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Dancing into the metaverse: Creating a framework for ethical and ecological telematic dance practice and performance
Get PDFAdaptation and resilience in the performing arts shares important insights into the effects of the pandemic on live performance in the UK. Contributors reflect on what they discovered from working with practitioners and companies in the live performing arts, who rapidly adapted their working practices and the spaces in which they were able to connect safely with audiences, whether digital or outdoors. Chapters provide evidence of the impacts of digital innovations and telepresence technologies on artists and audiences, and shed light on how government discourses and the support structures within the industry affected the mental health of creative practitioners. Addressing policymakers and practitioners, others investigate how artists and local government events managers approached programming community-based work outdoors
Introduction
Get PDFBuilding on the assumptions that decadence is a complex and transnational phenomenon, this volume proposes fresh understandings of the theory and practice of translation. Icelandic poetry and a Japanese novel rub shoulders with Latvian translations of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and early twentieth-century translations of Baudelaire by Cyril Scott, who also set some of Ernest Dowson’s verse into song. Strindberg’s ‘Sensations détraquées’, one of the few texts he wrote in French, and G. B. Shaw’s recent translation of Widower’s Houses into Italian reveal how decadence was received in different countries and different periods, from the late nineteenth century to contemporary times, as well as demonstrate the flexibility of translation practice, which no longer signifies mere linguistic equivalence. On the contrary, translation appears as a mode of reception, attentive to cultural geographies and historical transformations, as a means of practising intermediality, or as a creative activity, sometimes dangerously close to appropriation and rewriting, thereby raising ethical questions. With its focus on hitherto neglected areas and artists and its insistence on the centrality of translation, this volume is a timely addition to the now well-established field of decadence studies
Black British Gospel Music Past, Present, and Future: Final Reflections from the Editors
No full textThe title of this book, Rivers of Babylon, uses the metaphor of a ‘river’ to conceptualise the diversity of Black British Gospel Music that continues to evolve as streams of living water in 21st-century Britain and globally. In this final chapter, we each share final reflections of our scholarship, which will be framed using water’s metaphoric language to help us imagine the future. First, the use of Babylon metaphorically is worth revisiting. Taken from the scriptural text in Psalm 137:
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
Here we have the image of a group of people sitting, weeping, and remembering. They are located in a place captivated by a system that has caused generational harm, yet they are required to sing. The people are reminiscing on the past, yet we know from other biblical passages that they did not lose hope for their future as a people. Indeed, many generations later, many of them returned to Zion, though transformed through their sojourn in exile. In the time in between their exile and return, they did indeed learn to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.
That in-between time, which finds the people of Zion living in the tension between the pain of the ‘now’ and the joy of the ‘not yet,’ is the moment that this book has chronicled. Among people of the African diaspora in Britain, the Lord’s song has taken many forms, from the soulful melodies of singers to the harmonies of choirs, to the rhymes and rhythms of grime MCs. Though nurtured within the Black Majority Church, it has never been contained within its walls; Black British Gospel Music continually spills out into the high streets, schools, and suburbs. And BBGM does not return to sacred spaces unchanged; through its sojourns, the music is constantly renewed and transformed, at times subtly and at other times radically.
In this final chapter, each of the three editors reflects on key themes of this volume, drawing together threads of the discussion and pointing the way forward for further examination. In doing so, we embody a stance that we hope will be adopted by scholars of BBGM moving forward: that of collaboration across, and in full view of, difference among scholars who embody a variety of backgrounds and perspectives
Evaluating the Influence of Musical and Monetary Rewards on Decision Making through Computational Modelling
Get PDFA central question in behavioural neuroscience is how different rewards modulate learning. While the role of monetary rewards is well-studied in decision-making research, the influence of abstract rewards like music remains poorly understood. This study investigated the dissociable effects of these two reward types on decision making. Forty participants completed two decision-making tasks, each characterised by probabilistic associations between stimuli and rewards, with probabilities changing over time to reflect environmental volatility. In each task, choices were reinforced either by monetary outcomes (win/lose) or by the endings of musical melodies (consonant/dissonant). We applied the Hierarchical Gaussian Filter, a validated hierarchical Bayesian framework, to model learning under these two conditions. Bayesian statistics provided evidence for similar learning patterns across both reward types, suggesting individuals’ similar adaptability. However, within the musical task, individual preferences for consonance over dissonance explained some aspects of learning. Specifically, correlation analyses indicated that participants more tolerant of dissonance behaved more stochastically in their belief-to-response mappings and were less likely to choose the response associated with the current prediction for a consonant ending, driven by higher volatility estimates. By contrast, participants averse to dissonance showed increased tonic volatility, leading to larger updates in reward tendency beliefs
