Journal articles on the topic 'Band music 20th century History and criticism'

Adorno’s work, in particular the texts dealing with the relationship between music and social behaviors or structures, has been the target of criticism, especially in the second half of the 20th century, being considered by many to be generalist, dogmatic or even elitist. This work proposes the analysis of musical technologies not only as a set of compositional techniques, as Adorno does, but, in fact, as material conditions for the realization of a certain type of sound/music. The colonialist character of these technologies is also analyzed. Based on a review of some key concepts in Adornian theory, a dialogue is sought with more contemporary authors from the sociology of music.

Abstract In late 19th-century periodicals, music criticism captured only a few details on the composition techniques, the structural organization, the rhythmic-melodic or vocal and stage interpretation of various performances. The press shed light on these pieces only at an informative level, mentioning titles, composers, and interpreters and even omitting some details due to, on the one hand, the authorities’ indifference to the musical phenomenon and, on the other hand, the editors’ sheer ignorance of particular stylistic or musical language features. However, the attempts made by the personalities active in the cultural and artistic life were real and unrelenting, their results being guided by the desire to promote music with specific national traits. This study provides an analytical perspective on the current reception of that social-artistic context. Taking into account that new sources have favored a more detailed and profound investigation of the 19th-century critical phenomenon, our analysis supplements the information presented in the music history studies already published in Romania. Consequently, the first section of this paper approaches the extremely dynamic phenomenon represented by the creation of new journals / newspapers in the 19th century. It is our belief that starting from general journalism we can acquire a better understanding of the development of musical criticism. This research aimed to discover new dimensions of Iași-based music, placing special emphasis on the critical reception of the composer Alexandru Flechtenmacher. We have followed its reflection in the Romanian press, starting from the first accounts in this respect, and ending with the subsequent assessments formulated in 20th-century musicology. Although the texts that tackle musical issues are quite few and social aspects prevail in the commentators’ list of interests, by combining the information provided by general literary/historical/social sources with the details included in specialized articles we can create a new perspective on late 19th-century Iași-based compositions.

The transition of the 19th into the 20th century in Serbian music history was a period of music criticism, journalism and essay writing. At that time, Serbian musicology had not yet been developed as an academic discipline. After WWI there were many more academic writings on this subject; therefore, the interwar period represents the beginning of Serbian music historiography. This paper analyses Serbian interwar music magazines as source material for the history of Serbian musicology. The following music magazines were published in Belgrade at the time: Muzicki glasnik (Music Herald, 1922), Muzika (Music, 1928-1929), Glasnik Muzickog drustva ?Stankovic? (Stankovic Music Society Herald, 1928-1934, 1938-1941; from January 1931. known as Muzicki glasnik /Music Herald/), Zvuk ( Sound, 1932-1936), Vesnik Juznoslovesnkog pevackog saveza (The South Slav Singing Union Courier, 1935-1936, 1938), Slavenska muzika ( Slavonic Music, 1939-1941), and Revija muzike (The Music Review, 1940). A great number of historical studies and writings on Serbian music were published in the interwar periodicals. A significant contribution was made above all to the study of Serbian musicians? biographies and bibliographies of the 19th century. Vladimir R. Djordjevic published several short biographies in Muzicki glasnik (1922) in an article called Ogled biografskog recnika srpskih muzicara (An Introduction to Serbian Musicians? Biographies). Writers on music obviously understood that the starting point in the study of Serbian music history had to be the composers? biographical data. Other magazines (such as Muzicki glasnik in 1928 and 1931, Zvuk, Vesnik Juznoslovenskog pevackog saveza, and Slavenska muzika) published a number of essays on distinguished Serbian and Yugoslav musicians of the 19th and 20th centuries, most of which deal with both composers? biographical data and analysis of their compositions. Their narrative style reflects the habits of 19th-century romanticism and positivism: in some of these writings the language also has an aesthetic function. Serbian interwar music magazines also published some archival documents contributing to the future research of Serbian music history. Interwar period in the then Yugoslavia was a time of rapid development and modernization in various fields of culture. There was a great demand for music writings of general interest. Therefore, Revija muzike (January - June 1940) was totally oriented towards the popularization of music and the arts (such as drama and film). This magazine also published some popular articles on music history. Serbian interwar music periodicals were least active in the field of musicological analysis. However, in 1934, Branko M. Dragutinovic published a detailed analytic study of Josip Slavenski?s composition Religiofonija (Religiophonics) in Zvuk. There were also some interdisciplinary history articles in Serbian interwar music magazines. Being well aware of the fact that music history comprises not only music itself, but also music writing, schools, institutions and music life, our music writers used ?indirect? sources, such as literature and art, as well as music. Serbian interwar music periodicals opened many fields of research, thus blazing a trail in postwar Serbian musicology.

The article is devoted to one of the forms of creative synthesis of types of art, which is being actualized in the modern space-time of musical and stage compositions, including through its own historical and genetic code. Singing in ballet appears in the context of art of the early 20th century as a common aesthetic phenomenon. However, music criticism and academic science have not yet provided the explanation of its mechanisms (image-aesthetic, psychological, form-creating, communicative), its overriding tasks in the concepts of modern musical theatre. The experience of problem statement in the field of interpretology provides the relevance of the topic of the article and determines the novelty of the obtained results. The purpose of the article is to reveal the preconditions and content of the functional unity of the art of singing and dance against the background of artistic trends of the early 20th century (starting with “Pulcinella” by I. Stravinsky). The creative tandem of dance and singing has its roots in ancient Greek culture, on which the creators of the French tradition of ballets du court (J.-B. Llully focused. In the realm of «mixed genres» of baroque music, the «golden age» of homo musicus began. The latest history of singing in ballet begins with I. Stravinsky, his «Pulchinelli». The obtained results of the research of the problem “What is singing in ballet — a tribute to history or an invention of modern culture”? First, the presence of the “genetic code” of this phenomenon in the art of Western Europe of the Modern times; secondly, the regularity of the tendency to synthesize singing in the art of ballet as a manifestation of neoclassicism, closely related to the historicism of compositional thinking of I. Stravinsky. The conclusions outline the preconditions and content of the functional unity of singing and dance in the format of artistic trends of the early 20th century: 1) the historical and cultural code of French art (singing — dramatic play — dance); 2) personal self-reflection of I. Stravinsky (his relations on the basis of creative cooperation in the early 20th century later formed a wide range of communication for artists: O. Rodin, A. Modigliani, K. Monet, P. Picasso, V. Kandinsky); 3) imitation of pre-classical, pre-baroque, and ancient folk traditions. In general, the revival of the function of singing in ballet of the 20th century took place on the basis of musical historicism and serves as a mental sign of the birth of neoclassicism.

The article is devoted to the theoretical and practical aspects of military musicians’ arrangement practice, considered in the context of developing a system of Russian military orchestras. When studying the socio-cultural foundations of the formation and development of the art of arrangement, factors that reveal the role of Russian composers in the history of military musical culture are highlighted (such works as P.Tchaikovsky’s Skobelev March, A.Rubenstein’s Cavalry Trot are noted). The works of A.Ermolenko (The Evolution of Instrumentation in Russian Wind Music Until the 70s of the 19th Century), G.Salnikov (On the Basic Principles of Transcribing Symphonic Works for a Brass Band), D.Braslavsky (Arrangement for Variety Ensembles and Orchestras), B.Kozhevnikov (Instrumentation for a Brass Band), E.Aksenov (Problems of Theoretical Instrumentation), V.Emelyanov (Instrumentation as an Artistic Factor in Music) were used as fundamental ones to explain this issue. In the process of studying the stages of improving the system of military bands, special attention is paid to studying the features of the development of the military band service in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is noted that several works of academic music performed by military bands belong to this time: the choir and aria from the opera La Sonnambula, the duet from the opera Bianca and Fernando by V.Bellini, the overture, march, choir and a drinking song from the opera Undina by P.Tchaikovsky. In this context, the problems of the formation of the arrangement art are touched upon on the example of A.Alyabyev’s work (the use of orchestral means necessary for a full orchestral sound). When considering the features of the development of military musicians’ arrangement practice in the first half of the 20th century as well as during the collapse of the USSR, attention is paid to the processes of oblivion and revival of the traditions of orchestral wind performance, the emergence of new genres such as the drill show. In this perspective, the activities of famous military bands of the specified period are considered, for example, the Alexandrov Russian Army Song and Dance Ensemble. In conclusion, the author notes that unique conditions for the development of military musicians’ arrangement practice have been created in the national culture, making it possible to preserve the traditions of the military band service and form the value principles of academic art.

A large part of German musicology sees itself as a science of art in the emphatic sense and is committed to quite different principles than historical-critical approaches in the discipline. The latter seek to gain a realistic picture of the history of music, including contemporary ways of thinking, and allow for historical actors to make meaningful, free will decisions within anthropologically determined circumstances. The emphatic science of art, on the other hand, claims to be able to prove and scientifically determine the objects of great art music and their nature. It originated during the Enlightenment, when philosophy took the place of religion and created ever new theoretical constructs of thought presented as scientifically proven and binding. In music, Beethoven rose to the ideal of the ingenious creator, who embodied the progress and achievements of mankind on the path toward perfection. Thus, in the course of the 19th century, a Beethoven cult developed using philosophy as its guide in selecting and evaluating historical sources, gladly accepting literary testimonies as historical fact. Historical criticism, which revealed this construction of a romantic image of Beethoven, was suppressed for a long time. Society’s broad acceptance of the notion of the evolutionary progress of mankind, one to which modernity adhered, proved too powerful, and belief in it took the form of an art religion. Beethoven as Zeus of the Third Reich, as the god of modernity, was the program and message of the 14th Secession Exhibition in Vienna in 1902. This image was destructed in the late 20th century.

The article analyses how the folk singing tradition of the Lithuania Minor developed in the late 20th and in the early 21st centuries. It examines the activities of the folklore groups in the Klaipėda Region during the period of 1971–2020, focusing on those that assert fostering of the lietuvininkai singing tradition as their mission or one of their goals. The study employs the previously unused materials, which allow revising the former research results regarding the revival of the Lithuanian ethnic music and show the folklore ensembles working in the Klaipėda Region as a significant part of the Lithuanian folklore movement and the revival of the ethnic music, emerging from the 1960s. Special emphasis is placed on the early phase in adoption of the lietuvininkai singing tradition related to the activities of the folklore ensemble “Vorusnėˮ established in 1971 at the Klaipėda faculties of the State Conservatory of the former LSSR, and the role it had in prompting the creation of other folklore groups in Klaipėda, as well as its impact on the broader cultural and educational processes taking place in the Klaipėda Region.In the 20th century, the prevailing narrative regarding the Lithuanian inhabitants of the Lithuania Minor maintained that books, hymns, schools, church, social and cultural organizations, and choral or theatre activities were the most significant factors influencing the cultural expression of lietuvininkai, while the Lithuanian folklore was hardly practiced anymore or even considered an inappropriate thing. Judging from the folklore recordings, the folk singing tradition supported by the lietuvininkai themselves disappeared along with the singers born in the late 19th century. However, after the WWII, it was adopted and continued by the folklore groups appearing the Klaipėda Region. These groups included people from the other regions of Lithuania who had settled there. This is essentially the process of reviving the ethnic music, which began in Europe during the Enlightenment period and continues in many parts of the world.“Vorusnėˮ was founded in 1971 as the first institutional student folklore ensemble in Klaipėda Region. For 27 years, its leader was a young and talented professor of the Baltic languages Audronė Jakulienė (later Kaukienė). She became the founder of the linguistic school at the Klaipėda University (KU). In the intense and multifaceted activities of the “Vorusnėˮ ensemble, two different stages may be discerned, embracing the periods of 1971–1988 and 1989–2000.In 1971–1988, the ensemble mobilized and educated students in the consciously chosen direction of fostering the Lithuanian ethnic culture, sought contacts with the native lietuvininkai, collected and studied ethnographic and dialectal data, prepared concert programs based on the scholarly, written, and ethnographic sources, gave concerts in Lithuania and abroad, and cooperated with folklore groups from other institutions of higher education.In 1989–2000, the “Vorusnėˮ ensemble engaged in numerous other areas of activity. The children‘s folklore ensemble “Vorusnėlėˮ was established in 1989; both “Vorusnėˮ and “Vorusnėlėˮ became involved in the activities of the community of the Lithuania Minor founded in 1989. The leader of the ensemble and its members contributed to the establishment of the Klaipėda University, which became an important research center of the Prussian history and culture. The leader of the ensemble and her supporters created a new study program of the Lithuanian philology and ethnology at the KU, which during its heyday (2011–2014) had developed three levels of higher education, including bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral studies. The Folklore Laboratory and Archive was established at the Department of the Baltic Linguistics and Ethnology, headed by Kaukienė, and young researchers in philology, ethnology, and ethnomusicology were encouraged to carry out their research there. In the course of over two decades, Kaukienė initiated organizing numerous research conferences dealing with lietuvininkai language and culture.Until 1980, “Vorusnėˮ was the only folklore ensemble in the Klaipėda Region, but in 1985, there were already ten folklore ensembles. These ensembles developed different creative styles that perhaps most notably depended on the personal structure of these ensembles and their leaders’ ideas and professional musical skills. Generally, at the beginning of their activity, all these ensembles sang, played and danced the folklore repertoire comprising all the regions of Lithuania. The activities of “Vorusnėˮ and other folklore ensembles in Klaipėda until 1990 showed that revival of folklore there essentially followed the lines established in other cities and regions of Lithuania.During the first decade after the restoration of independence of Lithuania in 1990, folklore was in high demand. In Klaipėda, the existing ensembles were actively working, and the new ones kept appearing based on the previous ones. The folklore ensembles of the Klaipėda Region clearly declared their priorities, embracing all the contemporary contexts. Some of them associated their repertoire with the folklore of lietuvininkai, others with Samogitian folklore.The lietuvininkai singing tradition was adopted and developed in two main directions.The first one focused on authentic reconstruction, attempting recreation with maximumaccuracy of the song‘s dialect, melody, and manner of singing, as well as its relationship tocustoms, historical events or living environment. The second direction engaged in creativedevelopment, including free interpretations of the songs, combining them with other stylesand genres of music and literature, and using them for individual compositions. These twoways could be combined as well. Lietuvininkai are not directly involved in these activities, butthey tolerate them and participate in these processes in their own historically and culturallydetermined ways.The contemporary artistic expression of the promoters of the lietuvininkai singing tradition is no longer constrained by the religious and ideological dogmas that were previously maintained in the Lithuania Minor and in a way regulated performance of these songs. It is determined nowadays by consciousness, creativity, resourcefulness, and knowledge of its promoters. The dogmas of the Soviet era and modernity have created a certain publicly displayed (show type) folklore. The ensembles took part of the institutionalized amateur art, subsequently becoming subject to justified and unjustified criticism, which is usually levelled on them by the outsiders studying documents and analyzing processes. However, favorable appreciation and external evaluation by the participants of the activities and the local communities highlight the meaning of this activity.

