Zeitschriftenartikel zum Thema „Diamond sword wooden sword“

This paper presents a review of the finds of children’s wooden toys imitating battle armament from the properties uncovered at the Troitsky Excavation in Veliky Novgorod. Totally, 203 items have been found including: wooden swords (160), bows (21), spears (14), knives (3), axes (3), a mace (1) and a bec de corbin (1). The chronological range of the study is the mid-10th — late 14th century. The majority of the collection is composed by sword hilts (160 items). Among this category, three main types have been distinguished according to the shape of the pommel corresponding to real battle swords. The topography of the finds throughout the properties was examined revealing separate accumulations characteristic primarily of the 10th — first half of the 11th century.

Materials of a mound of the early Sarmatian time investigated by the Turgay archaeological expedition of the A. Baitursynov Kostanay State University under the leadership of V.N. Logvin and S.S. Kaliyeva in a field season of 1995 were considered in the article for the first time. The earthen mound before the beginning of excavation had a diameter of 25 m, a height of 1.25 m. It was surrounded by a circular ditch with a diameter of 31 m. Fragments of a wooden tent structure were recorded in the embankment. A pair burial was found under the mound. The inventory is represented by iron sword and dagger, bronze sleeve and iron petiolate arrowheads, bone and iron buckles and fragments of wooden utensils. Burial refers to the end of Early Sarmatian culture (2nd century BC). The issueof the origin and spread of the tradition of wooden tent ceiling isconsideredby the authors.

In 2015 during excavations in the Ust’-Al’ma necropolis, a grave with a side-chamber was discovered (No. 1074). The deceased was a male aged 25-35 who had suffered many injuries during his life which could be traces of blows received in battle. The burial complex dates from the mid-1st century ad and belongs to a group of ‘Barbarian’ elite burials complete with gold funeral wreaths and face-coverings (eye- and mouth-covers). Most of these graves are earthen catacombs located along the road leading towards the ancient fortified settlement of Ust’-Al’ma on the western coast of the Crimean peninsula. Assemblages from male burials of this group usually contain weapons (sword, bow, arrows). As a rule, the burial goods are plentiful and rich. Elements of burial attire are often made of precious metals, and are represented by armlets, brooches, pendants, amulets, items from belt-sets and plaques which would have been sewn on to items of apparel. Among other burial goods, there are amphorae, wooden utensils with carved figures of animals and Roman imported bronze and silver ware. Taking into consideration that these burial structures were of a special type, that the graves had been positioned in a special area along the road leading to the settlement, as well as the extraordinary splendor of the grave goods, it can be concluded that they were burials for individuals belonging to the highest ranks of the social elite. The use of an unusual type of burial structure (a grave with a side-chamber) and the relatively small number of grave goods, which were nevertheless signs of high social rank (a funeral wreath, face-coverings, a sword), indicate the special status of the individual buried in Grave No. 1074.

Recent excavations in Macedonia have provided an analogy to the pillaging of the Palace at Persepolis. In plundered tombs at Aiani the excavators found a number of small gold discs with impressed rosettes and of gilded silver ivy leaves; at Katerini some thirty-five gold discs with impressed rosettes, a gold double pin, a gold ring from a sword-hilt, a bit of a gilded pectoral, gilded silver fittings once attached to a leather cuirass, many buttons and other fragments; and at Palatitsia (near Vergina) bits of a gilded bronze wreath and of a gold necklace, and an ivory fitting. It was suggested that some of these objects had been dropped when ornamental facings were being torn away from a wooden funerary couch and from clothing by the robbers, who were probably working at speed and dared not return. In the antechamber of the tomb at Katerini many of the objects I have mentioned were found inside a burnt layer, and M. Andronikos has provided the explanation that they had been burnt on the pyre outside the tomb and then brought inside with the debris of the pyre itself. Nothing else was associated with burnt material.

Purpose. The Manchus’ ancestors, the Jurchen people who established the Jin Dynasty (1115-1234) and the Eastern Xia State (1215-1233) on the territory of the Far East, constructed many sites dated back to those periods in Primorye. Mostly, the sites are walled town, settlements and religious buildings. Up to the present day, the Jurchen burial grounds have remained a highly disputable issue and require more detailed descriptions and more accurate dating. Such a burial ground was found 2 km southeast from the village of Novitskoye in the Partizansky District of Primorye. In the article, we analyze and date the artifacts discovered. Results. The archaeological site is located on the creek valley that is 600 m wide extending from the east to the west. The burial ground is located in a deep mountain glen closed on three sides. Fifteen platform-based graves were excavated there. We have determined that all the bodies buried there had been cremated. The ash was put into a ceramic or wooden urn and then placed onto a flat stone on the bottom of the burial pit. After that, the urn was covered with another flat stone and some wooden pieces. One of the graves was constructed on a high basement decorated with two rows of stones. A «devitalized» (embowed) sword was put over the quiver with eleven arrowheads and some remains of bone dust found on the southwestern side of the basement. A grave house made of river gravels, stones or roofing tiles was erected over the grave. Then the pieces of wood were burnt, all the graveside decorations were covered up with soil. As a result, the grave turned into a small mound. We compared the funeral rites and the constructive features of the burial ground in Novitskoye to those of the previously excavated sites and discovered certain similarities in the cremation rituals and some differences in details of the burial constructions. Conclusion. The burial ground of Novitskoye gives archaeologists an opportunity to outline a more comprehensive concept of the Jurchen funeral traditions of the XII–XIII centuries and associate them with the Buddhist funeral ceremony. It was done by determining the ceremonial features, researching the burial constructions excavated and analyzing their chronological and social contexts.

AbstractLasara is a mytological object being that is often symbolized in Nias material culture such as osa-osa, sarcofagus, wooden coffin, grave, lasara on village gate, traditional house ornaments, and sword handle. This comparative study-enhanced descriptive-analytical research method is aimed at finding connection between lasara, which is a part of Nias people mythology, and its interpretation through the outlying elements to obtain a complete understanding of lasara. The analysis reveals that in a society where mythology is an innate value, lasara is understood as a symbol of a ride related with religious and social aspects. Lasara is symbolized as a boat used in the migration of Nias people through the sea, as well as a spiritual ride in its religious life.AbstrakLasara merupakan makhluk mistis yang banyak diwujudkan dalam budaya materi di Nias seperti osa-osa, sarkofagus, peti jenazah kayu, bangunan kubur, lasara pada gerbang desa, ornamen rumah adat, dan hulu pedang. Untuk menjawab permasalahan mengenai pemaknaan lasara dalam pemahaman masyarakat Nias digunakan metode deskriptif analitik yang diperkuat oleh studi komparatif yang bertujuan untuk menarik benang merah antara objek yang dikenal sebagai lasara yang menjadi bagian dari mitologi masyarakat Nias dengan pemaknaannya melalui aspek-aspek yang melatarbelakanginya sehingga dapat diperoleh pemahaman yang utuh terhadap salah satu bentuk kebudayaan di daerah Nias tersebut. Dari analisis tersebut dapat terjawab bahwa dalam pemahaman masyarakatnya yang masih sangat terikat oleh mitologi, lasara dimaknai sebagai simbol yang berkaitan dengan struktur sosial serta simbol wahana terkait dengan aspek religi dan sosial. Lasara sebagai wahana dikaitkan dengan bentuk perahu yang berhubungan dengan proses migrasi orang Nias melalui jalur lautan, serta sebagai kendaraan arwah dalam kehidupan religinya.

The article is devoted to typology and chronology of swords and daggers without a metal pommel from the Maeotian cemeteries of the right bank of the Kuban. We took into account 57 pieces of this type of weapon from closed complexes. In this paper, we use the typological scheme of A.M. Khazanov, developed on the materials of the Sarmatian armament. The Maeotian swords and daggers of mentioned group are divided into three types: 1 – swords and daggers with a rain-guard; 2 – swords and daggers without a rain-guard, the blade and the hilt make an obtuse angle; 3 – swords and daggers without rain-guards, the blade and the hilt make a right angle. Metal tangs of hilts differ by shape and size; thus they are divided into two variants: “a” – rectangular or triangular; “b” – a long pin. The swords of the “a” variant had wooden overlays on the handles, sometimes fastened with rivets or winding, and the handles of the “b” variant swords were mounted on a tang. Chronological dating of the burials indicates that bladed weapon of this type appears among the Maeotians of the Kuban right bank in the beginning of the 1st cent. AD and remains there until the middle of the 3rd cent. AD. And the main time of its use is the 1–2 cent. A.D. Swords and daggers of all types from Maeotian assemblages have existed at the same time, just like ones from the Sarmatian burials of the Lower Volga region. But, unlike the Sarmatian sites with no predominance of any particular sword type, the Maeotians show clear advantage of type 2 blades.

