning Kelley—often read primarily through psychoanalytic frameworks—as a pivotal yet overlooked figure in the histories of socially engaged and public art, the article unsettles prevailing narratives of community, resistance, and the public good.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050103

Authors: Mark Yoffe

This article offers a comprehensive theorization of stiob as a historically sedimented, culturally specific, yet increasingly globalized modality of ironic discourse whose logic of deadpan overidentification has migrated from late-Soviet conceptualist counterculture into twenty-first-century political communication. Revisiting the folkloric, carnivalesque, and double-voiced foundations of stiob, this study situates the phenomenon within the longue durée of Russian humor, holy foolishness (юрoдствo), and the grotesque tradition described by Dmitry Likhachev, Aleksandr Panchenko, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Sergei Averintsev. The argument proceeds to demonstrate how contemporary political actors—most prominently Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin—have appropriated stiob and its adjacent practices (holy foolishness, trolling, strategic sacrilege, and carnivalesque inversion) as powerful rhetorical instruments capable of destabilizing discursive norms, undermining institutional authority, and creating a semi-permanent state of “infernal laughter.” Drawing on examples from political speech, social media, public performance, and mediatized spectacle, the article contends that both Trump and Putin deploy a repertoire of ironic aggression, misdirection, double-voiced innuendo, and taboo-breaking parody that weaponizes cultural archetypes of the jester, trickster, and holy fool. This mode of communication, simultaneously theatrical and destructive, produces a new form of political carnivalesque in which hierarchical orders are inverted, outrage is instrumentalized, and the distinction between sincerity and mockery collapses. Ultimately, this article argues that stiob, trolling, and holy foolishness now constitute a transnational discursive formation reshaping public culture in the twenty-first century.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050102

Authors: Berit Sandberg

The film Black Panther (2018) has been the subject of extensive discussion, particularly within the context of representational politics in contemporary Hollywood cinema. This critical scoping review maps how academic literature interprets the film‘s treatment of colonial, racial, cultural, gender, and disability-related stereotypes and examines how these interpretations are shaped by epistemic context. A systematic search and screening process yielded 52 publications from 2018 to 2024 that were analyzed with qualitative content analysis and descriptive mapping. The review indicates that scholarly response to the film is defined by structured ambivalence. While scholarship predominantly frames Black Panther as challenging colonial and racial stereotypes, it also points to inconsistent representations and reinforced stereotyping, particularly with regard to cultural homogenization, exceptionalism, and patriarchal governance. Interpretive stances vary systematically across epistemic positions. Scholarship based in Africa emphasizes counter-stereotypical readings, whereas scholarship from the United States, accounting for half of the reviewed contributions, displays greater interpretive diversity, including more critical and ambivalent positions. These findings suggest that Black Panther does not function as a counter-stereotypical text. Rather, it is a site where representational politics in global blockbuster cinema, industry constraints, and epistemic authority intersect, extending the soft-power dynamics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe into academic knowledge production.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050101

Authors: Varuni Kanagasundaram

Material practices of cultural rituals continue to be performed by the diaspora, initiating relational connections in places they have settled. The ritual of Kolam is a drawing on the ground undertaken by Tamil women in South India and Sri Lanka to mark the threshold. Groups of women from the diaspora in Australia and Singapore carry out the traditional Kolam in public spaces during auspicious days. Observations of performative acts of place making served to develop the methodology for a contemporary practice. As a member of the Tamil diaspora, the author (re)imagines the performance of the traditional ritual to activate connections relevant for the wider communities living in the inner suburbs of Melbourne. The paper describes how tacit knowledge, materials, and processes are adapted for the broader society. The ethics of the traditional practice and the agencies harnessed upon performing become integrated into contemporary creative methods of participatory activity. Passersby using common paths and residents in a social housing complex created a series of visual drawings on bark using clay and natural materials. Ground installations of the assembled drawings conveyed stories through material dialogue. The less visible spaces and communities were revealed as part of the pulse of the suburban rhythms of movement. The paper demonstrates the potential significance of performing the cultural practices of the diaspora through collective acts of place making that strengthens social bonds not only for the diasporic group but also for society at large.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050100

Authors: Carolina Ramirez-Figueroa Pei-Ying Lin Antony Nevin

This contribution examines how contemporary exhibition practices engage with biological otherness through the interplay of material, technological mediation and curatorial practice. It explores how organisms and materials often considered marginal, such as viruses, microbial life, dust, and ash, can operate as co-authors in exhibition-making, unsettling hierarchies and binary frameworks that privilege human perception and control. Biological matter becomes a medium for thinking with and through nonhuman perspectives, revealing entangled temporalities, rhythms, and ecologies that exceed conventional scales of perception. Through three case studies: Living Ashes II, Studies of Interbeing—Trance 1:1, and The Materialised Temporality of Dust, the paper interrogates how decomposition, infection, and microscopic life are translated into relational, multisensory experiences. In Living Ashes II, protocells and ash are staged as agents of emergent vitality; in Studies of Interbeing—Trance 1:1, SARS-CoV-2 is re-materialised through textile and performative practices, fostering intimacy and affective encounter; and in The Materialised Temporality of Dust, immersive VR and spatial sound render microbial and dust temporalities perceptible within architectural space. Across these projects, digital technologies function not as neutral instruments but as active mediators, shaping the conditions under which nonhuman agency, vibrancy, and unpredictability are apprehended. Collectively, these works demonstrate that exhibitions can operate as relational laboratories in which biological otherness is co-produced, negotiated and experienced. They foreground an ethic of care and attunement, emphasising the multispecies, temporal, and technological entanglements that redefine what it means to exhibit living and non-living matter in the digital age.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050099

Authors: Helen Hills

This essay examines the visual culture of what might be termed “the ecology of silver” between 1492 and 1710 in relation to colonialism on both sides of the Atlantic, with particular attention to both its shiny allure and the blind spots that that shininess produces. It focuses on three inter-related areas: depictions of Potosí, the great silver mountain in viceregal Peru; silver’s shine in European elite material culture; and the deployment of silver in celebrating the Spanish monarchy in viceregal Sicily, part of its empire within Europe. Current scholarship on early modern silver bifurcates between historical, political, and anthropological studies of silver’s extraction in the Americas and colonialism on one hand and a celebratory art historical scholarship focused on high-end European silver goods on the other. Scholars have energetically examined its extraction, the global trade in bullion, the rise of capitalism that it fed, and the wars that it fomented and paid for, but they stop short of inquiring into the ends to which silver was deployed within Europe and Asia beyond the naming of the principal ports. Meanwhile, studies of silver in Europe are overwhelmingly tightly drawn and connoisseurial, often with no reference to where the silver came from, let alone the circumstances of its extraction, transport, or even its effects. This split is due partly to a prevalent notion that silver’s value is inherent, objective, and caused by “rarity”; and it is partly due to art history’s unswerving identification with the rich and powerful. Such approaches overlook silver’s remarkable material and alchemical qualities and ignore its capacity to turn grubby profit into charismatic sparkle, which simultaneously drove the ecological and environmental damage and exonerated its profiteers. Early modern silver linked environmental destruction, colonialism, genocide, and coloniality to high culture, making it a particularly relevant topic for art historical analysis in this context. But more than that silver entwined them in complex, convulsive, and transformative ways, turning imperialism, violence and exploitation into beauty, shimmer and cultural sophistication. Hence, this essay insists on the centrality of imperial issues in the Old World as in the New, underscoring colonial dynamics within metropolitan culture while critically examining the work of seduction of art. The paradoxical quality of shine is the lens through which is seen the relation between violent coloniality and the allure and ecology of early modern silver.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050098

Authors: Xinge Kong Reza Moayer Toroghi

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are unique digital assets stored on a blockchain that certify ownership of an item, giving rise to NFT art, where digital creations are tokenized to provide verifiable scarcity and provenance. To clarify the polarized debate surrounding this phenomenon, this paper conducts a systematic literature review of 18 academic articles (2020–2025) to synthesize the current state of research on its aesthetics. The review first maps the field’s methodological and typological landscape, and then presents three core thematic findings: the reconfiguration of value from intrinsic visual merit to social factors like community and identity; the evolution of the artist’s role from creator to system designer and community manager; and the adaptation of traditional art world frameworks. The study’s primary contribution is the articulation of a new theoretical framework, “decentralized aesthetics,” which posits that the value of NFT art is derived from the holistic, participatory experience it generates across perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and socio-cultural dimensions, rather than from its isolated visual properties. Finally, the paper identifies critical research gaps, such as a lack of longitudinal and cross-cultural studies, and proposes an agenda for future inquiry into digital creativity and ownership.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050097

Authors: Evgenii Kazartsev Nikita Kirichenko

This article offers a theoretically nuanced and empirically grounded investigation into the paradoxical afterlife of classical versification within the poetic practices of the Russian and Soviet avant-garde. Challenging the persistent historiographic narrative that equates avant-garde poetics with an unequivocal rupture from tradition, the study demonstrates that canonical metrical forms—most notably iambic tetrameter—continued to operate as structurally productive, albeit critically reconfigured, elements within experimental verse. Drawing on a broad corpus encompassing poetic manifestos, verse texts, and prose writings by Vladimir Maiakovskii, Ilia Sel’vinskii, Semen Kirsanov, and Nikolai Aseev, the authors combine close formal analysis with quantitative prosodic modeling, including linguistic and speech models derived from Kolmogorov–Taranovsky verse theory. The article argues that avant-garde poets did not simply negate inherited metrics but subjected them to a process of internal recomposition, shifting attention from meter as a fixed scheme to rhythm as a dynamic, semantically charged construct. While rhythmic innovation is shown to be consciously engineered in verse, the analysis of verse-like fragments in prose reveals persistent, unconscious attachments to “classical” rhythmic patterns, particularly the Pushkinian alternating rhythm. This tension between declarative rejection and latent continuity illuminates the avant-garde’s distinctive mode of negotiating tradition: not abolishing it, but instrumentalizing it within a broader project of total artistic reorganization. The study thus reframes avant-garde prosody as a site where innovation and inheritance coexist in a state of productive contradiction, reshaping our understanding of modernist poetic technique.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050096

Authors: Martina Ruhsam

Gayatri Spivak suggests that we turn our attention to the planet rather than to the globe. While she recognizes the planet in the species of alterity, she considers the globe to be an abstract quantity linked with the desire for control through digital quantification methods. This article discusses Claudia Bosse’s choreographic approach of re-imagining the human being as a planetary subject by investigating her dance performance WASTEland (2025), which took place on a piece of fallow land near Vienna Central Station. The choreographer turned this wasteland into her artistic laboratory and workplace for seven months. Using a mixed-method approach—combining performance analysis and discourse analysis—and drawing from planetary thinking and new materialism, I analyze Bosse’s artistic research, which raises the question of the relationship of precarious landscapes and the precarity of the bodies that perform (on) them, exposed to their climatic and ecological conditions as well as to their uncontrollable inhabitants, both human and other-than-human. How can wasteland and building sites be artistically activated? Does working and dancing on/with wasteland signify a withdrawal from urgent political issues or does this physical exposure enable a shift of perspective in regard to political miseries?

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050094

Authors: Lyubov Khachaturian

This paper examines the technological dimension of “handwritten time” a distinctive mode of existence of the Russian Avant-garde. By the mid-1930s, the avant-garde’s stylistic confrontation with Socialist Realism had effectively expelled it from the contemporary literary process, artificially arresting its development—an instance of “unfinished modernity.” The article offers a detailed analysis of the technology of self-archiving (“lit-recycling”) developed by Aleksei Kruchyonykh: a deliberately chosen strategy of uncensored writing oriented toward an implicit reader of the future. The conscious refusal to complete the conventional publishing cycle, together with the systematic archiving of materials, generated a new pragmatics of the Russian avant-garde, enabling continued work under conditions of total censorship. The study considers both the strengths of this pragmatics of self-isolation and its unavoidable costs, above all the rupture of author–reader communication. Drawing on workbooks and diary notebooks from the 1930s, it reconstructs an archiving technology that had fully matured by that decade: the balance between draft and fair copy, as well as the mechanisms of auto-communication and self-censorship. Each stage of textual work is shown to acquire a specific function within a single technological continuum. Special attention is paid to contemporary methods for reconstructing the avant-garde’s creative records. The article reconstructs successive versions of Kruchyonykh’s poems (“Irina in the Fog,” “Trash,” “All Dead Poets…,” “Mind You!,” “Grumbling,” etc.), and cites diaries and handwritten books. It also foregrounds Kruchyonykh’s “prophetic” texts—those marked by a premonition of the coming great war—which conclude his diary and creative notebooks of the 1930s.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050095

Authors: Howard Morphy

An ecological approach in the broadest sense arguably places art in a context that is unconstrained by disciplinary categories. It is focused on the form of art in context and on all the variables that account for its making and the contexts of its use at the time of its making. The argument of the paper is centred on a set of Yolŋu bark paintings exhibited in the Madayin exhibition that opened in the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in September 2022. In a period of 80 years Yolŋu art has moved from a moment of first contact to becoming a global contemporary phenomenon, while maintaining its cultural distinctiveness. Rather than using an ecological approach to examine Yolŋu culture, Yolŋu art as a mode of action exemplifies the ways in which the natural environment is integral to their sense of being in the world.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050093