Objectives Computed Tomography (CT) is an indispensable element of medical care used throughout the world, and first developed for clinical use by Hounsfield in 1971. The largest source of monetary support for Hounsfield’s work was from his employer, Electrical Musical Industries, Ltd. (EMI) and, in turn, the most lucrative source of income for EMI through the 1960’s was their recording contract with the English quartet, the Beatles. The purported link between the Beatles’ productive oeuvre with EMI and Hounsfield’s discovery of CT has not been well established. We endeavored to elucidate the technological and creative talents that linked Hounsfield with EMI and the Beatles and which ultimately led to one of the greatest medical innovations of the 20th century. Methods We used GoogleScholar, PubMed, and primary sources to research the life of Godfrey Hounsfield, the history of Electric and Musical Industries, Ltd (EMI), and The Beatles in reference to the development of CT. We used the EMI Archives Trust (London), and the archives of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) UK and Ireland (London). We obtained unpublished photographs courtesy of private collections. Results EMI translated its electronic prowess during WWII into the recorded music business, purchasing Capitol Records in 1955. EMI would sign The Beatles in 1963 and EMI profits rose 80% that first year. Sir Godfrey Hounsfield began a successful scientific career with EMI in 1951. With financial support from EMI’s research division, Hounsfield began developing what would become the first CT-scanner in 1967. By directing x-ray beams through the body at 1 degree angles, with a detector rotating in tandem on the other side, he could measure the x-ray attenuation of different tissues inside the body. These values were then analyzed via a mathematical algorithm to produce a 2-dimensional image of the slice of the body. Hounsfield worked with James Ambrose, a radiologist, to conduct the first clinical CT-scan at Atkinson Morley Hospital in 1971 in a patient with a brain tumor. EMI entered the medical equipment business thereafter and heavily marketed the CT-scanner using the financial resources EMI derived from its record sales. By 1976, EMI could not produce enough CT-scanners to fill demand and ultimately would cede the medical imaging business to competitors, and devote itself to the music industry. In 1979, Hounsfield, and Allen Cormack, a South African physicist who independently theorized the basis of CT imaging, would win the Nobel Prize. Conclusions ‘Let it be’ known that it was only ‘yesterday’ when a recording company, a rock band, and a radar scientist revolutionized medical imaging with the development of computed tomography.

Hryhoriy Skovoroda’s idea of the immanent existence (1722–1794) about related work in Ukrainian modernists poetry, in particular representatives of the artistic group “Muzaget” (1919) is considered as the main methodological prism that conceptualize related work of Panna, outlined with the support of V. Gorsky, L. Ushkalov, and D. Chyzhevsky. The article describes the history of creation and specifics of Kyiv post-revolutionary group of symbolists “Muzaget” activities. The literary and artistic almanac with a similar name was analyzed, where each member of the collective presented his “related” art form: poetry, prose, criticism, painting and, at the same time, recorded the affinity of individual and social (national) principles. Based on the analysis of Mykhailo Zhuk, Dmytro Zahul, Volodymyr Kobylyansky, Klym Polishchuk, Oleksa Slisarenko, Mykola Tereshchenko, Pavlo Tychyna, Pavlo Fylypovych, and Volodymyr Yaroshenko poetry, conceptual dominants have been singled out, which in general realize the creative and collective affinity of “Muzaget poetry”. The symbolism of poetic images-archetypes is outlined: God, Christ, joy, star, flower, wind, path, poet’s soul, singing, music, and dream. The functioning of antitheses and parallelisms is emphasized: the flow of human life / the impermanence of nature, life / death, earth / hell / heaven, good / evil, day / night, asceticism / holiness / sinfulness, Christ / Satan, loneliness / crowd. The polyphonic musical imagery and musicality of the poem are analyzed by using tropes, phonetic and syntactic means. It is concluded that poetic innovation, truthful exhibition of creativity and individuality, accentuation of affinity between talent and character, productive interaction of friends in popular creative collectives in the conditions and under the influence of complex historical events and ideological dilemmas of the 20-30s of the 20th century, led some Musagetists to glorious recognition, and others to the tragic consequences of the Red Renaissance.

Introduction. The Italian opera in Kharkiv has a long history tradition. Its beginnings date back to the 1850s, when the city became a part of the tour routes of Odesa Italian opera troupes under F. Berger’s, V. Sermattei’s direction (1850s – early 1860s), those of Taganrog – under V. Sermattei’s, Corsi’s and Co (second half of 1860s – 1876). These little provincial troupes with unequal by quality the stuff of singers, with a little choir, usually without their own orchestra, within their possibilities, introduced the popular Italian opera repertoire to the Kharkiv audience. Technical and technological achievements – the development of the rail network, the shipping industry, the telegraph and telephone as the newest means of communication, etc., facilitated communication and, among other things, caused cultural achievements rapid exchange. Those times were marked by increasing of diffusive phenomena (in opera repertoire, in the troupe composition, etc.) in musical and theatrical arts, which, in particular, contributed to the scenic creativity activation of Italian artistes and the extension of the geography of their performances. Outstanding and average singers from the Apennines have travelled to different countries of the world with solo concert programs as part of wandering or stationary opera groups. Artistic tours to Eastern direction – to the European territories of the Russian Empire, along with touring trips to the North and South America countries, – became one of the most prevalent. Kharkiv, being one of the largest industrial and cultural centres in the Russian Empire, as a rule, was included by Italian theatre management in vocal-artistic tour programs. Theoretical background. The problem of the famous Italian opera singers’ activity on the Kharkiv stage in the 80s of the 19th – the beginning of the 20th is poorly investigated. Separate pages of M. Battistini’s, J. Bellinchoni’s, A. Mazini’s, T. Ruffo’s, and E. Tamberlik’s biographies related to Kharkiv were studied by M. Varvartsev (2000) in his historical and biographical work “Italians in the cultural space of Ukraine (the end of 18 – 20s years of the 20th century”, written in the form of a dictionary. The main source for the study of this subject were the local musicologists’ (V. Sokalsky, K. Bych-Lubensky, Yu. Babetsky, etc.) theatrical reviews, published in the Kharkiv regional and city press. Objectives. As the Italian opera art had undeniable influence on the Kharkiv musical culture development, the purpose of the article is to study the scenic activity of the famous Italian opera artistes, which acquainted the local theatrical audience with the assets of the world opera arts in the last decades of the 19th – early 20th century. For this purpose, the following tasks have been outlined: to find out the information potential of music-critical publications, dedicated to the Italian singers’ performances, which were printed in the local press; identify and systematize the facts describing the Italian opera performers’ participation in Kharkiv musical life during that period; to reveal the concert and opera repertoire, to study the evaluations of the Italian singers’ performances by professional criticism, the ways of artistes’ interaction with the audience; to determine the Kharkiv performances position in the famous vocalists’ creative biography, to reconstruct the geography of their tour routes, included performances in Kharkiv. The methodology involves the application of the semiotic-hermeneutic method in order to analyze the phenomena of musical-theatrical life (peculiarities of vocal-stylistic style, specificity of musical-critical thought, reactions and preferences of the audience) as a culture text and their hermeneutical understanding; bio-bibliographic method (to find out and combine facts of life and creative activity of Italian singers in Italy and abroad, in particular, in Kharkiv as well-known culture centre); cultural and historical method (allows to study the Italian singers’ scenic activities as a social phenomenon, to identify social factors contributed to the spread of the Italian opera achievements in the local music and theatre environment). Results and discussion. The study of famous Italian singers’ performances on the Kharkiv stage in the definite period allowed highlighting new facts of their biographies, to analyze the concert and opera repertoire, the features of vocal and performing style, acting specifics. The research revealed the place of Kharkiv concert and opera performances in Italian artistes’ touring programs, analyzed the directions and peculiarities of communicative interactions between performers and spectators, determined the Kharkiv performances place in creative biographies of vocalists who have gained European fame. Conclusions. Italian artistes’ performances had a great influence on local opera singers’ professional growth, the formation of musical tastes and preferences of the educated part of the city residents. The investigation of the repertoire of the Italian singers testifies to their desire to acquaint the listener with the best achievements of European opera art, as well as to present contemporary Russian composers’ operas, which, at the time, were getting popularity in the Western European countries, due, primarily, to Italian performers. Kharkiv performances were usually the part of Italian artistes’ tours, being organized in the largest cities of Ukraine and surrounding regions of former Russian Empire – in Odesa, Kyiv, Mykolayiv, Rostov on Don, which testified, in particular, that the city was transformed into one of the European music culture distribution centres then. The high valuation given by the musical critique of the famous singers artistic talents, the active support of their performances by the audience, attest to the utmost importance of the Italians’ touring activity in the Kharkiv musical culture development.

Dr. Miloje Milojevic (1884-1946) was a central figure in Serbian music criticism and academic essays between the World Wars. A large part of his writings on music were dedicated to the issue of the Serbian ?national music style?, its means of expression, and the question of modernity, i. e. to what extent modernity is desirable in the ?national style?. This paper analyzes some twenty articles - reviews, essays, and writings for special occasions - published by Milojevic between 1912 and 1942 in various Serbian newspapers magazines and collections: Srpski knjizevni glasnik (The Serbian Literary Magazine, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1923, 1924, 1935), Prosvetni glasnik (The Educational Herald, 1914, 1921, 1942), Politika (The Politics, 1921, 1922 1923, 1937, 1938, 1940, 1941), Muzika (The Music, twice in 1928) Spomenica-album Udruzenja muzikanata Kraljevine Jugoslavije 1928-1930 (The Commemorative Volume - The Album of the Society of Musicians of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia 1928-1930, 1930), Smena (The Change, 1938), and Slavenska muzika (The Slavonic Music, 1940). In the course of those thirty years Milojevic passionately believed that the future of Serbian music lies in the ?national style?, i.e. in the artistic transformation of anonymous Serbian folk songs and melodies. In spite of the changes of styles that occurred over the years, he never gave up anticipating the appearance of an ingenious composer who would develop the ?national style? to its climax and enrich Serbian music with ?national? symphonies, operas and chamber music. Milojevic was in favour of a ?national style? mainly on principle. He rarely got into a discussion about the stylistic and technical means he considered most suitable for the ?national style?. In his text Nas muzicko umetnicki program (Our music and artistic programme), published in the Serbian Literary Magazine in 1913, and another article, Za folklornu muziku (In favour of Folk Music), published in the Belgrade daily newspaper Politics in 1921, he recommended that Serbian ?national style? composers followed the model of some representatives of the European national schools of romanticism impressionism and moderately modern music. In a special kind of manifesto Za ideju umetnosti i umetnickog nacionalizma kod nas (In favour of the idea of art and artistic nationalism in Serbia), published in 1935 in the Serbian Literary Magazine, he gave an indirect answer to the question of which means of musical expression he preferred in the ?national style?. For example, he singled out the composition Sever duva (North Wind) by Kosta P. Manojlovic (1890-1949), from his collection of choral songs Pesme zemlje Skenderbegove (The Songs from the Land of Skenderbeg, 1933), as an outstanding example of what he meant by ?national style?. This Albanian folk music was transformed into a relatively modern, but yet not avant-garde composition. Therein lies the answer as to what kind of ?national style? Milojevic preferred. An advocate of a moderately modern music language, he wished Serbian art music to use its very rich folk heritage as best as it could. He was well aware that times had changed, and that there was not much inclination towards this style and ideology in the interwar period. However, he never abandoned this idea. Basically, he never accepted more radical, expressionist treatments of folk elements as a solution to the problems of ?national style?. It is also very significant that he never mentioned the name B?la Bart?k in his writings, which is something we analyze in this paper. He was never able to give up romanticism, a style that never had time to fully develop in Serbian music. Serbian folk music was a perfect basis for composing in a romantic style. Nevertheless, due to many unfavourable circumstances in Serbian history, the Serbs became part of European music world only at the beginning of the 20th century, when it was too late to develop a modern romantic national style.