The end-state comfort (ESC) effect refers to the consistent tendency of healthy adults to end their movements in a comfortable end posture. In children with and without developmental coordination disorder (DCD), the results of studies focusing on ESC planning have been inconclusive, which is likely to be due to differences in task constraints. The present pilot study focused on the question whether children with and without DCD were able to change their planning strategy and were more likely to plan for ESC when demanded by complex object manipulations at the end of a task. To this end, we examined ESC planning in 18 children with and without DCD (aged 5–11years) using the previously used sword-task and the newly developed hammer-task. In the sword-task, children had to insert a sword in a wooden block, which could be relatively easily completed with an uncomfortable end-posture. In the hammer-task, children had to strike down a nail in a wooden pounding bench, which required additional force and speed demands, making it relatively difficult to complete the movement with an uncomfortable end-posture. In line with our hypothesis, the results demonstrated that children with and without DCD were more likely to plan for ESC on the hammer-task compared with the sword-task. Thus, while children with and without DCD show inconsistent ESC planning on many previously used tasks, the present pilot study shows that many of them are able to take into account the end-state of their movements if demanded by task constraints.

Beskrivelse af de sociale klassers sportsdyrkelse og bevægelseskulturer i middelalderen i de nordiske lande.Games and Sports in the Middle Ages in the NorthFrom Saxo’s Gesta Danorum (ce. 1200), the Icelandic Sagas and the Norwegian King’s Mirror (ce. 1250), we obtain the clear impression that games and sports in the early Middle Ages served two main functions: 1) to display physical strength and 2) to train in the proper use of weapons. These abilities were needed at all levels of Viking and early medieval society. Even kings had to distinguish themselves in sports. Later in the Middle Ages sports and games were socially differentiated. The peasantry continued with trials of strength, – wrestling, boxing, tug-of-war, running and jumping games, ball games, throwing the javelin, shooting with longbow or crossbow, stone lifting etc. The nobility however developed new games. The chivalric virtues, values and norms were transmuted into tournaments. A full scale tournament comprised three sections: 1) riding at the ring, 2) fights between riding knights armed with lances and, 3) standing fights with swords. The nobles also played skittles and other games. The burghers in the towns invented their own games during the Later Middle Ages. Their guilds organised festive sports at Shrovetide, pulling the head off a goose, sword dancing, riding summer and winter, – and at Pentecost, shooting popinjays (a wooden figure on the end of a pole). During the Middle Ages sports and games lost most of their original function of displaying power. Instead they aspired to a place among the rituals of representative courtly display. The games were often integrated into annual festivities, and contributed to giving a distinct cultural identity to each of the social groups who performed them.

IntroductionWhat can we learn about anomaly from the strangeness of a puppet, a lifeless object, that can both bleed and die? How does the filming process of a puppet’s death engage across media and produce a new media genre that is not easily classified within traditional conventions? Why do these fighting and bleeding puppets’ scenes consistently attract audiences? This study examines how Pili puppetry (1984-present), a popular TV series depicting martial arts-based narratives and fight sequences, interacts with digital technologies and constructs a new media genre. The transmedia constitution of a virtual world not only challenges the stereotype of puppetry’s target audience but also expands the audience’s bodily imagination and desires through the visual component of death scenes. Hence, the show does not merely represent or signify an anomaly, but even creates anomalous desires and imaginary bodies.Cultural commodification and advancing technologies have motivated the convergence and displacement of traditional boundaries, genres, and media, changing the very fabric of textuality itself. By exploring how new media affect the audience’s visual reception of fighting and death, this article sheds light on understanding the metamorphoses of Taiwanese puppetry and articulates a theoretical argument regarding the show’s artistic practice to explain how its form transverses traditional boundaries. This critical exploration focusses on how the form represents bleeding puppets, and in doing so, explicates the politics of transmedia performing and viewing. Pili is an example of an anomalous media form that proliferates anomalous media viewing experiences and desires in turn.Beyond a Media Genre: Taiwanese Pili PuppetryConverging the craft technique of puppeteering and digital technology of filmmaking and animation, Pili puppetry creates a new media genre that exceeds any conventional idea of a puppet show or digital puppet, as it is something in-between. Glove puppetry is a popular traditional theatre in Taiwan, often known as “theatre in the palm” because a traditional puppet was roughly the same size as an adult’s palm. The size enabled the puppeteer to easily manipulate a puppet in one hand and be close to the audience. Traditionally, puppet shows occurred to celebrate the local deities’ birthday. Despite its popularity, the form was limited by available technology. For instance, although stories with vigorous battles were particularly popular, bleeding scenes in such an auspicious occasion were inappropriate and rare. As a live theatrical event featuring immediate interaction between the performer and the spectator, realistic bleeding scenes were rare because it is hard to immediately clean the stage during the performance. Distinct from the traditional puppet show, digital puppetry features semi-animated puppets in a virtual world. Digital puppetry is not a new concept by any means in the Western film industry. Animating a 3D puppet is closely associated with motion capture technologies and animation that are manipulated in a digitalised virtual setting (Ferguson). Commonly, the target audience of the Western digital puppetry is children, so educators sometimes use digital puppetry as a pedagogical tool (Potter; Wohlwend). With these young target audience in mind, the producers often avoid violent and bleeding scenes.Pili puppetry differs from digital puppetry in several ways. For instance, instead of targeting a young audience, Pili puppetry consistently extends the traditional martial-arts performance to include bloody fight sequences that enrich the expressiveness of traditional puppetry as a performing art. Moreover, Pili puppetry does not apply the motion capture technologies to manipulate the puppet’s movement, thus retaining the puppeteers’ puppeteering craft (clips of Pili puppetry can be seen on Pili’s official YouTube page). Hence, Pili is a unique hybrid form, creating its own anomalous space in puppetry. Among over a thousand characters across the series, the realistic “human-like” puppet is one of Pili’s most popular selling points. The new media considerably intervene in the puppet design, as close-up shots and high-resolution images can accurately project details of a puppet’s face and body movements on the screen. Consequently, Pili’s puppet modelling becomes increasingly intricate and attractive and arguably makes its virtual figures more epic yet also more “human” (Chen). Figure 1: Su Huan-Jen in the TV series Pili Killing Blade (1993). His facial expressions were relatively flat and rigid then. Reproduced with permission of Pili International Multimedia Company.Figure 2: Su Huan-Jen in the TV series Pili Nine Thrones (2003). The puppet’s facial design and costume became more delicate and complex. Reproduced with permission of Pili International Multimedia Company.Figure 3: Su Huan-Jen in the TV series Pili Fantasy: War of Dragons (2019). His facial lines softened due to more precise design technologies. The new lightweight chiffon yarn costumes made him look more elegant. The multiple-layer costumes also created more space for puppeteers to hide behind the puppet and enact more complicated manipulations. Reproduced with permission of Pili International Multimedia Company.The design of the most well-known Pili swordsman, Su Huan-Jen, demonstrates how the Pili puppet modelling became more refined and intricate in the past 20 years. In 1993, the standard design was a TV puppet with the size and body proportion slightly enlarged from the traditional puppet. Su Huan-Jen’s costumes were made from heavy fabrics, and his facial expressions were relatively flat and rigid (fig. 1). Pili produced its first puppetry film Legend of the Sacred Stone in 2000; considering the visual quality of a big screen, Pili refined the puppet design including replacing wooden eyeballs and plastic hair with real hair and glass eyeballs (Chen). The filmmaking experience inspired Pili to dramatically improve the facial design for all puppets. In 2003, Su’s modelling in Pili Nine Thrones (TV series) became noticeably much more delicate. The puppet’s size was considerably enlarged by almost three times, so a puppeteer had to use two hands to manipulate a puppet. The complex costumes and props made more space for puppeteers to hide behind the puppet and enrich the performance of the fighting movements (fig. 2). In 2019, Su’s new modelling further included new layers of lightweight fabrics, and his makeup and props became more delicate and complex (fig. 3). Such a refined aesthetic design also lends to Pili’s novelty among puppetry performances.Through the transformation of Pili in the context of