Authors: Michael Szpakowski

I revisit Benjamin’s text ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ and find it both problematic and richly suggestive. Carefully reading it, both with and against, I search it for continuities and breaks with ‘reproducibility’ today and hence insights into AI and its relationship to art. In so doing, I sketch some tentative conclusions about how such an investigation might assist us towards understanding what art is and isn’t, how the practice of art relates to our humanity and finally, though a thorough settling of accounts with AI and its boosters will require political change on a grand scale, how Benjamin’s ‘aura’ might offer a small but significant locus of resistance to the commodification and dehumanising drive currently occasioned by AI in the field of art.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050090

Authors: Teruaki Yamaguchi

This paper examines the artistic project Border Ghosts (2018–2025) as a practice of material translation through which migrant presences—excluded from institutional records along the Mexico–United States border—become perceptible in artistic form. Situated within necropolitical regimes that produce structural vulnerability, the study draws on the work of Achille Mbembe, Ariadna Estévez, and Avery Gordon to consider how spectrality operates not as metaphor, but as a mediated mode of presence. Through brief interviews and three-dimensional recordings of bodies, objects, and temporary dwellings using 3D scanning and printing, the project transforms fragmentary traces into sculptural configurations that make precarious lives perceptible within exhibition space. The case studies show that even minimal testimonies, often absent from formal archives, can persist as material traces within aesthetic circulation. Rather than proposing a solution to structural violence, Border Ghosts approaches artistic practice as a way of engaging absence, mediation, and incompletion. In doing so, the project reflects on the limits of institutional recognition and on the conditions under which marginal lives may be encountered.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050092

Authors: Emma Simmons

Representations of industrial life have long been understood to be essential to the Soviet project, and this article analyzes the distinctive, but overlooked, functions of narratives and images of women workers at the factory workbench in the 1920s, and their ramifications for understanding Soviet paradigms of gender. Examining the place of mechanized labor in Aleksandra Kollontai’s theory of women’s emancipation in conjunction with the programs of labor theorist Aleksei Gastev demonstrates the establishment of mechanized labor and its tools as essential to utopian representations of Soviet social and gender relations beyond the factory. In this light, the article traces the establishment of the stanok, or factory workbench, as a metonym for new collective labor, and an interface with other nascent Soviet institutions and the new byt, or everyday life, in the mass illustrated periodical for urban women, Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker), in the 1920s.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050091

Authors: Rocío Sosa-Fernández Roi Méndez-Fernández Ana Lorena Jiménez-Preciado

This study examines how immersive narrative resources, whether technological–sensory, narrative–structural, or contextual, are deployed in contemporary blockbuster cinema and to what extent audiences recognize and value them in their evaluations. Using Avatar: Fire and Ash as a case study, the research follows a sequential mixed-methods design. In the first phase, a qualitative film analysis identifies eight types of cognitive immersion, drawing on established theoretical frameworks of narrative immersion. The second phase is quantitative and involves the computational analysis of 1133 valid reviews from Internet Movie Database (IMDb) through Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, including n-gram frequency analysis, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling with 3 topics after perplexity minimization, and sentiment polarity analysis. The LDA model reveals three discursive clusters, experiential and emotional, technical and comparative, and critical, with the latter concentrated mostly in low-rated reviews. Text sentiment and numeric ratings show a moderate positive correlation (r = 0.53, p < 0.001), pointing to a general but imperfect alignment between the two modes of evaluation. Markers of content fatigue (nothing new, predictable, boring) appear in 25.1% of the reviews, yet a third of those are still rated 8 or higher. When cross-tabulating the immersion categories with audience language, phenomenological and affective dimensions such as Emotional Engagement (59.8%) and Haptic/Sensory Experience (59.1%) emerge as the most frequently discussed, while cinematographic techniques like Bracketing (2.6%) are barely mentioned. Taken together, the findings suggest that the franchise sustains its appeal through a form of embodied sensory engagement that operates largely independent of narrative novelty.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050089

Authors: Chao Chi Chiu

As a key figure among Japanese American artists, Yasuo Kuniyoshi attracted scholarly attention for his melancholic paintings produced during and shortly after the Second World War. Many of his works from this period portrayed somber figures in masks painted in muted color palettes. Kuniyoshi also placed his figures in bleak circus or carnival settings, imbuing these traditionally festive settings with an air of sadness. As many scholars argued, Yasuo’s solemn postwar paintings reflected the artist’s disillusionment with American society after he was labeled an “enemy alien” as a Japanese artist living in the U.S. during the Pacific War. While his postwar paintings have been extensively studied, his lithographic works remained overlooked due to their scarcity. This paper examines Kuniyoshi’s two postwar lithographs, Carnival and Mask, which follow the same carnival motifs as his late-life works, but represent a departure from his earlier artistic principles. Through the close analysis of the artist’s two lithographs and comparison to contemporary paintings, this paper argues that Kuniyoshi’s lithographs function as reflexive records of his paintings, serving as platforms for him to experiment with new artistic techniques and themes. Furthermore, examining the lithographs in the context of the artist’s full oeuvre, this paper will highlight how Kuniyoshi blurred the boundaries between artistic mediums, mirroring his broader efforts to navigate the challenges of postwar identity and artistic expression.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050088

Authors: Alexander Angsongna

This study investigates the communicative power of editorial cartoons in Ghana’s public discourse, focusing on how they inform, critique, and influence sociopolitical narratives. Drawing on a dataset of cartoons by Tilapia—one of the country’s leading cartoonists—published between May 2024 and May 2025, the paper explores how cartoons address themes such as economic hardship, youth addiction, cultural values, environmental degradation, and political hypocrisy. The central question guiding this study is as follows: How do Tilapia’s editorial cartoons visually construct and critique key national issues—such as economic hardship, environmental degradation, youth addiction, and political hypocrisy—in Ghanaian public discourse? Guided by an integrated theoretical framework from semiotics, visual rhetoric, and critical metaphor theory, the analysis reveals how cartoons use humour, caricature, exaggeration, and symbolic imagery to simplify complex realities and foster civic reflection. The study highlights how cartoons serve not only to entertain but also to hold power to account, amplify public concerns, and promote sociopolitical engagement. Through detailed visual analysis of ten selected cartoons, the paper underscores their capacity to critique governance, expose contradictions, and reflect collective sentiment—especially during election cycles. Overall, the research affirms the evolving role of visual satire as a potent medium of resistance, cultural expression, and democratic participation in Ghana. By bridging visual culture and critical discourse, the paper contributes to broader understandings of the role of the media in shaping public perception and fostering informed citizenship.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050087

Authors: Sascha Bru

This article explores how historic avant-garde works can be considered as aesthetic technologies or time machines conditioning an audience to experience the future differently. Rather than revisiting well-known Western scholars, it turns to perhaps lesser known “Cold War” theorists and critics: Polish art scholar Andrzej Turowski, Yugoslavian–Croation literary scholar Aleksandar Flaker, and Russian–Estonian semiotician Juri Lotman. In rather different ways, these thinkers considered avant-garde works as artefacts that, in an audience’s phenomenological encounter with them, model and yield different experiences of the future. In the closing section of the article, Gerrit Rietveld’s model for the Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht is discussed. Rietveld’s model reminds us that theoretical speculation should always be accompanied also by historical contextualization, in part because many of the historic avant-garde’s projected futures are now also futures anterior, the history of which might further shed light on the avant-garde’s actual futurity.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050086

Authors: Shuwei Zhang

Paul Celan’s speech the “Meridian” addresses the fundamental question of how poetry can be possible in a world “after Auschwitz.” In contrast to the Platonic aesthetic system and classical art traditions, Celan draws upon Büchner’s concept of “Hostility to Art.” Amid the paradox of “the impossibility of writing” and “the loneliest loneliness,” Celan embraces the mission of “struggling with the German language,” speaking through a wounded mouth to reclaim a lost home for art. He employs a “grayer language” that distrusts beauty and turns toward truth, approaching a “meridian” of language in a way both “art-less” and “art-free.” On this “meridian,” Celan engages in a secret dialogue of poetry and thought with Others such as Mallarmé, Adorno, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, seeking to return to a realm that is at once uncanny and oriented toward the human.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15040085

Authors: Nélio Conceição

In his swan song A Tale of the Wind (1988), Joris Ivens undertakes the seemingly impossible task of capturing the invisible—the wind—on film. At the same time, the film looks back over the director’s own career, in a spirit that is at once self-reflective and youthful. Set mainly in China, it functions both as an allegory of the wind and as a search for a middle ground between realism and more poetic approaches to cinema. This article examines the film through the lenses of self-reflexivity, the cinematic portrayal of old age, and the relation between life and death. It first delves into Stanley Cavell’s ontological understanding of self-reflexivity, before examining how this self-reflexivity unfolds in A Tale of the Wind. In this regard, it analyses the relationship between technique and magic, the search for a “theory of cinema”, and the importance of imagination and childhood. Taking into consideration the Deleuzian correlation between face and landscape and the notion of “any space whatever”, the article concludes by analysing old age through its marks and gestures: wrinkles, laughter, waiting, and searching—elements that contribute decisively to the film’s self-reflexivity.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15040084

Authors: Mine Doğantan-Dack

This article presents an autoethnographic narrative account of curating and performing two pieces for solo piano and string orchestra—Climate Concerto by Brian Field and Eclogue by Gerald Finzi—to advocate for climate action. It discusses the selection of a concert venue that could be “thickly lived”, offering layers of cultural, historical and aesthetic resonance, and a concert date that could generate “interaction chains”, where engagement in one event motivates engagement in others. The article reflects on the multiple forms of loss brought about by the climate emergency, exploring Field’s musical portrayal of environmental loss and Finzi’s evocation of a harmonious human-nature relationship, which highlights a way of being-in-the-world that has been lost. In response to pervasive pessimism and dystopian narratives in climate communication, the discussion foregrounds hope as a powerful motivator for positive action, showing how the narrative scope of Field’s large-scale forms and the aesthetic beauty of Finzi’s music can elicit felt hope. The article also advocates for gentle musical activism for climate action, emphasising music’s capacity to cultivate relational sensitivity, ethical responsiveness, and collective responsibility toward each other and the world—even amid ecological crisis, social fragmentation, and uncertainty.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15040083

Authors: Alexandria Zlatar Hala Georges

This paper explores the intersection of embodied trauma, resilience, and healing as represented in contemporary art, focusing on a case study analysis of the autoethnographic practice as a reflexive methodology that integrates personal lived experience with cultural, political, and artistic analysis of the works of Zlatar. Central to this study is examining the notion of rematriation, which calls for the reclamation of women’s histories and the restoration of knowledge passed down through generations. Through a series of her paintings, including works from her series A Serbian Renaissance, Refuge For the Oppressed Body, and The Minotaur Came and I Surrendered, Zlatar interrogates the transmission of trauma across generations of women, from Balkan origins, focusing on issues such as gender-based violence, displacement, and identity formation. These works challenge dominant narratives by centring women’s experiences not through externalized indicators or representations of healing, but mediating how mind–body relationships have dialogue, and her art employs this concept as spaces for memory, survival, and meaning-making. Drawing on feminist philosophy, artwork analysis and trauma studies, this paper situates Zlatar’s art to address historical inequities in women’s healing and the ongoing struggle for women’s agency and safety in contemporary society.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15040082

Authors: Emily Eliza Scott

This essay focuses on a series of radical, never-built “garden” designs from 1969 by the artist-turned-landscape-architect Patricia Johanson (1940–2024), which proposed sites in and around New York City that would confront the public with complex human–ecological interrelationships of the day, often posing thorny questions about them. In all, she composed 150 drawings and 7 related essays, sparked by a misguided commission from House & Garden magazine, which envisioned everything from skyscrapers retrofitted with plant trellises to filter water; to the conversion of a highway interchange into a clover field for honey production; fissures sliced into asphalt to allow the release and observation of subterranean steam; and a river dyed to highlight, rather than conceal, ongoing industrial pollution. I revisit this ambitious, multidisciplinary body of work not only in relation to its original context, when a modern ecology movement was gaining momentum, American cities were becoming ever more privatized, and a number of fellow artists began making large-scale outdoor artworks that would come to dominate art historical accounts of land and environmental art, but also, through the lens of its continued, and arguably heightened, relevance in our own moment of spiraling climate breakdown, corporate geo-engineering schemes, and further enclosures of various commons, as well as an ever-growing field of eco-art history, to which this special journal issue is a testament.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15040081

Authors: Andrey Astvatsaturov Feodor Dviniatin

The article discusses contexts of Henry Miller’s works (“Black Spring”, “Tropic of Capricorn”) and the poem Brooklyn Bridge by Vladimir Mayakovsky, which have in common the theme and imagery of a Bridge and the avant-garde era of creation. The authors of the article analyze not so much the “intersection” as the “union” of Miller and Mayakovsky, that is, not so much coincidences and closeness as complements that allow us to trace the entire breadth of the avant-garde literary project. In Henry Miller’s works the semantics of the image of a bridge referring to Nietzche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra is primarily noted and analyzed. In the analysis of Mayakovsky’s poem, special attention is paid to the verse and thematic composition of the text; metaphors; sound repetitions and echoes and their semantics; the specific historicism; and an important concept of reconstruction from traces, remains, and reflexes, turning to which Mayakovsky comes closer to, the unknown to him, Charles S. Peirce (abduction) and Carlo Ginzburg (keys), who was not yet born in the year the text was written.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15040080

