Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070164

Authors: Zeyefu Li Diana Angoso de Guzmán

This study analyzes how sociological factors within the context of globalization have influenced the development of secondary markets for contemporary art in China and Spain. Through a comparative approach, it examines the impact of economic, cultural, and legal changes on market structures and collectors’ behavior. Special attention is given to the growth of the Chinese market as a new global player, contrasted with the Spanish market, which is characterized by a more gradual institutional development and greater structural challenges. The study also explores how the interaction between East and West is transforming collecting practices and perceptions of cultural value. Finally, strategies are proposed to strengthen the resilience and competitiveness of both secondary art markets in a shifting global landscape. In doing so, the study highlights the importance of adapting sociological structures to the new dynamics of the contemporary art market.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070163

Authors: Marina V. Akimova

Valentin Yakovlevich Parnakh (1891–1951)—poet, dancer, translator, critic, and indefatigable mediator between artistic milieux—developed idiosyncratic avant-garde poetics in which verbal texture, choreographic invention, and graphic inscription form a single communicative ecology. Focusing on Parnakh’s Parisian collection The Acrobat Climbs (Karabkaetsya acrobat) (1922), this article reconstructs how “low” temporal arts (cabaret, music hall, circus, pantomime) and the modernist revaluation of the body reoriented lyric practice away from a representational “image” toward a performative event and a kinetic sign. The argument proceeds from Parnakh’s struggle “to free oneself from the burden of the word” to the compensatory emergence of dance as an international, non-nationalized medium—at once existential (a “cry of the soul”) and formally experimental. Central attention is given to the author’s attempts to fix movement: the enigmatic “hieroglyphs of dances” printed in 1922 and their later clarification through more legible pictographic systems (“stick-figures”) published in the second half of the 1920s. By correlating poems, self-descriptions of choreography, and visual materials, this study reframes Parnakh’s apparent “obscurity” not as gratuitous zaum, but as a deliberately intermedial hermeneutic problem—one that presupposes translation between sign systems (word/line/body) as the very substance of avant-garde meaning.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070162

Authors: Ann R. David

The article begins with a detailed description of a brief and rare film clip of Indian dancer Ram Gopal applying his black kājal eyeliner in front of the mirror in his dressing room before a performance, giving us an intimate glimpse into a dancer’s essential and careful preparation. Material objects related to dance performance such as make-up, mirrors and costumes are often essential to the presentation of Indian dance, especially in that historical period, but are often overlooked as significant artefacts or objects of dance. In considering this short clip of preparatory make-up, I argue how the materiality of cosmetic stage make-up together with dramatic stage costumes (in particular headdresses) and other material objects assist the process of alteration from dancer into a Hindu deity (Śiva) or mythological character on stage. I examine the process of making up, asking how it might manipulate what comes to be seen on stage and what affect is created through such a process. This article takes an imaginative look at the affective register of selected dance objects and their power to create transformation, drawing on theoretical evidence from philosophy and psychology relating to mirror image and the aesthetics of making up and the use of mirrors in early Indian art.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070161

Authors: Elena Penskaya

This article analyzes the laboratory discourse in Soviet society during the first third of the twentieth century through the lens of tékhnē—the ancient fusion of making and knowing—arguing that the laboratory became a key site for redefining artistic practice as a form of knowledge production. Drawing on the institutional critique of the laboratory (Bruno Latour), the author raises the question of the potential for mutual influence between different types of laboratories established in the fields of art, technical sciences, and production. The mechanisms of a laboratory’s influence on society, as identified by Latour, allow for a new interpretation of the phenomenology of the All-Russian Theatre Society and its significant internal divisions. The history of the emergence and defeat of the Laboratory of Mass Psychology at the All-Russian Theatre Society (ARTS) in the 1920s–1930s is reconstructed on the basis of archival materials from RGALI (fund 970). Meeting minutes and documents from 1929 to 1932 reveal the main modes of the anthropology of the “laboratory genre” within the ARTS system (1920s–1980s). These are examined within the general experimental context of the era: the laboratory boom of the 1920s–1930s reshaped the boundaries between the natural sciences and the humanities. The second mode is the human experience of being on the threshold between life and death—a transgressive state. The third mode is the laboratory as a site for new forms of labor and technology. Within the laboratory’s work, psychotechnics acquired particular significance, reaching its culmination in 1931–1932. This period, marked by an intense flurry of events and new laboratory practices of psychological influence, was rightly called a “psychosis of activities” by the participants of the ARTS laboratory themselves.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070160

Authors: Alexandra Kolb

This article analyses pneumatic (inflatable) objects as used in the work of four contemporary European artists from diverse disciplinary backgrounds: choreographers Adrienne Hart and Gabriella Engdahl, and visual artists Michael Shaw and Bambí Benkö. Deployed across deconsecrated churches, swimming pools, theatres, galleries and streets, these works demonstrate a broad spectrum of engagement with inflatables, ranging from formalist to existential, social and political-activist purposes—all implicating choreography in an expanded sense. Informed by theories from the visual arts, dance studies and sociology, as well as interviews with the artists themselves, the analysis adopts a multi-methodological approach attuned to this diversity. Overarching concerns about spectatorship, site and materiality centre on how inflatables’ precarious properties—porous seams requiring continual reinflation—engender playful instability and encourage interaction with audiences. Proposing ‘whimsy’ as a critical lens, the essay reimagines contemporary inflatables as cultural-choreographic objects that question disciplinary boundaries. The artists’ practices both extend a 1960s legacy of pneumatic experiments and redirect their utopian-critical impulses toward twenty-first-century issues.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070159

Authors: Xuemei Zhong

The Goddess of the Luo River is a visible painting that depicts The Rhapsody on the Goddess of the Luo River, an invisible poem. How does the painter convey the intricate plot, abstract verbal imagery, and musicality of the poem—particularly the subtle emotions of betrayal, anguish, and regret—in a tangible visual form? In translating the text, the painter employs at least five methods: literal depiction, perspective shift, metaphor, suggestion and symbolism. Corresponding to these methods, the painter selects, abridges, modifies, or expands upon the textual content. The success of this transformation from text to image lies precisely in the fact that the image does not rigidly adhere to the text but instead captures its spiritual essence. The indirect translation from literature to image is fundamentally grounded in the heterogeneous nature of poetry and painting and must respect the inherent principles of each art form.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070158

Authors: Fangfei Miao

This paper examines the under-researched pivotal career moment of Shen Wei (沈伟, b.1968, last name Shen and first name Wei), one of the most renowned Chinese American dance artists in the West, when he traveled from China to the United States for the first time in 1995 and his unacclaimed early career in New York from 1995 to 2000. Based on primary sources, I compare the divergent conceptualizations of universalism in China and the United States, as embodied in Shen’s choreographies and as manifested in the contrasting receptions of his works by Chinese and American critics. Building on existing dance scholarship on universalism and situated at the intersection of Asian studies and Asian American studies, this paper explores how Shen’s choreography of universalism convinced Chinese critics but discouraged American critics from recognizing the significant value of his art. I question the United States as a neutral platform for artistic freedom and propose that Shen must perform according to the expectations of American society—the “dress code” for Asian artists—to gain acceptance and success. In so doing, I challenge the intent that primarily examines Shen based on his widely acclaimed works. The “failures” that Shen experienced in his career contain the same, if not more, research value as his “successes.”