puppetry history, we see how the handicraft-like puppet itself gradually commercialised into an artistic object that the audience would yearn to collect and project their bodily imagination. Anthropologist Teri Silvio notices that, for some fans, Pili puppets are similar to worship icons through which they project their affection and imaginary identity (Silvio, “Pop Culture Icons”). Intermediating with the new media, the change in the refined puppet design also comes from the audience’s expectations. Pili’s senior puppet designer Fan Shih-Ching mentioned that Pili fans are very involved, so their preferences affect the design of puppets. The complexity, particularly the layer of costumes, most clearly differentiates the aesthetics of traditional and Pili puppets. Due to the “idolisation” of some famous Pili characters, Shih-Ching has had to design more and more gaudy costumes. Each resurgence of a well-known Pili swordsman, such as Su Huan-Jen, Yi Ye Shu, and Ye Hsiao-Chai, means he has to remodel the puppet.Pili fans represent their infatuation for puppet characters through cosplay (literally “costume play”), which is when fans dress up and pretend to be a Pili character. Their cosplay, in particular, reflects the bodily practice of imaginary identity. Silvio observes that most cosplayers choose to dress as characters that are the most visually appealing rather than characters that best suit their body type. They even avoid moving too “naturally” and mainly move from pose-to-pose, similar to the frame-to-frame techne of animation. Thus, we can understand this “cosplay more as reanimating the character using the body as a kind of puppet rather than as an embodied performance of some aspect of self-identity” (Silvio 2019, 167). Hence, Pili fans’ cosplay is indicative of an anomalous desire to become the puppet-like human, which helps them transcend their social roles in their everyday life. It turns out that not only fans’ preference drives the (re)modelling of puppets but also fans attempt to model themselves in the image of their beloved puppets. The reversible dialectic between fan-star and flesh-object further provokes an “anomaly” in terms of the relationship between the viewers and the puppets. Precisely because fans have such an intimate relationship with Pili, it is important to consider how the series’ content and form configure fans’ viewing experience.Filming Bleeding PuppetsDespite its intricate aesthetics, Pili is still a series with frequent fighting-to-the-death scenes, which creates, and is the result of, extraordinary transmedia production and viewing experiences. Due to the market demand of producing episodes around 500 minutes long every month, Pili constantly creates new characters to maintain the audience’s attention and retain its novelty. So far, Pili has released thousands of characters. To ensure that new characters supersede the old ones, numerous old characters have to die within the plot.The adoption of new media allows the fighting scenes in Pili to render as more delicate, rather than consisting of loud, intense action movements. Instead, the leading swordsmen’s death inevitably takes place in a pathetic and romantic setting and consummates with a bloody sacrifice. Fighting scenes in early Pili puppetry created in the late 1980s were still based on puppets’ body movements, as the knowledge and technology of animation were still nascent and underdeveloped. At that time, the prestigious swordsman mainly relied on the fast speed of brandishing his sword. Since the early 1990s, as animation technology matured, it has become very common to see Pili use CGI animation to create a damaging sword beam for puppets to kill target enemies far away. The sword beam can fly much faster than the puppets can move, so almost every fighting scene employs CGI to visualise both sword beams and flame. The change in fighting manners provokes different representations of the bleeding and death scenes. Open wounds replace puncture wounds caused by a traditional weapon; bleeding scenes become typical, and a special feature in Pili’s transmedia puppetry.In addition to CGI animation, the use of fake blood in the Pili studio makes the performance even more realistic. Pili puppet master Ting Chen-Ching recalled that exploded puppets in traditional puppetry were commonly made by styrofoam blocks. The white styrofoam chips that sprayed everywhere after the explosion inevitably made the performance seem less realistic. By contrast, in the Pili studio, the scene of a puppet spurting blood after the explosion usually applies the technology of editing several shots. The typical procedure would be a short take that captures a puppet being injured. In its injury location, puppeteers sprinkle red confetti to represent scattered blood clots in the following shot. Sometimes the fake blood was splashed with the red confetti to make it further three-dimensional (Ting). Bloody scenes can also be filmed through multiple layers of arranged performance conducted at the same time by a group of puppeteers. Ting describes the practice of filming a bleeding puppet. Usually, some puppeteers sprinkle fake blood in front of the camera, while other puppeteers blasted the puppets toward various directions behind the blood to make the visual effects match. If the puppeteers need to show how a puppet becomes injured and vomits blood during the fight, they can install tiny pipes in the puppet in advance. During the filming, the puppeteer slowly squeezes the pipe to make the fake blood flow out from the puppet’s mouth. Such a bloody scene sometimes accompanies tears dropping from the puppet’s eyes. In some cases, the puppeteer drops the blood on the puppet’s mouth prior to the filming and then uses a powerful electric fan to blow the blood drops (Ting). Such techniques direct the blood to flow laterally against the wind, which makes the puppet’s death more aesthetically tragic. Because it is not a live performance, the puppeteer can try repeatedly until the camera captures the most ideal blood drop pattern and bleeding speed. Puppeteers have to adjust the camera distance for different bleeding scenes, which creates new modes of viewing, sensing, and representing virtual life and death. One of the most representative examples of Pili’s bleeding scenes is when Su’s best friend, Ching Yang-Zi, fights with alien devils in Legend of the Sacred Stone. (The clip of how Ching Yang-Zi fights and bleeds to death can be seen on YouTube.) Ting described how Pili prepared three different puppets of Ching for the non-fighting, fighting, and bleeding scenes (Ting). The main fighting scene starts from a low-angle medium shot that shows how Ching Yang-Zi got injured and began bleeding from the corner of his mouth. Then, a sharp weapon flies across the screen; the following close-up shows that the weapon hits Ching and he begins bleeding immediately. The successive shots move back and forth between his face and the wound in medium shot and close-up. Next, a close-up shows him stepping back with blood dripping on the ground. He then pushes the weapon out of his body to defend enemies; a final close-up follows a medium take and a long take shows the massive hemorrhage. The eruption of fluid plasma creates a natural effect that is difficult to achieve, even with 3D animation. Beyond this impressive technicality, the exceptional production and design emphasise how Pili fully embraces the ethos of transmedia: to play with multiple media forms and thereby create a new form. In the case of Pili, its form is interactive, transcending the boundaries of what we might consider the “living” and the “dead”.Epilogue: Viewing Bleeding Puppets on the ScreenThe simulated, high-quality, realistic-looking puppet designs accompanying the Pili’s featured bloody fighting sequence draw another question: What is the effect of watching human-like puppets die? What does this do to viewer-fans? Violence is prevalent throughout the historical record of human behaviour, especially in art and entertainment because these serve as outlets to fulfill a basic human need to indulge in “taboo fantasies” and escape into “realms of forbidden experience” (Schechter). When discussing the visual representations of violence and the spectacle of the sufferings of others, Susan Sontag notes, “if we consider what emotions would be desirable” (102), viewing the pain of others may not simply evoke sympathy. She argues that “[no] moral charge attaches to the representation of these cruelties. Just the provocation: can you look at this? There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching” (41). For viewers, the boldness of watching the bloody scenes can be very inviting. Watching human-like puppets die in the action scenes similarly validates the viewer’s need for pleasure and entertainment. Although different from a human body, the puppets still bears the materiality of being-object. Therefore, watching the puppets bleeding and die as distinctly “human-like’ puppets further prevent viewers’ from feeling guilty or morally involved. The conceptual distance of being aware of the puppet’s materiality acts as a moral buffer; audiences are intimately involved through the particular aesthetic arrangement, yet morally detached. The transmedia filming of puppetry adds another layer of mediation over the human-like “living” puppets that allows such a particular experience. Sontag notices that the media generates an inevitable distance between object and subject, between witness and victim. For Sontag, although images constitute “the imaginary proximity” because it makes the “faraway sufferers” be “seen close-up on the television screen”, it is a mystification to assume that images serve as a direct link between sufferers and viewers. Rather, Sontag insists: the distance makes the viewers feel “we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence” (102). Echoing Sontag’s argument, Jeffrey Goldstein points out that “distancing” oneself from the mayhem