Few are the artists who really triumph in the song, during the first years of life of the cinema, and of the radio, at the beginning of the 20th century. Within the historical context that we will proceed to establish, reference will be made to music, focusing on the copla and flamenco, in the period in which the cinematographic image lacks sound integrated into the film band, being synchronized for years film and album in trade passes. In the early twenties, the most famous singer was none other than Raquel Meller, especially in the field of cuplé, without forgetting Pastora Imperio, who excelled in flamenco. But a new voice would arrive, that of Conchita Piquer. The three artists, versatile where they exist, each one from their place, change the history of cinema by participating in the shootings to which they are summoned. History and even biographers continue to mix dates, titles and formats today. The time has come to put the first years of cinema in order again, now with Conchita Piquer, who is the first Spanish artist to shoot a sound short film outside of Spain. Pocos son los artistas que realmente triunfan en la canción, durante los primeros años de vida del cine, y de la radio, a principios del siglo XX. Dentro del contexto histórico que procederemos a establecer, se realizará referencia a la música, centrándonos en la copla y el flamenco, en el periodo en que la imagen cinematográfica carece de sonido integrado en la banda de película, siendo sincronizado durante años película y disco en los pases comerciales. En los primeros años veinte, la más famosa cantante no es otra que Raquel Meller, sobre todo en el campo del cuplé, sin olvidar a Pastora Imperio, quien destacaba en el flamenco. Pero, llegaría una nueva voz, la de Conchita Piquer. Las tres artistas, polivalentes donde las haya, cada una desde su sitio, cambian la historia del cine al participar en los rodajes a los que son convocadas. La historia e incluso los biógrafos, continúan actualmente entremezclando fechas, títulos y formatos. Ha llegado el momento de poner en orden, nuevamente, los primeros años del cine, ahora con Conchita Piquer, quien es la primera artista española en rodar fuera de España un cortometraje sonoro.

Dear readers, We are pleased to present to you Issue 4, 2022, of the scientific and analytical journal Burganov House. The Space of Culture. Upon the recommendation of the Expert Council of the Higher Attestation Commission, the journal is included in the List of Leading Peer-reviewed Scientific Journals and Publications in which the main scientific results of theses for the academic degrees of doctor and candidate of science must be published. The journal publishes scientific articles by leading specialists in various humanitarian fields, doctoral students, and graduate students. Research areas concern topical problems in multiple areas of culture, art, philology, and linguistics. This versatility of the review reveals the main specificity of the journal, which represents the current state of the cultural space. The journal opens with articles by Chinese researchers devoted to the art of Ancient China. In the article "The Heaven-and-Man Oneness Concept and the Style of Funerary Plastic Art During the Han Dynasty", Xiang Wu analyses the idea of heaven-and-man oneness, which was important for the art of this period. It was based on the Confucian view, the rituals of a strict social hierarchy and Taoist metaphysics. Qiu Mubing’s scientific research topic is “Objects of the Funerary Cult in the Han Dynasty. Gold and Silver Items. Aesthetics of Gold and Silver in the Han Dynasty”. Examining archaeological sources, the author concludes the high achievements of Chinese artisans during the Han Dynasty on examples of works of arts and crafts made of precious metals. In the article “Aesthetics of the Song Dynasty. The Origins of the New Style of Furniture Design in China", N.Kazakova and Qiu Qi analyse the vector of development of the furniture industry through the prism of the industrial design evolution. The reasons for the emergence of the New style in furniture design in China are studied. They are analysed in detail against the background of changing economic, political and cultural realities. The issues of the influence of Ancient China aesthetics on the formation and development of a new language in furniture design are touched upon. In the article "Problems of Colour Harmonisation of Composition and Development of Associative and Imaginative Thinking in the Environmental Design", N.Bogatova reveals the potential of colouristic graphic two-dimensional modelling in artistic and imaginative thematic compositions. On the example of the compositional laws of colouristics, the author traces the path of ascent from the concrete to the abstract, pictorial to the expressive, and emotional to the figurative. P.Dobrolyubov presents the text “Sculptor Alexander Matveev’s School and His Students”, which includes many archival documents and photographs. The author describes the process of learning from teacher and sculptor A.Matveev, names the main dates in his creative work, reveals the details of the sculptural craft, talks about the variety of moves in the master’s plasticity, analyses the methods and principles of work in sculpture, shows the attitude of students to their teacher, and highlights the entire course of historical milestones in the sculptor’s creative biography. In the article "The Golden Age of PRC History Painting (1949–1966): Origins, Searches, Achievements”, K.Gavrilin and L.Xiaonan consider the issues of the formation of the modern Chinese art school. Its foundation was laid in the framework of the creative and educational dialogue between China and the Soviet Union at the beginning of the second half of the 20th century. The authors believe that the characteristic features of the golden age of Chinese historical painting were, on the one hand, the popularisation of painting as an art form and, on the other hand, the predominance of the dominant position of realism over the traditional styles of Chinese painting. It is noted that during this period, two main plots became widespread: scenes of socialist construction and historical events of the revolution. S.Zubarev considers theoretical and practical aspects of the activities of military musicians in the article "Academic Music in the Practice of Russian Military Bands of the 19th - early 21st Centuries". In the process of studying military bands, special attention is paid to the study of the features of military band service development in the 19th and 20th centuries. Factors revealing the role of Russian composers in the history of military musical culture are highlighted, and several works of academic music performed by military bands are analysed. In conclusion, the author notes that in the national culture, unique conditions for the development of military musicians’ arranging activity were created. They made it possible to preserve the traditions of the military band service and form the value principles of academic art. The publication is addressed to professionals specialising in the theory and practice of the fine arts and philology and all those interested in the arts and culture.

The purpose of the article is to provide systematization and synthesis of data concerning the history of the separate directions of musical art in Ukraine in the XX century. Methodology. General scientific methods of research, analytical, typological, semantic, and comparative analysis - are applied to the terminological definition of a conceptual framework of the history of musical art and justification of its theoretical art criticism application. The scientific novelty consists in consideration of musical art in Ukraine in the XX century as a certain welfare community. Conclusions. The article considers the history of certain areas of musical art in Ukraine in the twentieth century. It was established that at the stage of the emergence of musical art in Ukraine, the initial music of a syncretic nature developed. This trend consisted in the fact that music, dance, song, and poetry were in constant unity and, accompanied both ceremonies, rites and rituals, and everyday life. During the twentieth century, Ukrainian music in a significant variety of genres and forms is widespread in our country and beyond. Ukrainian artists actively mastered classical European instrumental genres, including the Baroque suite, chamber sonata, trio, quartet, quintet. It was at this time that the aesthetics of the Art Nouveau era dictated an appeal to the style of impressionism, expressionism, and other directions of Art Nouveau (in association with traditional genres, forms, and means of musical expressiveness). This has had an appropriate impact on the field of music education. The development of Ukrainian professional music is associated with the evolution of Ukrainian statehood, which only in the 20th century received the driving forces for formation. This state dynamics influenced the development of Ukrainian culture (and musical art) as an integrated system that is necessary for the active development of the society of Ukraine and the international community as a whole. Speaking about the interaction following the results of the ХХ century of innovations and traditions (archaics) in the musical art of Ukraine, it should be pointed out that any tradition is an innovation in the past, and any innovation is potentially a tradition in the future. In addition, it is important that novelty and archaic in the composer's work should complement each other. It is through this trend that innovations in musical art differ significantly from innovations in technology, where a return to archaic cannot be considered an innovative development. Keywords: art, music, musical works, music schools, the ХХ century, directions, development innovations.

The invention of Drum has been known to trace thousands of years.However, the drum kit came to exist in the early 20th century. Considering its historical development and our country's popular music history, development of this instrument in Turkey is the starting point of this research. In this study, the cults and playing attitudes that influenced the drummers, the location of drum kit in the studio environment, the set up prefrrences in the band with equipments used will be commented by analysing the data obtained via interviews. Within this framework, questions in 4 main topic have been asked to Osman İşmen and Turhan Yükseler, two of the significant arrangers of the period; Okay Temiz, one of the significant drummers of the period; Cahit Berkay, one of the founders of the band Moğollar; İsmail Soyberk, the bass-guitarist; the drummer Mert Türkmen as the representative of Cezmi Başeğmez. In accoedance with the data obtained, it has been concluded that jazz and rock drummers influenced our country, Anadolu Pop attitude was seen in the playing attitudes and set ups of that period drummers, Studio Hayri and sound technician Sıtkı Acim (tonmeister) rose to prominence in terms of studios where drum records were made, Ludwig drums were used together with Turkish brands in equipments. Keywords: Drum kit, drums, popular music, turkey, drummers, drum playing