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070157

Authors: Robert Ek Federico Visi Anchen Froneman

This article presents a study that applies Laban’s Effort theory to detect a musician’s expressive intentions during performance. Laban Effort theory was chosen for its capacity to support the observation, description, and interpretation of expressive movement. The aim was to develop interactive musical systems that learn from the embodied expressivity musicians cultivate through practice. The study adopts a multidisciplinary approach, combining Laban Motion Analysis with interactive machine learning. Gesture data, audio, and video were recorded during a performance of Brahms’s Clarinet Sonata Op. 120 No. 2. The video was then analysed by an expert annotator observing Laban Efforts. The annotated video was then reviewed in collaboration with the performer to incorporate Effort Phrasing that reflects changes in intensity within Efforts. The annotations were then used as training data, together with motion data recorded during the performance, to train a regression model. The model was evaluated against expert annotations and through qualitative video analysis. Unlike the very linear notation of a Laban analyst, the model reflects the dynamism of human motion by capturing the almost humanly unobservable nuances in Effort variations. This points to the possibility of using machine learning models to reflect a performer’s expressive intentions in real-time.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070156

Authors: Charles Green Lyndell Brown

Linking art and ecology can mean two significantly different things. First, it may suggest art that takes the objects of ecology as its theme. This, most frequently, means art that is about ecological health, including climate warming. Second, and less often, it may suggest that art can be imagined from the methodologies of ecology rather than from the approaches of art history. The first two parts of this article are deliberately selective literature reviews of each approach, followed by a third part that traces the three-decade trajectory of an artistic collaboration that embodies both. (In full disclosure, I am one of the two artists.) What might such a self-consciously ecological art practice look like? These sections aim to provide the background and critical context for a response to this question, and that response is the final section of the article, an original artist project: The Last Cool Skies (2026) by artists Lyndell Brown and Charles Green. These artist pages are intended to be the principal focus of this article and are presented as research in the form of visual art across this journal’s pages, as original research contributions in themselves and not as ancillary or as simply illustrations to this article’s text.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070155

Authors: Michał Jędrzejski

This article is devoted to the 18th-century Bernardine repertoire of pseudo-plainchant, that is, Latin liturgical monophony, which differs significantly from the style of Gregorian and Neo-Gregorian chant. The research employs methods of codicological (from Latin, codex = book) analysis of the source, as well as analysis of the repertoire, melody, text and musical notation. Melodies are also transcribed and compared with selected manuscripts from the Library of the Bernardine Province in Kraków. The research reveales that the pseudo-plainchant collection comprises 14 ordinarium missae (the Ordinary of the Mass, i.e., the fixed or invariable parts of the Mass), one Gloria and 15 Patrem (Credo, the Creed). The repertoire dedicated to St Anne, local patron saint, shares tonal language, elements of rhythm and metre, key signatures, chromatic signs, melodic sequences, the repeated use of the same musical material, alternatim technique (vocal and instrumental parts performed alternately), contrasts in performance, register and style, melodies based on Polish church songs, and geographical titles. The term “sweet” (suaves) appearing on the title page may indicate the aesthetic stance of the Bernardines from Święta Anna and their positive attitude towards the repertoire in question, although 20th-century musicological literature has attributed decompositional elements to it. In this way, the manuscript under study may serve as a basis for updating our understanding of the pseudo-plainchant repertoire as such.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070154

Authors: Anna Maria Wierzbicka Marta Nawrocka

The article examines water as a symbolic and existential medium in contemporary art. Water, present in culture since the earliest times, constitutes both a fundamental condition of life and one of the most enduring archetypes of human imagination. The analysis is conducted from two theoretical perspectives: phenomenological, focusing on the embodied experience, and symbolic, presenting the cultural and spiritual meanings attributed to water, as well as contemporary concepts examining its role in relational and site-specific art. Particular attention is devoted to the analysis of selected case studies in which water serves as a medium for transformation, introspection, and boundary. The findings indicate that in contemporary art, water functions as a multidimensional medium, engaging all the viewer’s senses and eliciting profound aesthetic and existential experiences. At the same time, its use reveals tensions between the authentic message and the risk of greenwashing, or over-technologization. The article emphasizes that the combination of symbolic depth with a responsible approach is crucial for the credibility of water as an artistic medium.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070153

Authors: Anni Li Yan Xu

Women-centred motifs in African rock art form part of the most persistent symbolic repertoire of early cosmologies. Despite their prominence, these figures have received limited sustained analysis. Examination of their contexts reveals four recurrent logics—care, regeneration, boundary mediation, and the social encoding of voice—that structure social and ritual life. A comparative case from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple shows these logics rearticulated in the narrative of Celie’s self-awakening, demonstrating the afterlives of symbolic forms. This perspective clarifies the role of female imagery as a structuring element of cosmology and offers a heuristic for integrating rock-art studies with broader cross-temporal analysis.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070151

Authors: Michaela Böhmig

This article reconceptualizes Velimir Khlebnikov’s aesthetic temporality not as a lyrical motif but as an epistemic procedure through which poetic language tests the legibility of history. Treating his historico-mathematical “constants” and his avant-garde formal inventions as mutually implicative, it isolates a double regime: time as oscillatory recurrence (wave, cyclic return, numerical periodicity) and time as a higher-order extension in which duration is spatialized, traversable, and re-coordinatizable. Against linear models of influence, this study situates Khlebnikov within a thick interdiscursive atmosphere—folkloric chronotopes, Romantic time–space convertibility (Novalis), non-Euclidean geometry (Lobachevsky, Riemann), Minkowski–Einstein relativity, and the Russian vogue for “hyperspace” mediated by Morozov and Ouspensky (with Hinton as prototype)—and argues that these matrices are metabolized via poetico-fantastic transmutation rather than imported as explanatory doctrine. Close readings show how reverse temporality, historical inversion, palindromic and collage logics, and the super-narrative architecture of autonomous “planes” operationalize a hyperspatial present in which distant epochs collide without recourse to technological “time machines.” The article thereby reframes Khlebnikov’s project as a cognitive technology: an attempt to re-engineer the chronotope so that past and future become navigable coordinates inside an expanded textual now. In this model, number and word converge as homologous instruments for forecasting, montage, and speculative world-construction itself.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070152

Authors: Daniel Paul Schwartz

Commissioned for West German public television, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s hotly debated 1972 series Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day was Germany’s first working-class family drama. Centering on the growing class consciousness of a crew of toolmakers in Cologne, the show provoked an explosion of criticism and debate among conservative critics, leftists, and trade unionists alike. Westdeutscher Rundfunk—a leader in high-quality, non-commercial, socially engaged television—sought to meet the cultural demands of the New Left by embracing the “worker film” (Arbeiterfilm) that aspired to bring the lives and dreams of the working class, WDR’s target audience, to the screen for the first time. What they got instead was a radical call for the abolition of capitalism—a TV-show that did not condescend to workers through representation of their everyday struggles, but rather radicalized them into the knowledge that employers need workers, not the other way around. Within a remarkably intersectional framework that appoints the lone non-straight, racialized worker and female characters the intellectual vanguard of the mobilizing workers, the show takes the contradictions between the factory workers’ interests and those of their management as its dramatic motor, converging on the anticapitalist insight that eight hours do not, in fact, make a day. Unsurprisingly, despite its popularity, Fassbinder’s show was cancelled five episodes into an eight episode series. In this article, I consider its potential in terms of two great thinkers of abolition—Mario Tronti, a founding figure in the Operaismo movement, and Mario Mieli, a gay communist organizer who asserted that the “liberation of Eros and the achievement of communism” were two sides of the same coin.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070150

Authors: Andrew Philip

This article investigates the reparative politics of resistance at the heart of the production model and formal strategies developed by Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós in the film Dry Ground Burning [Mato Seco em Chamas] (2022). Pimenta and Queirós propose an alternative to the tendency of global filmic realism to focus on the suffering of the impoverished. Their participatory approach fabulates heroic collective memories in the marginalised community where the film is set. I propose they are engaging with the Brazilian practice of gambiarra, a reframing of material and discursive possibilities given a lack of economic and/or social resources. By repurposing state financing to radically extend the duration of production, the filmmakers generate a reparative realism that expands the possibilities of World Cinema as well as the revolutionary ideals proposed by Third Cinema.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070149

Authors: Boris Kriger

This paper argues that art and aesthetic engagement are not cultural luxuries but structural necessities for any cognitive system operating in post-scarcity information environments—a claim derived from a unified structural theory of complex systems grounded in the persistence principle. The argument proceeds in three stages. First, drawing on the formal theory of structural viability, the paper demonstrates that when a cognitive agent’s basic needs are satisfied and information is abundant, the agent’s viability set expands until utilitarian goal structures degenerate. Non-utilitarian goal-setting—creative activity pursued beyond direct utility—remains the only structurally available mode of purposeful agency. Second, the paper provides a neuroaesthetic grounding for this claim: predictive processing, derived as the unique optimal cognitive architecture under physical constraints, entails that creative engagement generates prediction errors whose resolution activates reward pathways shared with reproductive behavior—both being instances of generating new structure. Active perception of art constitutes co-creation through the same mechanism. Third, the paper addresses the role of artificial intelligence: AI accelerates the arrival of post-scarcity conditions and serves as an instrument of creative engagement, but passive consumption of AI-generated content without the agent’s own goal-setting fails to fulfill the structural function of art and deepens the very condition it could remedy. The framework contributes to neuroaesthetics by providing a substrate-independent formal foundation for understanding why cognitive systems require art—not merely enjoy it—and why this requirement intensifies as post-scarcity conditions approach.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070148