represented in media makes it tolerable. Media creates an “almost real” visuality of violence, so the audience feels relatively safe in their surroundings when exposed to threatening images. Thus, “violent imagery must carry cues to its unreality or it loses appeal” (280). Pili puppets that are human-like, thus not human, more easily enable the audience to seek sensational excitement through viewing puppets’ bloody violence and eventual death on the screen and still feel emotionally secure. Due to the distance granted by the medium, viewers gain a sense of power by excitedly viewing the violence with an accompanying sense of moral exemption. Thus, viewers can easily excuse the limits of their personal responsibility while still being captivated by Pili’s boundary-transgressing aesthetic.The anomalous power of Pili fans’ cosplay differentiates the viewing experience of puppets’ deaths from that of other violent entertainment productions. Cosplayers physically bridge viewing/acting and life/death by dressing up as the puppet characters, bringing them to life, as flesh. Cosplay allows fans to compensate for the helplessness they experience when watching the puppets’ deaths on the screen. They can both “enjoy” the innocent pleasure of watching bleeding puppets and bring their adored dead idols “back to life” through cosplay. The onscreen violence and death thus provide an additional layer of pleasure for such cosplayers. They not only take pleasure in watching the puppets—which are an idealized version of their bodily imagination—die, but also feel empowered to revitalise their loved idols. Therefore, Pili cosplayers’ desires incite a cycle of life, pleasure, and death, in which the company responds to their consumers’ demands in kind. The intertwining of social, economic, and political factors thus collectively thrives upon media violence as entertainment. Pili creates the potential for new cross-media genre configurations that transcend the traditional/digital puppetry binary. On the one hand, the design of swordsman puppets become a simulation of a “living object” responding to the camera distance. On the other hand, the fighting and death scenes heavily rely on the puppeteers’ cooperation with animation and editing. Therefore, Pili puppetry enriches existing discourse on both puppetry and animation as life-giving processes. What is animated by Pili puppetry is not simply the swordsmen characters themselves, but new potentials for media genres and violent entertainment. AcknowledgmentMy hearty gratitude to Amy Gaeta for sharing her insights with me on the early stage of this study.ReferencesChen, Jasmine Yu-Hsing. “Transmuting Tradition: The Transformation of Taiwanese Glove Puppetry in Pili Productions.” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 51 (2019): 26-46.Ferguson, Jeffrey. “Lessons from Digital Puppetry: Updating a Design Framework for a Perceptual User Interface.” IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology, 2015.Goldstein, Jeffrey. “The Attractions of Violent Entertainment.” Media Psychology 1.3 (1999): 271-282.Potter, Anna. “Funding Contemporary Children’s Television: How Digital Convergence Encourages Retro Reboot.” International Journal on Communications Management 19.2 (2017): 108-112.Schechter, Harold. Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment. New York: St. Martin’s, 2005.Silvio, Teri. “Pop Culture Icons: Religious Inflections of the Character Toy in Taiwan.” Mechademia 3.1 (2010): 200-220.———. Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan. Honolulu: U Hawaii P, 2019. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004.Ting, Chen-Ching. Interview by the author. Yunlin, Taiwan. 24 June 2019.Wohlwend, Karen E. “One Screen, Many Fingers: Young Children's Collaborative Literacy Play with Digital Puppetry Apps and Touchscreen Technologies.” Theory into Practice 54.2 (2015): 154-162.

History, State of and Necessity for Research on the Roman and Migration Period Military Equipment from Poland. Subjective Approach (Despite Good Intentions)Significant studies on military equipment from the Roman Period have been initiated by Martin Jahn (1916a; 1921). For many years his works have been the main point of reference for research on weaponry of the Germanic peoples. This picture has not been changed radically by the post-war works of Klaus Raddatz, devoted mostly to the Germanic military equipment in the Late Pre-Roman Period (1966), Younger Roman Period (1967), and wide spectrum from the Late Pre-Roman until the Migration Period (1985). Although important at the time, they were insufficiently involving inner cultural diversity of the ‘Germanic’ world, presenting the issue from the first and foremost northern European perspective.After the war the studies on weaponry of the Central European Barbaricumhave been based mostly on the materials of the Przeworsk culture, due to abundance of military equipment in graves of this cultural unit. It is achronicler’s duty to mention rather unsuccessful work of Janina Elantkowska (1961), but then underline also the fundamental works of Kazimierz Godłowski in the field of chronology of weapon graves (1970; 1992; 1994), enabling further, more precise works on armaments of the Przeworsk culture. This scholar has educated several hoplologists, experts in archaeological military equipment (active – just like him – at the Jagiellonian University) who broaden the knowledge in this field considerably. Among those one should name especially Piotr Kaczanowski (1988) – the author of the studies on inlaid pole weapon heads, finds of imported weapons from the area of Barbaricum (Kaczanowski 1992) or the classification of heads of shafted weapons from the Przeworsk culture (Kaczanowski 1995). The latter is especially important, because establishing typologies and chronology of the pole weapon heads enabled further studies on military equipment in multiple aspects, thanks to the ability to precisely date graves equipped only with spear- or javelin heads, until that time dated very widely. Equally important person ‘descended’ from Kraków is Marcin Biborski, to whom academics owe research on Barbarian and Roman swords from the Barbarian Europe (Biborski 1978; 1994a; 1994b; 1994c; 1994d; Biborski, Ilkjær 2006); he has also begun the discourse on the ritual weapon destruction (Biborski 1981), as well as decorations of shafted weapon heads and swords (1986). Both aforementioned researchers have initiated the metal analysis of swords, which enabled devising of criteria for identification of the Roman imports (Biborski et alii1982; 2003). In the Kraków’s academia the classification of spurs has also been developed (Ginalski 1991), as well as axes (Kieferling 1994). Acomplement to the abovementioned is the study of weapon sets from graves, i.e. Germ. Waffenkombination issue (Kontny 2001; 2002; 2003a; 2008b), and – embracing broader territorial range – studies on pole weapon heads ornamented with astitch-like pattern (Kontny 2008a) and negative ornament on their blades (Kontny 2017a), or an eye-motif decoration placed at the sockets (Czarnecka, Kontny 2008), as well as the newest registers of watery deposits of weapons from the area of Poland (Kontny forthcoming b).Piotr Kaczanowski has also initiated the studies on weaponry of the Wielbark culture (Kaczanowski, Zaborowski 1988). Due to the specifics of burial rituals (taboo on weapons in grave goods) the research on arms of the Wielbark culture has arather short history. In the aforementioned work singular finds of weapons from graves have been used, interpreted by enduring traditions of the Oksywie culture – in the period of the Wielbark culture formation – or the Przeworsk culture – at the former areas of this cultural unit, later occupied by the Wielbark culture peoples. What was used there abundantly was the archival source – the files of Martin Jahn, in which one could find notes and sketches presenting finds of weapons from, i.a. Pomerania. However, the authors did not refer to written sources, especially very important remark of Tacitus (Tacyt, Germania 44, 1) about short swords and round shields, which were supposed to be distinctive for the peoples of Gotones, Rugii, and Lemovii, associated with the area of the Wiebark culture. This gap has been filled, which gave an opportunity for verification of the part of archaeological sources for reconstruction of the Wielbark military equipment and complementing their list (Kontny 2006a; 2008d).The usefulness of the accounts of Tacitus for the reconstruction of weapons from the Roman Period occurred to be insignificant, but it came to light that the Roman author had not always used the contemporaneous sources (the aforementioned description fits the picture of weaponry of the Oksywie culture). Discoveries of further Wielbark military objects as well as the renewed analysis of the discovery from Żarnowiec (Kontny 2006b) considerably broaden the database of sources and were used to formulate the working hypothesis about the influence of the Przeworsk model on the Wielbark military equipment in the Early Roman and the beginnings of the Younger Roman Period, later replaced by the Scandinavian pattern (Kontny 2006b, 152; 2008d, 195). The probability of this concept grew, since the analysis of male belts led to similar inferences (Madyda-Legutko 2015). Therefore, the need for verification of the suggested picture occurred, with the use of possibly complete corpus of Wielbark military finds; all the more because the issue was complicated by the discovery of the inhumation burial with asword and sword bead in Juszkowo near Pruszcz Gdański, i.e. in the area of the important settlement centre of the Wielbark culture. The grave is dated to the time of the decline of this cultural unit (Dyrda, Kontny, Mączyńska 2014; Kontny, Mączyńska 2015). In effect, the synthesis of the Wielbark military equipment has been developed (Kontny 2019a, 69–113), in which it was possible to confirm the Przeworsk