Authors: Nikos Papastergiadis

In this article, I will use the ecological approach to explore the recent videos of Pınar Öğrenci. I will focus on two works: Aşît—The Avalance (2022) and Cemetery of the Nameless (2025). In the latter work, there is a complex examination of the interplay between the precarious paths taken by refugees and the climate change crisis. She also explores the multiple layers of history and memorialization in sites that have been scarred by genocide. In Cemetery of the Nameless (2025), Pınar establishes an analogy between missing bodies and the contamination of the water of Lake Van. However, this connection is not linear and there is no direct cause and effect; Lake Van was meant to be a transit zone for the refugees, not a cemetery. I will argue that the function of analogy is in its suggestion of comparisons, rather than the establishment of equivalence. Öğrenci thereby puts the analogy to work in a dual manner—it both amplifies and concentrates our attention. We listen to the narratives of migration while looking at the scenes caused by climate change. The image broadens the horizon of the narrative, and the voice sucks the gaze into a dark hole. In this manner, Öğrenci’s art of witnessing, which both combines and separates voice and image, amplifies and concentrates the transfer of information. I will also frame this commentary on the artworks with a broader discussion on the politics of care and memorialization.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15040079

Authors: molly rosabelle ackhurst

This article explores the affective and material complexities of creating arts-based artefacts to explore and represent sexual violence. It does so through attending to both the materials used and the embodied practices of those making them. Focusing on collage, it examines how the physical properties of materials mediate what can be imagined, simultaneously enabling expression and constraining it within familiar visual vocabularies often shaped by state, security, and punitive logics. I argue that materiality operates not only through objects but through the bodies, gestures, and decisions of makers, shaping what can be imagined. Through engagement with Nancy Naples’ (2003) formative work on survivor discourse alongside novel empirical data and cultural texts, the article makes the subtle yet significant contention that attending to these entangled materialities—of both maker and medium—reveals how friction between imaginative intent and material affordances can generate methodological insights, open alternative futures, and disrupt dominant discourses.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15040078

Authors: Alexander Zholkovsky

The paper examines the poetics of graphomania as a productive aesthetic device within the Russian literary tradition, focusing primarily on Velimir Khlebnikov and extending the analysis to figures such as Fedor Dostoevsky’s Captain Lebyadkin and real authors such as Eduard Limonov, Dmitrii Prigov, and Sasha Sokolov. Building on the article’s central insight that Khlebnikov’s “bad writing,” stylistic shifts, and violations of canonical norms constitute not a defect but a sui generis artistic strategy, the study situates these techniques within broader historical and theoretical frameworks, including the Formalist concepts of parody, junior branch, and heteroglossic subcodes of poetic culture. The article traces the way Khlebnikov’s dynamic alternation of heterogeneous linguistic, prosodic, and generic registers produces a complex, unstable but grandstanding authorial “I” aligned with the traditional figure of the poet-as-character and the culturally embedded myth of the Poet–Tsar. Furthermore, it maps a genealogy of “graphomaniac” writing from the avant-garde to postmodernism, demonstrating how later authors transform Khlebnikov’s innovations—alternately amplifying, parodying, or ironizing them. Through close readings and extensive intertextual contextualization, the article argues that graphomania functions as a critical mechanism for destabilizing aesthetic orthodoxies, exposing, performing and producing literary authority, and redefining the boundaries between norm and deviation, author and character, poetic freedom and canonical constraint.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15040077

Authors: Willem G. Weststeijn

The developments in mathematics in the nineteenth century, in particular non-Euclidean geometry, which was not concerned with flat space, but with curvature, led at the end of the century and the beginning of the next one to much discussion of and experiments with the fourth dimension. The idea of a fourth dimension played a major role in the arts. In literature the Symbolists were convinced that there existed a “higher” reality behind the visible one and tried to suggest it in their poetry. In pictorial art and sculpture completely new forms emerged that distorted reality and in that way showed that one had to look at the world in a different way; there was something beyond the usual three dimensions. Many artists consciously tried to visualize this “beyondness”, the fourth dimension. The followers of the idea of a higher reality considered the fourth dimension as time, most artists as space. Much influence in the discussion about the fourth dimension had Charles Howard Hinton and, especially in Russia, Pyotr Ouspensky; both wrote a book entitled The Fourth Dimension (1904 and 1909, respectively), in which they propagated their ideas. The Futurist poet Velimir Klebnikov did not explicitly mention the fourth dimension in his work, but in view of his scientific interests (he studied mathematics at the University of Kazan, one of whose most celebrated scientists was Nikolai Lobachevsky, the founder of non-Euclidean geometry) and his close ties with the avant-garde painters, he was undoubtedly aware of the ideas about the fourth dimension in his time. Khlebnikov compared himself with Lobachevsky and used his geometry in his own description of the cities of the future. With his experiments with language and numerals he tried to find a new meaning behind the usual ones, and he made endless calculations to determine the laws of time: there must be some principle that rules the continuous stream of events. Establishing this principle, one might transcend history and ultimately find a solution for fate and death. His entire work is devoted to the search of a new dimension.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15040076

Authors: Karen Phan

This thesis examines the theological status of artificial intelligence-generated religious imagery through Byzantine icon theory, asking whether such images can participate in the material, devotional, and communal, definitions traditionally ascribed to icons. Situating AI within an intellectual lineage beginning with iconoclasm debates and then turning to Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, this project places contemporary image generation models such as DALL·E and Midjourney in dialog with late antique and Byzantine debates on representation, likeness, and mediation. Drawing on St Theodore the Studite’s defense of icons as relational images grounded in the Incarnation, this thesis argues that AI-generated portraits cannot be understood as icons in a theological or art historical sense. Icons depend upon an embodied triad between maker, prototype, and worshiping community, sustained through liturgical practice, ascetic discipline, and intentional craft. Adding Aristotle’s account of deliberation further clarifies this distinction: algorithmic production lacks the ethical agency and purposive choice intrinsic to sacred image-making. While engaging the scholarship of Robin Cormack, Charles Barber, Bissera V. Petcheva, and many others, this study reasserts the Christological foundations of icon theory while situating AI imagery within contemporary political economies of data extraction, militarism, and environmental cost. AI may attempt to reproduce religious imagery, but it cannot generate objects of real veneration.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15040075

Authors: Matteo Soranzo

This article provides a new interpretation of Giulio Campagnola’s 1509 engraving, The Astrologer, by situating its innovative punteggiato technique and enigmatic iconography within the precise astrological and political climate of Renaissance Venice. By identifying the numerical data on the astrologer’s disc as a reference to the lunar eclipse of 2 June 1509, the author argues that the composition—featuring a scholar, a monstrous reptile, and a distant city—represents a visual projection of the eclipse’s predicted impact. Framed by the political crisis following the Battle of Agnadello, the engraving emerges as a prophetic defense of Venetian resilience, a message further reinforced by a comparative analysis of a recently rediscovered astrological sonnet attributed to Campagnola.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15040074

Authors: James G. Schryver

The Mediterranean is being recognized as a helpful frame of reference for scholarship in various academic disciplines focusing on that area of the world. Some of these focus on the sea, while others focus on the countries surrounding it. Proponents laud the commonalities and unities that such an approach foregrounds, as well as the new ways of looking at related cultures and cultural products. At the same time, however, scholars recognize a number of challenges that come with this approach, particularly regarding the balance of micro and macro levels of analysis. Given these challenges, as well as the importance of local contexts for understanding aspects of time and agency in most works of art and architecture, how useful might such a lens be for scholars of medieval art and architecture in the region? How might we capitalize on the benefits of a Mediterranean frame of reference while also allowing for its challenges to be addressed? In response to these questions, consumption is suggested as a framework of analysis. Scholars of certain aspects of consumption have sought to balance similar tensions and their studies provide useful insights into how the local and the regional, the micro and the macro, might be effectively balanced. Such a consciously multiscale approach has the potential to help us see how the local and the Mediterranean are intertwined. In this way, thinking about certain aspects of medieval Mediterranean art via a lens of consumption can help us to make sense of how it reflects some of the complexities of the region.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15040073

Authors: Dylan Yamada-Rice

In responding to the special issue’s call to examine the shifting space of materiality, this article uses creative writing, hand-drawn comics, and speculative fiction/design as a form of research by practice to critique changes in UK Higher Arts Education in relation to art materials. It shows how embedded neoliberal structures that have been documented to negatively impact HE staff and the arts in general, also now extend to prioritising and excluding some art materials over others. A speculative vision is offered as an alternative in which a nomadic higher arts education is put forward, one that encourages the use of hybrid art materials. The means chosen to make the arguments presented are analogue methods of drawing, cutting, printing, sewing and writing to strengthen the point that digital materials are currently prioritised in UK arts education due to HE’s entanglement with agendas entwinned with Big Tech and most recently the military. The format is also deliberately experimental to move away from common ways of presenting research and theory that have become formulaic as academics are pushed to meet the ideals of the Research Excellence Framework, another neoliberal rubric.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15040072

Authors: Vassilis Zakopoulos Panagiota Xanthopoulou Agoritsa Makri

This study aims to investigate and analyze the factors that affect the adoption of digital technologies in theatre/drama education by reviewing existing literature. This study employed the Scopus and Google Scholar databases to conduct a systematic literature review (SLR), as well as a bibliometric analysis. The results showed that using digital tools in theatre/drama education makes students more engaged, helps with creative exploration, and facilitates the teaching of sustainability concepts using new methods. The most discussed determinants referred to accessibility issues with infrastructure and technological resources, as well as the presence of digital skills and a related digital culture within the educational environment. The thematic analysis produced key themes, such as training, digital skills, access, and interactivity, showing that the main challenge for digital technology integration in theatre education remains the lack of appropriate digital skills, educators’ training, and infrastructure. The findings can be useful for various groups, including theatre educators, faculty members, education researchers, theatre practitioners, and policymakers. This study adds to the existing literature by highlighting how digital technologies can enhance theatre/drama education, while emphasizing challenges such as accessibility and digital literacy, and the need to keep traditional theatre/drama methods alive in the digital world.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15040071

Authors: Andrey A. Rossomakhin

This paper is the first attempt to interpret the visual ‘construemes’ by the constructivist poet Alexei N. Chicherin, published in the anthology Mena vsekh which appeared in Moscow in1924. ‘Construemes’ can be considered the most enigmatic artifacts of the Russian avant-garde. Although ‘construemes’ can be easily confused with meaningless visual zaum (‘the transrational’), Chicherin’s actions and the very nature of his personality prevent one from interpreting ‘construemes’ as actionist endeavors to scandalize or a ‘play on nonsense’. Analysis of the poet’s treatise Kan-Fun published in Moscow in 1926 required finding the key to deciphering the ‘construemes’, reveals the positivist nature of Chicherin’s visual–phonological exercises. In the treatise, the poet argues for the primacy of the eye and vision. He illustrates synthetic ‘signs’ or ‘pictograms’ with the quotidian example of propaganda posters, capable of influencing millions more effectively than words alone. The study emphasizes the enigmatic nature of the titles of Chicherin’s books, the Nietzschean subtexts of his self-presentation, encrypted allusions to the esoteric and magical tradition of the Tarot, and religious symbolism. Sixteen illustrations help the understanding of Chicherin’s logic behind the creation of his four ‘construemes’, including the most mysterious composition called ‘Raman’ (‘the shortest Kan-Fun Novel in the world’). The structure of this text synthesizes the verbal, visual–graphic, acoustic (phonological symbols) and musical (notes) levels. The article also examines Chicherin’s proven techniques: the appropriation of the sacred dimension and self-presentation as an actor possessing genuine knowledge and capable of competing alone with the entire literary environment.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15040070

Authors: Kornelija Icin

The study reconsiders the architectural production associated with Russian Suprematism (which was speaking of “the supremacy of pure artistic sensation” rather than the veritable figurative depiction of real-life subjects) in the early Soviet period as a coherent and conceptually rigorous mode of speculative world-making rather than as a marginal or unrealized appendix to avant-garde art history and theory. By examining the architectural propositions articulated by Kazimir Malevich and then elaborated by his younger colleagues Lazar Khidekel, Ilya Chashnik, and Nikolai Suetin, the study advances the claim that Russian Suprematist architecture constituted an epistemic experiment aimed at redefining the very ontological premises of architecture. Far from functioning as a mere transposition of abstract pictorial language into three-dimensional form, Suprematist planits, architectons, and aerocentric projects operated as instruments for thinking spatiality beyond terrestrial gravity, anthropocentric utility, and historical typology. Situating these projects within the intellectual horizon of Russian cosmism and early aerospace thought, the article demonstrates how Suprematist architecture intersected with contemporary philosophical, scientific, and technological discourses that envisioned humanity’s active participation in the reorganization of cosmic space. The architectural imagination of Suprematism emerges here as inseparable from broader debates on excitation, non-objectivity, transformation of matter, and the reconfiguration of human corporeality. Through close analysis of formal strategies, pedagogical frameworks, and theoretical writings, the paper reveals the internal plurality of avant-garde Suprematist architectural inquiry, ranging from ecological proto-urbanism and hovering settlements to magnetic and cruciform spatial systems. Ultimately, the paper argues that the historical non-realization of these projects should not be interpreted as a failure but as an intrinsic feature of their speculative methodology. Suprematist architecture is thus redefined as an anticipatory practice whose unresolved propositions continue to resonate with contemporary discussions on space habitation, planetary design, ecological responsibility, and post-human architectural thought, challenging inherited assumptions about the scope and function of architecture as such.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15040069