Authors: Marta Gołębiowska Krystyna Januszkiewicz

This article addresses the role of geometry in architecture throughout history as a language that supports and connects the domains of design and aesthetic expression. This study focuses on the analysis of contemporary curvilinear glass architecture, in which geometry becomes a fundamental tool for shaping both form and its visual perception. We define and investigate panelization strategies for freeform surfaces, adopting surface continuity as the primary criterion for their classification. Research is conducted through the confrontation of two complementary approaches: a descriptive one, based on case study analysis, and a generative one, employing parametric modeling of curvilinear surfaces. In the descriptive approach, selected architectural realizations are analyzed, in which panelization strategies and their impact on the aesthetic expression of glass façades are identified. In the generative approach, a digital surface analysis is conducted, enabling the assessment of relationships between geometry, panel typology, and visual continuity. The results provide a basis for developing theoretical and methodological frameworks for the analysis and design of curvilinear glass architecture. This study identifies interdependencies between geometry, material, and fabrication processes. The main contribution of this study is a method for analyzing curved surfaces based on digital analysis, enabling a systematic evaluation of the relationships between geometry, panelization typology, and surface continuity in the context of freeform architectural design. This method may support informed and conscious design decision-making.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070147

Authors: Marina Sartori

Far from being merely repetitive, the painted decoration in Theban tombs of the New Kingdom reveals a rich variety of individual artistic choices, and therefore offers a privileged point of view for the study of agency in ancient Egypt. By examining selected pictorial units from a number of tombs, personally investigated by the author, this paper will explore the painters’ approaches to tomb decoration through the lens of the agency theory developed by Alfred Gell. Personal intervention can be recognised in many little details which ensure that no two Theban chapels are identical, even where the same scenes are represented. These variations undoubtedly sprang from the individual choices of the artists. Preparatory ostraca show the basic layout of text and scenes, with the division into registers and columns, but these remain only preparatory sketches. All the final details in the lines, colours, and components that make up a figure or a sign offer room for modifications. By analysing how artists interacted with the single pictorial units they were tasked with painting, their patterns of action and horizons of freedom become clearer, offering us a deeper insight into the role of Theban painters in the history of the site.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060146

Authors: Anna Colin

This article proposes an exploration of British educational initiatives since 1925 that have brought together art- and land-oriented practices, particularly ones that are social, regenerative, and reparative. By juxtaposing historical and contemporary case studies, this article highlights uncharted connections between artistically infused ecopedagogies of past and present. Beyond surveying defunct and currently active educational programmes and comparing and analysing their mode of operation, pedagogies, and contributions to systems change, the article highlights a pattern of emergence, brief flourishing, and closure in art and ecology educational and research programmes in Britain since the 1990s. While Dartington Hall and the Village Colleges, the historical case studies, draw on secondary research, the contemporary ones—Goldsmiths’ MA Art & Ecology, Black Mountains College’s BA (Hons) Sustainable Futures: Arts, Ecology, and Systems Change, The Gathering, and The Gramounce—are composed from interviews conducted with their founder and other key protagonists as well as from empirical research. This article captures the continuities and discontinuities between historical experiments and contemporary initiatives, arguing for the ongoing relevance—and the institutional fragility—of an educational mode that refuses the separation of art and land.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060145

Authors: Christopher R. Rogers

In this experimental inquiry, I welcome readers into an unfolding undisciplined platform, expanding upon my earlier theorizing of philly soul musicking through insurgent listening to Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues in all of its radical, beautiful, and tragic public memory work of the 1971 Attica Uprising. Philly soul musicking gives regional texture to a transgenerational Black diasporic performance practice that serves to archive the complexity of Black lived experiences and articulate felt collective visions of liberated Black futures. Through these introductory comments, I improvise what I reckon to be essential to the secretive sonic histories of the album, giving shape to a fire music organizing praxis meant to call us into being-with the anticolonial worldmaking project that the men of Attica advanced with their hearts, minds, and bodies on the line. This prelude foreshadows a wider overall project speculating upon how Attica Blues and other related avenues of Black compositional practice attune us to assembling active solidarities with militants/rebels on the frontlines inventing rhythmic zones of autonomy, freedom, and liberation. I ask of the music’s fugitive archive, to draw on the words of James Baldwin, what are the contemporary use(s) of the Attica Blues?

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060144

Authors: Jan Margaret Hogan

The Porous Line is a drawing inquiry that uses materials and processes to engage in a dialogue with a suburban ecosystem. I follow the physicist David Bohm’s proposal to use dialogue as a mode of engagement where habitual modes of thought are suspended, a form of non-judgmental curiosity. I reflect on how immersing a large roll of French imported paper in my everyday environs reveals the porousness between nature and culture. The binary separation of nature and culture has undergone significant criticism as we deal with the climate crisis. As a foundational medium within western art and thought, how can drawing communicate this growing ontological shift? The essay engages in dialogue with Yolngu art from Yirrkala as a guide on what an ecological art practice entails. Their commitment to work with what ‘country’ provides has resulted in innovative and thoughtful new works. In response to propositions seen in Yolngu artworks, this essay engages with place, materiality, and relationality through the process of merging line and ground, the fundamentals of drawing, physically and conceptually. I reflect on the challenges that need to be addressed within western ontologies to develop an ecological approach in drawing.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060143

Authors: Boyi He Yu Sun

This article examines how Chinese scholars and institutions selected Western musicological works for translation into Chinese and how these choices shaped the formation of musicology as a modern discipline in mainland China from 1900 to 2025. Drawing on disciplinary translation history, it asks which musicological works were translated, who selected and translated them, under what historical and institutional conditions they circulated, and how they contributed to the intellectual development of Chinese musicology. On the basis of translated works, publication records, archival materials, and the secondary literature, the article identifies four historical stages: technical transplantation (1900–1949), planned transplantation (1949–1978), critical transformation (1978–2010), and two-way dialogue (2010–2025). Each stage was shaped by a different configuration of ideology, academic demand, market forces, and translator agency. The article argues that the Chinese translation of Western musicological scholarship was never a passive import of foreign theories. Rather, it was a historically situated process in which Chinese scholars, translators, publishers, and institutions identified, adapted, and reorganized foreign musicological knowledge in response to local academic needs. The findings contribute to knowledge translation studies by offering a diachronic, multi-agent account of translation selection and by explaining how these choices helped shape modern Chinese musicology as a discipline.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060142

Authors: Cían Ó Donnchadha

This article develops an understanding of Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) as a testament film. It considers the filmmaker’s personal philosophy and concept of history, proposing the resonance of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, the epitome of Benjamin’s contention with the ‘continuum of history’ in his final text, Theses on the Philosophy of History. This article considers the testament of Blue as a concept of history, contextualised by Jarman’s reckoning with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and thereby with his own mortality, as Jarman’s attestation of a model of history (both personal and national, or coinhered as ‘memory’), which answers the demand of the ‘tradition of the oppressed.’ Theories of profane illumination, second nature, and the crisis of representation are explicated for the purposes of identifying Jarman’s model of history, and of his refusal of a historicist conception. In addition, it proposes the context of the AIDS crisis, as the ‘state of emergency’, the condition which compels this concept of history.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060141

