Open Access Books - Arts - 2021

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  • Publication
    German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism
    ( 2021)
    Baer, Hester
    This book presents a new history of German film from 1980-2010, a period that witnessed rapid transformations, including intensified globalization, a restructured world economy, geopolitical realignment, and technological change, all of which have affected cinema in fundamental ways. Rethinking the conventional periodization of German film history, Baer posits 1980-rather than 1989-as a crucial turning point for German cinema's embrace of a new market orientation and move away from the state-sponsored film culture that characterized both DEFA and the New German Cinema. Reading films from East, West, and post-unification Germany together, Baer argues that contemporary German cinema is characterized most strongly by its origins in and responses to advanced capitalism. Informed by a feminist approach and in dialogue with prominent theories of contemporary film, the book places a special focus on how German films make visible the neoliberal recasting of gender and national identities around the new millennium.
  • Publication
    Beta Exercise: The Theory and Practice of Osamu Kanemura
    ( 2021)
    Kanemura
    Beta Exercise: The Theory and Practice of Osamu Kanemura is the first bilingual (Japanese-English) book to provide an overview of the theoretical work of Japanese photographer and video artist Osamu Kanemura, a unique talent and voice in the world of avant-garde contemporary photography. The opening essay “Life Is a Gift" meditates on the transformation of human life into an exchangeable commodity and the abstraction that entails. “Essay 01" develops Kanemura’s idea of photographic “technique" in an era when such techniques have become accessible to all, radically undermining the importance of human subjectivity in the process of capturing the photographic image: “We can say that modern technology constitutes photographic technique." Instead, Kanemura argues, extra-technical elements such as concept and vision will have to compensate for the expression of individuality that technique is no longer able to convey. Taking cues from Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Karlheinz Stockhausen, the essay “Dead-Stick Landing" develops Kanemura’s theory of the moving image as mechanical system, solely governed by an “on-off switch," while “Essay 02" develops these ideas into a consideration of cinematic time and the experience of boredom in cinema as the result of a truthful “loyalty" expressed to machines, and not to stories. The essays are accompanied by an extensive two-part interview with Italian photographer Marco Mazzi, touching upon topics ranging from the technical aspects of Kanemura’s equipment, the concept of non-editing, and the destruction of the frame to the similarity between Mao’s dialectics and the camera, the presence of the human figure as trace, and the politics of photographing Tokyo.
  • Publication
    Documentary Making for Digital Humanists
    ( 2021)
    Darren R. Reid, Brett Sanders
    "This fluent and comprehensive field guide responds to increased interest, across the humanities, in the ways in which digital technologies can disrupt and open up new research and pedagogical avenues. It is designed to help scholars and students engage with their subjects using an audio-visual grammar, and to allow readers to efficiently gain the technical and theoretical skills necessary to create and disseminate their own trans-media projects. Documentary Making for Digital Humanists sets out the fundamentals of filmmaking, explores academic discourse on digital documentaries and online distribution, and considers the place of this discourse in the evolving academic landscape. The book walks its readers through the intellectual and practical processes of creating digital media and documentary projects. It is further equipped with video elements, supplementing specific chapters and providing brief and accessible introductions to the key components of the filmmaking process. This will be a valuable resource to humanist scholars and students seeking to embrace new media production and the digital landscape, and to those researchers interested in using means beyond the written word to disseminate their work. It constitutes a welcome contribution to the burgeoning field of digital humanities, as the first practical guide of its kind designed to facilitate humanist interactions with digital filmmaking, and to empower scholars and students alike to create and distribute new media audio-visual artefacts."
  • Publication
    Storytelling on Screen: An Online Playback Theatre Archive and Guidebook
    ( 2021)
    Jordan Rosin, Heidi Winters Vogel, Sammy Lebron
    Playback Theatre is a form of community-centered storytelling theater where the audience tells stories, which are then reflected by a company of actors and musicians. Storytelling on Screen: An Online Playback Theatre Archive and Guidebook is an open education resource consisting of a collection of full-length recordings of online Playback Theatre performances, and a 55-page explanatory guidebook. The guidebook, featuring a foreword by Playback Theatre co-founder, Jo Salas, explains the adaptation to online performances and some of the key concepts, roles, and forms involved in online Playback Theatre. The resource as a whole is suitable for a wide range of theatre students in courses such as applied theatre, theatre for social justice, improvisation, theatre appreciation, or acting. The guidebook contains hyperlinks to specific sections of the archive where students can see a given form or concept in action, allowing for a comparison of how different companies approach a given form.