inspirations to Wielbark armaments in the Early Roman Period and subphase C1a, as well as to notice later influences of the northern European weaponry model. What was added to this picture was the probable introduction into the sphere of nomadic influences in the terminal stadium of the Wielbark culture, suggesting, that it was in fact the eastern-Germanic-type weaponry then, in which the nomadic influences are quite noticeable, manifesting in the adaptation of bow and trilobate arrows with rhomboid blades, as well as spathae of the Asian type. It was also possible to classify some conceptions formulated in the pioneering work; thus, the suggestion of the Wielbark origins of the negative ornament on shafted weapon heads has been rejected (Kontny 2017a), as well as the one about the important role of abow in the Wielbark armamentarium (Kontny 2019a, 85–87). On the other hand, in the light of current research the idea of the axes’ importance seems valid (Kontny 2019a, 83–85; 2019c,154–158).As opposed to the weapons, the Wielbark spurs were analyzed on multiple occasions. The newest classification of Wielbark spurs (Smółka 2014, 48–51) was mentioned only in the form of summary of the unpublished M.A. thesis and therefore it is hard to refer to it in details and evaluate it. It is beyond doubt, however, that spurs from the Early Roman and the beginnings of the Younger Roman Period, in principle, were based on Przeworsk forms – with obvious differences in material (the lack of iron examples in graves, which is conditioned by the burial rituals), slight morphological ones, as well as the larger popularity of the chair-shaped examples (Germ. Stuhlsporen). In the later timespan one should notice more explicit northern European influences, although along with the preservation of arangeof local forms (Kontny 2019a, 87–88), and at the dawn of the Wielbark culture’s existence one might indicate the examples of spurs having been imported or inspired by Roman solutions (Kontny 2020, 673–675; Kontny, Michalak 2020). These observations, to the large extent, inscribe into the general dynamics of changes in the Wielbark military equipment. Asaresearch objective one should recognise the intensification of studies on watery deposits, as at some sacrificial sites of this kind Wielbark-culture arms have been discovered.In the last few years there has been ahuge advancement in the research on weapons of the West Balt cultural circle from the area of north-eastern Poland. This issue has been basically unrecognised until recently, and the progress is owed to discovery and dissemination of the archives and collections of the former Prussia-Museum, as well as private files of scholars active in the pre-war period. Currently the researchers have at their disposal the studies on Bogaczewo and Sudovian cultures’ swords from the Roman Period (Kontny 2017b; see Nowakowski 1994; 2007) as well as seaxes of the Elbląg and Olsztyn group from the Late Migration Period (Kontny 2013a; 2019a, 142–147; see Prassolow 2018). Besides, the idea of the use of battle knives has been rejected, as they were too short to serve this purpose (Kontny 2019a, 128–129). The earliest (Kontny 2007a) and latest (Kontny 2008c) finds of weapons from Bogaczewo culture have been elaborated, which allowed to establish the timeframes of the phenomenon of including weapons in grave inventories: from the dawn of the Late Pre-Roman Period until subphase C1b. Particular categories of blunt weapons have been comprehensively analyzed, i.e. socketed axes (weapon characteristic for the West Balt circle and some areas of eastern Europe) and axes from Bogaczewo and Sudovian cultures (Kontny 2016a; 2018). Furthermore, the issue of using the organic blunt weapons has been introduced, which popularity in the Balt milieu is suggested by the Tacitus’ remark about fustis. It has been established (Kontny 2015a) that such weapon has been used in the West Balt Barrows culture, but most probably it has not played any important role in the Roman Period, and the account of Tacitus is (in this aspect) anachronic. Elaboration of shafted weapon heads (Kontny 2007b) has shown that examples from the Bogaczewo culture imitate solutions known from the Przeworsk culture, although they show some local features (e.g. asocket is frequently mounted on ashaft with ause of asingle nail, and not rivet, as it was in the Przeworsk culture). On the other hand, in the Sudovian culture similar inspirations might be indicated only in the earliest stadium of its development and they are rather scarce. Shafted weapons match, however, the Lithuanian pattern, proposed by Vytautas Kazakâvičius (Kazakâvičius 1988, 12–63). One can also encounter here the Scandinavian imports. In the case of the Sudovian culture it was also possible to attempt to reconstruct sizes of shafted weapons, thanks to the analysis of the position of their heads in inhumation graves (Kontny 2019a, 119–124). It was also indicated that the significance of javelins in both cultures is rather scarce, which manifests in the sporadic presence of more than one weapon head in grave inventories (Kontny 2019a, 119, table 1), as well as the sparsity of barbed heads (Nowakowski 2014). The influences of the Przeworsk culture are noticeable also in the decorations of weapon heads (see: Kontny 2008a; 2017a; Czarnecka, Kontny 2008). Only recently the topic of bow and arrows from the Bogaczewo and Sudovian cultures has been introduced. They were mainly used for hunting purposes (Kontny 2019a, 137–139). Equine equipment is quite well-represented in the Balt area, the proof of which are quite numerous finds of headgear and horse tack with chain reins, requiring – similarly to spurs – comprehensive studies (see Kontny 2019a, 139–141). On the presented background the research on Balt shields from the area of Poland seems at adisadvantage. It is necessary to challenge the possibility of an uncritical use of the (still incomplete) classification of middle-European shield-bosses and grips for the analysis of the Balt examples, as they indicate adifferent rhythm of popularity and morphological development, and in the same time also arange of primitive features (shield-bosses assembled from two parts, joint with rivets) and archaisms in construction (e.g. many attaching points at the brim; using big disc-headed nails and rivets as late as the Roman Period). It is also important to notice the large diversification in morphology of shield-bosses with blunt apex and probability of popularity of wooden shield-bosses (Kontny 2019a, 132–133, fig. 25), as well as the use of metal supports of shield constructions (Kontny 2019a, 136, fig. 30). The reconstruction of the shape of Sudovian culture shields was also proposed, on the basis of the location of shield elements in inhumation graves (Kontny forthcoming a).Numerous are the finds of the military equipment of the so-called Lubusz group (see the paper by Bartłomiej Rogalski in the hereby volume), located by the lower Oder River in the Early Roman Period and the beginnings of the Younger Roman Period. Distinctive feature of this cultural unit is the use of cremation and including into graves burnt and sometimes – by the Przeworsk custom – destroyed weapons. Studies of this issue still have not been fully published, although it has been approached for some time now (Wołągiewiczowie 1964); aM.A. dissertation was even written on this topic (Czarnecka 1995). The theses, which have been included there, became obsolete due to the rapid increase in the archaeological record, i.a. thanks to the fieldwork at the necropolis in Czelin, as well as the lake sacrificial site in Lubanowo. On the basis of the hitherto observations, it has to be acknowledged that the model of the military equipment is very similar to the solutions known from the Przeworsk culture (Kontny 2019b, 349). The forms of shafted weapon heads, single- or double-edged 74B. Kontnyswords, shield-bosses, grips, and even arrowheads and spurs (with the documented exam-ples of the so-called bow-shaped – Germ. Bügelsporen – and chair-shaped spurs correspond with the Przeworsk prototypes. There are no axes known from burial grounds of the Lubusz group so far, which diversifies it from the Wielbark-culture armament, and shows even more ties with the military equipment of the Przeworsk culture. However, their presence has been confirmed at the sacrificial sites; it is possible that the weapons discovered there have been seized from the defeated Wielbark-culture invaders from the east (similar interpretation is accepted for the analogical northern European deposits). Scarce examples of weapons from the dawn of the Lubusz group refer to the solutions known from Scandinavia. It is thus probable that the change, which can be observed here, is analogous to the process known from the Wielbark culture.Basically unrecognised remains the military equipment of the Dębczyno group, which superseded the Wielbark culture in Western Pomerania in the Younger Roman Period and functioned until the Migration Period. Also in the case of Luboszyce culture what is lacking is the synthetic approach towards the issue of military equipment from the typological and chronological point of view. The finds of weapons were collected in the monograph of this culture; the attention has been paid in this case to the diversity from the Przeworsk model of military equipment, expressed in the use of axes (their classification was proposed); singular ties to the Scandinavian patterns have been observed (Domański 1979, 43–54), although one cannot find here comprehensive analysis of the issue. Adissertation devoted to military equipment of the Luboszyce culture has been written lately; unfortunately, it was not printed (Demkowicz 2014); only some of the issues approached there were published (Andrzejewska, Demkowicz 2015a; 2015b; 2016). They indicate the emulation – with slight modifications – the Przeworsk-culture model of weaponry in the early phases of development of