Authors: Katerina Paramana

Differing perspectives on the ephemerality of performance have led to debates since the 1980s regarding its ontology. Sondra Fraleigh and Peggy Phelan, for example, believe that performance’s ‘only life is in the present’. Others have disagreed. For example, Rebecca Schneider believes that performance remains in the body of the spectator in a complicated manner and Miranda Joseph, drawing on Marxist theory, argues that performance is in fact material because it produces social relations which have material effects: they affect our thinking and behaviour. In alignment with Joseph, this text begins with the presupposition that performance, and, specific to this text, the object we might call dance performance—the dance performance event and its particular contours, in other words, the performance event as an entity which emerges in the space-time where/when the onlooker and the work meet—is material because it is social. I discuss two dance performance objects, my work Martyro (2011) and Jérôme Bel’s (2005) Veronique Doisneau, as (im)material affective objects. I examine each work individually, providing first a thick description of each in order to communicate how they used affect to connect to their spectators and to critique the contexts of their presentation, the worlds in which the Subject in each of these performances worked. Drawing on understandings and theories of affect (from Deleuze and Guattari, Gilbert Simondon, and Brian Massumi to Lauren Berlant) and political economy (including David Harvey, Cedric Robinson, Jeremy Gilbert, Ashok Kumar, and Katerina Paramana), I then argue that both works used affect to remind their audiences, their witnesses, of the power of revealing one own’s experience of ‘suffering’ as Subjects, whilst simultaneously critiquing the wider economies in which these works, these affective objects and their Subjects, are embedded. It is this production of affect, I suggest, that potentiated action for change, by affecting others’ perspectives and behaviours.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060140

Authors: Yufei Du Shahrul Anuar Bin Shaari Tao Su Jingwen Ding

Research on contemporary Chinese comprehensive material painting has long focused on aesthetic qualities or relied on Western modernist frameworks, leaving the mechanism of material-to-symbol transformation under-theorized. This study investigates the generative logic of material meaning through a qualitative cross-case analysis of forty-eight works by twelve Chinese artists, integrating in-depth interviews and visual analysis. Through systematic analysis of images, material operations, and artists’ interpretations, the study proposes a three-stage semiotic mechanism: anchoring, exemplification, and differentiation. Findings demonstrate that material meaning is formed through continuous negotiation between bodily technique and material resistance, mediated by cultural techniques guided by pre-textual schemata. Material attributes are first filtered and anchored, reinforced through embodied operations, and eventually stabilized into stylistic structures articulating cultural identity. This research argues that Chinese comprehensive material painting constitutes a localized mode of cross-cultural symbolic production rooted in indigenous cultural experience and material praxis. Ultimately, it supplies a mechanism-based interpretive framework for this art form while contributing a localized perspective to global discussions on the relationship among subjectivity, materiality, and cultural identity.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060139

Authors: Brianne Cohen

The Singaporean government’s Green Plan 2030 aims to “galvanize a whole-of-nation movement and advance [its] national agenda on sustainable development,” transforming the Garden City into a City in Nature. The state’s #OneMillionTrees campaign, which intends to plant a million trees over a decade, seems less focused on climate adaptation, given Singapore’s unresolved environmental issues such as oil refinement, terraforming, and hyperconsumption. Instead, it appears to superficially address deeper socioenvironmental wounds inflicted on the postcolonial people and land. In this article, I explore the visual culture of Singapore’s ableist-nationalist greening campaigns alongside artworks such as Marvin Tang’s A Guide to Tree Planting and History of 39 Cuttings—Hybrids, and Woong Soak Teng’s Ways to Tie Trees and Rules for Photographing a Scoliotic Patient. I argue that Tang and Woong highlight adaptation issues in the face of eco-ableist sustainability in Singapore, challenging simplistic notions of climate adaptation by attending to vulnerable, sexed and gendered more-than-human bodies. The field of art history has an opportunity to probe ableist visions of ecological sustainability—within an emerging discourse between environmental justice and disability studies—by historicizing and interpreting such art, as it speaks to enduring, more-than-human impairment and climate adaptation.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060138

Authors: Bláithín Duggan

By combining musicology, sound studies, and linguistics, this article goes beyond existing studies of voice and popular song to analyse vocal modifiers in four songs recorded by The Miracles in 1960 and 1967: ‘Way over there’ (1960), ‘Shop around’ (1960), ‘Who’s lovin’ you’ (1960) and ‘I second that emotion’ (1967). Vocal modifiers, a sub-category of paralanguage, are a nonverbal characteristic of speech that can alter meaning or convey emotion. By adopting a mixed methodology (spectral and music analysis alongside paralinguistics), I argue that aspects of The Miracles’ performative quality reside in their use of vocal modifiers, which occur in performance and are retained on recordings. Over time, specific uses, especially by the lead singer William “Smokey” Robinson, give rise to expressive tropes (significant or recurring themes, similar to a motive in Western art music). Expressive tropes are important for not only do they create aural connections across songs, they can also represent thematic content without the aid of lyrics and reveal subtle insights into non-lexical sounds that have long been acknowledged but have resisted analysis.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060137

Authors: Siaw Hung Ng

The tale commonly known as “Hunter Catches Birds” circulates widely across South Asia, the Islamicate world, and insular Southeast Asia. Despite linguistic, religious, and cultural differences, the narrative architecture of the Hunter Catches Birds tale displays remarkable continuities across Buddhist, Persian, Malay, Indonesian, and Javanese traditions. Its persistence across radically different religious and cultural settings raises a broader question of how narrative meaning remains recognizable through continual reinterpretation. In early Malay renderings, particularly within the Hikayat Bayan Budiman tradition, oral materials are reorganized into framed and nested literary structures. These forms enable both textual and visual interplay while supporting ethical instruction alongside aesthetic elaboration. Frequently positioned as an introductory episode in parrot-cycle literature, the story integrates motifs such as collective escape, feigned death, interspecies conflict, and the tension between loyalty and betrayal. These narrative elements remain open to reinterpretation in different moral and cultural settings. Drawing upon Sanskrit, Persian, Uyghur, Malay, Indonesian, and Javanese materials, this study examines how the tale moved across oral, manuscript, and visual traditions. Rather than treating the narrative as a fixed folktale type, the article approaches it as a flexible modular structure whose ethical meanings were continually reshaped across changing religious and social environments. These interactions generate layered systems of meaning in which image and text jointly shape narrative tension, vulnerability, and strategic judgment. In Persian miniature traditions, scenes of entrapment, sacrifice, and escape are organized through sequential composition and spatial tension, allowing conflict, vulnerability, and narrative causality to be experienced visually as well as textually. By tracing these transformations, this study argues that the enduring vitality of the Hunter Catches Birds tradition may lie less in narrative stability than in the sustained reinterpretation of repeated narrative structures across textual and visual cultures.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060136

Authors: Maria Berbara Carolina Martínez André Reyes Novaes

Spaces labeled as ‘extreme’ have long fueled the imagination of those who sought to explore, conquer, and represent them. Framed in colonial narratives as terra incognita or finis terrae, these regions generated diverse forms of textual and visual knowledge while simultaneously arousing curiosity and fear. The polar regions, Amazonian forests, and the seas and mountains of Patagonia played a central role in shaping the epistemologies of modern science and art in South America, functioning as laboratories in which ways of seeing were tested and transformed through processes of encounter. In this paper, we move beyond approaches that treat extreme spaces as fixed geographical entities defined solely by climatic severity or environmental hostility. Drawing on a pedagogical experiment inspired by Warburgian image-based research practices, we argue that extreme spaces are better understood as relational constructs, co-produced through multispecies and intercultural encounters. Through a comparative analysis of European iconographies across South America, we identify two coexisting clusters of meaning: one organised around abundance, intercultural cooperation, and extractivism; the other around scarcity, resistance, and environmental imposition. By tracing the circulation and mobilization of these meanings across different environments, we propose an epistemology of extremes, suggesting a mode of knowledge production that classifies spaces through the lens of radical otherness.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060135

Authors: Tomasz Grusiecki

This article reconsiders the methodological primacy of representation in early modern art history by shifting attention from image to material. Taking Rembrandt’s Polish Nobleman (1637) as its point of departure, it argues that narrative interpretation—long central to the discipline—has obscured the material conditions that make images possible. Rather than assembling meaning from pictorial elements, the essay follows the painting’s support: a Baltic oak panel sourced from the woodlands of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. From this perspective, the artwork emerges not simply as an autonomous image but as the endpoint of an extractive chain linking forestry, peasant labour, river transport, and long-distance trade. Drawing on agronomic manuals, estate records, and economic histories, the article reconstructs these dispersed threads as “story matter”: fragments that, brought into relation, begin to cohere into an alternative mode of narration. In doing so, it advances “material literacy” as a methodological reorientation—an attunement to substances, processes, and infrastructures that precede and exceed representation. Recovering these histories does not replace interpretation but expands its scope, opening art history to ecological and infrastructural forms of storytelling.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060134