  • Publication
    The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968-1973): Volume II, Aesthetics and Ontology
    ( 2021)
    Fairfax, Daniel
    The uprising which shook France in May 1968 also had a revolutionary effect on the country's most prominent film journal. Under editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma embarked on a militant turn that would govern the journal's work over the next five years. With a Marxist orientation inspired by the thinking of Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes, the "red years" of Cahiers du cinéma produced a theoretical outpouring that was formative for the establishment of film studies as an academic discipline in the 1970s, and is still of vital relevance for the contemporary audiovisual landscape. It was also the seminal experience for a generation of critics who have dedicated the following half-century to the task of critically responding to the cinema. The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973) gives a historical overview of this period in the journal's history, combining biographical accounts of the critics who were involved with Cahiers in the post-1968 and theoretical explorations of the text they wrote.
  • Publication
    Fundamentals of Music Theory
    ( 2021)
    Nikki Moran, Michael Edwards, Richard Worth, Zack Moir, John Kitchen
    This open e-book is the result of a project funded by a University of Edinburgh Student Experience Grant, Open e-Textbooks for access to music education. The project was a collaboration between Open Educational Resources Service, and staff and student interns from the Reid School of Music. As a proof-of-concept endeavour, the project aimed to explore how effectively we could convert existing course content into convenient and reusable open formats suitable for use by staff and students both within and beyond the University. The resulting e-book presents open licensed educational materials that deal with the building blocks of musical stave (sometimes known as staff) notation, a language designed to communicate about musical ideas which is in use around the world. The resources in this e-book include video lectures and their transcripts, as well as supporting text explanations, examples and illustrations. The materials introduce topics such as the organisation of discrete pitches into scales and intervals, and temporal organisation of musical sounds as duration, in rhythm and metre. These rudiments are presented through an introduction to the elements of five-line stave notation, and through critical discussion of the advantages and limitations served by notational systems in the representation and analysis of musical sounds. This serves as the basis of further explanations, to illustrate musical concepts including key, time signature, harmonisation, cadence and modulation. We anticipate that subsequent versions of this e-book will update and develop the contents and presentation of the materials, following the success of this student-led collaboration.
  • Publication
    Ancient Greek I: A 21st Century Approach
    ( 2021)
    Philip @. Peek
    In this elementary textbook, Philip S. Peek draws on his twenty-five years of teaching experience to present the ancient Greek language in an imaginative and accessible way that promotes creativity, deep learning, and diversity. The course is built on three pillars: memory, analysis, and logic. Readers memorize the top 250 most frequently occurring ancient Greek words, the essential word endings, the eight parts of speech, and the grammatical concepts they will most frequently encounter when reading authentic ancient texts. Analysis and logic exercises enable the translation and parsing of genuine ancient Greek sentences, with compelling reading selections in English and in Greek offering starting points for contemplation, debate, and reflection. A series of embedded Learning Tips help teachers and students to think in practical and imaginative ways about how they learn. This combination of memory-based learning and concept- and skill-based learning gradually builds the confidence of the reader, teaching them how to learn by guiding them from a familiarity with the basics to proficiency in reading this beautiful language. Ancient Greek I: A 21st-Century Approach is written for high-school and university students, but is an instructive and rewarding text for anyone who wishes to learn ancient Greek.
  • Publication
    Explorations 1: Grammar for the Experienced Beginner
    ( 2021)
    Susan Caisee, Jennifer Rueda, Kristee Emens-Hesslink
    Welcome to Explorations 1: Grammar for the Experienced Beginner. This English grammar textbook was designed for a class of Clackamas Community College (CCC) ESOL students who need only a review of the BE verb and are ready to learn the simple present and present progressive tenses. This textbook has four chapters. Each chapter covers a grammatical point/component/element. Chapter 1 is a review of the BE verb. The BE is special and has its own rules (different from other verbs). Chapter 2 is the Present Progressive tense. This is the tense we use when we are talking about things happening now or near now. Chapter 3 is the Simple Present Tense. We use the Simple Present Tense to talk about facts, routines, and habitual activities. Chapter 4 is a comparison of chapter 3 and 4.