This variable describes what kind of concept of culture underlies the cultural coverage at a certain point of time or across time. The variable dissects the concept of culture into cultural forms that are being journalistically covered. It presupposes that each article predominantly focuses on one cultural genre or discipline, such as literature, music, or film, which is the case in most articles in the cultural beat that are written according to cultural journalists’ areas of specialization. By identifying the cultural forms covered, the variable delivers an answer to the question of what kind of culture has been covered, or what kind of culture has been represented. Forms of culture are sometimes also called artistic or cultural disciplines (Jaakkola, 2015) or cultural genres (Purhonen et al., 2019), and cultural classification (Janssen et al., 2011) or cultural hierarchy (Schmutz, 2009). The level of detail varies from study to study, according to the need of knowledge, with some scholars tracing forms of subculture (Schmutz et al., 2010), while others just identify the overall development of major cultural forms (Purhonen et al., 2019; Jaakkola, 2015a). The concepts of culture can roughly be defined as being dominated by high cultural, popular cultural, or everyday cultural forms (Kristensen, 2019). While most culture sections in newspapers are dominated by high culture, and the question is rather about which disciplines, in the operationalization it is not always easy to draw lines between high and popular forms in the postmodern cultural landscape where boundaries are being blurred. Nevertheless, the major forms of culture in the journalistic operationalization of culture are literature, classical music, theatre, and fine arts. As certain forms of culture – such as classical music and opera – are focused on classical high culture, and other forms – such as popular music and comics – represent popular forms, distribution of coverage according to cultural forms may indicate changes in the cultural concept. Field of application/theoretical foundation The question of the concept of culture is a standard question in content analyses on arts and cultural journalism in daily newspapers and cultural magazines, posed by a number of studies conducted in different geographical areas and often with a comparative intent (e.g., Szántó et al., 2004; Janssen, 1999; Reus & Harden, 2005; Janssen et al., 2008; Larsen, 2008; Kõnno et al., 2012; Jaakkola, 2015a, 2015b; Verboord & Janssen, 2015; Purhonen et al., 2019; Widholm et al., 2019). The essence of culture has been theorized in cultural studies, predominantly by Raymond Williams (e.g., 2011), and sociologists of art (Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952). In studying journalistic coverage of arts and culture, the concept of culture reveals the anatomy of coverage and whether the content is targeting a broader audience (inclusive concept of culture) or a narrow audience (exclusive or elitist concept of culture). A prevalent motivation to study the ontological dimension of cultural coverage is also to trace cultural change, which means that the concept of culture is longitudinally studied (Purhonen et al., 2019). References/combination with other methods of data collection Concept of culture often occurs as a variable to trace cultural change. The variable is typically coupled with other variables, mainly with representational means, i.e., the journalistic genre (Jaakkola, 2015), event type (Stegert, 1998), or author gender (Schmutz, 2009; Jaakkola, 2015b). Quantitative content analyses may also be complemented with qualitative analyses (Purhonen et al., 2019). Sample operationalization Cultural forms are separated according to the production structure (journalists and reviewers specializing in one cultural form typically indicate an increase of coverage for that cultural form). At a general level, the concept of culture can be divided into the following cultural forms: literature, music – which is, according to the newsroom specialization typically roughly categorized into classical and popular music – visual arts, theatre, dance, film, design, architecture and built environment, media, comics, cultural politics, cultural history, arts education, and other. Subcategories can be separated according to the interest and level of knowledge. The variable needs to be sensitive towards local features in journalism and culture. Example study Jaakkola (2015b) Information about Jaakkola, 2015 Author: Maarit Jaakkola Research question/research interest: Examination of the cultural concept across time in culture sections of daily newspapers Object of analysis: Articles/text items on culture pages of five major daily newspapers in Finland 1978–2008 (Aamulehti, Helsingin Sanomat, Kaleva, Savon Sanomat, Turun Sanomat) Timeframe of analysis: 1978–2008, consecutive sample of weeks 7 and 42 in five year intervals (1978, 1983, 1988, 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008) Info about variable Variable name/definition: Concept of culture Unit of analysis: Article/text item Values: Cultural form Description 1. Fiction literature Fiction books: fictional genres such as poetry, literary novels, thrillers, detective novels, children’s literature, etc. 2. Non-fiction literature Non-fiction books: non-fictional genres such as textbooks, memoirs, encyclopedias, etc. 3. Classical music Music of more high-cultural character, such as symphonic music, chamber music, opera, etc. 4. Popular music Music of more popular character, such as pop, rock, hip-hop, folk music, etc. 5. Visual arts Fine arts: painting, drawing, graphical art, sculpture, media art, photography, etc. 6. Theatre Scene art, including musicals (if not treated as music, i.e. in coverage of concerts and albums) 7. Dance Scene art, including ballet (if not treated as music, .e. in coverage of concerts and albums) 8. Film Cinema: fiction, documentary, experimental film, etc. 9. Design Design of artefacts, jewelry, fashion, interiors, graphics, etc. 10. Architecture Design, aesthetics, and planning of built environment 11. Media Television, journalism, Internet, games, etc. 12. Comics Illustrated periodicals 13. Cultural politics Policies, politics, and administration concerning arts and culture in general 14. Cultural history Historical issues and phenomena 15. Education Educational issues concerning different cultural disciplines 16. Other Miscellaneous minor categories, e.g., lifestyle issues (celebrity, gossip, everyday cultural issues), and larger categories developed from within the material can be separated into values of their own Scale: nominal Intercoder reliability: Cohen's kappa > 0.76 (two coders) References Jaakkola, M. (2015a). The contested autonomy of arts and journalism: Change and continuity in the dual professionalism of cultural journalism. Tampere: Tampere University Press. Jaakkola, M. (2015b). Outsourcing views, developing news: Changes of art criticism in Finnish dailies, 1978–2008. Journalism Studies, 16(3), 383–402. Janssen, S. (1999). Art journalism and cultural change: The coverage of the arts in Dutch newspapers 1965–1990. Poetics 26(5–6), 329–348. Janssen, S., Kuipers, G., & Verboord, M. (2008). Cultural globalization and arts journalism: The international orientation of arts and culture coverage in Dutch, French, German, and U.S. newspapers, 1955 to 2005. American Sociological Review, 73(5), 719–740. Janssen, S., Verboord, M., & Kuipers, G. (2011). Comparing cultural classification: High and popular arts in European and U.S. elite newspapers. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 63(51), 139–168. Kõnno, A., Aljas, A., Lõhmus, M., & Kõuts, R. (2012). The centrality of culture in the 20th century Estonian press: A longitudinal study in comparison with Finland and Russia. Nordicom Review, 33(2), 103–117. Kristensen, N. N. (2019). Arts, culture and entertainment coverage. In T. P. Vos & F. Hanusch (Eds.), The international encyclopedia of journalism studies. Wiley-Blackwell. Kroeber, A. L., & Kluckhohn, C. (1952). Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions. Meridian Books. Larsen, L. O. (2008). Forskyvninger. Kulturdekningen i norske dagsaviser 1964–2005 [Displacements: Cultural coverage in Norwegian dailies 1964–2005]. In K. Knapskog & L.O. Larsen (Eds.), Kulturjournalistikk: pressen og den kulturelle offentligheten (pp. 283–329). Scandinavian Academic Press. Purhonen, S., Heikkilä, R., Karademir Hazir, I., Lauronen, T., Rodríguez, C. F., & Gronow, J. (2019). Enter culture, exit arts? The transformation of cultural hierarchies in European newspaper culture sections, 1960–2010. Routledge. Reus, G., & Harden, L. (2005). Politische ”Kultur”: Eine Längsschnittanalyse des Zeitungsfeuilletons von 1983 bis 2003 [Political ‘culture’: A longitudinal analysis of culture pages, 1983–2003]. Publizistik, 50(2), 153–172. Schmutz, V. (2009). Social and symbolic boundaries in newspaper coverage of music, 1955–2005: Gender and genre in the US, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Poetics, 37(4), 298–314. Schmutz, V., van Venrooij, A., Janssen, S., & Verboord, M. (2010). Change and continuity in newspaper coverage of popular music since 1955: Evidence from the United States, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Popular Music and Society, 33(4), 505–515. Stegert, G. (1998). Feuilleton für alle: Strategien im Kulturjournalismus der Presse [Feuilleton for all: Strategies in cultural journalism of the daily press]. Max Niemeyer Verlag. Szántó, A., Levy, D. S., & Tyndall, A. (Eds.). (2004). Reporting the arts II: News coverage of arts and culture in America. National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP). Verboord, M., & Janssen, J. (2015). Arts journalism and its packaging in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States, 1955–2005. Journalism Practice, 9(6), 829–852. Widholm, A., Riegert, K., & Roosvall, A. (2019). Abundance or crisis? Transformations in the media ecology of Swedish cultural journalism over four decades. Journalism. Advance online publication August, 6. Journalism. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884919866077 Williams, R. (2011). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. Routledge. (Original work published 1976).

It is peculiar that we so urgently seek out the emotion of fear in film. We have a thirst for fear, and we go to elaborate means to experience it. It would be convenient if we could invoke the experience of fear without the apparatus of a cinema, but such intermediaries are necessary. We cannot will ourselves to be afraid. To evoke an emotion, we must organize our environment -- or invoke mental images of such an environment -- which then triggers the emotion. One of the great discoveries of the 20th century was the powerful effect of combining film with musical representations of emotion. It is possible to combine these two media in a way that reflects no naturally occurring visual-auditory correlation, such as the correlation between the sight and sound of a person running. That two such distinct media should combine so readily may seem puzzling. Background music is not part of the diegesis of the film and has the potential to create confusion (Cohen, 2). This potential was illustrated in Mel Brooks' comedy Blazing Saddles (1974). A sheriff rides in the desert set to suitable background music, but then meets the Count Basie Band performing the now foreground music. The music, initially interpreted on a subconscious or emotional level, is unexpectedly thrust into the fictional component of the film and processed on a conscious level. Such exceptions aside, there is usually no such confusion because film and music are integrated on an emotional rather than an analytic level. Fear responses do not require brain structures needed for consciousness and analytic thought but can be processed without conscious awareness by subcortical structures (i.e., the amygdala). A frightening score that is not part of the diegesis of the film combines with visual information at sub-cortical levels to create a unified experience of fear, with no sense that there are two sources of emotional meaning -- fictional and musical. The lack of literal connection between visual and auditory sources is not confusing. We do not question the logic of musicians playing triumphant music at every battle in Star Wars, or sentimental music inside the police station on Hill Street Blues. The combination of film and music is exceptionally potent because both are highly influential media. Economic activity reflects their influence (Huron, 3). In the United States, the largest export sector is entertainment, led by music and film. Film makers are so confident that they invest billions of dollars in them. In 1999 the average budget for a single Hollywood film was 76 million. The prevalence of music in industrialized society is also massive: the music industry is larger than the pharmaceutical industry. As a film composer, I've learned that I can induce fear most readily by turning my attention away from conventional music structures. In an important sense, writing fearful music should not involve composition in the usual sense of the term. Rather, one may rely on the fact that sound is inherently frightening when stripped of the comforting structuring properties of language and music. It is difficult to express fear using conventional forms. Fear is sometimes expressed in Opera but using unconventional forms. Fear is also associated with the bhayanaka rasa in Classical Indian music, but evidence suggests that sensitivity to rasas is related to basic acoustic properties such as pace, loudness, and complexity (Balkwill & Thompson, 1). The major and minor modes in Western music are associated with happiness and sadness, but the evocation of fear seems antithetical to such conventions. When music is recognizable, as in a melody with a traditional harmonic accompaniment, we experience reassurance. Conventional music evokes a comforting feeling that we are "among our own" and there is safety in numbers. The possibility of fear arises when familiar music structures are removed. It is certainly possible to create a creepy atmosphere using traditional forms by repeatedly pairing a musical segment with a frightening image or event. Such learned associations are used in the practice of leitmotiv, in which a musical theme is paired repeatedly with a character until it comes to represent that character. Consider Mike Oldfield's circular melody in The Exorcist or Beethoven's ninth symphony in A Clockwork Orange. Through learned association, both scores created extremely disturbing atmospheres. The most effective way to induce terror, however, is to manipulate basic acoustic properties, also called secondary musical parameters. Primary parameters include melody and harmony: aspects of music that are culturally shaped and recognizable as traditional forms. Secondary parameters include pace, loudness, timbre, and pitch height: elements of sound that are perceived similarly across cultures. The use of musical convention is deeply connected with one's emotional intention. We create fear most powerfully by stripping music of conventional forms. Composers aiming to design a fearful score often import and embed frightening sounds into traditional compositional structures, such as a melody with harmonic accompaniment. They do this as a musical challenge or out of concern that their score might otherwise be perceived as unsophisticated. What evokes fear, however, are not those recognizable conventions of composition but rather, elements of the score that are unrelated to conventional structures. We fear surprising or unfamiliar sounds: sudden changes in loudness, jittery sounds, deep hollow textures, and unpredictable pitch combinations or movement. Sounds are more frightening than visual images, and hence soundtracks are essential to thriller flicks. Visual images are experienced as "out there" and emotionally distant. We've learned to detach ourselves emotionally from visual images by habituating to the continuous stream of horrifying TV and film images. When we actually witness a terrifying event, it seems "like a movie." Sounds are experienced as both outside and inside our heads. We feel sound in our bones, making it difficult to distance ourselves from them. They are less easily localized than visual images, creating nervousness about possible escape routes. Their sources are not always identifiable, creating uncertainty. Prey rely heavily on sounds to alert them of predators, linking sound to fear. The fear centre of the brain -- the amygdala -- lies deep inside the temporal lobe, which processes sound (LeDoux, 4). From an evolutionary standpoint, we can assume that humans, like all animals, evolved a sensitivity to the potential dangers associated with sounds. Brain systems that generate fear are highly conserved throughout evolutionary history, suggesting that fear responses in modern brains are similar to fear responses in early hominids. Large, aggressive, or unfamiliar animals are potentially life-threatening and it is adaptive for us to fear them. Low pitches are associated with large sound-producing cavities and hence, animals with big mouths. Loud low-pitched sounds signal aggression. High-pitched screeches are perceived as alarm calls. During the stabbing scene in the film Psycho, repeated screeching sounds or "alarm-calls" combine with the visual scene to induce excruciating fear. In industrialized society, fear of predation is largely non-existent, replaced with a fear of our own technology: car and airplane accidents, nuclear disasters, weapons. But fear responses today are the result of adaptive pressures that took place thousands of years ago when predation was a constant threat. We are acutely sensitive to alarm calls and predatory sounds. When predators of humans are portrayed in film, as in Jaws or Jurassic Park, the experience of fear is unbearable. Why do we so urgently seek out this unpleasant emotion? One possibility relates to social cohesion. Group solidarity is enhanced when there is a common enemy. The object of fear in film distinguishes "us against them" and secures a bond between those experiencing the terror. The representation of fear identifies an enemy (the object of fear) to enhance solidarity. Teenagers -- who have the greatest need for social bonding and self definition -- are voracious consumers of terror films. Shared experiences of film-induced fear are extremely widespread. In the week ending May 28th, 2000, there were over 3,100 screening of Gladiator in the United States. America dominates the world market in film and music (only India has resisted this domination). For better or worse, Hollywood emotions are globally shared. People from Japan, China, Italy, Spain, and Brazil have a common bond on the basis of having seen The Matrix or The Exorcist. Fear in film also performs another function. Films are externalized representations of cultural memory, and of culturally significant or meaningful experiences. They are a mechanism for accumulating and transmitting knowledge of the environment, preparing ourselves for circumstances in which we might find ourselves. Terror films stimulate the development of cognitive strategies for coping with challenging circumstances. All of us -- teenagers especially -- feel a need to prepare ourselves for hostile environments. Terror films not only nurture social bonding, they motivate the refinement of an essential human trait: courage. By situating ourselves within an environment that presents various hypothetical sources of terror, we test our courage, and we activate the development of important strategies for coping with the very real fears with which we will inevitably be confronted. References Balkwill, L.L. & Thompson, W.F. "A cross-cultural investigation of the perception of emotion in music: Psychophysical and cultural cues." Music Perception, 17, 43-64, 1999. Cohen, A. "Music as a source of emotion in film." In Patrik Juslin & John Sloboda (Ed.) Music and Emotion: Theory and Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Huron, D. "Is music an evolutionary adaptation?" In Robert Zatorre & Isabelle Peretz (Ed.), The Biological Foundations of Music. New York: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 930. New York, 2001. LeDoux, J. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. New York: Touchstone, 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Thompson, Bill. "Evoking Terror In Film Scores" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.1 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/evoking.php>. Chicago Style Thompson, Bill, "Evoking Terror In Film Scores" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/evoking.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Thompson, Bill. (2002) Evoking Terror In Film Scores. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(1). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/evoking.php> ([your date of access]).