Authors: John Wild Shira Wachsmann

Symbiotic Intelligence (SI) rethinks dominant evolutionary narratives within Western artificial intelligence (AI) development through a practice-led research methodology centred on co-creating with mycelium. This research investigates how living mycelium can inform and reframe prevailing AI narratives, particularly those shaped by evolutionary logics. These narratives, found in developer manifestoes and futurological discourse, often frame intelligence within competitive, deterministic paradigms rooted in social Darwinism and invoke eugenicist ideas such as the g-factor in intelligence. Through the creation of responsive art installations, the project positions mycelium as a material and conceptual collaborator, opening new spaces for dialogue. This article inverts the curatorial strategy of incorporating AI technology into artistic practices. Instead, we show how arts-led ‘making’ practices can generate new narratives that propose alternative ethical frameworks and sustainable directions for technological development. We argue that a direct, generative but non-deterministic relationship exists between AI narratives and the technical actualisation of AI. Specifically, SI contends that: (i) evolutionary narratives underpin Western AI imaginaries; (ii) these often reflect reductive social Darwinist models; (iii) counter-narratives grounded in collective assemblage and symbiotic intelligence are essential for shaping more complex and sustainable AI futures.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15040068

Authors: Nuozhou Chen Jiaqi Li Chenheng Deng

While recent game research explores culture and Orientalism, a significant gap remains regarding Sinologism. Gu proposed Sinologism based on Orientalism, laying the theoretical foundation for this study. Utilizing the analytical framework of Chapman and Šisler, this study examines the characteristics of Sinologism within and outside the game, including its scenes, characters, items, abilities, skills, and narrative style. The cultural practice of Black Myth: Wukong exemplifies the complex dynamics described by “Sinologism.” Operating within the globalized framework of the video game industry, it negotiates with Western perspectives while, to a certain extent, challenging established Orientalist modes of representation. However, this study argues that its success is not a result of “complicit” strategies that merely replicate dominant paradigms. Instead, it represents a reconstruction of “cultural subjectivity.” By combining high production values with familiar ARPG conventions, the game makes culturally dense elements more legible to international audiences, encouraging engagement with indigenous cultural logic rather than defaulting to externally imposed interpretive frames. Accordingly, Black Myth: Wukong stands as a paradigmatic case, illustrating how Chinese developers attempt to negotiate agency within an asymmetrical Sino-Western structure to seek autonomous expression amidst structural constraints.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15040067

Authors: Zachary Hicks

Released in 2012, Svetlana Baskova’s Za Marksa… (For Marx…) poses the question of the abolition of capitalism through workers’ struggle—that is, the question of revolution in decidedly non-revolutionary times. A follow-up to her activist documentary Odno reshenie—soprotivlenie (The Only Solution Is Resistance, 2011), For Marx… can be read as a post-Soviet return to Sergei Eisenstein’s Stachka (Strike, 1925), one that confronts the historical afterlife of the revolutionary proletariat following the rapid decomposition of the industrial working class once positioned at the center of the socialist imaginary. Borrowing its title from Louis Althusser and situating itself within an international genealogy of left debates on form and revolution—running from the Soviet avant-garde through Brechtian estrangement, militant cinema of 1968, and the collapse of “actually existing socialism”—the film mobilizes inherited models of committed art only to expose their historical limits. I argue that For Marx… does not revive earlier oppositional forms but stages their failure under contemporary capitalism. Montage, estrangement, and documentary realism appear as sedimented forms that no longer cohere into an operative revolutionary praxis. By foregrounding the exhaustion of political form, For Marx… reframes abolition—not only of the police or the carceral state but of capitalism itself—as a horizon that persists precisely where inherited aesthetic strategies break down. The film’s success lies in its refusal to offer closure, keeping the question of political transformation open.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15040066

Authors: Tinka Harvard

This article investigates how women’s relative absence from medieval textual archives can be reconsidered through the study of visual and material culture. Focusing on Mongol and Yuan China and read in relation to The Travels of Marco Polo, it argues that women’s artistic production functioned as a form of embedded counter-archive that preserves traces of participation obscured in narrative sources. Drawing on Black feminist epistemology as a heuristic framework and employing critical fabulation and poetic inquiry as analytical methods, the study interprets silence as a meaningful historical trace rather than a void, and considers silence not as absence but as a structured condition of archival production. Four case studies—Guan Daosheng’s literati bamboo painting, the handscroll tradition associated with Lady Su Hui, imperial phoenix embroidery, and Silk Road textile fragments—demonstrate distinct modes through which women’s presence becomes materially legible: mediated visibility, formal containment, infrastructural anonymity, and circulatory displacement. These “quiet arts” reveal how women’s labour and creativity persisted within and alongside patriarchal inscriptional systems even when textual attribution receded. In dialogue with the shadow silhouettes of contemporary artist Kara Walker, the article further situates these premodern archives within a broader visual language of absence and recovery. Rather than reconstructing lost biographies, it proposes a transdisciplinary method—integrating art history, feminist theory, theology, and poetic inquiry—for reading material culture as a site where historical silence becomes structurally legible. It proposes a transdisciplinary approach that expands art historical methods for interpreting gender, authorship, and archival silence in medieval visual culture.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15040065

Authors: Alisée Devillers Kathlyn M. Cooney

Art creates power1—for the commissioner, the depicted, as well as for the creator [...]

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030064

Authors: Muhammad Sohail Ahmad Amina Malik Rana Yassir Hussain

This paper examines how Pakistani popular cinema reproduces a cruelly optimistic attachment to gender identity and thinness, where weight loss is imagined as the key to love, success, and social acceptance. Rather than surveying the entire industry, this study focuses on two emblematic case studies—Jawani Phir Nahi Ani (2015) and Oye Motti (2021)—to show how Lollywood normalises fatphobia through comic ridicule, makeover tropes, and exclusionary casting practices. The analysis reveals how fatness is framed not as an identity but as a flaw to be corrected, rendering overweight characters undesirable despite their talents or personalities. Thus, fatness is usually treated as an obstacle to social acceptance, marriage, and personal happiness; the very hope of inclusion becomes an instrument of exclusion, exemplifying Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism. In Berlant’s terms, cruel optimists always struggle to achieve unattainable fantasies of a better life that promise upward mobility.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030063

Authors: Margret Nisch

Film scenography often suffers from a dual problem of invisibility in academic theory and hypervisibility as mere ‘spectacle’ in popular reception. This study addresses the lack of integrated theoretical frameworks that connect scenographic design to its emotional and narrative functions. Utilizing a reception-focused analytical approach, this research applies Peter Wuss’s model of film perception to Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Analyzing the broad range of the film’s scenographic methods, this article investigates how high degrees of scenographic visibility operate as affective mechanisms rather than just stylistic signatures. The analysis identifies specific epistemic qualities of film space that facilitate emotional engagement and narrative movement. By examining scenographic elements across multiple scales, this study reveals how these design choices operate simultaneously across concept-guided, perception-guided, and stereotype-guided cognitive structures. Ultimately, the research demonstrates that scenographic visibility is intrinsically motivated by affective function. This challenges conventional film theory dichotomies and repositions scenography as fundamental to understanding cinema’s epistemic operations.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030062

Authors: Thomas P. Riccio

This article documents and analyzes a three-month intercultural performance collaboration with Metamorphosis Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia, during the summer of 1992—a pivotal moment following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Drawing on the author’s fieldwork methodology developed through decades of collaboration with Indigenous communities in Alaska, Southern Africa, and Siberia, the project employed trance techniques, rhythm-based training, and ritual archaeology to reconstruct pre-Christian Slavic performance practices. The resulting production, Shadows from the Planet Fire, emerged through a process that positioned ritual not as nostalgic revival but as a living technology for addressing cultural trauma and existential displacement. This account contributes to performance studies, applied theatre, and cultural heritage discourse by demonstrating how cosmocentric Indigenous methodologies can be adapted to address the spiritual and psychological wounds of post-industrial, post-colonial societies. The work establishes foundational principles for what the author terms “Techdigenous” practice—the synthesis of Indigenous wisdom traditions with contemporary performance contexts—and argues for ritual as a necessary consciousness technology in an era of ecological crisis and cultural fragmentation.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030061

Authors: Sara Sallam

In this essay, the author reflects on the entangled histories of archaeology, colonial extraction, and heritage dispersion through the lens of her artistic research project, A Layer of Salt for My Oblivion. Centering the displacement of the Old Kingdom mastaba of Neferirtenef from Saqqara to the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, the author unearths the silences embedded within archival photographs. The archive in focus is that accumulated by Belgian Egyptologist Jean Capart, several of whose archaeological missions were funded by the Belgian industrialist Baron Empain. The latter’s imperial ambitions also defined the urban fabric of the author’s own childhood in Egypt. Blending essay, archival intervention, and poetic voice, the author proposes an alternative mode of listening to displaced heritage: one that honours the agency of the silenced, embraces rupture over restoration, and invites the possibility of care over control.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030060

Authors: Christina Lodder

This text focuses on Vladimir Tatlin and the different concepts of energy that he embraced during the 1920s: from the technological ethos of his Model for a Monument to the Third International (1920) to the organic forms and renewable energy of The Letatlin, (1932). Despite the differences, I shall argue that there are strong continuities in the way that Tatlin approached the innate properties of material. I shall also suggest that his reservations about technology in the late 1920s may have reflected some misgivings about the government’s industrialization policy.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030059

Authors: Zhilong Yan Manyi Pei

Daoism is an important indigenous religion of China that emerged from ancient totemic worship and shamanic practices, encompassing mysterious ritual arts known as fulu (talismans and registers). Daoist fulu writing constitutes an important content and manifestation of Daoist spiritual calligraphy, representing a significant embodiment of Daoist sacred knowledge and mystical power. This paper presents the first in-depth investigation into the sources of the mysterious numinous power inherent in Daoist fulu writing. We conclude that the spiritual power of fulu writing derives from three distinct yet interconnected levels: external divine spiritual power, innate primordial qi spiritual power, and the fundamental Dao spiritual power. These three sources are not mutually exclusive but rather work in coordination. Only through the integration of the fundamental Dao spiritual power at the primordial level with the High Master’s own innate primordial qi spiritual power can external divine spiritual power be mobilized and utilized. This unity of subject and object, essence and application, forms a complete cycle that maximizes the spiritual efficacy of the talismans. Furthermore, to apply these research findings to promote contemporary artistic creation and enhance the mystical and innovative dimension of contemporary art at the visual level, the authors, drawing upon their personal Daoist cultivation experiences and fulu writing artistic practice, will further discuss the revelatory significance of fulu writing for contemporary calligraphic art creation.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030058

Authors: Evgeny Pavlov

In the canon of Soviet travel writings of the 1920s–30s, Andrei Bely’s lesser-known book Veter s Kavkaza (1928, not reprinted since its first publication) and the essay Armenia (1929) are something of an oddity. They are generally seen аs an active attempt on his part to become a Soviet writer. This attempt by all accounts had very limited success, but the intention was genuine, and it enters into a most intriguing constellation with the more successful travel writings of the same period that ostensibly are based on the same practice of participatory observation as was practiced by members of LEF and other literary groups. Bely’s writings are more about observation itself than they are about anything else. His entire approach to the subject matter of his travel narratives is based on an obsessive mapping of the topography of his journey in an attempt to learn (by his own account) the Goethean art of seeing—not just the physical topography but also the past and the future of the human landscape in its revolutionary transformation. Ultimately, Bely’s spatially focused narrative seeks to see and represent time, and for this reason suffers the most spectacular failure, which Bely the Kantian and Bely the Symbolist wants to celebrate, but Bely the Soviet writer desperately tries to overcome. The article examines this failure in the broader political and artistic context of the time.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030057

Authors: John Zarobell

When I set out to edit a Special Issue in Arts on urban development and the role of the arts, I wanted to harvest a different perspective on the advantages of culture for urban development [...]