  • Publication
    Humans R Social Media
    ( 2021)
    Diana Daly
    Social media and humans exist in a world of mutual influence, and humans play central roles in how this influence is mediated and transferred. Originally created by University of Arizona Information scholar Diana Daly, this Third Edition of the book Humans are Social Media uses plain language and features contributions by students to help readers understand how we as humans shape social media, and how social media shapes our world in turn.
  • Publication
    Creative Frictions: Arts Leadership, Policy and Practice in Multicultural Australia
    ( 2021)
    Cmielewski, Cecelia
    Creative Frictions explores the relationship between visionary aspects of practice and policy. Despite over 30 years of arts and cultural policy attention, there remains a widespread view among the general public and artists alike that creative production does not reflect Australia's culturally diverse population. Australia's increasingly complex society can no longer be confined to 'essentialised' or traditional definitions of ethnic communities. While this diversity and its emerging complexity can be 'celebrated' as a source of creativity and innovation, it can also give rise to social, political and creative challenges. A key challenge that remains for the arts sector is its ability to support the creative expression of cultural difference. One measure of inclusive creative production is to look at the participation of artists of non-English speaking backgrounds (NESBs)-a problematic term discussed in the book. There are half as many NESB artists compared to those of other professions participating in the workforce, and while under-representation is an issue for management in the arts sector, the question of representation also benefits from being understood more broadly beyond the narrow sense of multiculturalism as a tool to manage cultural difference. This book explores the crucial role of creative leaders and how they work with the 'mainstream' while maintaining their creative integrity and independence to generate a 'virtuous' circle of change. Creative Frictions argues that it is the NESB artists who lead change in the arts sector and that creative and organisational leadership working in partnership make creative use of 'friction' and develop the necessary 'trust' to generate the 'traction' for a supportive multicultural arts milieu.
  • Publication
    Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past
    ( 2021)
    Parvikko, Tuija
    Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past offers a critical analysis of the original American debate over Hannah Arendt’s report of the trial of Adolf Eichmann. First published in 2008, Tuija Parvikko’s book discusses both the campaign against Arendt organised by American Zionist organisations and the controversy Arendt’s report caused within American Jewish intellectual circles. Parvikko’s analysis carefully draws from the historical background of the report, discussing Arendt’s early studies of Zionism and her critique of the Jewish state. The volume also gives an account of Eichmann’s capture in Argentina and the reception of the report among legal scholars and the world press. This edition includes a new prologue in which Parvikko reflects on her own account in connection to recent academic discussions on the controversy. The author’s analysis also covers contributions that have attempted to follow Arendt’s notion of thinking without banisters. With them, Parvikko engages in debate about going beyond Arendt’s theoretical reflections on cohabitation, sharing the world, and discussing the new political evils of the present world without pregiven norms and patterns of thought.
  • Publication
    Closer to Dust
    ( 2021)
    Rich
    No one thinks straight. At least no one remembers straight. But ten years ago, things were different, weren’t they? Roland Barthes once wrote that color in a photograph is like make-up on a corpse. No one is fooled. In anarchic denial of convenient truths, a young international couple meet and marry on a small Mediterranean island. Ten years later, the couple separate in part due to complications with immigration laws. Following this transcontinental rupture, fragmented histories emerge in response to the woman’s encounters with a series of color snapshots. There is death here, familiar to the mourner, as the photographs issue their special powers to magically and auspiciously predict the future and simultaneously to permit the return of the dead. The woman recognizes pieces of herself as past objects indexed within photographic stills, but paradoxically, she is present, outside in this chaos trying not to fall apart. The images and their objects yawn to remind us of the reluctant destiny of all our beloved memories, bodies, and things: that is, to disintegrate. Borrowing its title from a passage in The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald, Closer to Dust is a séance, a gathering of invitees: inherently biased elegies, the images that conjured them, and the reader- viewer in attendance who is warmly invited to order these intimate fragments into cohesion.