Authors: David Castillo Sari Pamer

This contribution engages with perspectives, concerns and experiences of artists who staged either their own life stories or the life stories of others. At its core, it challenges the idea that staging a life story is solely an empowering, self-enabling and emancipatory aesthetic practice. By analysing two choreographies and their respective working conditions, as well as an interview with one of the choreographers, this article reflects on the commercialisation and neoliberal extraction of personal life stories. Further, this contribution revisits the concept of ‘cultural mobility’ with two case studies. The first one, mi vida en tránsito (2022), draws on the precariousness and vulnerability experienced in times of professional mobility in the Central European dance scene. Overseas (2022), the second case study, criticises the Eurocentric assumption that mobility is equally distributed across the globe. To analyse both case studies, this article establishes ‘cultural immobility’ as a scholarly perspective on how immobility relates to the production, performance, practice and circulation of cultural artefacts and artistic works.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060133

Authors: Marina Daragan Sergei Polin

This study focuses on the construction sequence of three complex and atypical Scythian kurgans at the Vodoslavka burial ground in the Northern Sivash region, which incorporate several unique structural and ritual elements. One of the most striking features is the layer of mud applied to the ground surface prior to mound construction, which, in several cases, formed anthropomorphic outlines. Funerary feasting, which took place both before and during the burial ceremony, was just one of the other features. So too was the deliberate shaping of soil removed from the central grave into a spherical segment, and the ritual activity associated with this prepared spoil heap. Although the mounds’ preserved height is relatively modest (originally about 3–5 m), their internal organisation and the composition of the grave goods suggest that they were used for burying individuals of high status within Scythian society. The cemetery’s proximity to major salt lakes suggests that the local elite’s affluence may have been linked to their control over this vital resource. The architectural and depositional features of the kurgans can be interpreted as elements of a ritual system designed to ensure the deceased’s proper transition to the afterlife. The design of the burial chambers and the richness of the grave goods reflect a concern for the conditions of existence in the afterlife, while the associated manipulations of the sub-mound space and mound deposits, prepared surfaces, deliberately shaped spoil heaps, and related ritual practices can be understood as material markers and procedures intended to secure the successful passage of the deceased to the afterlife.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060132

Authors: Kristi M. Peterson

The question of the presence and active participation of artists of African descent is an obscure one in the art history of Mexico. We know that Black hands were vital participants in the arts of the Americas, and their contributions to Spanish American art were innumerable, but the full extent of this contribution remains frustratingly unclear. Relatively little scholarly research has focused on the Black artists of the colonial world; the most famous are the rare exceptions, including Juan Correa of Mexico (1646–1716). Even in this instance, however, misinformation and confusion abound. A distinguished painter of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Correa was of a mixed-race family and was himself Afro-Mexican. The son of a physician from Cádiz, Spain and a free Black woman, Pascuala de Santoyo, Correa became one of the most prolific painters of his day with upwards of four hundred works identifiably of his oeuvre. He executed a number of works for the cathedral in Mexico City, while others were sent half a world away to Spain. The Correa family was one of the most active families of painters in colonial Mexico City, and his nephew Nicolás Correa was also a mixed-race artist of note. Yet, only recently has Correa’s Black heritage publicly marked his identity. While not overtly hidden from modern viewers, the assertion and emphasis of Correa’s status as Afro-Mexican is relatively new. This is the result of a long history of racial erasure(s), slippage, public disinterest, and modern narratives of Mexicanidad that began in the colonial period. Already a maestro pintor when the painters’ guild in Mexico City instituted new policies in the late seventeenth century designed to prevent artists of othered racial categories from achieving the highest levels of success, Correa stands out as an artist of Black heritage in Mexico who renders the African history of the Americas visible through his own personhood, but who participates in the invisibility of that African-ness in the visual canon. This article therefore proposes to begin from Juan Correa and cast a wide net to examine the invisibility of the Black artist in Mexico and the visibilities of race and rhetorical bodies in New Spain as the larger Viceregal territory.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060131

Authors: Thomas Aiello

Pornocrates (1878) is the most influential work of Belgian artist Félicien Rops. Featuring a naked woman with a blindfold walking behind a tethered pig on a marble floor, the work caused controversy on its first appearance. It has been interpreted by critics and art historians as representing various possibilities. While the evolution of how critics and scholars have interpreted the relationship between woman and pig is important, what none of them acknowledge is the existing status of the human relationship with pigs at the turn of the century, or the phenomenon of blind pig races that mirrored the action taken in the painting. Those races were arbiters of class and gender in fin-de-siecle United States and Europe, two elements of social standing that Rops often used his work to critique. This paper describes the history and criticism of Pornocrates in relation to interpretations of human-animal difference and compares the work to the largely unknown story of blind pig races.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060130

Authors: David Haley

A micro-commission from Signal Film & Media, Barrow-in-Furness, initiated a two-year dialogue between artist/filmmaker Laurence Campbell and ecological artist David Haley. They started with the question, ‘How did such a small stream serve the development of such a large industrial town?’ Their eco-poetic, video/sonic exploration became a freshwater odyssey, discovering the blood of extinction (chalybeate-polluted water) through arterial tributaries, from deep time to 19th-century extraction to today. Their inquiry was informed by the Cumbria Archives, a local environmental conservationist, a poet and opera singer and passersby. The emergent art form revealed a complex set of ecological narratives. The project continues to raise questions about our relationships with the Nature–Climate–Culture Emergency, and the nuclear, defence, mining and water industries.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060129

Authors: Eliecer Jiménez Almeida Santiago Juan-Navarro

Nicolás Guillén Landrián (1938–2003) is often described as one of the most formally daring documentary filmmakers to emerge from Cuba’s Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), yet decades of institutional censorship, including imprisonment, forced psychiatric treatment, and the quiet burial of his films in archives, pushed him into a kind of official nonexistence. His work resurfaced unexpectedly during a 2003 screening in Havana, an event that seemed to reveal just how much had been missing from the historical record. This article examines the systematic relationship between the revolutionary Cuban censorship apparatus and the aesthetic strategies Guillén Landrián developed, from his early ICAIC shorts to his final exile film, Inside Downtown (2001). Drawing on archival materials, published interviews, critical theory (Foucault, Agamben, Bourdieu, Scott, de Certeau), and close readings of key films such as Coffea Arábiga (1968), Desde La Habana ¡1969! Recordar (1969–1971), and Taller de Línea y 18 (1971), we argue that censorship did not simply constrain his filmmaking but shaped it in ways that opened unexpected formal paths. We describe these strategies as a “poetics of obliqueness”—a mode of working that embeds critique within intermedial collage, uneasy juxtapositions, ellipsis, allegory, and double coding. These tactics exploited the gap between the apparatus’s strict monitoring of explicit ideological statements and its difficulty policing ambiguous or formally inventive gestures. Although grounded in the Cuban case, this framework speaks to broader questions about how artists under authoritarian conditions convert pressure into a generative constraint, revealing how creativity can survive, and sometimes mutate, under sustained surveillance.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060128

Authors: Diana Neiva

This paper examines Wes Craven’s Scream 4 (2011) as a testament film that philosophises about creative death: the process by which artistic works face exhaustion, inauthenticity, and the impossibility of renewal. Released four years before Craven’s death in 2015, the film uses the resources of the slasher and its sequel culture to meditate on what it means for a creative work to die. I argue that Scream 4 conducts this investigation through characteristically cinematic means, such as its metatextual architecture, the progressive collapse of the franchise’s reality across four films, the figure of Jill Roberts as an embodied reboot, and its construction of creative death as something that cannot be reversed through the mechanisms commercial culture makes available. The paper also situates this argument within the broader question of film as a medium for philosophising about death, drawing on Craven’s own account of what horror films are for.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060127