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030056

Authors: Ronit Milano

This article examines the politics of visuality in Israel through the case study of Alami House, a Palestinian home in the village of Hiribya that became the nucleus of Kibbutz Ziqim in 1949 and was later transformed into a heritage site near the Gaza border. Drawing on theories of visual culture, affect, and heritage, the study traces the shifting visual and ideological functions of the site—from its early use as a kibbutz “watchtower,” through its renovation and rebranding as a heritage museum and wine bar, to its symbolic role during and after the Gaza War. It argues that the Israeli gaze toward the Palestinian—manifested in both the spatial design and the performative experience of the site—embodies a dual operation of seeing and unseeing, whereby the Palestinian is simultaneously acknowledged and erased. The essay introduces the concept of disciplined visuality to describe this politically orchestrated management of what may be seen, remembered, or forgotten. By analyzing Alami House as a microcosm of Israeli heritage-making, the article reveals how visuality functions as a tool of power, shaping both the material and conceptual landscape of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030055

Authors: Svetlana Atlavina

The ACE-funded project Clay and Augmented Reality (CAR) explored how the combination of tactile and digital media might activate embodied memory, foster art expression, and stimulate new forms of creative learning. The project investigated memory recollection by integrating clay sculpting with immersive Augmented Reality (AR), focusing on psychoanalysis and participatory art research. The created multisensory environment was a significant element in reconnection with early-life experiences. Six workshops engaged over 40 participants in memory-mapping through AR interfaces and tactile activities. Extensive theoretical and methodological research focuses on theories of Freud, Polanyi, Ettinger, and art practice of Hepworth, integrating embodied making with experimental technologies, including 3D scanning, ARvid/HoloLens experiences, and qualitative feedback analysis. The outcome is a hybrid repository of over 120 memory-informed artefacts titled My Mother and I, presented on the sketchfab platform. The collection showcases intergenerational memory, imprints of intangible and visual storytelling. During the research, the significance of slowness, play, and relational presence was underlined as conditions for memory activation. It concludes that memory lives in gesture, spatial perception and given care, and that hybrid arts-based methods offer new epistemologies of healing, creativity and pedagogical inquiry. CAR presents a model for participatory research that bridges physical and digital realms in deeply human ways.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030054

Authors: Natalie Beak

This practice-led research examines how virtual production represents a circular return to scenographic practice, reactivating integrated modes of spatial authorship that have long underpinned screen storytelling but were obscured by industrial fragmentation. Drawing on a single-day intensive workshop at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS), the study analyses how spatial authorship emerged through embodied, collaborative engagement with an LED volume environment. Grounded in scenographic theory and concepts of distributed cognition and situated authorship, the article reframes virtual production as a condition that renders pre-digital, collaborative modes of making visible within contemporary screen production. The LED volume functions simultaneously as scenic environment, lighting instrument, and compositional partner, requiring participants to negotiate space, light, movement, and camera as a unified spatial event. Analysis identifies how scenographic understanding emerged through virtual scouting, world-responsive storytelling, physical-digital integration, and embodied realisation. The findings extend production design theory by challenging ocular-centric models of mise-en-scène and positioning scenographic integration as screen practice—an epistemic mode of enacting through collective, materially grounded spatial experimentation. While situated within an educational context, the study points to broader implications for how spatial authorship and collective practice are understood in contemporary screen production.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030053

Authors: Adina-Iuliana Deacu

Digital capitalism has generated new forms of extractivism that extend beyond natural resources to encompass data, attention, affect, and planetary materials. This article examines how exhibition practices can function as forms of algorithmic resistance by foregrounding material praxis, embodied engagement, and curatorial strategies of care. Drawing on a practice-based research approach, the paper develops a theoretical framework around extractivism, materiality, and relational ethics, and applies it to two case studies: the author’s exhibition Nature Reclaims: Images of Healing, which cultivates regenerative imaginaries through urban rewilding photography, tactile installations, and trauma-informed reflective tools; and Fossil Fables, curated by the Global Extraction Observatory (GEO), which exposes the infrastructural, political, and ideological architectures sustaining extractive industries and digital technologies. Through comparative analysis, the article introduces the concept of symbiotic curation to describe a post-extractive curatorial method that holds critical exposure and regenerative proposition in sustained tension. The findings illustrate how exhibitions can reorganize perception, recalibrate temporality, and render hidden infrastructures visible, while also cultivating embodied relations of care, ecological attunement, and collective reflection. By positioning curatorial practice as an epistemic process in which theoretical propositions are tested through spatial, material, and affective decisions, the article identifies transferable principles for post-extractive cultural work. It argues that exhibitions can operate as laboratories for algorithmic resistance and as sites for rehearsing alternative relations between humans, technologies, and more-than-human worlds.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030052

Authors: Simon Poulter

This article sets out an assertion that a mass art project can make a virtue of ‘network extension’ through an Instagram account, to build creative community, new connections, and physical artwork outcomes. We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher is an example of a ‘manifested artwork’, where Fisher’s ideas on capitalism and community are explored through electronic media. We have taken the work of critical theorist, Mark Fisher, and subjected it to a process of détournement, alluding to the work of Guy de Bord and The Situationists. The thing in itself—Fisher’s processed ideas—are reprocessed and held up against the posthumous period between 2017 and now, since he died. The assertion in the work is that while the tools are circumscribed by a set of ‘standards’ and ‘production processes’, this does not delimit them from being employed towards the evolution of embodied and shared actions that develop a counter-narrative or something that eschews the methods of Hollywood or broadcast television documentaries. We just have to learn ways to do this. ‘Decapitalising’ a process, working with human agency and good will, turns the platform of Instagram into a tool of empowerment—reappropriating the algorithm and capturing the collective back from the closed corporate system of control. We see that a form of value is pulled back out of the machinic effects of a proprietary platform.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030051

Authors: Henrietta Mondry

The first two decades of the twentieth century saw an unprecedented surge in scientific and technological experiments directed at the physical transformation of the human body. In Bolshevik Russia of the 1920s, science fiction and scientific and technological experiments created a nexus. The science fiction of Aleksandr Beliaev (1884–1942) turned experiments into adventure plots. Beliaev’s views on scientific experiments were informed not only by Bolshevik science but also by late-nineteenth-century pre-Revolutionary scientific theories. Nikolai Fedorov’s visionary futurity known as “Philosophy of the Common Task” bridged pre-Revolutionary utopian aspirations with the speculative thought of the 1920s across science, literature and art. My aim is to identify and analyse both intersections and differences in Beliaev’s and Fedorov’s visions of futurity in relation to body transformations in two of Beliaev’s most important yet understudied novels of the 1920s, The Amphibian Man and Professor Dowell’s Head. My approach is both synchronic and diachronic. I address features of transhumanist and posthumanist thought in Beliaev’s narratives that involve experiments in assembling hybridised human–animal, interhuman and human–machine organisms. I position Beliaev’s writing within the speculative discourse that was informed by Fedorovian aspirational futurity as well as by scientific and medical experiments involving reanimation and restoration of humans and animals.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030050

Authors: Yuanyuan Zhang Mumtaz Mokhtar

This study advances the Confucian Visual Transformation Model (CVTM) to analyse how Confucian values are visually reformulated in contemporary Malaysian Chinese art. Integrating artist interviews (n = 5), symbolic visual coding, and audience surveys (n = 227), the research addresses the lack of empirical frameworks for transcultural aesthetics. While an initial exploratory factor analysis (EFA) confirmed four dimensions—Ren (benevolence), He (harmony), WenZhi (technique-ideology), and MeiShan (aesthetic-moral)—it also revealed structural overlaps. Consequently, the study proposes CVTM 2.0, which replaces additive metrics with a tension-driven fusion mechanism. Key innovations include a Symbolic Tension Index (STI) for dynamic weighting and a fuzzy integration layer to handle overlap between WenZhi and MeiShan. Results indicate that Confucian dimensions are not static but are activated through compositional and material tensions. Theoretically, this reframes Confucian aesthetics as a context-responsive system; practically, it offers a replicable blueprint for analysing postcolonial identity negotiation in Southeast Asian art.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030049

Authors: Nataliya Zlydneva

This article examines the avant-garde reformulation of the nature–culture dichotomy. Within avant-garde discourse, the traditional opposition between the organic and the mechanical—and, by extension, between the body and the machine—evolves into a specific dialectical form based on the principle of juxtaposition-in-identity. In this framework, a metaphysics of corporeality comes into conflict with an instrumentalist understanding of the organic. The analysis identifies a key conceptual shift in the 1920s: the notion of the body is superseded by that of the organism, which is subsequently transfigured into the machine. Focusing on Russian painting from the 1910s to the early 1930s, this study employs a comparative and typological methodology. It analyzes works by Mikhail Larionov, Mikhail Matyushin, and Pavel Filonov in relation to those of Konstantin Redko, situating this analysis within a broader art-historical and intellectual context. The research traces and exemplifies a pivotal transition in visual art: the shift from the early avant-garde mythopoetics of the machine–human to the late-1920s construct of the human–machine, as theorized in biomechanics and gesture studies. The article foregrounds electricity as a central pictorial motif, arguing that it served as a powerful visual and conceptual medium for synthesizing the organic with the mechanical and the mythological with the ideological. Ultimately, it posits that the internal social logic of this aesthetic shift contributed to the formation of the totalitarian body politic in Stalinist Russia.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030048

Authors: Emmanuel Iduma

In this paper, I examine ways in which a digital photographic archive might be instantiated or instigated, how that instantiation contributes to discourse on the localization of archives, and how the imbrication of an archive with the knowledge it produces requires new ways of knowing. I argue that the key responses to that imbrication, broadly conceptualized as an ‘ethics of care’, should be expanded into an ‘ethics of futurity’, given the affordances of the networked image. I conclude by pointing to how a practice of futurity for digital photographic archives is concerned not just with domiciliation but with the archival imaginary of a post-digital era.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030047

Authors: Benjamin Pinsent

On the 25 September 1987, CBS aired the first episode of Beauty and the Beast. This television fantasy romance centred on the chaste relationship between Catherine Chandler (Linda Hamilton), a New York socialite turned District Attorney investigator, and the beastly Vincent, a man with leonine features who lives in a secret commune of outcasts beneath the city, played by Ron Perlman, but designed by Rick Baker. This article examines Vincent as a core part of Beauty and the Beast’s appeal and as a sight for affective spectacle. It will argue that due to television’s ability to provide audiences with intimacy and proximity, as well as Alexia Smit’s theories of tele-affectivity, Vincent, as a character and as part of the scenography of the television show, allows for “a multisensory, situated experience”. Taking a historical materialist approach, this article will examine the initial reaction to Vincent as a character in the prerelease material and the critical reception upon the release of the first season. It will also explore ideas of responsibility in the creation of Vincent and the tension and collaboration that take place between Perlman and Baker.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030046

Authors: Alexandros Dimosthenis Protopappas

This article examines the influence of tradition, particularly Orthodox thought and icons, on the “Russian” and Soviet avant-garde. This field of research was systematically initiated in the 1990s and continues to this day, as evidenced, among others, by recent articles in the Arts Journal. The present article contributes to this field by broadening the perspective, which has overwhelmingly focused on art. The step towards architecture is taken with a case study on the famous Soviet architect Ivan Leonidov. The article positions him in the context of contemporary debates on icons led by theorists Evgeniy Trubetskoy, Pavel Florensky and Nikolay Tarabukin, but also in connection with the emergence of Suprematism, which was introduced by Kazimir Malevich and further developed by El Lissitzky. Leonidov’s geometric bodies, which dynamically “float” in space, prove to be relevant to “Russian”/Soviet aesthetic interpretations of icons and “Russian”/Soviet artistic forms of expression. Just as the icon aimed at bringing believers closer to God, or Suprematism sought to reveal to the masses a higher spiritual or scientific truth, Leonidov’s architecture offered a metaphysical spectacle for a corresponding universalist goal: the creation of a pan-humanist utopia.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030045

Authors: Mikhail Odesskiy Monika Spivak

For the spiritual situation at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, it is appropriate to speak of the project of the new man, which was caused by a grandiose revolution that had various dimensions, including scientific, technological, and artistic aspects. From this perspective, it is useful to distinguish between two models of the relationship between experimental art and science and technology. According to the first model, art assists science and technology to create the new man, with science and technology playing a fundamental role (Futurism). According to the second model, art opposes science and technology, which poses a threat to the individual and humanity as a whole. Bely is closer to the second model, but with important clarifications. The treatise The History of the Formation of the Self-conscious soul occupies a central place among his philosophical texts. In this treatise, the author examined the development of culture from Christ to the beginning of the 20th century. Bely worked on The History in the USSR, but did not plan to publish it. Therefore, he freely used the anthroposophical methodology and conceptual methodology, which led to the radically experimental (avant-garde) character of the treatise. In The History, science and technology are an important expression of culture, but by no means the highest. Their significance is determined by when and how they contribute to understanding the spiritual laws of the universe. At the same time, Bely published a review of Fyodor Gladkov’s novel Energy in the Soviet magazine Novy Mir, in which he continued to criticize the cult of science and technology being self-sufficient. Finally, in his experimental novel Moscow, Bely explored the tragedy of the scientist in modern society. The protagonist of the novel makes a scientific discovery that has potential for industrial (military) applications. The character realizes the danger of the discovery, and he is tortured, but he does not reveal the discovery to either foreign spies or the communists. In other words, in his Soviet-era writings, Bely did not so much deny the importance of science and technology as he did prioritize spiritual work and art. Thus, his texts express the type of interference between scientific reflection and avant-garde art that R. Poggioli described as “general dynamism”.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030044