Now in its thirtieth season, in 2018, The Simpsons is a popular culture phenomenon. The series is known as much for its social commentary as its humour and celebrity appearances. Nonetheless, The Simpsons’ ratings have declined steadily since the early 2000s, and fans have grown more vocal in their calls for the program’s end. This article provides a case study of episode “That 90s Show” (S19, E11) as a flashpoint that exemplifies fan desires for the series’ conclusion. This episode is one of the most contentious in the program’s history, with online outrage at the retconning of canon and both fans and anti-fans (Gray) of The Simpsons demanding its cancellation or “fan euthanasia”. The retconning of the canon in this episode makes evident the perceived decline in the quality of the series, and the regard for fan desires. “That 90s Show” is ultimately a failed attempt to demonstrate the continued relevance of the series to audiences, and popular culture at large, via its appeal to 1990s nostalgia.“That 90s Show”“That 90s Show” begins with Bart and Lisa’s discovery of Marge’s Springfield University diploma. This small incident indicates an impending timeline shift and “retcon”; canonically Marge never attended college, having fallen pregnant with Bart shortly after completing high school. The episode then offers an extended flashback to Marge and Homer’s life in the 1990s. The couple are living together in the Springfield Place apartment complex, with Homer working a variety of menial jobs to support Marge while she attends college. Homer and Marge subsequently break up, and Marge begins to date Professor Stephan August. In his despair, Homer can no longer perform R & B ballads with his ensemble. The band changes genres, and their new incarnation, Sadgasm, are soon credited with initiating the grunge movement. Sadgasm gain worldwide fame for their songs “Margerine” (a version of “Glycerine” by Bush), and “Politically Incorrect/Shave Me” (set to the melody of “Rape Me” by Nirvana) – which is later parodied in the episode by guest star Weird Al Yankovic as “BrainFreeze”. Homer develops an addiction to oversized, sweetened Starbucks coffee, and later, insulin, becoming a recluse despite the legion of fans camped out on his front lawn.Marge and Professor August soon part company due to his rejection of heteronormative marriage rituals. Upon her return to campus, Marge observes an MTV report on Sadgasm’s split, and Homer’s addiction, and rushes to Homer’s bedside to help him through recovery. Marge and Homer resume their relationship, and the grunge movement ends because Homer claims he “was too happy to ever grunge again.”While the episode rates a reasonable 6.1 on IMDB, fan criticism has largely focused on the premise of the episode, and what has been perceived to be the needless retconning of The Simpsons canon. Critic Robert Canning notes: “…what ‘That 90s Show’ did was neither cool nor interesting. Instead, it insulted lifelong Simpsons fans everywhere. With this episode, the writers chose to change the history of the Simpson family.” Canning observes that the episode could have worked if the flashback had been to the 1980s which supports canonicity, rather than a complete “retcon”. The term “retcon” (retroactive continuity) originates from narrative devices used in North American superhero comics, and is now broadly applied to fictional narrative universes. Andrew Friedenthal (10-11) describes retconning as “… a revision of the fictional universe in order to make the universe fresh and exciting for contemporary readers, but it also involves the influence of the past, as it directly inscribes itself upon that past.” While Amy Davis, Jemma Gilboy and James Zborowski (175-188) have highlighted floating timelines as a feature of long running animation series’ where characters remain the same age, The Simpsons does not fully adhere to this trope: “… one of the ‘rules’ of the ‘comic-book time’ or ‘floating timeline’ trope is that ‘you never refer to specific dates’… a restriction The Simpsons occasionally eschews” (Davis, Gilboy, and Zborowski 177).For many fans, “That 90s Show” becomes abstruse by erasing Marge and Homer’s well-established back story from “The Way We Was” (S2, E12). In the established narrative, Marge and Homer had met, fell in love and graduated High School in 1974; shortly after Marge fell pregnant with Bart, resulting in the couple’s shotgun wedding. “That 90s Show” disregards the pre-existing timeline, extending their courtship past high school and adding the couple’s breakup, and Homer’s improbable invention of grunge. Fan responses to “That 90s Show” highlight this episode of The Simpsons as a flashpoint for the sharp decline of quality in the series (despite having long since “jumped the shark”); but also, a decline in regard for the desires of fans. Thus, “That 90s Show” fails not only in rewriting its canon, and inserting the narrative into the 1990s; it also fails to satiate its loyal audience by insisting upon its centrality to 1990s pop culture.While fans have been vocal in online forums about the shift in the canon, they have also reflected upon the tone-deaf portrayal of the 1990s itself. During the course of the episode many 90s trends are introduced, the most contentious of which is Homer’s invention of grunge with his band Sadgasm. While playing a gig at Springfield University a young man in the audience makes a frantic phone call, shouting over the music: “Kurt, it’s Marvin. Your cousin, Marvin Cobain. You know that new sound you’re looking for…?,” thrusting the receiver towards the stage. The link to Nirvana firmly established, the remainder of the episode connects Homer’s depression and musical expression more and more blatantly to Kurt Cobain’s biography, culminating in Homer’s seclusion and near-overdose on insulin. Fans have openly debated the appropriateness of this narrative, and whether it is disrespectful to Cobain’s legacy (see Amato). Henry Jenkins (41) has described this type of debate as a kind of “moral economy” where fans “cast themselves not as poachers but as loyalists, rescuing essential elements of the primary text ‘misused’ by those who maintain copyright control over the program materials.” In this example, many original fans of The Simpsons felt the desire to rescue both Cobain’s and The Simpsons’ legacy from a poorly thought-out retcon seen to damage the legacy of both.While other trends associated with the 90s (Seinfeld; Beanie babies; Weird Al Yankovic; Starbucks; MTV VJs) all feature, it is Homer’s supposed invention of grunge which most overtly attempts to rewrite the 90s and reaffirm The Simpsons’ centrality to 90s pop culture. As the rest of this article will discuss, by rewriting the canon, and the 1990s, “That 90s Show” has two unrealised goals— firstly, to captivate an audience who have grown up with The Simpsons, via an appeal to nostalgia; and secondly, inserting themselves into the 1990s as an effort to prove the series’ relevance to a new generation of audience members who were born during that decade, and who have a nostalgic craving for the media texts of their childhood (Atkinson). Thus, this episode is indicative of fan movement towards an anti-fan position, by demanding the series’ end, or “fan euthanasia” (Williams 106; Booth 75-86) and exposing the “… dynamic spectrum of emotional reactions that fandom can generate” (Booth 76-77).“Worst. Episode. Ever”: Why “That 90s Show” FailedThe failure of “That 90s Show” can be framed in terms of audience reception— namely the response of original audience members objecting to the retconning of The Simpsons’ canon. Rather than appealing to a sense of nostalgia among the audience, “That 90s Show” seems only to suggest that the best episodes of The Simpsons aired before the end of the 1990s. Online forums devoted to The Simpsons concur that the series was at its peak between Seasons 1-10 (1989-1999), and that subsequent seasons have failed to match that standard. British podcaster Sol Harris spent four months in 2017 watching, rating, and charting The Simpsons’ declining quality (Kostarelis), with the conclusion that series’ downfall began from Season 11 onwards (despite a brief spike following The Simpsons Movie (2007)). Any series that aired on television post-1999 has been described as “Zombie Simpsons” by fans on the Dead Homer Society forum: “a hopelessly mediocre imitation that bears only a superficial resemblance to the original. It is the unwanted sequel, the stale spinoff, the creative dry hole that is kept pumping in the endless search for more money. It is Zombie Simpsons” (Sweatpants). It is essential to acknowledge the role of economics in the continuation of The Simpsons, particularly in terms of the series’ affiliation with the Fox Network. The Simpsons was the first series screened on Fox to reach the Top 30 programs in the US, and despite its overall decline, it is still one of the highest rating programs for the 18-49 demographic, enabling Fox to charge advertisers accordingly for a so-called “safe” slot (Berg). During its run, it has been estimated variously that Fox has been building towards a separate Simpsons cable channel, thus the consistent demand for new content; and, that the series has earned in excess of $4.6 billion for Fox in merchandising alone (Berg). Laura Bradley outlines how the legacy of The Simpsons beyond Season 30 has been complicated by the ongoing negotiations for Disney to buy 20th Century Fox – under these arrangements, The Simpsons would likely be screened on ABC or Hulu, should Disney continue producing the series (Bradley). Bradley emphasises the desire for fan euthanasia of the Zombie Simpsons, positing that “the series itself could end at Season 30, which is what most fans of the show’s long-gone original iteration would probably prefer.”While more generous fans expand the ‘Golden Age’ of The Simpsons to Season 12 (Power), the Dead Homer Society argues that their Zombie Simpsons theory is proven by the rise of “Jerkass Homer”, where Homer’s character changed from delightful doofus to cruel and destructive idiot (Sweatpants; Holland). The rise of Jerkass Homer coincides with the moment where Chris Plante claims The Simpsons “jumped the shark”. The term “jumping the shark” refers to the peak of a series before its inevitable, and often sharp, decline (Plante). In The Simpsons, this moment has been variously debated as occurring during S8, E23 “Homer’s Enemy” (Plante), or more popularly, S9, E2 “The Principle and the Pauper” (Chappell; Cinematic) – which like “That 90s Show”, received a vitriolic response for its attempt to retcon the series’ narrative history. “The Principal and the Pauper” focuses on Principal Skinner, and the revelation that he had assumed the identity of his (presumed dead during the Vietnam War) Army Sergeant, Seymour Skinner. The man we have known as Skinner is revealed to be “no-good-nik” Armin Tanzarian. This episode is loathed not only by audiences, but in hindsight, The Simpsons’ creative team. Voice actor Harry Shearer was scathing in his assessment:You’re taking something that an audience has built eight years or nine years of investment in and just tossed it in the trash can for no good reason, for a story we’ve done before with other characters. It’s so arbitrary and gratuitous, and it’s disrespectful to the audience. (Wilonsky)The retcon present in both “That 90s Show” and “The Principal and the Pauper” proves that long-term fans of The Simpsons have been forgotten in Groening’s quest to reach the pinnacle of television longevity. On this basis, it is unsurprising that fans have been demanding the end of the series since the turn of the millennium.As a result, fans such as the Dead Homer Society maintain a nostalgic longing for the Golden Age of The Simpsons, while actively campaigning for the program’s cancellation, a practice typically associated with anti-fans. Jonathan Gray coined the term “anti fan” to describe “… the active and vocal dislike or hate of a program, genre, or personality (841). For Gray, the study of anti-fans emphasises that the hatred of a text can “… produce just as much activity, identification, meaning, and ‘effects’ or serve just as powerfully to unite and sustain a community or subculture” (841). Gray also stresses the discourse of morality used by anti-fans to validate their reading position, particularly against texts that are broadly popular. This argument is developed further by Jenkins and Paul Booth.