Authors: Lila Moore

This article examines dialogic presence as articulated by Martin Buber and explores its continued relevance within contemporary technoetic and AI-mediated new media art. Drawing on Buber’s early writings on art, theatre, and dance—particularly Daniel (1913)—the article first analyses the dialogic relations between artist, art form, and viewer, with attention to the aesthetic principles of distance, unity, and presence that structure the I–Thou encounter. The second part explores the correlation between Buber’s dialogic philosophy and the principles of technoetic art as theorised by Roy Ascott, focusing on the telematic installation Aspects of Gaia: Digital Pathways across the Whole Earth (1989) as a paradigmatic example of dialogic encounter within technologically mediated environments. The third part examines seven artworks from the Infinite Self Pavilion, curated for The Wrong Biennale (2025–2026), as illustrative examples. These works engage AI-mediated aesthetics to interrogate the relation between Self and Other through modes of dialogic encounter and presence induced by orbital apparatus, installation, and screen practices, positioning the viewer at the centre of the encounter while challenging the limits of human consciousness. The article concludes by foregrounding Buber’s ethical stance toward advanced technologies, emphasising relational responsibility and humility in dialogue with Ascott’s technoetic ethics.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060126

Authors: Luoyao Liu Lu Jiang

A significant transformation in the Chinese pictorial tradition took place during the Han Dynasty. Stone reliefs, considered here as a representative art form, recorded the evolution of social thought, funeral concepts, and religious beliefs. Images of immortals on stone reliefs from the northwest region of the Han Realm—an area that included both northern Shaanxi and northwestern Shanxi—combined the belief system of the Central Plains with local characteristics. This research explores how divine images in stone reliefs were adapted to local contexts and took on new functions within the frontier environment and what social forces and beliefs drove these changes.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060125

Authors: Simon Blackmore

This paper examines 20th-century instruments that translate visual forms into sound, focusing on Daphne Oram, Iannis Xenakis, and Fernando von Reichenbach. Emerging from diverse socio-cultural contexts, these devices offer alternative art–technology configurations that challenge dominant computational paradigms. By analysing their artistic intent and technical innovation, the study positions them as speculative tools for rethinking human–machine relations and generating new technological paradigms. Extending this lineage, the author’s practice—L’UPIC Ludique—reimagines Xenakis’ UPIC as a tactile, playful instrument for children, emphasising drawing-based interaction, haptic engagement, and accessible musical creativity. Demonstrated at NIME 2024 and Rogue Open Studio 2025, the project shows how revisiting historical technologies can reconnect users with the magical, playful qualities of early drawn-sound instruments. The paper highlights the need for public investment in collaborative spaces where artistic experimentation can shape technology, reflecting Yuk Hui’s vision of art as a catalyst for epistemic transformation.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060124

Authors: Serguei Alex. Oushakine

This study examines how early Soviet culture sought to render time perceptible, governable, and politically productive by translating Futurist “chrontology” into socialist “chronization.” Taking Aleksandr Kusikov’s 1922 polemic on the Berlin journal Veshch (Thing)—edited by Ilya Ehrenburg and El Lissitzky—as its point of departure, it reconstructs a “third-way” Futurism shaped by postrevolutionary transit and exile, in which anticipatory futurity was inseparable from an intensified orientation toward materiality, technique, and constructive making. Against the backdrop of modern heterochrony—where “times” proliferate and synchronization remains contested—the essay traces how Soviet actors devised new units, comparisons, and pedagogies for living in a temporally unstable present. Two case studies anchor the argument. First, the League of Time (1923–1925) promoted multiscalar time-management practices through campaigns, memos, and didactic graphics that treated clocks, routines, and efficiency as instruments of socialist subject-formation. Second, illustrated children’s books translated variegated temporal sensibilities into a pedagogy of images, making futurity legible via “thingful” traces that recoded the past as a catalogue of obsolete objects. Chronization thus appears as an ambitious cultural technology for producing a planned, dynamic, and productive socialist way of being. By foregrounding work, visualization, and material comparison, these projects converted temporal uncertainty into actionable, collective everyday socialist practice.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060123

Authors: Catherine Asquith

This paper examines two Australian women art collectors of contemporary art, Sydney-based Gene Sherman, and Melbourne-based Naomi Milgrom, each of whom is subject to case study analysis, interrogating their role and participation in arts-related scenarios, to highlight collector behaviour and discern legacy building strategies and mechanisms. Using observations from these trajectories and case study scholarship of historically significant women collectors as a category of evidence, in addition to theoretical concepts to frame the analysis, I argue that women collectors hold inherent ambitions to construct a legacy. By employing strategic mechanisms in the form of publishing and archiving protocols, collaborative exhibitions with museums and institutions, and philanthropic initiatives, women collectors advance legacy building. Further, women collectors develop innovative and unorthodox programs incorporating multi-disciplinary approaches to facilitate legacy. Finally, I assert that women collectors leverage their positions, connections, and collections to support these legacy-building aspirations. Through a consideration of the women collectors’ active engagement with the art market, together with a comparative analysis of historical collector behaviour present within the relevant literature, this study has revealed several key findings. Collector behaviours discerned in the case studies comprise clearly articulated and intentional legacy building, sustained archival practices to preserve histories, innovation, collaboration with actors to facilitate legacy, and assertive leveraging of position, status and collections to strengthen legacy objectives.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060122

Authors: Iryna Shramko

One of the indicators of high social status of women in ancient societies is the funerary costume, whose main element is the headgear. In our previous work, we drew attention to several female burials in the first half of the 6th century BC, which featured funerary headdresses adorned with gold plaques of several types. All of them come from the territory of forest-steppe Scythia. During recent excavations at one of the largest necropoleis of the Bilsk hillfort, a burial mound of the last quarter of the 6th century BC yielded another grave of a member of the local elite, whose funerary headdress was decorated with gold plaques. Among the objects placed in the grave was a unique set of Central European leather items (a belt and a cap), which, although not belonging to the funerary costume proper, were nevertheless used in the funerary rite. Being found among sacred objects, the belt and the cap may be attributed to female ceremonial dress, emphasizing the special position of the deceased woman in society. The state of preservation of these items makes it possible to reconstruct their shape; trace a number of features of cut and manufacturing technique, as well as the design of a previously unknown type of Central European headdress of the Hallstatt period; propose their reconstruction; discuss the probable place of manufacture of these unique artifacts and the mechanism by which they reached the barrow necropolis of forest-steppe Scythia; and extend the chronological framework of the period of burials of elite women in this region.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060120

Authors: Tomasz Mateusz Mońko

The pipe organ, unlike many other instruments used in so–called classical music, is inextricably entwined with technology and contemporary improvements throughout its history. The craftsmanship of organ building is closely related to the evolution of organ music, as can be seen in musical literature. These two fields have always propelled each other. This article provides a view of the author’s invention and its effect on music. The described project comprises two parts and closely links two supposedly distant fields. The first part is the instrument: a pipe organ equipped with a prototype mechatronic programmable key action. The other is the recording of the interpretations of existing baroque and contemporary literature and original improvisations, which constitutes research material and demonstrates the improved elements of artistic expression enabled by the enhanced capabilities of the prototype. Two methods of research were used: perceptual evaluation of the innovative means of expression and simplified FFT analysis of selected samples. Research results prove that automating the key action in the described manner leads to a significant expansion of the range of means of artistic expression achievable on the pipe organ.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060121

Authors: Lucie Friedrich Stephen Pech Gai

Co-authored by a French humanitarian anthropologist and a South Sudanese refugee and environmental activist, both writers situated across the Global North and South, this article argues that artistic practices in displacement operate as infrastructures of survival, whose conditions of existence are both enabled and constrained by external actors. Drawing on a case study of Tongogara Refugee Settlement, it argues that the arts—and, more broadly, knowledge production—constitute key survival mechanisms across psychological, psychosocial, and identity-related dimensions. This article further shows that artistic practices in displacement are not only autonomous expressions of resilience but also mediated cultural forms whose visibility and meaning are co-produced through humanitarian, institutional, and epistemic regimes—including the regimes of academic writing itself. First, we examine art’s three interrelated survival dimensions: psychological (personal coherence amid uncertainty and symbolic mobility), psychosocial (collective bonding and mutual support), and identity (cultural representation, memory, heritage, and self-definition in displacement). Second, we examine how these functions are shaped by interactions with external actors—including humanitarian organizations, donors, cultural platforms, and academic institutions—that may increase visibility while favoring curated representation over sustained artistic development, reflecting broader donor-driven logics of accountability. Third, drawing on reflexive notes from the co-authorship process, we show how academic narration can reproduce these asymmetries, thereby positioning co-creation as both an ethical practice and an epistemic condition of equitable knowledge production. Drawing on humanitarian anthropology, aesthetics, and decolonial epistemologies, we argue that processes of symbolic and cultural reconstruction remain structurally under-institutionalized, circulating across humanitarian, developmental, and epistemic regimes without being fully claimed by any of them. Rather than offering normative prescriptions, the article traces how co-production itself becomes a site where these asymmetries are reproduced and made visible.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060119