Authors: Lindsey Drury

While concepts of remoteness have long conditioned the fabulation of alterity, remoteness is not a quality ascribable to distant places and strange peoples “out there”. No one is by nature “remote”. Building from this proposition, this article argues that a heritage of European aestheticization of the “far” north grew out of European ways of imagining the world and contributed to settler social imaginaries of remoteness. Through historical analysis of travelling accounts, colonial exhibitions, and the settler art theorical work of Francis Sparshott about the “cold and remote art” of “far” northerly Inuit peoples, the concept of an aesthetics of remoteness—modes of appreciation and taste that produce a “darkness” not inherent to the Arctic itself but projected by the settler-colonial milieu, which maintains control through the creation of distance. The study shows how Indigenous Arctic art becomes aestheticized through settler sensoria of faraway and incomprehensible forms of beauty that mask histories of colonial extraction and dispossession. The article further contextualises a close, critical reading of Sparshott into relation with the wider history of trade and colonisation, to consider how colonial markets for art objects interface with both European narration of remote peoples and European markets for art from remote parts of the world. The work ultimately argues for a reorientation that refuses this projection of an aesthetics of remoteness and proposes an ethics of recognition that confronts the colonial histories embedded in art circulation and appreciation within Canada and beyond.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030043

Authors: Róisín Blunnie Orla Flanagan

The commonly recognised image of a choral conductor is of a person who stands in front of a group of singers and uses a set of gestures to direct them in performance. In order to arrive at this moment of shared musical experience, however, there is a long journey of preparation that must take place, from devising an artistic concept, to formulating a coherent and stimulating programme of repertoire, to realising such a programme by engaging in an extended period of rehearsal that encompasses vocal, musical, expressive, linguistic, and emotional facets and gathers diverse individual singers into a unified choral instrument with a common expressive purpose. In this article, two experienced choral conductors present structured reflective exegeses on artistic projects undertaken with their respective chamber choirs. Drawing on reflective approaches aligned with practice-based/artistic research, and on leading voices in repertoire programming and choral studies more broadly, the authors articulate and analyse their creative processes, highlighting considerations and goals for choral conductors both in designing programmes as a basis for impactful collective musical experiences and in enacting these experiences in a spirit of co-creation with choir members and other artistic contributors.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15030042

Authors: Enrique Mallen

During the German Occupation, Picasso reacted to the omnipresent threat of death and violence with defiant stoicism, artistic subversion, and a profound memorialization of its victims. Though his work was banned as “degenerate” by the Nazis, he remained in Paris, and chose to fight with his art rather than flee. Picasso was also personally affected by death during this time as he lost several close friends. Among them were the poet Max Jacob, who died in the Drancy concentration camp in 1944. He knew that his art was impacted by the horror around him, even if he did not paint the war directly. That same year, he declared, “I did not paint the war… but there is no doubt that the war is there in the pictures which I painted then.” The artist stripped away any hint of beauty in his wartime portraits and still lifes in favor of brutal, angular compositions. In all the jarring pictures he painted during this period, death is portrayed as a violent threat rather than a peaceful end to life.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15020041

Authors: Robert Paul Huber

This article examines the unexplained image of a reptilian creature in the fire of a spandrel of Raphael’s Loggia of Psyche in Villa Farnesina, Rome, from the point of view of alchemy. The essay identifies the probable alchemical literary source upon which the image was based and explains its reason in the overall symbolism of the artwork. Moreover, evidence is brought to bear regarding the Cupid and Psyche myth from Apuleius’ Golden Ass in the Renaissance as being understood as an allegory of the Magnum Opus of alchemy. Alchemy and related astrology, furthermore, are here considered in relation to Hermetism within the context of the period’s notion of the prisca theologia and its learned magia. Medici household interest in the Psyche myth, as demonstrated by illustrations of Apuleius’ fable on three sets of Florentine marriage cassoni, are used as evidence to explicate this. The essay also provides plausible reasons why the patron Agostino Chigi, papal banker from Siena, likely harbored interest in alchemy and the consequent effect on the symbolism in the Loggia of Psyche it implies. The methodology employed is essentially humanistic, in that I consider medieval and Renaissance literary sources regarding the Psyche myth, but also Hermetic philosophy, astrology and alchemy to rationally explain the symbolism of the Psyche tale illustrated in the Loggia of Psyche according to the Hermetic ideals of alchemy.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15020040

Authors: Robert Harvey

Irish traditional music is typically characterised as an ‘oral tradition’ which has been handed down from one generation to the next. Though the process of reworking has been considered central to its transmission, little consideration has thus far been given to the ways in which the music develops diachronically and what factors influence these performance decisions. Cottrell considers the act of performance as a palimpsest where traces of earlier renditions can still be identified in any given performance. Taking the example of ‘The Japanese Hornpipe’, this article will consider the ways in which individual actors and regional styles can reshape fundamental melodic characteristics through creative alteration in successive performances as the melody passed from circus performance act through the Donegal fiddle tradition and the whistling competition at Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15020039

Authors: Joana Jacob Ramalho

This article outlines the central role of the human eye as a consistent and recurring aesthetic strategy in the cinematic oeuvre of Sergei Eisenstein via an investigation of three films—Strike (1925), Potemkin (1925), and the unfinished, two-part Ivan the Terrible (1945, 1958). It analyses seeing, being seen, and shut and open eyes, in conjunction with the use of the close-up, as crucial to Eisenstein’s visual vocabulary and argues for the need to think about the persistent focus on eyes and vision in terms of panoptic mechanisms of political surveillance and control. Meaning is generated from eye to eye, through configurations of looking and spying, revealing and concealing—formal and aesthetic strategies which condition the gaze of the spectator, creating sites of affect that provide continuity between the films. It furthermore contextualises Soviet montage and Eisenstein’s work in relation to European avant-gardes, specifically French Impressionism and German Expressionism, whose influence on the director’s filmography has received little scholarly attention.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15020038

Authors: Ana Echemendia

The George Washington University holds a collection of African objects donated by a private collector in the 1970s, many of which are culturally misattributed. Among the objects are two large wooden posts cataloged as “house posts” from Côte d’Ivoire. These posts exhibit two distinct sections, each resembling material culture used in ceremonial traditions, but together have not been identified in existing museum collections or scholarly sources. This paper documents the findings of an investigation into the provenance and the cultural context of these posts through the analysis of the objects’ materiality, stylistic characteristics, and possible market production to determine a framework for their ethical handling and restitution. What do the combined objects reveal about the interconnectedness of Western market demands and the creation of African tourist art from the 1970s? And what are the implications of these unique forms of African material culture in the conversation on museum reforms and ethical display? The research points to the blurred boundaries between authentic ritual objects and the fabrication of “authenticity” for Western consumption. The goal of this paper is to reveal the possible connections between carvers producing objects for the tourist market within the social and cultural environment of the Senufo workshop system. The paper argues that the objects in the George Washington University collection were adapted for a Western market and audience. Through a comparative analysis of cultural ideographs from surrounding cultures in the area, records of workshops and economic production, the paper concludes that the objects were not produced for sacred use but more likely for commercial purposes, and that their cultural value is not diminished. Instead, they represent another form of expression developed by carvers who adapted Indigenous forms to satisfy Western market demands.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15020037

Authors: Alina Lipowicz-Budzyńska

Interference patterns are increasingly explored in contemporary architectural façades as visual configurations generated through the superposition of repetitive and layered geometric structures. This study examines the role of interference patterns in contemporary architecture, with particular attention to the perceptual effects and illusion-related phenomena that may emerge during their observation. The research is based on a comparative, case-based analysis of selected architectural examples in which interference patterns are introduced through façade articulation, layered glazing systems, spatial textures, or form-related strategies. The analysed material is classified into four groups: semi-spatial façades, façade graphics applied to multi-layer glass systems, spatial textures, and interference embedded in the overall building form. The analysis focuses on identifying recurring perceptual effects associated with interference patterns, such as illusion-related phenomena, including visual aliasing, motion parallax, apparent depth, figure–ground ambiguity, flicker effects, and dynamic perspective. The comparative analysis indicates that interference patterns can significantly influence the perception of architectural space within its urban context. This influence extends beyond visual appearance and aesthetic composition, contributing to architectural communication, meaning-making processes, and the cognitive engagement of the viewer with spatial and visual structures. The study provides a structured analytical framework that may support further research on perceptual strategies in contemporary architectural design.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15020036

Authors: Frederick A. De Armas

In spite of the preeminence of Nicolas Poussin as one of the great classicist painters in seventeenth century France, some of his earlier work has not received the attention it deserves. This article turns to his Realm of Flora (c. 1631) in order to study some salient aspects that have been neglected. First, Poussin followed what I call the “Botanical Renaissance.” This study foregrounds which elements he followed and which he transformed. In conjunction with this movement, this article highlights Poussin’s uses of Platonic philosophy through the works of Marsilio Ficino. The importance of Sol in his works is replicated here in the power of the solar rays to nourish nature. Thirdly, we consider the many metamorphoses in the work and their significance. Finally, we turn to the circle in the heavens with the planets, stars and twelve constellations and contrast it with the more elongated circle of the metamorphic figures on Earth in order to highlight the relation between zodiacal signs/stars and the flowers depicted. The circular constellations contrast with an elongated, even elliptical shape of the figures on Earth, perhaps to suggest the conflict, prevalent at the time, between the Copernican heliocentric and circular system with Kepler’s elliptical view of the path of the heavenly planets.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15020035

Authors: Alison Rowley Dennis Stepanov

In 1967, the Soviet government altered its expectations and procedures for mandatory military service by reducing the overall length of service and instituting biannual call-ups. This article looks at the demobilization albums created by several generations of conscripts as their time in the army or navy approached its end. These sources have received little attention to date, despite the wealth of information that they contain. The focus here will be on the artistic styles and different media commonly employed by the young men who made such scrapbooks and how these connect to the overall commemorative aspects of their creations. After discussing how some soldiers literally used parts of their uniforms to fashion their albums, thereby establishing an embodied memory of their time in the armed forces, the focus shifts to the ways in which picture postcard collages commemorated geographic locations and introduced a touristic aesthetic into the albums. Next the article considers the ways in which paintings and cartoons were employed to express concepts of time as experienced by the conscripts. The final section of the article is devoted to the private photographs that were included, specifically those taken to commemorate the friendships built while the young men endured a common rite of passage.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15020034

Authors: Kaori Ueda

Nishijin weaving in Kyoto developed as a luxury textile for kimono, yet sustaining the district requires expansion toward contemporary apparel and markets. Within a silk-centred culture and quality regime, polyester has been adopted as a versatile option, and its use has increased, especially for kimono-related products, partly because its filament form can substitute for silk and fit existing processes. From this trajectory, we explore a craft–code–craft pathway by integrating a biodegradable polyester grade into Nishijin’s code-based Jacquard production (CGS). Through practice-based research, we trace how design intent is encoded (Houdini → CGS → Jacquard) and how shop-floor constraints reconfigure design (Jacquard → CGS → Houdini), revealing institutional constraints that shape which materials become usable. We report three case studies: (A) 3D woven structures informed by pleat parameterisation, (B) a zero-waste garment using a 25 cm repeat logic, and (C) a fashion show that makes translation processes legible to the public in an exhibition context. While biodegradable polyester can fit existing infrastructure, apparel-grade warp use remains under development due to warping and warp-joining requirements; yarn specifications and design parameters are being revised. By foregrounding translation across tools, roles, and standards, the study proposes pathways for material transition and circularity within a craft system.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15020033

Authors: Krzysztof Cybulski

AI-generated content—spanning text, imagery, and music—is becoming increasingly commonplace. As the newest generation of song-producing AI systems garner attention, serious questions emerge regarding the role and place of music producers, particularly in the area of non-artistic, or “utility music”. While it might seem that human skills and creativity are unlikely to be replaced entirely by generative AI in domains such as art music or live performance, recent developments in the field suggest that human efforts in creation of advertisement or background music are already being challenged by generative AI systems. However, there is a number of alternative, more balanced forms of human–machine co-creativity. It is in this regard that I am posing a question: can commercial generative AI systems really be classified as tools in the strict sense of the term? In this paper, I am attempting to answer this question by introducing the “Control–Convenience Spectrum”—a concept I believe applies to all human creative processes that utilize tools. It bears some similarities to earlier ideas in complexity theory or flow psychology—particularly, it proposes that the extremes of this spectrum are unlikely to produce compelling aesthetical outcomes or satisfying creative practice. I argue that prompt-driven commercial generative AI systems occupy one of the far ends of the spectrum, thus failing to meet the criteria for a creative expression tool.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15020032

Authors: Anne-Gaëlle Colette Saliot

This essay contends that Jean-Luc Godard’s late digital cinema elaborates a geopolitical aesthetics in which Europe confronts the return of its repressed histories through the very instability of the digital image. While Europe has long functioned in Godard’s work as both theme and epistemic horizon—echoing the Hegelian cartographies—Film Socialisme (2010) and The Image Book (2018) transform this Eurocentrism into a site of crisis. In these films, what Fredric Jameson terms the “political unconscious” (1981) emerges through the spectral return of Palestine and the Arab world, compelling a reckoning with colonial legacies and the limits of representation. The digital turn proves decisive. Godard mobilizes pixelation, saturation, glitch, and decomposed sound to reveal what might be called the technological unconscious of the medium. I develop the concept of “Digital Orientalism” to designate how Orientalist chronotopes persist in the digital age yet are unsettled by Godard’s experimental manipulation of audiovisual fragments. Through close readings of Film Socialisme and The Image Book, which incorporates works by Arab filmmakers including Youssef Chahine, Nacer Khemir, Ossama Mohammed, and Wiam Simav Bedirxan, I show how Godard’s fractured montages produce symptomatic cartographies of the world-system where repression, memory, and accident collide.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15020031

