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The rhythmic repetitions that run through weaving, dance, music, poetry, and prayer are guidelines that can be followed with eyes closed and hands outstretched toward a sensory experience of the sacred. This essay traces the synergies between these somatic practices and the potential of rhythmic entrainment to generate numinous states. As cultural paradigms shift from the disembodied mind to mindful embodiment, weaving and cloth provide models for relational thinking and nonhierarchical structures. The author forwards the notion that the act of weaving sensitizes the body-mind to a perception of the interconnected universe.
Following general reflections on the relations between global media, local and oral history, this paper addresses the paradoxical constraints imposed by language specialization, which focuses Western historians on particular regions and languages at the expense of demotic and oral cultures. Taking up the idea that translation is never an ideologically innocent act, Stein addresses the ambiguous status of English in the Indian context, both as the language of British imperial power, but also as a vehicle for challenging and “writing back” against colonial discourse. To illustrate the linguistic pitfalls that accompany research on South Asian art, the paper investigates the relations between temple art, iconoclasm, and the zinc smelting industry in Jawar, Rajasthan.
This paper strives to pluralize notions of taste in relation to the canonized category of the Hindu or Indian temple. I put ‘Hindu’ in italics because I include Jain temples in my discussion and I put ‘Indian’ in italics because the architecture I discuss predates India as a nation-state and in the twenty-first century includes buildings in South and Southeast Asia as well as the Diaspora. Through a discussion of the Archaeological Preservation Aesthetic (APA) and multiple variants of the Ritual Renovation Aesthetics (RRA), new ways of looking emerge. This paper seeks to reconcile the hegemonic assumptions about art historical taste and the temple within an increasingly global environment. The main argument is predicated on temple users’ practice as a form of curatorial practice in the field and provides a deep description of the multiplication of aesthetics due to increasing privatization of temple administration in India. The tenth-century cluster of temples from the Medapata region (Southern Ra…
In this paper I examine the cultural implications of the United States military’s use of commercial video game controllers as contemporary battle equipment. My research draws on analysis of the academic literature on militarism and video games, controller studies, and media theory, as well as industry sources and mainstream media reporting. The paper is organized into three sections: a history of the relationship between the military and the video game industry, a discussion of the military’s use of Xbox controllers, and an exploration of the causes and consequences of the increasingly blurry line between toys and weapons.
In this wide-ranging essay, Bernardi explores personal and artistic responses to state violence. Marking the limits of memory in witnessing the past, she argues for a complex understanding of memory as a mode of reclaiming the disappeared, as the foundation for consciousness building, and, when transmuted into material forms, as a means of witnessing. Bernardi conceptualizes artistic creation as fulfilling multiple roles in witnessing, and as an exchange that demands both speech and recognition. An artistic response to atrocity, she writes, demonstrates an important form of listening to testimonials of atrocity; in turn, that demonstration invites both members and observers into rituals of commemoration. Such rituals, she argues, can provide the foundation for rebuilding trust and understanding in communities that have been damaged by state violence.
"Cloaca Projects is situated in a small, garage-like space on the old industrial edge of San Francisco, a rapidly changing city dedicated more and more to new technical systems of hyperefficiency. Sonja Gerdes's recent project for Cloaca portrayed uncertain states of relation with such technologies as human beings lurch into the future. Her suite of sculptures represented living creatures as they become augmented, undermined, or superseded by built extensions. Individually and as an ensemble, they functioned as signs of dystopian outcomes amid a scientistic culture of optimism."
"The author effectively deploys multiple overarching framing devices, including the central one of the book's title: that developing versions of "traditional" musical products have been innovated through new digital means of audio recording and editing, enabling a "cut-and-paste" methodology where musical fragments can be intensively rearranged—with resultantly shifting aesthetic values. [...]the creation of "ethnic" music in the popular realm in Turkey in recent generations, while drawing on some musical elements of established customary use in certain locales, is as much dependent on arbitrary choices of other musical practices integrated into composite productions by professional studio practitioners. "Latency" is one especially generative notion the author proposes in tracking "lags" across different domains—from historical cultural values and social negotiations to cognitive psychology to the physics of temporal duration in translations from acoustical to analog electrical to digital signals and back aga…