Authors: Jesse Ash

This essay reflects on how regenerative strategies used within the field of ecology can be considered in terms of Fine Art practice and pedagogy (and vice versa) and proposes how these methodological alliances inform and extend our understanding of the relationship between these disciplines. Building on recent interest in regenerative practice in the field of design and contemporary art, this piece of writing compares actions of ecological restoration with methods and processes taking place in the artist’s studio. Referencing specialists in the fields of regenerative agriculture, ecology and contemporary arts practice, this text suggests potential alignments and coalescences that broaden our understanding of what a ‘regenerative’ perspective may mean for art practice and, in particular, that of collage and painting, which are central to the author’s own work. This essay includes accounts and anecdotes from conversations with students in studio tutorials alongside recollections of conversations with tutors when I was a student, where discussions highlight processes and decision-making that align with what a ‘regenerative art practice’ might look like. In conclusion, building on Basarab Nicolescu’s proposal of the transdisciplinary, this essay locates the edge of boundaries as fertile ground for radical method-making.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060118

Authors: Alexander Lisov Willem Jan Renders

This essay examines the painting known as Portrait of Elizaveta Iakovleva, which has long been attributed to Kazimir Malevich, using close analysis of the painting materials and techniques, as well as newly discovered archival evidence. It reconstructs part of the work’s provenance, places it within Malevich’s late Leningrad circle, and explores Maria Dzhagupova’s and Elizaveta Iakovleva’s roles in relation to the artist. By comparing the portrait with Malevich’s late portraits and works by Dzhagupova, the study revisits authorship and sitter identity. It argues for a more nuanced understanding of the complex exchanges between Malevich and his students and situates the work more precisely within his late portrait practice and artistic milieu of the 1930s.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060116

Authors: Olzhas Ospanov Alan Vincelette

This article explores the depiction of galloping horses in ancient art, focusing on a Greco-Bactrian gilt bronze finial known as the “Heavenly Horse.” By systematically classifying artistic gallop motifs—rearing gallop, flying gallop, landing gallop, and the anatomically accurate V-gallop—the study traces the evolution of equine imagery across Eurasia. Detailed analysis of the Heavenly Horse finial shows that its pose, musculature, and anatomical features closely correspond to the true suspension phase of a horse’s gallop, a finding supported by modern motion studies. High-resolution 3D scanning, surface diagnostics, and computational modeling indicate that the sculpture’s mass distribution was intentionally designed for dynamic balance and realism. The artifact’s stylistic features, such as the frontal forehead protuberance and S-shaped neck, align with descriptions of elite horse breeds in ancient Chinese and Central Asian sources. Symbolic motifs, including the vine-and-cloud scroll, further connect the object to broader Eurasian traditions of imperial and celestial symbolism. Comparative analysis with Saka and Chinese artifacts highlights both shared conventions and unique technical achievements. The study demonstrates how the Heavenly Horse finial integrates empirical observation, artistic tradition, and symbolic meaning, reflecting the exchange of ideas and technologies along the Silk Road.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060117

Authors: Kutup Ata Tuncer Seçil Soytok Nalçacı

In this study, we compare Byzantine and Armenian church music, focusing on musical parameters such as notation systems, modal structure, rhythmic concepts, and liturgical practice. Both traditions, which took shape within the shared cultural heritage of Anatolia, share fundamental common characteristics such as the eight-mode (Octoechos/oot tzayn) system, a monophonic vocal-based structure, and a text-based rhythmic approach; however, they have developed distinct characteristics under the influence of historical, political, and cultural dynamics. Conducted using comparative historical research methods, this study involved a literature review based on primary and secondary sources. The findings reveal the following: while the Byzantine tradition followed an evolution from Ecphonetic to Neume to modern notation, the Armenian tradition developed the Khaz–Hampartsum notation system; the distinction between authentic and plagal modes exists in both traditions, yet the correspondences established with the Turkish makam system at the theoretical and microtonal (cent) levels are approximate; and regarding rhythmic structure, both traditions share a text-driven, free-flowing organization in which liturgical prosody takes precedence over fixed meter, with such variation as exists operating at the level of ornamentation and performance practice rather than underlying rhythmic principle. During the Ottoman period, both traditions experienced deep interaction with Turkish makam theory; the Chrysanthos reform in Byzantium and the Hampartsum notation in Armenian music is concrete evidence of this interaction.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060115

Authors: Rebecca Anne Sheehan

This article theorises an “aesthetics of thrownness” in experimental Black cinema through three recurring aesthetic figures—torque, glitch, and ecstasy—that materially rupture cinematic continuity and perceptually dislodge spectators from immersive viewing. Taking Arthur Jafa’s account of the “barometric pressure” of Black artistic presence in white-dominant art spaces as a starting point, the essay reframes this experience through Martin Heidegger’s concept of Geworfenheit (thrownness), arguing that these works do not merely present the problem of anti-Blackness but stage its atmospheric mechanics as felt experience. Close readings of Jafa’s Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016), Kahlil Joseph’s Until the Quiet Comes (2012), featuring Storyboard P., and Ja’Tovia Gary’s An Ecstatic Experience (2015), alongside Christopher Harris’s Speaking in Tongues (2024), show how torque, glitch, and ecstasy produce a visceral estrangement that both mimics and contests the command of Black social death theorised by Afro-pessimists. Torque twists bodies, evading frontality, and editing away from linear narrative capture; glitch renders the origins of embodiment uncertain across body, camera, and platform; ecstatic processing displaces the image “outside itself,” foregrounding mediation as atmosphere. These ruptures “throw” the white gaze from default authority, generating politically productive breakdowns that expose liberal ideas of universal equality as structurally compromised by anti-Blackness.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060114

Authors: Valentina Parisi

Ivo Pannaggi (1901–1981), a lesser-known representative of Italian Futurism, contrary to many of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s adepts, did not support Benito Mussolini’s regime. Although born in the small town of Macerata (where he later died), Pannaggi developed his own artistic path in an international perspective: he lived in Berlin and in Norway (1939–1971), he was affiliated with the Bauhaus, and he was deeply influenced by Russian constructivism. Taking as a starting point Pannaggi’s “Manifesto dell’arte meccanica futurista”, co-authored with Vinicio Paladini (20 June 1922), seminal episodes of his mechanical aesthetics are re-assessed based on new evidence. Here, I focus on the possible influence that the Russian émigré dancer, Valentin Parnakh, could have had on the “Ballo meccanico futurista” Pannaggi and Paladini staged in Rome on 2 June 1922, as well as on Pannaggi’s failed collaboration with the Berlin-based futurist Ruggero Vasari for the costume and set design of the drama “L’angoscia delle macchine”.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060113

Authors: Carolyn Dean

Imagery produced by the Indigenous peoples of south-coastal Peru (100 BCE–700 CE) frequently paired plants, animals (human and otherwise), and what have been called mythical or supernatural entities in predator–prey relationships. The dyads suggest that the Nasca and their Paracas predecessors understood the biosphere as both the source and product of energy flow in which all entities functioned as both takers and givers. The perspectivist concept of multinaturalism reveals the ways south-coastal imagery visualizes commonality beyond domains; plants, animals, supernaturals, the living, and the dead all participated in the necessary give and take of life energy. Employing a holistic, ecosystemic perspective, artisans utilized visual analogy to emphasize this commonality across their different natures. Although predators and prey might appear antagonistic, ultimately, in cosmic terms, the pairings perform as complements, and so serve to remind viewers of their reciprocal obligations: takers must give, and givers must take. Yet, despite emphasizing equilibrium, takers dominated the south-coastal pictorial corpus. In the end, such imagery served the interests of high-status males who themselves took on powerful “taker” abilities, suggesting that they and their actions revved the cosmic engine to the benefit of all beings.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060112