“Just Pick a Dead End, and Chill Out till You Die”: Fan EuthanasiaWhile some fans of The Simpsons have moved towards anti-fan practices (active hatred of the series, and/or a refusal to watch the show), many more occupy a “middle-ground”, pleading for a form of “fan euthanasia”; where fans call for their once loved object (and by extension, themselves) to “be put out of its misery” (Booth 76). The shifting relationship of fans of The Simpsons represents an “affective continuum”, where “… fan dissatisfaction arises not because they hate a show, but because they feel betrayed by a show they once loved. Their love of a text has waned, and now they find themselves wishing for a quick end to, a revaluation of, something that no longer lives up to the high standard they once valued” (Booth 78). While calls to end The Simpsons have existing since the end of the Golden Age, other fans (Ramaswamy) have suggested it is more difficult to pinpoint when The Simpsons lost its way. Despite airing well after the Golden Age, “That 90s Show” represents a flashpoint for fans who read the retcon as “… an insult to life-long Simpsons fans everywhere… it’s an episode that rewrites history… for the worse” (Canning). In attempting to appeal to the 90s nostalgia of original fans, ‘That 90s Show’ had the opposite effect; it instead reaffirms the sharp decline of the series since its Golden Age, which ended in the 1990s.Shifting the floating timeline of The Simpsons into the 1990s and overturning the canon to appeal to a new generation is dubious for several reasons. While it is likely that original viewers of The Simpsons (their parents) may have exposed their children to the series, the program’s relevance to Millennials is questionable. In 2015, Todd Schneider data mapped audience ratings for Seasons 1-27, concluding that there has been an 80% decline in viewership between Season 2 (which averaged at over 20 million American viewers per episode) to Season 27 (which averaged at less than 5 million viewers per episode). With the growth of SVOD services during The Simpsons’ run, and the sheer duration of the series, it is perhaps obvious to point out the reduced cultural impact of the program, particularly for younger generations. Secondly, “That 90s Show’s” appeal to nostalgia raises the question of whom nostalgia for the 1990s is aimed at. Atkinson argues that children born in the 1990s feel nostalgia for the era becausewe're emotionally invested in the entertainment from that decade because back then, with limited access to every album/TV show/film ever, the ones you did own meant absolutely everything. These were the last pop-culture remnants from that age when the internet existed without being all-consuming. … no wonder we still 'ship them so hard.Following this argument, if you watched The Simpsons as a child during the 1990s, the nostalgia you feel would be, like your parents, for the Golden Age of The Simpsons, rather than the pale imitation featured in “That 90s Show”. As Alexander Fury writes of the 90s: “perhaps the most important message … in the 90s was the idea of authenticity;” thus, if the children of the 90s are watching The Simpsons, they would look to Seasons 1-10 – when The Simpsons was an authentic representation of ‘90s popular culture.Holland has observed that The Simpsons endures “in part due to the way it adapts and responds to events around it”, citing the recent release of clips responding to current events – including Homer attempting to vote; and Trump’s tenure in the White House (Brockington). Yet the failure of “That 90s Show” marks not only The Simpsons increasingly futile efforts to appeal to a “liberal audience” by responding to contemporary political discourse. The failure to adapt is most notable in Hari Kondabolu’s documentary The Problem With Apu which targeted racist stereotypes, and The Simpsons’ poorly considered response episode (S29, E 15) “No Good Read Goes Unpunished”, the latter of which featured an image of Apu signed with Bart’s catchphrase, “Don’t have a cow, man” (Harmon). Groening has remained staunch, insisting that “it’s a time in our culture where people love to pretend they’re offended”, and that the show “speaks for itself” (Keveney). Groening’s statement was followed by the absence of Apu from the current season (Snierson), and rumours that he would be removed from future storylines (Culbertson).“They’ll Never Stop The Simpsons”The case study of The Simpsons episode “That 90s Show” demonstrates the “affective continuum” occupied at various moments in a fan’s relationship with a text (Booth). To the displeasure of fans, their once loved object has frequently retconned canon to capitalise on popular culture trends such as nostalgia for the 1990s. This episode demonstrates the failure of this strategy, as it both alienated the original fan base, and represented what many fans have perceived to be a sharp decline in The Simpsons’ quality. Arguably the relevance of The Simpsons might also remain in the 1990s. Certainly, the recent questioning of issues regarding representations of race, negative press coverage, and the producers’ feeble response, increases the weight of fan calls to end The Simpsons after Season 30. As they sang in S13, E17, perhaps “[We’ll] Never Stop The Simpsons”, but equally, we may have reached the tipping point where audiences have stopped paying attention.ReferencesAmato, Mike. “411: ‘That 90s Show.” Me Blog Write Good. 12 Dec. 2012. 2 Oct. 2018 <https://meblogwritegood.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/411-that-90s-show/>.Atkinson, S. “Why 90s Kids Can’t Get over the 90s and Are Still So Nostalgic for the Decade.” Bustle. 14 Apr. 2018. 28 Sep. 2018 <https://www.bustle.com/p/why-90s-kids-cant-get-over-the-90s-are-still-so-nostalgic-for-the-decade-56354>.Berg, Madeline. “The Simpsons Signs Renewal Deal for the Record Books.” Forbes. 4 Nov. 2016. 20 Nov. 2018 <https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2016/11/04/the-simpsons-signs-renewal-deal-for-the-record-books/#264a50b61b21>.Booth, Paul. “Fan Euthanasia: A Thin Line between Love and Hate.” Everybody Hurts: Transitions, Endings, and Resurrections in Fan Cultures. Ed. Rebecca Williams. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018. 75-86.Bradley, Laura. “What Disney and Comcast’s Battle over Fox Means for Film and TV Fans.” Vanity Fair. 14 June 2018. 20 Nov. 2018 <https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/06/comcast-fox-bid-disney-merger-tv-film-future-explainer>.Brockington, Ariana. “Donald Trump Reconsiders His Life in Simpsons Video ‘A Tale of Two Trumps.” Variety. 23 Mar. 2018. 28 Sep. 2018 <https://variety.com/2018/politics/news/the-simpsons-donald-trump-a-tale-of-two-trumps-1202735526/>.Canning, Robert. “The Simpsons: ‘That 90s Show’ Review.” 28 Jan. 2008. 2 Oct. 2018 <https://au.ign.com/articles/2008/01/28/the-simpsons-that-90s-show-review>.Chappell, Les. “The Simpsons (Classic): ‘The Principal and the Pauper’.” AV Club. 28 June 2015. 20 Nov. 2018 <https://tv.avclub.com/the-simpsons-classic-the-principal-and-the-pauper-1798184317>.Cinematic. “The Principal and the Pauper: The Fall of The Simpsons.” 15 Aug. 2012. 20 Nov. 2018 <https://cinematicfilmblog.com/2012/08/15/the-principal-and-the-pauper-the-fall-of-the-simpsons/>.Culbertson, Alix. “The Simpsons Producer Responds to Apu Controversy.” Sky News. 30 Oct. 2018. 20 Nov. 2018 <https://news.sky.com/story/the-simpsons-indian-character-apu-axed-after-racial-controversy-11537982>.Davis, Amy M., Jemma Gilboy, and James Zborowski. “How Time Works in The Simpsons.” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 10.3 (2015): 175-188.Friedenthal, Andrew. Retcon Game: Retroactive Continuity and the Hyperlinking of America. USA: University Press of Mississippi, 2017.Fury, Alexander. “The Return of the ‘90s.” New York Times. 13 July 2016. 28 Sep. 2018. <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/t-magazine/fashion/90s-fashion-revival.html>.Gray, Jonathan. “Antifandom and the Moral Text: Television without Pity and Textual Dislike.” American Behavioral Scientist 48.7 (2005): 840-858.Harmon, Steph. “‘Don’t Have a Cow’: The Simpsons Response to Apu Racism Row Criticised as ‘Toothless’.” The Guardian. 10 Apr. 2018. 28 Sep. 2018 <https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/apr/10/dont-have-a-cow-the-simpsons-response-to-apu-racism-row-criticised-as-toothless>.Holland, Travis. “Why The Simpsons Lost Its Way.” The Conversation. 3 Nov. 2016. 28 Sep. 2018. <https://theconversation.com/why-the-simpsons-has-lost-its-way-67845>.IMDB. “The Simpsons – That 90s Show.” 2 Oct. 2018 <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1166961/>.Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: NYU P, 2006.Keveney, Bill. “The Simpsons Exclusive: Matt Groening (Mostly) Remembers the Show’s Record 636 Episodes.” USA Today. 27 Apr. 2018. 20 Nov. 2018 <https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2018/04/27/thesimpsons-matt-groening-new-record-fox-animated-series/524581002/>.Kostarelis, Stefan. “This Genius Chart That Tracks the Decline in The Simpsons Is Too Real”. Techly. 21 July 2017. 2 Oct. 2018 <https://www.techly.com.au/2017/07/21/british-man-binges-all-simpsons-episodes-in-a-month-charts-decline-in-shows-quality/>.Plante, Chris. “The Simpsons Jumped the Shark in One of Its Best Episodes”. The Verge. 22 Aug. 2014. 20 Nov. 2018 <https://www.theverge.com/2014/8/22/6056915/frank-grimes-the-simpsons-jump-the-shark>.Power, Kevin. “I Watched All 629 Episodes of The Simpsons in a Month. Here’s What I Learned.” Antihuman. 9 Feb. 2018. 1 Oct. 2018 <https://antihumansite.wordpress.com/2018/02/09/i-watched-all-629-episodes-of-the-simpsons-in-a-month-heres-what-i-learned/>.Rabin, Nathan, and Steven Hyden. “Crosstalk: Is It Time for The Simpsons to Call It a Day?” AV Club. 26 July 2007. 20 Nov. 2018 <https://tv.avclub.com/crosstalk-is-it-time-for-the-simpsons-to-call-it-a-day-1798211912>.Ramaswarmy, Chitra. “When Good TV Goes Bad: How The Simpsons Ended Up Gorging on Itself.” The Guardian. 24 Apr. 2017. 28 Sep. 2018 <https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/apr/24/jump-the-shark-when-good-tv-goes-bad-the-simpsons>.Schneider, Todd. “The Simpsons by the Data.” Todd W. Schneider’s Home Page. 2015. 28 Sep. 2018 <http://toddwschneider.com/posts/the-simpsons-by-the-data/>.Snierson, Dan. “Simpsons Showrunner on Homer’s ‘Cheating’ on Marge, RuPaul’s Guest Spot, Apu Controversy”. Entertainment Weekly. 28 Sep. 2018. 26 Nov. 2018 <https://ew.com/tv/2018/09/28/simpsons-showrunner-season-30-preview/>.Sweatpants, Charlie. “Zombie Simpsons: How the Best Show Ever Became the Broadcasting Undead.” Dead Homer Society. 28 Sep. 2018 <https://deadhomersociety.com/zombiesimpsons/>.Williams, Rebecca. Post-Object Fandom: Television, Identity, and Self-Narrative. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015.