Authors: Ann Burns

Awaken, aware, arise, perform, pause, and repeat. The actions of the everyday. Without it, we fall into dysregulation. This paper seeks to examine creative research developed as an experiment during COVID-19, an audiovisualscape in virtual reality (VR). Rhythmanalysis+ is a social, ecological, and sensorial enquiry into materiality, grounded in archipelagic thinking, through the lens of Rhythmanalysis, a form of analysis focusing on the everyday, through the lens of cyclical and linear rhythms. (Lefebvre). The research will also draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome theory, a botanical and philosophical investigation into networks. Networks form the backbone of the research. Lars Bang Larsen also argues that networks offer a distinctive view on how factual, speculative, historical, and non-human elements envelop and intertwine. Glissant’s archipelagic thought promotes transformation, multiplicity, and a sense of unpredictability. For this work, four inhabitants from Sherkin, a small island off the southwest coast of Ireland with a population of 100, became the research focus. Across four weeks, islanders gathered data from their daily sensory rhythms. Flight patterns of birds and bats were recorded, daily tasks noted, pathways cycled. Relational impacts of animal-odour on farming, weather, and tides were processed remotely, and an immersive cartographic score was created as a direct response in a three-dimensional virtual space. Rhythmanalysis+ analyses our newly altered perceptions of time and space as a material within a virtual world. VR, created as a gaming platform, is being pushed by art itself, forcing us to relook at the natural world, which is not static, but relational. Fluid but equally extractive, it is important to look at technology’s impact on all that is human and how it is perceived within the body as it is reframed digitally.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15020030

Authors: Anastasia Arefyeva

This article explores Vsevolod Meyerhold’s biomechanics as an avant-garde theatrical and anthropotechnical method developed to forge new subjectivity and redefine roles in post-revolutionary society. It delves into early Soviet avant-garde theatre’s emphasis on movement as a core expressive tool and the transformation of the actor’s body into a precise instrument for calibrated gestures. Methodologically, the research is based on cultural studies examining relations between art processes and the functioning of social institutions. The article also analyzes a significant corpus of recently published archival materials related to Meyerhold’s development of biomechanical elements and details the structure of Meyerhold’s exercises and their role in enhancing motor skills and expressiveness on stage. The purpose of this article is to interpret biomechanics in the socio-cultural context of early Soviet times, while also examining it as a complex system transcending mere theatrical training. The key finding of the article is that the development of biomechanics encompassed not only theatrical, scientific, and social aspects but also proved close to the ideas of philosophy of Russian anthropocosmism.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15020029

Authors: Alta Steenkamp

This article explores the reclamation of Khoisan identities in South Africa as a multifaceted process of cultural, spatial, and political resurgence. Framed within the country’s constitutional vision of a “Nation of Nations,” the research examines how Khoisan communities—historically marginalised and classified under apartheid as “Coloured”—are reasserting their Indigenous heritage through acts of cultural revival and place-based activism. Centred on Cape Town, the ancestral homeland and symbolic epicentre of both colonial encounter and Indigenous resurgence, the article theoretically investigates how creativity, heritage, and activism intersect in processes of reimagining, renaming, and retaking of place. Drawing on theories of visual sovereignty and re-placement, it analyses how visual and performative practices—ranging from protest art and language revitalisation to heritage occupations—function as decolonial acts that reclaim both the image and meaning of place. The article situates the Khoisan revival within broader global movements of Indigenous self-representation and argues that reclaiming place constitutes a living form of sovereignty, restoring relational networks between people, land, and identity. Ultimately, it demonstrates that contemporary Khoisan activism transforms visibility into agency, using culture and creativity as tools to rewrite belonging and to decolonise South Africa’s cultural landscape.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15020028

Authors: John E. Bowlt

The article queries the conventional interpretation of Vladimir Tatlin’s oeuvre as rational and pragmatic by focusing on more “irrational” aspects such as the visionary and unfeasible Monument to the III International, Letatlin and other, parallel projects that were never constructed or, perhaps, were never meant to be constructed. While acknowledging Tatlin’s debt to Cézanne and Picasso and referring to Formalist critics Punin and Tarabukin and to his proximity to Constructivism, the article also emphasizes the common contemporary reception of Tatlin as an actor, a buffoon and even a Holy Fool. The article concludes with copious references to Tatlin’s support of Daniil Kharms and the OBERIU group of Absurdist writers and to his illustrations for the former’s “fairy-tale” Vo-pervykh i vo-vtorykh.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15020027

Authors: Alexandra Antonopoulou Eleanor Dare

Antonopoulou and Dare’s ongoing collaborative projects (Phi Books 2008: ongoing; Digital Dreamhacker 2013: ongoing) enact an open-ended, experimental set of slow ‘Fictioning’ practices and actions that involve performing, diagramming, or assembling to create or anticipate new modes of existence. In this paper, the authors use the visual essay form to evidence how their daily practices of drawing, writing, and exchanging, position art and the artist. These practices unfold without, in this case, the utilitarian, economic, and epistemic priorities and systems of reductive representation which underpin the extractive models of Generative AI and other ‘innovative’ intermediaries, systems which expedite content and regulate consumption in the cultural and creative industries and in ‘arts and humanities’ education. Focusing on their creative practices, Antonopoulou and Dare reposition commodified notions of productivity, creativity, and innovation, seeking what Haraway describes as a way ‘of making, thinking and worlding’ beyond the neoliberal imperatives of extracting profit from labour. Positioned within an era of escalating precarity combined with ecological and political instability driven by extractive colonialism, the temporality of collaboration and drawing over decades is proposed as an act of material resistance to art’s subsumption into the venture capitalist hype cycles. Such cycles are associated with an accelerating array of crises, discussed here.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15020026

Authors: Emily Peppers

This article examines two drawings by the Prussian artist Anton Möller the Elder (1563–1611), based in Danzig [Gdańsk]. In 1587, Möller spent time in Marienburg [Malbork] near Danzig, fresh from his post-apprenticeship travels. These drawings evidence his tuition in Northern Renaissance styles, subject matter, and disguised symbolism—embodying contemporary Lutheran ideologies of temperance, morality, and the powerful sway of music. While scholarship on Möller’s works is well established (mainly in Polish and German sources in brief catalogue-style entries), this article represents an in-depth analysis of the symbolism in his works—primarily missing from modern scholarship, especially in the English language. Möller’s Folk Fair before Marienburg is entertaining, sensational, and serves as a graphic warning not to fall prey to alcohol’s destruction of moral character. Möller directly copies figures from Northern Renaissance artists working in the folk fair genre—I discuss these connections and symbolism. Musicians are given an incendiary role in the scene, spurring revelers on to indulge in base emotions and vices. In stark contrast, Möller’s An Elegant Reception with Christburg [Dzierzgoń] Castle in the Background, places music at the center of the scene, depicts “active listening,” and provides a visual message on how music can cultivate a pure mind and heart, if one’s moral compass is properly attuned.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15020025

Authors: Olaya Sanfuentes

In light of the ideas of Erwin Panofsky and Aby Warburg, this paper analyzes a contemporary tattoo by a Chilean artist. The image depicts a Spanish native on horseback destroying a Spanish conquistador. It is a reinterpretation of the classic figure of the apostle Saint James destroying his enemies of the faith. First, it was Saint James the Moor-slayer, then Saint James the Indian slayer. The formula, although inverted, is effective in showing the period’s interpretation of opposites confronting each other through violence, demonstrating that these images are visual constructions that emerge whenever there is an emotional climate that justifies them.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15010024

Authors: Akvile Terminaite

Interactive science galleries have transformed how the public engages with science, shifting from object-centred displays to immersive, design-led experiences. This study situates these changes within broader cultural and economic contexts, exploring how design mediates our understanding of science and reflects neoliberal and experiential values. Using archival research, qualitative interviews with museum professionals, and reflective practice, the research examines the evolution of interactive science spaces at the Science Museum in London—The Children’s Gallery, Launch Pad, and Wonderlab. The findings reveal that exhibition design increasingly prioritises entertainment, immersion, and pleasure, aligning with the rise in the experience economy and the influence of corporate models such as Disneyland. While such strategies enhance visitor engagement and accessibility, they risk simplifying complex scientific narratives and reducing learning to consumption. The study concludes that effective science communication design should balance enjoyment with critical inquiry, using both comfort and discomfort to foster curiosity, reflection, and ethical awareness. By analysing design’s role in shaping the “science experience”, this research contributes to understanding how cultural institutions can create more nuanced, thought-provoking encounters between audiences, knowledge, and space.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15010023

Authors: Billy O’Brien

Processes of preparing repertoire for performance in the field of artistic pianism are far from linear, often involving many epistemic modes contributing to an ever-evolving relationship between the pianist, the score and their instrument. Beyond the absorption and internalisation of the score (note-learning, memorisation, addressing technical issues), a range of contingent elements preoccupy pianists in their artistic journey of interpretation. These multifarious influences and approaches have increasingly been acknowledged in the field of Artistic Research, which has for some time sought to move beyond textualist, singular readings of works as bearers of fixed meanings and recognise the creative role of performers and the experience they bring. Through scholarly and phenomenological enquiry concerning the practice of ‘La vallée des cloches’ from Miroirs by Maurice Ravel, in this article, I attempt to represent the multi-modal complexity involved in the creative process of interpretation from my perspective as pianist and artistic researcher. I present novel engagement with scholarship in a multidisciplinary sense, demonstrating a dialogue through which scholarship and performance can interact. I reveal new insights about ‘La vallée des cloches’ through the analysis of my own diary entries logged over three practice sessions, exploring the themes of sound conceptualisation, the consideration of musical structure, and the creation of meaning.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15010022

Authors: Jorge Olcina Cantos María Rosario Martí Marco

The representation of atmospheric phenomena and, in particular, clouds was a prominent theme for painters during the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. During this period, under the influence of rationalism and encyclopedism, Luke Howard’s cloud classification (1803) was proposed, gaining followers among scientists and artists of the time. Among the latter, Goethe was instrumental, as he intensely promoted this cloud classification, even dedicating his own poems and drawings to it. From then on, some painters depicted cloud studies following the academic principles recommended by Goethe. Caspar David Friedrich did not adopt these principles and depicted clouds as bodies endowed with freedom and feeling, as fragments of soul. The work of P. H. de Valenciennes played a prominent role in this approach; it was translated into German and became a reference manual for Romantic landscape painting. This paper addresses the scientific and cultural context of that historical moment, studies the importance of the landscape, and its aerial aspect, in the painting of the time and details the role of Friedrich as a singular author of German Romanticism, who did not want to participate in the academic ideas of representing clouds, since the sky was, for this painter, a symbol of the transcendent.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15010021

Authors: Emmanuelle André Martine Beugnet

In Tinseltown and Full Rehearsal are examples of digital found-footage practice that explore the creative potential of the glitch. Featuring Monroe and Mickey, the two films conjure up what Walter Benjamin called figures of a “collective dream”. In his recent work, the artist blasts these two figures open and subjects them to a drastic process of digital decomposition, revealing the inner workings of the imaging system that determines their appearance on screen. In doing so, the glitches and malfunctions of the software reveal the presence of a machinic substratum—the convulsing expression of encoded dreams that carry the repressed traces of the mechanical, the graphic, and the organic. However, in their reliance on live-action footage on the one hand and animation film on the other, the two works arguably stand as examples of two separate forms of unconscious, as introduced by Benjamin in “The Work of Art”. In our analysis of In Tinseltown and Full Rehearsal we suggest that Arnold’s work allows for a radical reconsideration of the visual unconscious as previously defined in 20th century thought, exposing the ways in which not only the frontiers between the functioning of the psyche and the machinic have become progressively more porous, but how the very notion of the unconscious is in question.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15010020

Authors: Lin Zhu

This study focuses on the site-specific improvisatory dance performance Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Path of Life, a self-directed and self-performed work in Lhasa’ s sacred space dominated by a huge Buddha statue. It aims to explore how site-specific context and altitude sickness shape performance, and how freedom and meaning are created within limitations. Using auto-ethnography including video documentation, creative journals and reflective observation, this research examines interactions with spatial elements (Xuan paper, Buddha feet, stairs, flowers) and physiological responses to low oxygen. Main findings include that altitude-induced breath difficulty, chest oppression, and movement imbalance became generative forces: breathing rhythm changes (steady-rapid-steady) symbolized life’s struggles, while a “pain-movement-meaning” chain fostered new bodily senses, framing pain as a gateway to spirituality. Rather than treating the space as a static backdrop, this study explores how the material and cultural characteristics of the location actively lead to dance movement choices and choreographic logic under extreme physiological condition.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15010019