the Luboszyce culture (phase C1), which might be indicated e.g. by the forms of shafted weapon heads and spurs, while new elements, such as asymmetric axes parallel to the ones known from the Elbe region, became numerous only from the C2 phase (Andrzejewska, Demkowicz 2015a; 2015b; 2016). Scandinavian elements are represented i.a. by the knives with along grip, associated with the equipment of warriors (Andrzejewska, Demkowicz2016), although most probably not used in battle. Among the Scandinavian forms one might indicate also range of pole weapon heads (Andrzejewska, Demkowicz 2015b, 119), as well as ashield-boss and grip from the grave XII at Grzmiąca (Marcinkian 1978, 98, fig. 14:g,h).One has to notice new possibilities which occurred in amoment when the picture of diversities in the military equipment of the cultures: Przeworsk, Sudovian, Bogaczewo, and Wielbark has been recognised (see the synthesis of the hoplological research: Kontny 2019a), as well as – reaching beyond the borders of Poland – northern European Barbaricum, and – partly – Elbe circle. It presents possibilities of creating comparative models of military equipment, indicating mutual influences and reconstructing their mechanisms. Already now it was possible to indicate the culture-forming position of the Przeworsk pattern of military equipment in the Early Roman Period and subphase C1a; in the later time asimilar role was played by the Scandinavian model, although this influence was not that standardizing (Kontny 2019c). It was also possible to identify Przeworsk-culture and Balt archaeological materials at the chosen sacrificial sites in Scandinavia (Kontny 2017c; 2019e), as well as Crimea (Kontny 2013c). It allowed to form ahypothesis on undertaking even far-going military expeditions by the warriors from the area of current Poland in the Roman Period, while participating in frequently ethnically heterogeneous war bands (Kontny 2003b; 2019d); it can clarify, to some extent, also some changes in cultural ranges. Fuller knowledge of the picture of military equipment diversity in Barbaricum (paying attention especially to the analysis of the shafted weapon heads, being agood indication of the cultural affiliation) will allow to continue similar comparisons and deepen the knowledge in the field of history of wars in Barbaricum, on the top of that, reconstructed without any precise data from the written sources. Northern European sacrificial sites showed huge potential which is presented by this kind of studies. Such direction is even more promising because the studies of lake and riverine deposits identified lately in the area of Poland should create new research perspectives, although they not necessarily have acharacter identical to – truly not homogeneous – Scandinavian sites. It seems that there is an abundance of the most exciting topics for along time!

From elephants to ABBA fans, silicon to hormone, the following discussion uses a new research method to look at printed text, motion pictures and a teenage rebel icon. If by ‘print’ we mean a mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium, then printing has been with us since before microdot security prints were painted onto cars, before voice prints, laser prints, network servers, record pressings, motion picture prints, photo prints, colour woodblock prints, before books, textile prints, and footprints. If we accept that higher mammals such as elephants have a learnt culture, then it is possible to extend a definition of printing beyond Homo sapiens. Poole reports that elephants mechanically trumpet reproductions of human car horns into the air surrounding their society. If nothing else, this cross-species, cross-cultural reproduction, this ‘ability to mimic’ is ‘another sign of their intelligence’. Observation of child development suggests that the first significant meaningful ‘impression’ made on the human mind is that of the face of the child’s nurturer – usually its mother. The baby’s mind forms an ‘impression’, a mental print, a reproducible memory data set, of the nurturer’s face, voice, smell, touch, etc. That face is itself a cultural construct: hair style, makeup, piercings, tattoos, ornaments, nutrition-influenced skin and smell, perfume, temperature and voice. A mentally reproducible pattern of a unique face is formed in the mind, and we use that pattern to distinguish ‘familiar and strange’ in our expanding social orbit. The social relations of patterned memory – of imprinting – determine the extent to which we explore our world (armed with research aids such as text print) or whether we turn to violence or self-harm (Bretherton). While our cultural artifacts (such as vellum maps or networked voice message servers) bravely extend our significant patterns into the social world and the traversed environment, it is useful to remember that such artifacts, including print, are themselves understood by our original pattern-reproduction and impression system – the human mind, developed in childhood. The ‘print’ is brought to mind differently in different discourses. For a reader, a ‘print’ is a book, a memo or a broadsheet, whether it is the Indian Buddhist Sanskrit texts ordered to be printed in 593 AD by the Chinese emperor Sui Wen-ti (Silk Road) or the US Defense Department memo authorizing lower ranks to torture the prisoners taken by the Bush administration (Sanchez, cited in ABC). Other fields see prints differently. For a musician, a ‘print’ may be the sheet music which spread classical and popular music around the world; it may be a ‘record’ (as in a ‘recording’ session), where sound is impressed to wax, vinyl, charged silicon particles, or the alloys (Smith, “Elpida”) of an mp3 file. For the fine artist, a ‘print’ may be any mechanically reproduced two-dimensional (or embossed) impression of a significant image in media from paper to metal, textile to ceramics. ‘Print’ embraces the Japanese Ukiyo-e colour prints of Utamaro, the company logos that wink from credit card holographs, the early photographs of Talbot, and the textured patterns printed into neolithic ceramics. Computer hardware engineers print computational circuits. Homicide detectives investigate both sweaty finger prints and the repeated, mechanical gaits of suspects, which are imprinted into the earthy medium of a crime scene. For film makers, the ‘print’ may refer to a photochemical polyester reproduction of a motion picture artifact (the reel of ‘celluloid’), or a DVD laser disc impression of the same film. Textualist discourse has borrowed the word ‘print’ to mean ‘text’, so ‘print’ may also refer to the text elements within the vision track of a motion picture: the film’s opening titles, or texts photographed inside the motion picture story such as the sword-cut ‘Z’ in Zorro (Niblo). Before the invention of writing, the main mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium was the humble footprint in the sand. The footprints of tribes – and neighbouring animals – cut tracks in the vegetation and the soil. Printed tracks led towards food, water, shelter, enemies and friends. Having learnt to pattern certain faces into their mental world, children grew older and were educated in the footprints of family and clan, enemies and food. The continuous impression of significant foot traffic in the medium of the earth produced the lines between significant nodes of prewriting and pre-wheeled cultures. These tracks were married to audio tracks, such as the song lines of the Australian Aborigines, or the ballads of tramping culture everywhere. A typical tramping song has the line, ‘There’s a track winding back to an old-fashion shack along the road to Gundagai,’ (O’Hagan), although this colonial-style song was actually written for radio and became an international hit on the airwaves, rather than the tramping trails. The printed tracks impressed by these cultural flows are highly contested and diverse, and their foot prints are woven into our very language. The names for printed tracks have entered our shared memory from the intersection of many cultures: ‘Track’ is a Germanic word entering English usage comparatively late (1470) and now used mainly in audio visual cultural reproduction, as in ‘soundtrack’. ‘Trek’ is a Dutch word for ‘track’ now used mainly by ecotourists and science fiction fans. ‘Learn’ is a Proto-Indo-European word: the verb ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to find a track’ back in the days when ‘learn’ had a noun form which meant ‘the sole of the foot’. ‘Tract’ and ‘trace’ are Latin words entering English print usage before 1374 and now used mainly in religious, and electronic surveillance, cultural reproduction. ‘Trench’ in 1386 was a French path cut through a forest. ‘Sagacity’ in English print in 1548 was originally the ability to track or hunt, in Proto-Indo-European cultures. ‘Career’ (in English before 1534) was the print made by chariots in ancient Rome. ‘Sleuth’ (1200) was a Norse noun for a track. ‘Investigation’ (1436) was Latin for studying a footprint (Harper). The arrival of symbolic writing scratched on caves, hearth stones, and trees (the original meaning of ‘book’ is tree), brought extremely limited text education close to home. Then, with baked clay tablets, incised boards, slate, bamboo, tortoise shell, cast metal, bark cloth, textiles, vellum, and – later – paper, a portability came to text that allowed any culture to venture away from known ‘foot’ paths with a reduction in the risk of becoming lost and perishing. So began the world of maps, memos, bills of sale, philosophic treatises and epic mythologies. Some of this was printed, such as the mechanical reproduction of coins, but the fine handwriting required of long, extended, portable texts could not be printed until the invention of paper in China about 2000 years ago. Compared to lithic architecture and genes, portable text is a fragile medium, and little survives from the millennia of its innovators. The printing of large