Authors: Maria de la O. Fernandez Raposo

The concept of awareness in the visual arts has become an ethical, professional, and social imperative. Adopting a sustainable approach to creative practice is no longer a trend but an established and necessary field of inquiry. Within this context, awareness has been expressed not only through eco-branding and design campaigns but also through artworks and contemporary artistic practices that embody sustainable values both aesthetically and philosophically. Visual arts thus function as a reflective and critical tool, capable of reassessing past and present paradigms, encouraging more responsible uses of resources, promoting environmental sustainability, and shaping public attitudes through conscious and critical forms of expression. This study adopts a qualitative approach to examine transformations in contemporary art practices within the Saudi Arabian art scene. Selected artworks are analysed to explore historical and conceptual narratives shaping artistic production. The research is based on a bibliographic and documentary review that includes academic literature, exhibition catalogues and press sources related to the Saudi cultural context. Data are gathered through observing artworks and, where possible, through interviews with artists. A comparative analysis was developed, with the study framed by art practices, their concepts, and their ecological contributions, leading to a sustainable awareness and their potential role in encouraging social change. The comparative study among artists provides an innovative research framework and initiates a broader dialogue on sustainable creative practices rooted in Saudi cultural contexts. The findings highlight how visual arts contribute to ecological awareness and climate activism through art installations, recycled materials, and digital practices, reinforcing sustainability as a core value within contemporary Saudi society.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060111

Authors: Tatjana Hofmann

This article explores, from a historical and comparative perspective, how Chinese and Japanese theatre inspired the revolutionary theatre movement in 1920s and 1930s Moscow, which in turn influenced German theatre. One notable example of this intercultural transmission of aesthetics can be seen in the play I Want a Child! by Sergei Tretiakov. It showcases the impact of Asian traditions, embodying theatre as a Eurasian phenomenon—a style of staging recognised by Brecht and Meyerhold as a means of actively educating the audience. Inspired by the power of this medium in China, Tretiakov who was a friend of Brecht, attempted to develop a theatrical language that would have the strongest impact on the masses with socialist values. The selected play exemplifies art as a communicative transfer zone where Asian, Soviet, and Western theatre traditions converge. Brecht later adopted these aesthetics in relation to gender roles and conventional (“epic”) theatre techniques, with the aim of politicising the audience. The article considers these dimensions, after delving into the context of I Want a Child! and revising Tretiakov’s activities related to his work in China. Finally, it situates the Brechtian alienation effect in the intercultural, Euro-Asian dimension of instructive modernist theatre.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050110

Authors: Rupert Ashmore

This article examines the context and aims of We Feed the UK: a multi-site series of arts projects and exhibitions, organised by the Gaia Foundation, that were exhibited at venues across the United Kingdom from February 2024 to June 2025. These aims were to celebrate and advocate for diverse regenerative food production businesses and community initiatives through poetry and photography. The featured enterprises combine food production with objectives such as biodiversity renewal, community development, mental health support and social justice, and the article proposes that this combination of environmental advocacy and affective social issues appeals to a wide and diverse audience. It supports this proposal through an examination of the first photography project in the series: Johannes Pretorius’s Intervention and Renewal, that engaged with a Cumbrian dairy farm that successfully combines biodiversity regeneration, organic agriculture and educational initiatives. Drawing upon Actor–Network Theory and notions of time as they pertain to the photograph, this examination reveals a project that offers both familiar imagery of British pastoral tropes, and the contemporary realities of the British food production system. As such it offers multiple points of engagement for audiences, and an effective entry point for the We Feed the UK programme.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050109

Authors: Gabriela Anderson

African migrants arriving in South Africa are finding themselves fighting a war on two fronts: the one they fled from and the one they are arriving to. As a collection of five individual narratives, this research goes behind the paintings, performances, and poetry to understand how not only migration and xenophobia, but also lives are embodied and negotiated through creative mediums, and how these creative mediums should also be emphasised as important epistemologies. Here, a journey will be taken through understanding xenophobia and otherness through the lens of language, and will look at how the arts, as a form of language, offer an alternative space and way of communicating in a space that discriminates based on communication (or lack thereof). Accordingly, the research further investigates (self-)representation from the individual and community, how public displays of pain are really felt by the artists sharing their vulnerability, and also how creative practices create a space to negotiate between the complexities of ‘home’ and the violent state of xenophobia arrived to in and beyond South Africa. Consequently, the study explores how trauma and experiences are not always visible on the body, but are carried through the mind, spirit, and generations that come later.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050108

Authors: Jane M. Tolmie William Carroll

This article brings visual thinking into the speculative fiction classroom, drawing on critical autism studies and on work on Indigenous futurism. It is the collaborative work of a neurotypical academic and an artist on the autism spectrum. Using one Canadian short story by a member of the Norway House Cree Nation, David A. Robertson, as a sample primary source, the project offers strategies for developing a multimodal classroom through assigning visual close readings as forms of literary criticism and critical thinking. This project aims to show the value of thinking in pictures as a respectful tool for both decolonization work in the classroom and for the encouragement of student creative work. Focused on a lesbian love story, the project presents critical love in the academy as queer and creative.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050107

Authors: Weihan Fang Karmilah Binti Abdullah Faizul Nizar Bin Anuar Xi Gong

In recent years, Chinese animation has increasingly embraced traditional cultural elements, with Chan (Zen) Buddhism emerging as a rich source of philosophical and aesthetic inspiration. Existing research on the manifestation of Chan aesthetics in Chinese animation has explored the topic from diverse perspectives, yet analyses from a systematic semiotic perspective remain limited. Most symbolic studies reduce Chan elements to isolated visual signs with one-to-one meaning correspondences, neglecting the synergistic operation of narrative, visual, and auditory symbols in animation as an integrated system. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ theory of myth, this study employs a qualitative semiotic analysis to examine how Chan aesthetics are reconstructed and naturalised in Chinese animated works across different periods and genres. The analysis demonstrates that core Chan concepts are reconfigured into secularised audiovisual symbol systems. These systems translate abstract philosophy into tangible aesthetic forms and narrative structures, with meaning generated through the interplay of denotation, connotation, and myth. Furthermore, the representation of Chan aesthetics evolves across eras. Early animation relies on minimalist ink-wash visuals and implicit narrative; contemporary commercial animated film employs causal storytelling to embed Chan values in modern contexts; and Ye Youtian ‘poetic animation’ emphasises personal spiritual expression through non-linear imagery.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15050106

Authors: Jose Luis Bartha

This article examines the visibility and invisibility of pregnancy in early modern Iberian religious art through artificial intelligence. While sacred imagery in Catholic Spain and Portugal between the 14th and 17th centuries includes representations of the pregnant Virgin Mary and scenes related to maternity, such depictions are often symbolically coded and devoid of embodied detail. Using the Astica Vision AI system, a two-phase methodology was applied to a total of fifty-two artworks depicting the Virgin of Expectation, the Visitation, and the Nativity of the Virgin. In the first phase, images were submitted without context to observe whether the AI could independently identify pregnancy or maternal affect. In the second phase, the same images were reanalyzed with iconographic metadata. Findings show that AI frequently fails to detect gestation in sacred images, and even when context is provided, rarely describes bodily signs or relational affect. These findings reflect the visual logic inherent to sacred art, which tends to prioritize theological meaning over biological or emotional realities. The inclusion of a modern secular photograph of pregnancy highlights the contrast: there, AI readily identifies maternal embodiment, emotion, and connection. This contrast reveals how cultural and doctrinal frameworks shape visual codes of legibility. Rather than a neutral observer, the AI becomes a diagnostic tool, amplifying iconographic silences and revealing how sacred art disciplines perception. The article proposes a new methodological role for machine vision in the humanities: not to mimic human reading, but to uncover what remains unseen in visual culture.

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 to include 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 [...]