  • Publication
    Music of the Baduy People of Western Java: Singing is a Medicine
    ( 2021)
    Wim van Zanten
    Music of the Baduy People of Western Java: Singing is a Medicine by Wim van Zanten is about music and dance of the indigenous group of the Baduy, consisting of about twelve-thousand people living in western Java. It covers music for rice rituals, for circumcisions and weddings, and music for entertainment. The book includes many photographs and several discussed audio-visual examples that can be found on DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5170520. Baduy are suppposed to live a simple, ascetic life. However, there is a shortage of agricultural land and there are many temptations from the changing world around them. Little has been published on Baduy music and dance. Wim van Zanten's book seeks to fill this lacuna and is based on short periods of fieldwork from 1976 to 2016.
  • Publication
    Cultural China 2020: The Contemporary China Centre Review
    ( 2021)
    Kehoe, Séagh ; Wielander, Gerda
    Cultural China is a unique annual publication for up-to-date, informed, and accessible commentary about Chinese and Sinophone languages, cultural practices, politics and production, and their critical analysis. It builds on the University of Westminster’s Contemporary China Centre Blog, providing additional reflective introductory pieces to contextualise each of the eight chapters. The articles in this Review speak to the turbulent year that was 2020 as it unfolded across cultural China. Thematically, they range from celebrity culture, fashion and beauty, to religion and spirituality, via language politics, heritage, and music. Pieces on representations of China in Britain and the Westminster Chinese Visual Arts Project reflect our particular location and home. Many of the articles in this book focus on the People’s Republic of China, but they also draw attention to the multiple Chinese and Sinophone cultural practices that exist within, across, and beyond national borders. The Review is distinctive in its cultural studies-based approach and contributes a much-needed critical perspective from the Humanities to the study of cultural China. It aims to promote interdisciplinary dialogue and debate about the social, cultural, political, and historical dynamics that inform life in cultural China today, offering academics, activists, practitioners, and politicians a key reference with which to situate current events in and relating to cultural China in a wider context.
  • Publication
    Theory into practice: Composition, Performance and the Listening Experience
    ( 2021)
    Cook, Nicholas ; Johnson, Peter ; Zender, Hans
    Theory into Practice. Composition, Performance and the Listening Experience' is the second publication in the series 'Collected Writings of the Orpheus Institute'. The series comprises articles concerning the activities of the Orpheus Institute. The centrale theme of this book is the relationship between the reflections about and the relization of a musical composition. In his paper Words about Music, or Analysis versus Performance, Nicholas Cook states that words and music can never be aligned exactly with one another. He embarks on a quest for models of the relationship between analytical conception and performance that are more challenging than those in general currency. Peter Johnson's article Performance and the Listening Experience: Bach's 'Erbarme dich' shows that a performance is an element within the intentionality of the work itself. He looks for scientific methods capable of proving the artisticity of a performance. The composer Hans Zender, in his A Road Map for Orpheus?, states that a composer must be capable of questioning obvious basic principles (such as equal temperament) and finding creative solutions.
  • Publication
    Renaissance Fun: The machines behind the scenes
    ( 2021)
    Steadman, Philip
    Renaissance Fun is about the technology of Renaissance entertainments in stage machinery and theatrical special effects; in gardens and fountains; and in the automata and self-playing musical instruments that were installed in garden grottoes. How did the machines behind these shows work? How exactly were chariots filled with singers let down onto the stage? How were flaming dragons made to fly across the sky? How were seas created on stage? How did mechanical birds imitate real birdsong? What was 'artificial music', three centuries before Edison and the phonograph? How could pipe organs be driven and made to play themselves by waterpower alone? And who were the architects, engineers, and craftsmen who created these wonders? All these questions are answered. At the end of the book we visit the lost 'garden of marvels' at Pratolino with its many grottoes, automata and water jokes; and we attend the performance of Mercury and Mars in Parma in 1628, with its spectacular stage effects and its music by Claudio Monteverdi - one of the places where opera was born. Renaissance Fun is offered as an entertainment in itself. But behind the show is a more serious scholarly argument, centred on the enormous influence of two ancient writers on these subjects, Vitruvius and Hero. Vitruvius's Ten Books on Architecture were widely studied by Renaissance theatre designers. Hero of Alexandria wrote the Pneumatics, a collection of designs for surprising and entertaining devices that were the models for sixteenth and seventeenth century automata. A second book by Hero On Automata-Making - much less well known, then and now - describes two miniature theatres that presented plays without human intervention. One of these, it is argued, provided the model for the type of proscenium theatre introduced from the mid-sixteenth century, the generic design which is still built today. As the influence of Vitruvius waned, the influence of Hero grew.