Nearly 50 years on from Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1971), contemporary society finds itself navigating the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This era has been described as the convergence of digitisation, robotics, artificial intelligence, globalisation—and speed (Johannessen). As such, temporality is taking on a turbulent and elusive edge. In the previous century, Toffler highlighted that technological change accelerated perceptions of time, and he predicted that by the 21st century, people would find it “increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterises our time”, where change would come about “with waves of ever accelerating speed and unprecedented impact” (18). While Toffler could not have predicted the exact nature and detail of the specificities of day-to-day life in 2019, we suggest Toffler’s characterisation marks an insightful ‘jumping off’ point for further introspection. With Toffler’s concerns in mind, this issue of M/C Journal is interested in multiple ways that digital media influences and expresses conceptions of temporality in this historical period, the final weeks of 2019. On the basis of the pieces that comprise this issue, we take this concern further to politicise the temporal figurations of media, which we propose permeate all aspects of contemporary experience. Theoretically, this position pays homage to the work performed by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin more than two decades ago. In 1996, Bolter and Grusin ruminated on the “the wire”, a fictional device that was the central focus of the film Strange Days (1995), a media gadget that could mediate experience from one subject to another, “pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex” (311). For Bolter and Grusin, ‘the wire’ epitomised contemporary culture’s movement toward virtual reality, “with its goal of unmediated visual and aural experience” and they suggested that the film provided a critique of the historical mode “in which digital technologies are proliferating faster than our cultural, legal, or educational institutions can keep up with them” (313). For us, perhaps even more urgently, the wire epitomises the colonisation, infiltration and permeation of the production of temporal layers through media systems and devices into the subject’s direct experience. The wire symbolises, among many things, a simulation of the terrain of time according to the Jorge Luis Borges fable, that is, one-for-one.Contingent upon new shifts, and the academic literature which has sought to critique them thus far, in this editorial, we raise the contention that the technologies and operations of power brought about through the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and its media apparatus, have exposed the subject to a multiplicity of timescapes. In doing so, these configurations have finally colonised subjective experience of time and temporality.Consequently, we have specifically featured a broad selection of articles that explore and discuss the presence of online, mobile, or streamed media as the primary means through which culture understands, expresses, and communicates the world, and ideas around temporality. The articles featured herein explore the ways in which constructs of time organise (and are organised by) other constructs such as; neoliberalism (Bianchino), relaxation (Pont), clocks (Cambpell), surveillance, biopower, narrative (Glitsos), monetisation (Grandinetti), memorialising (Wishart), time travel (Michael), utopias and dystopias (Herb). Through the spectrum of topics, we hope to elucidate to the reader the ways in which digital culture performs and generates ontological shifts that rewrite the relationship between media, time, and experience.ContemporaneityA key concern for us in this issue is the idea of ‘contemporaneity,’ which has been discussed more recently in art theory and criticism by Terry Smith, and Peter Osborne, amongst others. Both Smith and Osborne use the term to articulate the effects of contemporary globalisation, transnationalism, and post-conceptual art. Smith reminds us that in contemporary society there isthe insistent presentness of multiple, often incompatible temporalities accompanied by the failure of all candidates that seek to provide the overriding temporal framework – be it modern, historical, spiritual, evolutionary, geological, scientific, globalizing, planetary. (196)As a result, artists are negotiating and critiquing multiple intersecting and contradictory time codes that pervade contemporary society in order to grapple with contemporaneity today. Yet, concerns with overlayed temporalities enter our everyday more and more, as explored through Justin Grandinetti’s piece, “A Question of Time: HQ Trivia and Mobile Streaming Temporality”, in which he interrogates mobile streaming practices and the ways in which new devices seek out every possible moment that might be monetised and ‘made productive.’Grandinetti’s concern, like the others featured in this issue, attends to the notion of time as evasive, contradictory and antonymous while forming a sense of urgency around the changing present, and also reconciling a multiplicity of time codes at play through technology today. The present is immediately written and archived through news media live feeds, GPS tracking and bio data in apps used for fitness and entertainment amongst others, while the pace of national television, print media, and local radio is folded through our daily experiences. Consequently, we’re interested in the multiple, and sometimes incompatible temporalities that emerge through the varied ways in which digital media is used to express, explore, and communicate in the world today beyond the arenas of contemporary art and art history that Smith and Osborne are primarily concerned with. ExperienceExperience is key. Experience may in fact be the key that unlocks these following conversations about time and the subject, after all, time is nothing if not experiential. Empirically, we might claim that, time is “conceived as the intervals during which events occur” (Toffler 21). However, of course one can only be if one is being in time. Through Bergson we might say that the individual’s perception of time manifests “rightly or wrongly, to be inside and outside us at one and the same time … . To each moment of our inner life there thus corresponds a moment of our body and of all environing matter that is ‘simultaneous’ with it” (205). Time is the platform through which experience of consciousness is mediated, thus the varying manipulations of time through media apparatuses are therefore inextricable with our lived ‘everyday’.E.P. Thompson might call this our “time-sense”, a kind of “inward notation of time” (58), however this rationalisation of time is amplified and complicated by digital media, as warned by Campbell in this issue. Campbell explores the performativity of publicly writing the self on social media that commodifies experience. An inward notion of time therefore becomes inverted and publicly performed through digital media, which is a key source of anxiety and control for individuals. In Toffler’s estimation, even by as early as the 1970s the technoscience of Western culture had “released a totally new social force” and he contends that this had reshaped the collective psyche witha stream of change so accelerated that it influences our sense of time, revolutionizes the tempo of daily life, and affects the very way we “feel” the world around us. We no longer “feel” life as men [sic] did in the past. And this is the ultimate difference, the distinction that separates the truly contemporary man [sic] from all others. (17)While Toffler was referring to a different technological context, he serves as a reminder that digital media amplifies pre-existing effects of technology. Therefore, while autofiction and the public writing of the self is not necessarily new, it is nevertheless key to contemporary feelings of acceleration and the temporal vernacular of contemporaneity – one that exacerbates the experiences of acceleration, inertia, and how we ‘feel’ the present and our presence in the world.In this issue we also wish to note the ways in which digital culture, and perhaps in particular new media platforms and narratives that permeate our homes, appear to be directing the Western “time-sense” (Thompson 80) away from metaphors constructed through the linear trope of ‘rivers’ or ‘streams’ and toward the more complex arrangements that we suggest are more suited to metaphors of ‘confetti’ or ‘snow’, as Laura Glitsos elucidates in her piece “From Rivers to Confetti: Reconfigurations of Time through New Media Landscapes”.As just one example, we might think of the multiplicity of ‘peculiar times’ built upon each other in the production, distribution, consumption and convergence of so many levels of digital media. In one sense, we might approach ‘peculiar times’ as the peculiarity of temporality in any given context. However, in another sense, we might also recognise the layering of standardisation which is then peculiar to each of the modes of production, consumption, and distribution (as laid out by Althusser and Balibar). As just one example, in the context of streaming services, we find the “flattening of historical frames” (Kaplan 144) in the scrolling back and forward on social media timelines (Powell 2). So perhaps our peculiar time speaks of the collapsing between ontological boundaries of past, present, and future—a kind of contemporaneity that splits between the peculiarities of production and consumption of digital media.StandardisationHistoriographies of time-sense in the Western tradition have been covered by thinkers as diverse as E.P. Thompson, Graeme Davidson, Bernard Stiegler, and Henri Lefebvre. While it is not our aim to repeat those narratives here, we concede some markers are crucial to note in order to set the context for our selected pieces. Beginning in the early- to mid- middle ages in Europe, up until the spread of clocks in the 14th century, time was largely related to processes, tasks or stages of light during the day, and time does still continues to exist in this way for some communities (Thompson 58). During this era, and of even back to the third century BCE, there were time-keeping technologies which could measure smaller increments of the day, such as the water-clock, the sun-dial, and the hour-glass, but everyday activities for the working people were largely regulated by natural or circadian rhythms (Thompson). It is perhaps these rhythms which served to shape the ‘inward notation of time’, in Thompson’s words, through the discourses of nature, that is through the language of streams and rivers—or ‘flows’.The 13th century saw the advent of mechanical time-keeping technology utilising what is called a “verge escapement mechanism”, that is, a “feedback regulator that controls the speed of a mechanical clock” (Headrick 42). About a century later, coupled with the emergence of puritanism, Thompson tells us that we start to see a shift in the construction of time which more and more depends on the synchronisation of labour (Thompson 70). Even so, working rhythms remain fairly irregular, still more suited to what Thompson describes as “a natural human rhythm” (71). This changes suddenly in the 19th century when, with the explosion of the Industrial Age, we witness the dominance of factory-time and, of course, the adoption and standardisation of railway-time across Britain, Europe, India and North America (Schivelbusch). The trend toward standardisation continues into the mid-20th century with what George Ritzer has famously called “McDonaldization” (2008). Thus, through the blanketing nature of 20th century “industrial capitalism” (Thompson 80), everyday experience became predicated on standardisation. Thompson tells us that these “changes in manufacturing technique … demand greater synchronization of labour and a greater exactitude in time-routines in society” (80). For Thompson, the “technological conditioning” of “time-sense” ushers in the model of “time-measurement as a means of labour exploitation” (80). This historical point is central to Giacomo Bianchino’s argument in “Afterwork and Overtime: The Social Reproduction of Human Capital”, in his discussion of the fundamental nature of capitalism in shaping time-sense. However, what we suggest is that this theme of ‘time-sense’ as shaped by the broader political economy of media is found within each of the pieces in the issue.A discussion of standardisation is problematic, however, in the wider conceptualisation of time as elusive, multi-dynamic and fractured. Surely, standardisation should at least come with the ability of certainty, in some respects. However, this is the paradox of the digital and new media age: That standardisation is both arbitrary and, in echo of Balibar and Althusser, ‘peculiar’ to an endless layering of separate time-streams. It is, perhaps, the jumping between them, which has become a necessary function of living in the digital age, that produces the sense of fracture, the loss of standard.This issue of M/C Journal explores the various ways in which the constellation of current media practices that are online, offline, embodied, and networked, collectively inform and express concepts of time. The feature article "With This Body, I Subtract Myself from Neoliberalised Time: Sub-Habituality & Relaxation after Deleuze", written by Antonia Pont, keenly asks how relaxation might be used to evade neoliberal machinations around organising time, efficiency, and productivity, all of which endanger a diversity of temporalities. While all media have their own unique limitations and affordances regarding influencing and expressing relationships to time, they are also impacted by current perceptions of uncertainty and neoliberal agendas that underlie the working relationships between people, the media that they engage in, and representations of the world.The feelings of inertia expressed by Toffler nearly 50 years ago has not only been accelerated through technological expansion, but by a layering of multiple time codes which reflect the wide range of media practices that permeate the contemporary vernacular. In 2019, concepts from the current post-Internet stage are beginning to emerge and we are finding that digital media fragments as much as it connects and unites. An ‘inward notion of time’ becomes brokered through automated processes, issues around surveillance, affect, standardisation, norms, nostalgia, and the minutiae of digital time.ReferencesAlthusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Reading Capital. London: NBL, 1970.Ansell-Pearson, Keith, John Ó Maoilearca, and Melissa McMahon. Henri Bergson: Key Writings. New York: Continuum, 2002.Bolter, Jay, and Richard Grusin. “Remediation.” Configurations 4.3 (1996): 311-358.Davison, Graeme. The Unforgiving Minute: How Australia Learned to Tell the Time. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1993.Headrick, M.V. “Origin and Evolution of the Anchor Clock Escapement.” IEEE Control Systems 22.2 (2002): 41-52.Johannessen, Jon-Arild. Automation, Innovation and Economic Crisis: Surviving the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Milton: Routledge, 2018.Kaplan, E. Ann. Rocking around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture. New York: Methuen, 1987.Powell, Helen. Stop the Clocks! Time and Narrative in Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris, 2012.Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Los Angeles: Pine Forge P, 2008.Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Oakland: U of California P, 2014.Smith, Terry. What Is Contemporary Art? Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009.Thompson, E.P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present 38.1 (1967): 56-97.Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. London: Bodley Head, 1970.

