Pioneers in Machinima: The Grassroots of Virtual Production

Tracy Gaynor Harwood, De Montfort University and Ben Grussi

This important new work focuses on the pioneers in machinima, considered to be the grassroots and beginnings of virtual production. Machinima’s impacts are identified by the community, supplemented by Harwood and Grussi’s research and experience over a period of 25 years – from game, film and filmmaking to digital arts practice, creative technologies developments and related research and theory. Machinima is the first digital cultural practice to have emerged from the internet into a mainstream creative genre. Its latest transformation is evident through the increasing convergence of games and film where real-time virtual production as a professional creative practice is resulting in new forms of machine-generated interactive experiences. Using the most culturally significant machinima works (machine-cinema) as lenses to trace its history and impacts, ‘Pioneers in Machinima: The Grassroots of Virtual Production’ provides in-depth testimony by filmmakers and others involved in its emergence. The extensive reference to source materials and interviews bring the story of its impacts up to date through the critical reflections of the early pioneers. This book will be of interest to machinima researchers and practitioners, including game culture, media theorists, students of film studies and game studies, digital artists and those interested in how creative technologies have influenced communities of practice over time.

Posthumanist Nomadisms across non-Oedipal Spatiality

Edited by Java Singh, Doon University, Dehradun, India and Indrani Mukherjee, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

As an epistemological perspective, ‘nomadism’ is an emerging field of scholarship, offering intersectionality with eco-criticism, feminism, post-colonialism, migration studies, and translation. Much of the scholarship that uses the precepts of nomadism to read cultural texts and phenomena is scattered as separate articles in academic journals or as single chapters in books wherein the primary focus is the intersectional fields. Few book-length publications solely focus on the ramifications of nomadism; Posthumanist Nomadisms across non-Oedipal Spatiality fills that void. The fifteen chapters in this volume explore the possibilities offered by the nomadic perspective to explore a wide range of literary and cultural texts; organized into three sections, “Nomadic Assemblages,” “Non-Oedipal Cartographies”, and “Space-Time Montages”, that work as one to negate absorption into the interiority of sovereign territory. These sections are not an attempt at corralling the nomadic spirit into separate enclosures; instead, they are bands of warriors that operate the violence of the hunted animal, dehumanized human others, and earth others. The chapters are in constant multi-vocal conversations with narratives that camp on the turbulent weathers of global transitory spaces. They charter real or intellectual turfs of interstitial/rhizomatic nomadic epistemologies as political resistance to the exclusionary practices of a violently wired world. This book will appeal to post-graduate students, researchers, and faculty in the departments of literature, comparative literary and cultural studies. Researchers in sociology, cultural anthropology, gender studies, and migration studies will also find the material applicable to the expanding approaches available in their fields.

Classical Music in a Changing World (Audio CD Edition)

Crisis and Vital Signs

Edited by Lawrence Kramer, Fordham University and Alberto Nones, Conservatory of Music of Gallarate; Associazione Europea di Musica e Comunicazione (AEMC), Italy

In recent years classical music has become a test case for debates over the future of culture. As times have changed, the value traditionally placed on this music has been challenged on social rather than aesthetic grounds. Lovers of classical music have been asked how its privileged history can be reconciled with growing demands for social justice and social inclusiveness. They have been asked how the music’s standing as one of the great accomplishments of the West can be reconciled with the many injustices on which those accomplishments in part depended. How can the future of classical music escape the darker shadows of its past? ‘Classical Music in a Changing World: Crisis and Vital Signs’ addresses the crisis provoked by such questions in two complementary ways. Several of the chapters show how the classical music world is already grappling with the crisis, and finding vital signs beyond the borders of the music’s traditional European strongholds: in Turkey from Ottoman times to the present, in Colombia, and in a Black American film. Other chapters identify areas that still need improvement, especially on behalf of female and LGBTQ+ musicians, and suggest how advances can be made both on concert stages and in schools. This volume, which opens with an introduction by Alberto Nones that contextualizes the book and outlines the main arguments of its chapters, contains an essay by Lawrence Kramer that examines the place of classical music in the history of consciousness—a history now changing rapidly—and concludes with a Postscript written by the two editors. The writing in this volume will be accessible to a wide audience, including scholars and students, professionals and amateurs, performers and listeners. Teachers will find it a source of lively classroom debate, and scholars a source of learning outside the usual arenas. The book’s “vital signs” include the accompanying CD, which features vibrant music-making from a diverse range of performers and composers.

Arts on the Margins of World Encounters

Unknown Artistic Lifeworlds, Global Markets and New Development Policies

Edited by Willemijn de Jong, University of Zurich, Switzerland et al.

Arts on the Margins of World Encounters presents original contributions that deal with artworks of differently marginalized people—such as ethnic minorities, refugees, immigrants, disabled people, and descendants of slaves—, a wide variety of art forms—like clay figures, textile, paintings, poems, museum exhibits and theater performances—, and original data based on committed, long-term fieldwork and/or archival research in Brazil, Martinique, Rwanda, India, Indonesia, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. The volume develops theoretical approaches inspired by innovative theorists and is based on currently debated analytical categories including the ethnographic turn in contemporary art, polycentric aesthetics, and aesthetic cannibalization, among others. This collection also incorporates fascinating and intriguing contemporary cases, but with solid theoretical arguments and grounds. Arts on the Margins of World Encounters will appeal to students at all levels, scholars, and practitioners in arts, aesthetics, anthropology, social inequality, and discrimination, as well as researchers in other fields, including post-colonialism and cultural organizations.

Duncan and Marjorie Phillips and America’s First Museum of Modern Art

Pamela Carter-Birken

He was born to privilege and sought the world of art. She lived at the center of that world—a working artist encouraged by the famous artists in her extended family. Together, Duncan Phillips and Marjorie Acker Phillips founded The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the first museum of modern art in America. It opened in the grand Phillips family home in 1921, eight years before New York City’s Museum of Modern Art and only a few weeks after they wed. Duncan took the lead in developing the collection and showcasing it. Marjorie kept space and time to paint. Duncan considered Marjorie a partner in the museum even though she was not directly involved in all purchasing and presentation decisions. To him, her influence was omnipresent. Although Duncan’s writings on artists and art history were widely published, he chose not to provide much instruction for visitors to the museum. Instead, he combined signature methods of displaying art which live on at The Phillips Collection. Phillips had viewers in mind when he hung American art with European art—or art of the past with modern art, and he frequently rearranged works to stimulate fresh encounters. With unfettered access to archival material, author Pamela Carter-Birken argues that The Phillips Collection’s relevancy comes from Duncan Phillips’s commitment to providing optimal conditions for personal exploration of art. In-depth collecting of certain artists was one of Phillips’s methods of encouraging independent thinking in viewers. Paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin, Jacob Lawrence, and Mark Rothko provide testament to the power of America’s first museum of modern art.