Authors: Carlos Natálio

This article aims to reflect on the testamentary dimension of Max Ophüls’ last feature film, Lola Montès, from a research context that seeks to understand the thematic, narrative, and stylistic traits of film directors’ last films. Through a mobilisation of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of crystal image, and a film analysis of the work and comparison with other important Ophüls films, this paper argues that the constant movement of the characters and the filmmaker’s camera throughout his body of work is, in this testament film, transformed into an infernal circularity in which its protagonist is imprisoned. This movement without escape, based on the circularity of the circus arena in which Lola is held captive, is ultimately a way of portraying the decadence and exploitation of mass entertainment culture in its logic of capture, exploitation and commodification of its “human products.” The culmination of circularity and repetition in this capture is associated with the degradation of both the living performative body of Lola and the figure of its director Max Ophüls, given that Lola Montès was not only a very difficult film to direct but also very poorly received at the time of its release.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15010018

Authors: Rafał Blazy Hanna Hrehorowicz-Gaber Alicja Hrehorowicz-Nowak Wiktor Hładki Jakub Knapek

The architecture of spas and recreational complexes is increasingly being analyzed not only through the prism of its formal diversity but also through its functional, technical, and esthetic responses to evolving societal expectations. This article descriptively examines the context of evolving user needs and select examples representing new architectural forms integrated into the landscape, responding to the growing demand for beauty (understood subjectively), experiences, and emotional value in 21st-century tourism and recreation. The most diverse and characteristic examples were selected and described in order to maintain a broad context of analysis and illustrate contemporary changes as faithfully as possible. The descriptive approach enables a systematic and comprehensive representation of phenomena, identifying recurring patterns, spatial trends, and contextual relationships. Rather than being limited to numerical data, it provides a structured analytical framework that supports the objective documentation of architectural and urban processes. The aim of this study is to systematize selected design trends that reflect contemporary cultural aspirations and environmental concerns, and to illustrate the evolving relationship between architecture, nature, and users. The results indicate a consistent shift toward landscape-integrated, experiential, and esthetically driven architectural solutions, demonstrating that contemporary tourism facilities increasingly prioritize atmosphere, immersion in nature, and sensory engagement over traditional utilitarian design. This study concludes that beauty, understood as subjective esthetic experience, has become a key determinant in shaping new architectural forms, reinforcing the role of architecture as both a cultural expression and a tool for enhancing well-being in tourism and leisure environments.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15010017

Authors: Rita Cêpa

This article adopts a comparative approach to two women-only landmark exhibitions in Portugal—Portuguese Women Artists (1977) and All I Want. Portuguese Women Artists from 1900 to 2020 (2021–2022)—to explore how curatorial strategies can function as tools of resistance to gender asymmetries in the art field. Spanning 45 years, these initiatives reflect distinct historical, institutional, and cultural contexts: the former emerged in a post-revolutionary country as a bold, politically charged intervention, foregrounding female creativity within an established institution and promoting international visibility, while the latter offered a thematically structured survey that, albeit belatedly, engaged with more complex and globally informed debates. Both exhibitions converge in celebrating Portuguese women’s creative production, exposing persistent structural challenges and adopting critical yet defensive curatorial frameworks that reveal an ambivalent feminist gesture and certain limitations. By analysing these case studies, this research further emphasises the ongoing need for initiatives that foster discussion, awareness, visibility, and equity.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15010016

Authors: Siamak Khatibi Yuan Zhou Linus de Petris

This study explores how classical painting techniques, particularly those rooted in the Renaissance tradition, can produce illusions of depth that vary with the viewer’s position. Focusing on a work rich in soft shading and subtle tonal transitions, we investigate how movement across the frontal plane influences the perception of spatial structure. A sequence of high-resolution photographs was taken from slightly offset viewpoints, simulating natural viewer motion. Using image alignment and pixel-wise difference mapping, we reveal perceptual shifts that suggest the presence of latent three-dimensional cues embedded within the painted surface. The findings offer visual and empirical support for concepts such as and dynamic engagement, where depth is constructed not solely by the image, but by the interaction between the artwork and the observer. Our approach demonstrates how digital analysis can enrich art historical interpretation, offering new insight into how still images can evoke the illusion of spatial presence.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15010015

Authors: Linh S. Nguyen Elena Russo

This article presences the material entanglements of analog and digital archives through a workshop-based inquiry titled “Collaging Echoes and Resonances Across Space/Time”, which applied Annie Goh’s question of whether echoes can claim a voice of their own to objects. In this session, participants collectively collaged with imprints of meaningful objects diffracted through materials like paint, tape, etc., and with the objects themselves. Group discussions yielded key considerations that we examine in the context of archiving. These include understanding materials in relation to the structures that shape the formation of their echoes; tracing how echoes may evolve into unrecognizable forms; and how iterative threads of meaning across ongoing interactions act upon each other in non-linear time. As the digital archive becomes increasingly prominent, these questions help to frame implications across archival formats to better understand the relationships between iterations of an item and the containers in which it is held, furthering the conceptualization of a posthuman archive. This paper applies new materialist perspectives of knowledge to history and archiving through an arts-based approach, offering a novel entry point to understanding archival echoes. It will interest scholars and/or practitioners in history, curation, and museum studies, enriching criticality in how knowledge is enacted in the material.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15010014

Authors: Aleksandra Pelikhovska

This study proposes a structural method for analyzing Raphael Sanzio’s Sistine Madonna through the constructive modeling of visual impact. Such an approach makes it possible to connect the internal logic of the painting’s conception with the historical circumstances of its creation as a papal commission for Julius II, clarifying those compositional decisions that appear unique and uncharacteristic for Raphael’s usual manner. The term visual engineering is employed to designate a structural approach that shifts attention from traditional iconographic interpretation to the underlying constructive logic of the image—the principles by which Raphael organizes space, atmosphere, and light into a unified perceptual system. The aim of the study is to reveal how these interdependent mechanisms generate clarity of spatial hierarchy and integrate architectural, luminous, and symbolic functions within a coherent mode of perception. In this sense, the Sistine Madonna emerges as a deliberately constructed environment of vision, in which pictorial form and theological meaning operate as inseparable components of a single Renaissance act of artistic thought.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15010013

Authors: Reyna I. Rumbo-Morales Jennifer N. Garibay-Palacios Susana Vega-Leal Carmen Elvira Hernández Magaña Carlos Antonio Quintero Macías David Guillermo Pasillas Banda Francisco E. Oliva Miguel A. Ramírez-Torres

This article analyzes the symbolism of the phytomorphic motif of the mountain vine in the traditional embroidery of Cuetzalan, made by the Nahua women of the Masehual Siuamej Mosenyolchicauani collective. From the iconological approach, the pre-iconographic, iconographic and iconological levels of the motif will be examined, with the support of ethnography. The study identifies that the vine, a recurring plant element in traditional blouses, not only fulfills an ornamental function, but also constitutes a symbol of vital continuity, union and regeneration. Its visual representation alludes to the movement of life and the relationship between the natural and spiritual planes within the Nahua worldview. Through embroidery, the artisans express their connection to the land and the transmission of ancestral textile knowledge, reaffirming their cultural identity in a community context.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15010012

Authors: Elizabeth L. Langhorne

Experimental prints made by Jackson Pollock in Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 in 1944–45 were crucial to the evolution of his modernist style, an evolution quite different from Clement Greenberg’s conception of it. Hayter said “Pollock always claimed that he had two masters, Benton and me.” Following Charles Darwent’s Surrealists in New York: Atelier 17 and the Birth of Abstract Expressionism 2023 and Christina Weyl’s The Women of Atelier 17 2019, this article examines a 1944–45 engraving in which Pollock inscribed the letters A, R, T. This examination reveals the experimental techniques and the gendered themes that shaped Pollock’s continued exploration of his art as erotic dialogue. Absorbing Hayter’s technical understanding of the three-dimensionality of an engraved line as it produced and moved through “the space of the imagination,” Pollock succeeded in mediating between male and female tensions, stated in underlying imagery, as he began in ‘ART’ to generate his abstract and unifying all-over linear webs, culminating in such works as Autumn Rhythm 1950.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15010011

Authors: Charlie Hewison

This article explores the media practices of the Karrabing Film Collective through the lens of a materialist model of (colonial, ecological, and digital) unconscious, reconceived as a dynamic interplay of repression, expression, compression, and distension. Drawing on Jean-François Lyotard’s reworking of Freudian operations and Elizabeth Povinelli’s critique of late liberal geontopower, the paper analyzes how Karrabing’s improvisational realism and aesthetic strategies—particularly their use of smartphone filmmaking and digital superimposition—navigate and resist the structural pressures of settler governance. The article equally focuses on their augmented reality archive project, Mapping the Ancestral Present, as a potent example of how digital compression can be refunctioned to enact distension across space and time. Situating the unconscious not only in the psychic or symbolic but also in the infrastructural and technological, the article argues that Karrabing’s practice maps a politics of survivance in the “cramped space” of settler modernity.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15010010

Authors: Aya Motegi

How does digital technology mediate decision-making and shape our understanding of disaster recovery? I address this question by examining both the administrative and cinematic uses of digital images in the reconstruction process following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Post-disaster digital mediation is characterized by the administrative use of what has been termed “operational images,” designed not for interpretation but for action, particularly in disaster response and prevention. I connect the social and ethical dimensions of post-disaster recovery with the ontological dimensions of the technological characteristics of digital photography. By comparing Japanese independent filmmaker Haruka Komori’s digital filmmaking practice with the operational images utilized by administrative and research bodies, I aim to demonstrate how her particular digital aesthetics elicit the latent capacity of the “digital unconscious” and offer new modes of perceiving post-disaster recovery, in contrast to both other forms of post-disaster digital mediation and to analog photography. Through close analyses, I argue that her work articulates an alternative vision of recovery—one rooted not in spatial management or predictive planning, but in physical attachment to place, trust in the future, and imaginative engagement with survivors and the dead.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15010009

Authors: Minas Pergantis Anastasia Katsaounidou Aristeidis Lamprogeorgos Andreas Giannakoulopoulos

Digital art repositories strive to disseminate works of art through the World Wide Web and to reach the widest possible global audience. To that end, providing an optimal user experience (UX) is essential. Usability is the cornerstone of UX in all interactions between the visitor and the platform, but at the same time, as virtual places of art and culture, digital art repositories aim to also provide an aesthetically pleasing interface that stimulates the senses. These goals are not always aligned, and how end users perceive the interplay between aesthetics and usability is an important factor in creating a balanced UX. This study presents a streamlined methodology for the collection of visitor insights concerning aesthetics and usability, taking advantage of the attention tracking capabilities of the iMedius platform. The iMedius Form Builder digital research tool allows the collection of both self-reported feedback through survey replies and candid data through gaze and mouse tracking, thus creating a robust dataset that can lead to interesting insights. An interactive questionnaire investigating user reaction to three different digital art repositories is presented, and feedback from higher education students from the fields of digital art and media is presented and analyzed in detail. Through this analysis, interesting insights are derived regarding striking a balance between high usability and memorable aesthetics.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15010008

Authors: Denis Kukanov Nadezhda Stanulevich

The virtualization of museums is in a phase of active development, with institutions seeking relevant and original forms. At the same time, the number of projects dedicated to the reconstruction of past museum expositions is not as substantial as one might hope. How can we accurately reconstruct a museum’s appearance and exhibitions with limited source materials? How can the reconstruction process be consistent with the historical image of the museum and its digital strategy? The scientific study of the appearance of the museum, the preparation of digital content, and the artistic solution of the image in the virtual environment were carried out by the employees of the Kunstkamera’s Laboratory of museum technologies. The issues of museum bureaucracy, the preservation of objects, information, and the integrity of the approach to the formation of digital funds of the museum are solved through the implementation of the project within the museum and the involvement of specialists from outside for the final assembly of VR. The concept of a universe within a single room, which gave rise to a universal museum like the Kunstkamera, has evolved into the creation of the Laboratory of Museum Technologies, enabling the development of complex technological projects within the museum itself.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15010007

Authors: Inmaculada Villafranca Jiménez

The demographic growth resulting from the proclamation of the Caliphate of Córdoba led to the urban densification of the city’s western suburbs. In these areas, pre-existing munya complexes became integrated into the urban fabric, which complicates their identification. The discovery of Building 1 in Block 1 of the O7 partial plan, interpreted as a space of self-representation and display due to the presence of a substantial group of ataurique carvings, contributed to its identification as a munya (pl. munà). The aim of this article is to present the main conclusions of the study of this ataurique programme and to discuss its possible interpretation, nature and evolution.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15010006

Authors: David S. Whitley Ronald I. Dorn

Archaeological surface features on desert pavements, including geoglyphs, are notoriously difficult to assess. Lacking temporally diagnostic artifacts, they may be impossible to place chronologically, limiting their inferential utility. Not surprisingly, controversies have developed in the North American desert west over certain of these features. We describe methods for chronometrically constraining the ages of desert pavement features using three approaches to rock varnish dating: varnish lamination (VML), lead-profile dating, and the cation ratio (CR) as an additional tool. Each of these techniques may be applied to rock varnished cobbles that have been upthrust into areas previously cleared of the original pavement through cultural or natural processes. We use these methods to resolve two archaeological issues: the age of the intaglios (geoglyphs) along the lower Colorado River corridor and whether the Topock (or ‘Mystic’) Maze is the product of Precontact Indigenous or late-nineteenth-century railroad construction. Ethnographic analysis allows us to contextualize these features and to consider two additional issues: the antiquity of the Yuman speakers’ cultural pattern in the lower Colorado River region and the function of the Topock Maze.