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Wartime Art and Temporality in the Russian and Soviet Avant-Gardes, 1914–1928
No full textThis dissertation examines the ruptured temporality of “wartime” in works by artists, poets, and filmmakers belonging to the Russian and Soviet avant-gardes between 1914 and 1928. Wartime, this study argues, shaped the aesthetics and temporality of canonical works from cubo-futurist illustrated books and collage painting to agitprop theatre and groundbreaking silent film produced in an era of industrialized warfare, revolutionary upheaval, and civil unrest. I reveal the ways in which manifest notions of time were challenged and dismantled in a myriad of artistic forms, styles, and concepts responding to the First World War.
Over five chapters, this dissertation examines the ways in which artists working in a variety of media meditated on past wars and imagined futural wars between 1914 and 1928. I explore the unsettling experience of anticipating and protesting the War by civilians away from the frontlines in illustrated books including War by Olga Rozanova and Aleksei Kruchenykh, The Mystical Images of War by Natalia Goncharova, and Universal War also by Kruchenykh published between 1914 and 1916. During the height of hostilities, I analyze the intersection between war, disability, and crip time in portraiture of conscription and soldierhood in the collage painting Reservist of the First Division by Kazimir Malevich. The dissertation turns to an exploration of the recurrent motifs of war and violence in the 1913 futurist opera Victory over the Sun and its agitprop restagings in 1920 and 1923 through the Civil War and communist contexts. I conclude with an examination of commemorative films reflecting on the traumatic memory of the intertwined events of war and revolution in The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty by Esfir Shub, The End of St. Petersburg by Vsevolod Pudovkin, and October by Sergei Eisenstein produced between 1927 and 1928. Through the concept of wartime, this study examines the temporal slippage between wartime and peacetime, combatant and civilian, and war and revolution to illustrate the profound ways that war shaped the aesthetics and temporality of the avant-garde
The Ubiquity of Time in Latent-Cause Inference
Full text linkHumans have an outstanding ability to generalize from past experiences, which requires parsing continuously experienced events into discrete, coherent units, and relating them to similar past experiences. Time is a key element in this process; however, how temporal information is used in generalization remains unclear. Latent-cause inference provides a Bayesian framework for clustering experiences, by building a world model in which related experiences are generated by a shared cause. Here we examine how temporal information is used in latent-cause inference,using a novel task in which participants see ‘microbe’ stimuli and explicitly report the latent cause (‘strain’) they infer for each microbe. We show that humans incorporate time in their inference of latent causes, such that recently inferred latent causes are more likely to be inferred again. In particular, a ‘persistent’ model, in which the latent cause inferred for one observation has a fixed probability of continuing to cause the next observation, explains the data significantly better than two other time-sensitive models, although extensive individual differences exist. We show that our task and this model have good psychometric properties,highlighting their potential use for quantifying individual differences in computational psychiatry or in neuroimaging studies
Geologists as Colonial Scouts: The Rogers Expedition to Otavi and Tsumeb, Namibia, 1892–1895
Full text linkFrom 1892 to 1895, the South West Africa Company (SWACO) expedition led by geologist Matthew Rogers conducted the first geologic mapping in Namibia’s Otavi Mountains, including the now world-famous Tsumeb Mine. This paper uses archival documents from the Rogers expedition to trace his geologic contributions and to illustrate important themes in the relationships between 19th century colonial geologists, Western colonizing governments, Indigenous communities, resource extraction, and corporations. To carry out his mapping, Rogers performed a continuous balancing act between British and German colonial powers and local African leaders. The local leaders and communities he interacted with variously resisted his incursions, or collaborated with him, but consistently and vocally asserted their rights to the land and copper in Otavi. In addition to geologic mapping, Rogers understood his role as intelligence gatherer, reporting back on the resources needed to facilitate European settlers in the region, including his views on how Germany might subjugate local communities and ensure their labor for the growing colony. Throughout, the expedition was dependent on African guides to keep them alive and show them where copper outcropped, yet Rogers’ letters back to SWACO promoted racial and cultural prejudices that became the foundations for how SWACO would interact with those communities in the future. In addition to laying the geologic groundwork for the Otavi area, the expedition illustrated the many roles that 19th century colonial geologists played in Western colonization