non-text designs onto bark-paper and textiles began in neolithic times, but Sui Wen-ti’s imperial memo of 593 AD gives us the earliest written date for printed books, although we can assume they had been published for many years previously. The printed book was a combination of Indian philosophic thought, wood carving, ink chemistry and Chinese paper. The earliest surviving fragment of paper-print technology is ‘Mantras of the Dharani Sutra’, a Buddhist scripture written in the Sanskrit language of the Indian subcontinent, unearthed at an early Tang Dynasty site in Xian, China – making the fragment a veteran piece of printing, in the sense that Sanskrit books had been in print for at least a century by the early Tang Dynasty (Chinese Graphic Arts Net). At first, paper books were printed with page-size carved wooden boards. Five hundred years later, Pi Sheng (c.1041) baked individual reusable ceramic characters in a fire and invented the durable moveable type of modern printing (Silk Road 2000). Abandoning carved wooden tablets, the ‘digitizing’ of Chinese moveable type sped up the production of printed texts. In turn, Pi Sheng’s flexible, rapid, sustainable printing process expanded the political-cultural impact of the literati in Asian society. Digitized block text on paper produced a bureaucratic, literate elite so powerful in Asia that Louis XVI of France copied China’s print-based Confucian system of political authority for his own empire, and so began the rise of the examined public university systems, and the civil service systems, of most European states (Watson, Visions). By reason of its durability, its rapid mechanical reproduction, its culturally agreed signs, literate readership, revered authorship, shared ideology, and distributed portability, a ‘print’ can be a powerful cultural network which builds and expands empires. But print also attacks and destroys empires. A case in point is the Spanish conquest of Aztec America: The Aztecs had immense libraries of American literature on bark-cloth scrolls, a technology which predated paper. These libraries were wiped out by the invading Spanish, who carried a different book before them (Ewins). In the industrial age, the printing press and the gun were seen as the weapons of rebellions everywhere. In 1776, American rebels staffed their ‘Homeland Security’ units with paper makers, knowing that defeating the English would be based on printed and written documents (Hahn). Mao Zedong was a book librarian; Mao said political power came out of the barrel of a gun, but Mao himself came out of a library. With the spread of wireless networked servers, political ferment comes out of the barrel of the cell phone and the internet chat room these days. Witness the cell phone displays of a plane hitting a tower that appear immediately after 9/11 in the Middle East, or witness the show trials of a few US and UK lower ranks who published prints of their torturing activities onto the internet: only lower ranks who published prints were arrested or tried. The control of secure servers and satellites is the new press. These days, we live in a global library of burning books – ‘burning’ in the sense that ‘print’ is now a charged silicon medium (Smith, “Intel”) which is usually made readable by connecting the chip to nuclear reactors and petrochemically-fired power stations. World resources burn as we read our screens. Men, women, children burn too, as we watch our infotainment news in comfort while ‘their’ flickering dead faces are printed in our broadcast hearths. The print we watch is not the living; it is the voodoo of the living in the blackout behind the camera, engaging the blood sacrifice of the tormented and the unfortunate. Internet texts are also ‘on fire’ in the third sense of their fragility and instability as a medium: data bases regularly ‘print’ fail-safe copies in an attempt to postpone the inevitable mechanical, chemical and electrical failure that awaits all electronic media in time. Print defines a moral position for everyone. In reporting conflict, in deciding to go to press or censor, any ‘print’ cannot avoid an ethical context, starting with the fact that there is a difference in power between print maker, armed perpetrators, the weak, the peaceful, the publisher, and the viewer. So many human factors attend a text, video or voice ‘print’: its very existence as an aesthetic object, even before publication and reception, speaks of unbalanced, and therefore dynamic, power relationships. For example, Graham Greene departed unscathed from all the highly dangerous battlefields he entered as a novelist: Riot-torn Germany, London Blitz, Belgian Congo, Voodoo Haiti, Vietnam, Panama, Reagan’s Washington, and mafia Europe. His texts are peopled with the injustices of the less fortunate of the twentieth century, while he himself was a member of the fortunate (if not happy) elite, as is anyone today who has the luxury of time to read Greene’s works for pleasure. Ethically a member of London and Paris’ colonizers, Greene’s best writing still electrifies, perhaps partly because he was in the same line of fire as the victims he shared bread with. In fact, Greene hoped daily that he would escape from the dreadful conflicts he fictionalized via a body bag or an urn of ashes (see Sherry). In reading an author’s biography we have one window on the ethical dimensions of authority and print. If a print’s aesthetics are sometimes enduring, its ethical relationships are always mutable. Take the stylized logo of a running athlete: four limbs bent in a rotation of action. This dynamic icon has symbolized ‘good health’ in Hindu and Buddhist culture, from Madras to Tokyo, for thousands of years. The cross of bent limbs was borrowed for the militarized health programs of 1930s Germany, and, because of what was only a brief, recent, isolated yet monstrously horrific segment of its history in print, the bent-limbed swastika is now a vilified symbol in the West. The sign remains ‘impressed’ differently on traditional Eastern culture, and without the taint of Nazism. Dramatic prints are emotionally charged because, in depicting Homo sapiens in danger, or passionately in love, they elicit a hormonal reaction from the reader, the viewer, or the audience. The type of emotions triggered by a print vary across the whole gamut of human chemistry. A recent study of three genres of motion picture prints shows a marked differences in the hormonal responses of men compared to women when viewing a romance, an actioner, and a documentary (see Schultheiss, Wirth, and Stanton). Society is biochemically diverse in its engagement with printed culture, which raises questions about equality in the arts. Motion picture prints probably comprise around one third of internet traffic, in the form of stolen digitized movie files pirated across the globe via peer-to-peer file transfer networks (p2p), and burnt as DVD laser prints (BBC). There is also a US 40 billion dollar per annum legitimate commerce in DVD laser pressings (Grassl), which would suggest an US 80 billion per annum world total in legitimate laser disc print culture. The actively screen literate, or the ‘sliterati’ as I prefer to call them, research this world of motion picture prints via their peers, their internet information channels, their television programming, and their web forums. Most of this activity occurs outside the ambit of universities and schools. One large site of sliterate (screen literate) practice outside most schooling and official research is the net of online forums at imdb.com (International Movie Data Base). Imdb.com ‘prints’ about 25,000,000 top pages per month to client browsers. Hundreds of sliterati forums are located at imdb, including a forum for the Australian movie, Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan). Ten years after the release of Muriel’s Wedding, young people who are concerned with victimization and bullying still log on to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/> and put their thoughts into print: I still feel so bad for Muriel in the beginning of the movie, when the girls ‘dump’ her, and how much the poor girl cried and cried! Those girls were such biartches…I love how they got their comeuppance! bunniesormaybemidgets’s comment is typical of the current discussion. Muriel’s Wedding was a very popular film in its first cinema edition in Australia and elsewhere. About 30% of the entire over-14 Australian population went to see this photochemical polyester print in the cinemas on its first release. A decade on, the distributors printed a DVD laser disc edition. The story concerns Muriel (played by Toni Collette), the unemployed daughter of a corrupt, ‘police state’ politician. Muriel is bullied by her peers and she withdraws into a fantasy world, deluding herself that a white wedding will rescue her from the torments of her blighted life. Through theft and deceit (the modus operandi of her father) Muriel escapes to the entertainment industry and finds a ‘wicked’ girlfriend mentor. From a rebellious position of stubborn independence, Muriel plays out her fantasy. She gets her white wedding, before seeing both her father and her new married life as hollow shams which have goaded her abandoned mother to suicide. Redefining her life as a ‘game’ and assuming responsibility for her independence, Muriel turns her back on the mainstream, image-conscious, female gang of her oppressed youth. Muriel leaves the story, having rekindled her friendship with her rebel mentor. My methodological approach to viewing the laser disc print was to first make a more accessible, coded record of the entire movie. I was able to code and record the print in real time, using a new metalanguage (Watson, “Eyes”). The advantage of Coding is that ‘thinks’ the same way as film making, it does not sidetrack the analyst into prose. The Code splits the movie print into Vision Action [vision graphic elements, including text] (sound) The Coding splits the vision