The Wand Chooses the IMU - Open Source Hardware for Synchronising Wearables using Magnetometers
Get PDFThis paper presents the Synchronisation Wand, an open-source hardware solution which can be used to synchronise multiple inertial measurement unit sensors (IMU) using their onboard magnetometers. The wand is based on commercial off-the-shelf components with standard 4-layer PCB manufacturing and self-service assembly. The case can be 3D printed using any Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) based printer. The system combines an ESP32-S3 micro-controller unit with an electromagnetic (EM) generator to create an encoded EM event which can be used to synchronise multiple IMUs. The hardware includes an onboard IMU allowing the user to track the motion of the wand as well as perform kinetic synchronising events. The device also includes an OLED display and 4 configurable tactile switches to enhance the usability of the system. We demonstrate the device's capability to generate an encoded EM pulse which can be used to reduce the maximum synchronisation error between two IMUs down to 10ms
Classical Antiquity
No full textReferences to ancient Greece and Rome abound in Victorian literature and culture. Although classical studies are often associated with the elite, there is evidence in sources from textbooks to periodicals to the popular stage that Greek epic and tragedy, Roman history, and artifacts and accounts of archaeological discoveries reached a wide audience. Fascination with Greek culture developed in the Romantic period as a reaction against Augustanism and remained strong throughout the century, with cultural critics such as Matthew Arnold insisting on the relevance of Hellenism to the concerns of the present day. Victorian authors also found new significance in the Roman inheritance. Writers such as Matthew Arnold, W. M. Thackeray, Alfred Tennyson, A. H. Clough, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and A. C. Swinburne, among others, studied Latin and Greek for years at school or university and reworked their classical learning in poetry and fiction. A distinctive feature of the Oxford Greats syllabus was that it encouraged students to compare Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, and history with the work of modern thinkers, and to comment on parallels between the ancient and modern worlds. The classical curriculum shaped public life: politicians and imperial administrators interpreted the challenges facing modern Britain in terms of Athenian or Roman examples. Largely self-taught Hellenists such as Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot achieved a remarkable degree of proficiency in Greek with little assistance, since Greek literature, philosophy, and history seemed to offer them tantalizing access to unparalleled sources of truth and knowledge. A wider readership also shared in the richness of the classical inheritance through translations and adaptations of classical literature, history, and myth. Greek epics and tragedy were appropriated by the authors of dramatic monologues, novels, and theatrical burlesques to engage with contemporary concerns about marriage and divorce, the role of women, and the idea of heroism in the modern world. The predominance of Latin and Greek in formal education was beginning to be questioned toward the end of the century, as debates about issues such as the applicability of Greek culture to education in an industrialized society stimulated controversy; in the late Victorian period classical culture was increasingly scrutinized using new approaches based on anthropology, archaeology, and sociology, which broadened the disciplinary base of classics and informed transgressive tendencies in the Hellenism of aesthetic and decadent writers
Terra, Mare, Razza: Cartografie Decoloniali, counter-mapping e Linee abissali
No full textCarl Schmitt’s distinction between «land and sea», which he took as an expression of two visions of the world in conflict and irreducible to one another in the modern political order, is considered in this article by looking at some of the questions that decoloniality has raised in recent times. By taking a «coloniality» viewpoint, the article establishes an analogical link between the horizon of biopolitical unboundedness of the sea and a «colonial space» conceived of as an inert land, a place of exclusion and radical excess alongside the new European nomos. Moving beyond the polarity between land and sea, the structural bond that has long both united and separated modernity and coloniality permits us to trace a historical co-implication between race and plunder, conquest and limpieza de sangre, an economy of salvation and an economy of ethno-salvation. This article proposes a complex idea of historical process accounting for diachronic and internal developments within Europe as well as external and coextensive developments outside.
La distinzione tra «terra e mare», sviluppata da Carl Schmitt come espressione di due visioni del mondo in lotta e irriducibili l’una all’altra nell’ordinamento politico moderno, è considerata in questo articolo a partire da alcune delle domande sollevate dalla critica decoloniale in tempi recenti. Assumendo la prospettiva della «colonialità» verrà qui stabilito un legame analogico tra l’orizzonte di dismisura biopolitica del mare e quello di uno «spazio coloniale» pensato come terra inerte, luogo di esclusione ed eccedenza radicale del nuovo nomos europeo. L’articolo intende considerare, di là dalla polarità tra terra e mare, l’originario vincolo strutturale che ha, al tempo stesso, unito e separato modernità e colonialità, rintracciando così un rapporto di coimplicazione storica tra razza e razzia, conquista e limpidezza di sangue, economia della salvezza ed economia dell’etno-salvezza. Si cercherà di valorizzare un’idea complessa di svolgimento storico in grado di dar conto, da una parte, degli sviluppi diacronici e interni all’Europa e, dall’altra, di quelli esterni e coestensivi fuori dall’Europa