  • Publication
    Theater as Data: Computational Journeys into Theater Research
    ( 2021)
    Escobar Varela, Miguel
    In Theater as Data, Miguel Escobar Varela explores the use of computational methods and digital data in theater research. He considers the implications of these new approaches, and explains the roles that statistics and visualizations play. Reflecting on recent debates in the humanities, the author suggests that there are two ways of using data, both of which have a place in theater research. Data-driven methods are closer to the pursuit of verifiable results common in the sciences; and data-assisted methods are closer to the interpretive traditions of the humanities. The book surveys four major areas within theater scholarship: texts (not only playscripts but also theater reviews and program booklets); relationships (both the links between fictional characters and the collaborative networks of artists and producers); motion (the movement of performers and objects on stage); and locations (the coordinates of performance events, venues, and touring circuits). Theater as Data examines important contributions to theater studies from similar computational research, including in classical French drama, collaboration networks in Australian theater, contemporary Portuguese choreography, and global productions of Ibsen. This overview is complemented by short descriptions of the author's own work in the computational analysis of theater practices in Singapore and Indonesia. The author ends by considering the future of computational theater research, underlining the importance of open data and digital sustainability practices, and encouraging readers to consider the benefits of learning to code. A web companion offers illustrative data, programming tutorials, and videos.
  • Publication
    Photographic Presidents: Making History from Daguerreotype to Digital
    ( 2021)
    Finnegan, Cara A.
    "Defining the Chief Executive via flash powder and selfie sticks Lincoln's somber portraits. Lyndon Johnson's swearing in. George W. Bush's reaction to learning about the 9/11 attacks. Photography plays an indelible role in how we remember and define American presidents. Throughout history, presidents have actively participated in all aspects of photography, not only by sitting for photos but by taking and consuming them. Cara A. Finnegan ventures from a newly-discovered daguerreotype of John Quincy Adams to Barack Obama's selfies to tell the stories of how presidents have participated in the medium's transformative moments. As she shows, technological developments not only changed photography, but introduced new visual values that influence how we judge an image. At the same time, presidential photographs-as representations of leaders who symbolized the nation-sparked public debate on these values and their implications. An original journey through political history, Photographic Presidents reveals the intertwined evolution of an American institution and a medium that continues to define it."
  • Publication
    The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968-1973): Volume I, Ideology and Politics
    ( 2021)
    Fairfax, Daniel
    The uprising which shook France in May 1968 also had a revolutionary effect on the country's most prominent film journal. Under editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma embarked on a militant turn that would govern the journal's work over the next five years. With a Marxist orientation inspired by the thinking of Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes, the "red years" of Cahiers du cinéma produced a theoretical outpouring that was formative for the establishment of film studies as an academic discipline in the 1970s, and is still of vital relevance for the contemporary audiovisual landscape. It was also the seminal experience for a generation of critics who have dedicated the following half-century to the task of critically responding to the cinema. The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973) gives a historical overview of this period in the journal's history, combining biographical accounts of the critics who were involved with Cahiers in the post-1968 and theoretical explorations of the text they wrote.
  • Publication
    Richard Wagner's Essays on Conducting: A New Translation with Critical Commentary
    ( 2021)
    Walton, Chris
    Richard Wagner was one of the leading conductors of his time. Through his disciples Hans von Bülow, Hans Richter, Anton Seidl, Felix Mottl, Arthur Nikisch, and their many notable protégés, a Wagnerian art of interpretation became the norm in Europe and America until well into the twentieth century. Wagner's essays on conducting had an even longer impact, and were upheld as central to their art by later generations of conductors from Mahler to Strauss, Furtwängler, Böhm, Scherchen, and beyond. This is the first complete, modern translation of Wagner's conducting essays to appear in English, and the first-ever edition to offer extensive annotations explaining their reception and impact. The accompanying critical essay offers a detailed analysis of Wagner's conducting practices, his innovations in tempo and the art of transition, his creation of a new vocabulary to describe his art, and his success in establishing a school of conductors to promote his works and his aesthetic. Chris Walton is an honorary professor at Africa Open Institute, Stellenbosch University, and a research associate at the Bern University of the Arts.