track into normal action and graphic elements, such as text, so this Coding is an ideal method for extracting all the text elements of a film in real time. After playing the film once, I had four and a half tightly packed pages of the coded story, including all its text elements in square brackets. Being a unique, indexed hard copy, the Coded copy allowed me immediate access to any point of the Muriel’s Wedding saga without having to search the DVD laser print. How are ‘print’ elements used in Muriel’s Wedding? Firstly, a rose-coloured monoprint of Muriel Heslop’s smiling face stares enigmatically from the plastic surface of the DVD picture disc. The print is a still photo captured from her smile as she walked down the aisle of her white wedding. In this print, Toni Collette is the Mona Lisa of Australian culture, except that fans of Muriel’s Wedding know the meaning of that smile is a magical combination of the actor’s art: the smile is both the flush of dreams come true and the frightening self deception that will kill her mother. Inserting and playing the disc, the text-dominant menu appears, and the film commences with the text-dominant opening titles. Text and titles confer a legitimacy on a work, whether it is a trade mark of the laser print owners, or the household names of stars. Text titles confer status relationships on both the presenters of the cultural artifact and the viewer who has entered into a legal license agreement with the owners of the movie. A title makes us comfortable, because the mind always seeks to name the unfamiliar, and a set of text titles does that job for us so that we can navigate the ‘tracks’ and settle into our engagement with the unfamiliar. The apparent ‘truth’ and ‘stability’ of printed text calms our fears and beguiles our uncertainties. Muriel attends the white wedding of a school bully bride, wearing a leopard print dress she has stolen. Muriel’s spotted wild animal print contrasts with the pure white handmade dress of the bride. In Muriel’s leopard textile print, we have the wild, rebellious, impoverished, inappropriate intrusion into the social ritual and fantasy of her high-status tormentor. An off-duty store detective recognizes the printed dress and calls the police. The police are themselves distinguished by their blue-and-white checked prints and other mechanically reproduced impressions of cultural symbols: in steel, brass, embroidery, leather and plastics. Muriel is driven in the police car past the stenciled town sign (‘Welcome To Porpoise Spit’ heads a paragraph of small print). She is delivered to her father, a politician who presides over the policing of his town. In a state where the judiciary, police and executive are hijacked by the same tyrant, Muriel’s father, Bill, pays off the police constables with a carton of legal drugs (beer) and Muriel must face her father’s wrath, which he proceeds to transfer to his detested wife. Like his daughter, the father also wears a spotted brown print costume, but his is a batik print from neighbouring Indonesia (incidentally, in a nation that takes the political status of its batik prints very seriously). Bill demands that Muriel find the receipt for the leopard print dress she claims she has purchased. The legitimate ownership of the object is enmeshed with a printed receipt, the printed evidence of trade. The law (and the paramilitary power behind the law) are legitimized, or contested, by the presence or absence of printed text. Muriel hides in her bedroom, surround by poster prints of the pop group ABBA. Torn-out prints of other people’s weddings adorn her mirror. Her face is embossed with the clown-like primary colours of the marionette as she lifts a bouquet to her chin and stares into the real time ‘print’ of her mirror image. Bill takes the opportunity of a business meeting with Japanese investors to feed his entire family at ‘Charlie Chan’’s restaurant. Muriel’s middle sister sloppily wears her father’s state election tee shirt, printed with the text: ‘Vote 1, Bill Heslop. You can’t stop progress.’ The text sets up two ironic gags that are paid off on the dialogue track: “He lost,’ we are told. ‘Progress’ turns out to be funding the concreting of a beach. Bill berates his daughter Muriel: she has no chance of becoming a printer’s apprentice and she has failed a typing course. Her dysfunction in printed text has been covered up by Bill: he has bribed the typing teacher to issue a printed diploma to his daughter. In the gambling saloon of the club, under the arrays of mechanically repeated cultural symbols lit above the poker machines (‘A’ for ace, ‘Q’ for queen, etc.), Bill’s secret girlfriend Diedre risks giving Muriel a cosmetics job. Another text icon in lights announces the surf nightclub ‘Breakers’. Tania, the newly married queen bitch who has made Muriel’s teenage years a living hell, breaks up with her husband, deciding to cash in his negotiable text documents – his Bali honeymoon tickets – and go on an island holiday with her girlfriends instead. Text documents are the enduring site of agreements between people and also the site of mutations to those agreements. Tania dumps Muriel, who sobs and sobs. Sobs are a mechanical, percussive reproduction impressed on the sound track. Returning home, we discover that Muriel’s older brother has failed a printed test and been rejected for police recruitment. There is a high incidence of print illiteracy in the Heslop family. Mrs Heslop (Jeannie Drynan), for instance, regularly has trouble at the post office. Muriel sees a chance to escape the oppression of her family by tricking her mother into giving her a blank cheque. Here is the confluence of the legitimacy of a bank’s printed negotiable document with the risk and freedom of a blank space for rebel Muriel’s handwriting. Unable to type, her handwriting has the power to steal every cent of her father’s savings. She leaves home and spends the family’s savings at an island resort. On the island, the text print-challenged Muriel dances to a recording (sound print) of ABBA, her hand gestures emphasizing her bewigged face, which is made up in an impression of her pop idol. Her imitation of her goddesses – the ABBA women, her only hope in a real world of people who hate or avoid her – is accompanied by her goddesses’ voices singing: ‘the mystery book on the shelf is always repeating itself.’ Before jpeg and gif image downloads, we had postcard prints and snail mail. Muriel sends a postcard to her family, lying about her ‘success’ in the cosmetics business. The printed missal is clutched by her father Bill (Bill Hunter), who proclaims about his daughter, ‘you can’t type but you really impress me’. Meanwhile, on Hibiscus Island, Muriel lies under a moonlit palm tree with her newly found mentor, ‘bad girl’ Ronda (Rachel Griffiths). In this critical scene, where foolish Muriel opens her heart’s yearnings to a confidante she can finally trust, the director and DP have chosen to shoot a flat, high contrast blue filtered image. The visual result is very much like the semiabstract Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Utamaro. This Japanese printing style informed the rise of European modern painting (Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc., were all important collectors and students of Ukiyo-e prints). The above print and text elements in Muriel’s Wedding take us 27 minutes into her story, as recorded on a single page of real-time handwritten Coding. Although not discussed here, the Coding recorded the complete film – a total of 106 minutes of text elements and main graphic elements – as four pages of Code. Referring to this Coding some weeks after it was made, I looked up the final code on page four: taxi [food of the sea] bq. Translation: a shop sign whizzes past in the film’s background, as Muriel and Ronda leave Porpoise Spit in a taxi. Over their heads the text ‘Food Of The Sea’ flashes. We are reminded that Muriel and Ronda are mermaids, fantastic creatures sprung from the brow of author PJ Hogan, and illuminated even today in the pantheon of women’s coming-of-age art works. That the movie is relevant ten years on is evidenced by the current usage of the Muriel’s Wedding online forum, an intersection of wider discussions by sliterate women on imdb.com who, like Muriel, are observers (and in some cases victims) of horrific pressure from ambitious female gangs and bullies. Text is always a minor element in a motion picture (unless it is a subtitled foreign film) and text usually whizzes by subliminally while viewing a film. By Coding the work for [text], all the text nuances made by the film makers come to light. While I have viewed Muriel’s Wedding on many occasions, it has only been in Coding it specifically for text that I have noticed that Muriel is a representative of that vast class of talented youth who are discriminated against by print (as in text) educators who cannot offer her a life-affirming identity in the English classroom. Severely depressed at school, and failing to type or get a printer’s apprenticeship, Muriel finds paid work (and hence, freedom, life, identity, independence) working in her audio visual printed medium of choice: a video store in a new city. Muriel found a sliterate admirer at the video store but she later dumped him for her fantasy man, before leaving him too. One of the points of conjecture on the imdb Muriel’s Wedding site is, did Muriel (in the unwritten future) get back together with admirer Brice Nobes? That we will never know. While a print forms a track that tells us where culture has been, a print cannot be the future, a print is never animate reality. At the end of any trail of prints, one must lift one’s head from the last impression, and negotiate satisfaction in the happening world. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Memo Shows US General Approved Interrogations.” 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. 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