The concept of the “writer flâneur”, as developed by Walter Benjamin, sought to make sense of the seemingly chaotic nineteenth century city. While the flâneur provided a way for new urban structures to be ordered, it was also a transgressive act that involved engaging with urban spaces in new ways. In the contemporary city, where spaces are now heavily controlled and ordered, some members of the city’s socio-ecological community suffer as a result of idealistic notions of who and what belongs in the city, and how we must behave as urban citizens. Many of these ideals emerge from nineteenth century conceptions of the city in contrast to the country (Williams). However, a reimagining of the flâneur can allow for new transgressions of urban space and result in new literary imaginaries that capture the complexity of urban environments, question some of the more damaging processes and systems, offer new ways of connecting with the city, and propose alternative ways of living with the non-human in such places. With reference to the work of Debra Benita Shaw, Rob Shields and Donna Haraway, I will examine how the urban walking figure might be reimagined as cyborg, complicating boundaries between the real and imagined, the organic and inorganic, and between the human and non-human (Haraway Cyborgs). I will argue that the cyborg flâneur allows for new ways of writing and reading the urban and can work to reimagine the city as posthuman multispecies community. As one example of cyborg flânerie, I look to the app Story City to show how a writer can develop new environmental imaginaries in situ as an act of resistance against the anthropocentric ordering of the city. This article intends to begin a conversation about the ethical, political and epistemological potential of cyborg flânerie and leads to several questions which will require further research.Shaping the City: Environmental ImaginariesIn a sense, the flâneur is the product of a utopian imaginary of the city. According to Shields, Walter Benjamin used the flâneur as a literary device to make sense of the changing modern city of Paris: The flâneur is a hero who excels under the stress of coming to terms with a changing ‘social spatialisation’ of everyday social and economic relations which in the nineteenth century increasingly extended the world of the average person further and further to include rival mass tourism destinations linked by railroad, news of other European powers and distant colonies. This expanding spatialization took the form of economic realities such as changing labour markets and commodity prices and social encounters with strangers and foreigners which impinged on the life world of Europeans. (Fancy Footwork 67)Through his writing, these new spaces and inhabitants were made familiar again to those that lived there. In consequence, the flâneur was seen as a heroic figure who approached the city like a wilderness to be studied and tamed:Even to early 20th-century sociologists the flâneur was a heroic everyman—masculine, controlled and as in tune with his environment as James Fenimore Cooper’s Mohican braves were in their native forests. Anticipating the hardboiled hero of the detective novel, the flâneur pursued clues to the truth of the metropolis, attempting to think through its historical specificity, to inhabit it, even as the truth of empire and commodity capitalism was hidden from him. (Shields Flanerie 210)In this way, the flâneur was a stabilising force, categorising and therefore ordering the city. However, flânerie was also a transgressive act as the walker engaged in eccentric and idle wandering against the usual purposeful walking practices of the time (Coates). Drawing on this aspect, flânerie has increasingly been employed in the humanities and social sciences as a practice of resistance as Jamie Coates has shown. This makes the flâneur, albeit in a refigured form, a useful tool for transgressing strict socio-ecological conventions that affect the contemporary city.Marginalised groups are usually the most impacted by the strict control and ordering of contemporary urban spaces in response to utopian imaginaries of who and what belong. Marginalised people are discouraged and excluded from living in particular areas of the city through urban policy and commercial practices (Shaw 7). Likewise, certain non-human others, like birds, are allowed to inhabit our cities while those that don’t fit ideal urban imaginaries, like bats or snakes, are controlled, excluded or killed (Low). Defensive architecture, CCTV, and audio deterrents are often employed in cities to control public spaces. In London, the spiked corridor of a shop entrance designed to keep homeless people from sleeping there (Andreou; Borromeo) mirrors the spiked ledges that keep pigeons from resting on buildings (observed 2012/2014). On the Gold Coast youths are deterred from loitering in public spaces with classical music (observed 2013–17), while in Brisbane predatory bird calls are played near outdoor restaurants to discourage ibis from pestering customers (Hinchliffe and Begley). In contrast, bright lights, calming music and inviting scents are used to welcome orderly consumers into shopping centres while certain kinds of plants are cultivated in urban parks and gardens to attract acceptable wildlife like butterflies and lorikeets (Wilson; Low). These ways of managing public spaces are built on utopian conceptions of the city as a “civilising” force—a place of order, consumption and safety.As environmental concerns become more urgent, it is important to re-examine these conceptions of urban environments and the assemblage of environmental imaginaries that interact and continue to shape understandings of and attitudes towards human and non-human nature. The network of goods, people and natural entities that feed into and support the city mean that imaginaries shaped in urban areas influence both urban and surrounding peoples and ecologies (Braun). Local ecologies also become threatened as urban structures and processes continue to encompass more of the world’s populations and locales, often displacing and damaging entangled natural/cultural entities in the process. Furthermore, conceptions and attitudes shaped in the city often feed into global systems and as such can have far reaching implications for the way local ecologies are governed, built, and managed. There has already been much research, including work by Lawrence Buell and Ursula Heise, on the contribution that art and literature can make to the development of environmental imaginaries, whether intentional or unintentional, and resulting in both positive and negative associations with urban inhabitants (Yusoff and Gabrys; Buell; Heise). Imaginaries might be understood as social constructs through which we make sense of the world and through which we determine cultural and personal values, attitudes and beliefs. According to Neimanis et al., environmental imaginaries help us to make sense of the way physical environments shape “one’s sense of social belonging” as well as how we “formulate—and enact—our values and attitudes towards ‘nature’” (5). These environmental imaginaries underlie urban structures and work to determine which aspects of the city are valued, who is welcomed into the city, and who is excluded from participation in urban systems and processes. The development of new narrative imaginaries can question some of the underlying assumptions about who or what belongs in the city and how we might settle conflicts in ecologically diverse communities. The reimagined flâneur then might be employed to transgress traditional notions of belonging in the city and replace this with a sense of “becoming” in relation with the myriad of others inhabiting the city (Haraway The Trouble). Like the Benjaminian flâneur, the postmodern version enacts a similar transgressive walking practice. However, the postmodern flâneur serves to resist dominant narratives, with a “greater focus on the tactile and grounded qualities of walking” than the traditional flâneur—and, as opposed to the lone detached wanderer, postmodern flâneur engage in a network of social relationships and may even wander in groups (Coates 32). By employing the notion of the postmodern flâneur, writers might find ways to address problematic urban imaginaries and question dominant narratives about who should and should not inhabit the city. Building on this and in reference to Haraway (Cyborgs), the notion of a cyborg flâneur might take this resistance one step further, not only seeking to counter the dominant social narratives that control urban spaces but also resisting anthropocentric notions of the city. Where the traditional flâneur walked a pet tortoise on a leash, the cyborg flâneur walks with a companion species (Shields Fancy Footwork; Haraway Companion Species). The distinction is subtle. The traditional flâneur walks a pet, an object of display that showcases the eccentric status of the owner. The cyborg flâneur walks in mutual enjoyment with a companion (perhaps a domestic companion, perhaps not); their path negotiated together, tracked, and mapped via GPS. The two acts may at first appear the same, but the difference is in the relationship between the human, non-human, and the multi-modal spaces they occupy. As Coates argues, not everyone who walks is a flâneur and similarly, not everyone who engages in relational walking is a cyborg flâneur. Rather a cyborg flâneur enacts a deliberate practice of walking in relation with naturecultures to transgress boundaries between human and non-human, cultural and natural, and the virtual, material and imagined spaces that make up a place.The Posthuman City: Cyborgs, Hybrids, and EntanglementsIn developing new environmental imaginaries, posthuman conceptions of the city can be drawn upon to readdress urban space as complex, questioning utopian notions of the city particularly as they relate to the exclusion of certain others, and allowing for diverse socio-ecological communities. The posthuman city might be understood in opposition to anthropocentric notions where the non-human is seen as something separate to culture and in need of management and control within the human sphere of the city. Instead, the posthuman city is a complex entanglement of hybrid non-human, cultural and technological entities (Braun; Haraway Companion Species). The flâneur who experiences the city through a posthuman lens acknowledges the human as already embodied and embedded in the non-human world. Key to re-imagining the city is recognising the myriad ways in which non-human nature also acts upon us and influences decisions on how we live in cities (Schliephake 140). This constitutes a “becoming-with each other”, in Haraway’s terms, which recognises the interdependency of urban inhabitants (The Trouble 3). In re-considering the city as a negotiated process between nature and culture rather than a colonisation of nature by culture, the agency of non-humans to contribute to the construction of cities and indeed environmental imaginaries must be acknowledged. Living in the posthuman city requires us humans to engage with the city on multiple levels as we navigate the virtual, corporeal, and imagined spaces that make up the contemporary urban experience. The virtual city is made up of narratives projected through media productions such as tourism campaigns, informational plaques, site markers, and images on Google map locations, all of which privilege certain understandings of the city. Virtual narratives serve to define the city through a network of historical and spatially determined locales. Closely bound up with the virtual is the imagined city that draws on urban ideals, potential developments, mythical or alternative versions of particular cities as well as literary interpretations of cities. These narratives are overlaid on the places that we engage with in our everyday lived experiences. Embodied encounters with the city serve to reinforce or counteract certain virtual and imagined versions while imagined and virtual narratives enhance locales by placing current experience within a temporal narrative that extends into the past as well as the future. Walking the City: The Cyber/Cyborg FlâneurThe notion of the cyber flâneur emerged in the twenty-first century from the practices of idly surfing the Internet, which in many ways has become an extension of the cityscape. In the contemporary world where we exist in both physical and digital spaces, the cyber flâneur (and indeed its cousin the virtual flâneur) have been employed to make sense of new digital sites of connection, voyeurism, and consumption. Metaphors that evoke the city have often been used to describe the experience of the digital including “chat rooms”, “cyber space”, and “home pages” while new notions of digital tourism, the rise of online shopping, and meeting apps have become substitutes for engaging with the physical sites of cities such as shopping malls, pubs, and attractions. The flâneur and cyberflâneur have helped to make sense of the complexities and chaos of urban life so that it might become more palatable to the inhabitants, reducing anxieties about safety and disorder. However, as with the concept of the flâneur, implicit in the cyberflâneur is a reinforcement of traditional urban hierarchies and social structures. This categorising has also worked to solidify notions of who belongs and who does not. Therefore, as Debra Benita Shaw argues, the cyberflâneur is not able to represent the complexities of “how we inhabit and experience the hybrid spaces of contemporary cities” (3). Here, Shaw suggests that Haraway’s cyborg might be used to interrupt settled boundaries and to reimagine the urban walking figure. In both Shaw and Shields (Flanerie), the cyborg is invoked as a solution to the problematic figure of the flâneur. While Shaw presents these figures in opposition and proposes that the flâneur be laid to rest as the cyborg takes its place, I argue that the idea of the flâneur may still have some use, particularly when applied to new multi-modal narratives. As Shields demonstrates, the cyborg operates in the virtual space of simulation rather than at the material level (217). Instead of setting up an opposition between the cyborg and flâneur, these figures might be merged to bring the cyborg into being through the material practice of flânerie, while refiguring the flâneur as posthuman. The traditional flâneur sought to define space, but the cyborg flâneur might be seen to perform space in relation to an entangled natural/cultural community. By drawing on this notion of the cyborg, it becomes possible to circumvent some of the traditional associations with the urban walking figure and imagine a new kind of flâneur, one that walks the streets as an act to complicate rather than compartmentalise urban space. As we emerge into a post-truth world where facts and fictions blur, creative practitioners can find opportunities to forge new ways of knowing, and new ways of connecting with the city through the cyborg flâneur. The development of new literary imaginaries can reconstruct natural/cultural relationships and propose alternative ways of living in a posthuman and multispecies community. The rise of smart-phone apps like Story City provides cyborg flâneurs with the ability to create digital narratives overlaid on real places and has the potential to encourage real connections with urban environments. While these apps are by no means the only activity that a cyborg flâneur might participate in, they offer the writer a platform to engage audiences in a purposeful and transgressive practice of cyborg flânerie. Such narratives produced through cyborg flânerie would conflate virtual, corporeal, and imagined experiences of the city and allow for new environmental imaginaries to be created in situ. The “readers” of these narratives can also become cyborg flâneurs as the traditional urban wanderer is combined with the virtual and imagined space of the contemporary city. As opposed to wandering the virtual city online, readers are encouraged to physically walk the city and engage with the narrative in situ. For example, in one narrative, readers are directed to walk a trail along the Brisbane river or through the CBD to chase a sea monster (Wilkins and Diskett). The reader can choose different pre-set paths which influence the outcome of each story and embed the story in a physical location. In this way, the narrative is layered onto the real streets and spaces of the cityscape. As the reader is directed to walk particular routes through the city, the narratives which unfold are also partly constructed by the natural/cultural entities which make up those locales establishing a narrative practice which engages with the urban on a posthuman level. The murky water of the Brisbane River could easily conceal monsters. Occasional sightings of crocodiles (Hall), fish that leap from the water, and shadows cast by rippling waves as the City Cat moves across the surface impact the experience of the story (observed 2016–2017). Potential exists to capitalise on this narrative form and develop new environmental imaginaries that pay attention to the city as a posthuman place. For example, a narrative might direct the reader’s attention to the networks of water that hydrate people and animals, allow transportation, and remove wastes from the city. People may also be directed to explore their senses within place, be encouraged to participate in sensory gardens, or respond to features of the city in new ways. The cyborg flâneur might be employed in much the same way as the flâneur, to help the “reader” make sense of the posthuman city, where boundaries are shifted, and increasing rates of social and ecological change are transforming contemporary urban sites and structures. Shields asks whether the cyborg might also act as “a stabilising figure amidst the collapse of dualisms, polluted categories, transgressive hybrids, and unstable fluidity” (Flanerie 211). As opposed to the traditional flâneur however, this “stabilising” figure doesn’t sort urban inhabitants into discrete categories but maps the many relations between organisms and technologies, fictions and realities, and the human and non-human. The cyborg flâneur allows for other kinds of “reading” of the city to take place—including those by women, families, and non-Western inhabitants. As opposed to the nineteenth century reader-flâneur, those who read the city through the Story City app are also participants in the making of the story, co-constructing the narrative along with the author and locale. I would argue this participation is a key feature of the cyborg flâneur narrative along with the transience of the narratives which may alter and eventually expire as urban structures and environments change. Not all those who engage with these narratives will necessarily enact a posthuman understanding and not all writers of these narratives will do so as cyborg flâneurs. Nevertheless, platforms such as Story City provide writers with an opportunity to engage participants to question dominant narratives of the city and to reimagine themselves within a multispecies community. In addition, by bringing readers into contact with the human and non-human entities that make up the city, there is potential for real relationships to be established. Through new digital platforms such as apps, writers can develop new environmental imaginaries that question urban ideals including conceptions about who belongs in the city and who does not. The notion of the cyborg is a useful concept through which to reimagine the city as a negotiated process between nature and culture, and to reimagine the flâneur as performer who becomes part of the posthuman city as they walk the streets. This article provides one example of cyborg flânerie in smart-phone apps like Story City that allow writers to construct new urban imaginaries, bring the virtual and imagined city into the physical spaces of the urban environment, and can act to re-place the reader in diverse socio-ecological communities. The reader then becomes both product and constructer of urban space, a cyborg flâneur in the cyborg city. This conversation raises further questions about the cyborg flâneur, including: how might cyborg flânerie be enacted in other spaces (rural, virtual, more-than-human)? What other platforms and narrative forms might cyborg flâneurs use to share their posthuman narratives? How might cyborg flânerie operate in other cities, other cultures and when adopted by marginalised groups? In answering these questions, the potential and limitations of the cyborg flâneur might be refined. The hope is that one day the notion of a cyborg flâneur will no longer necessary as the posthuman city becomes a space of negotiation rather than exclusion. ReferencesAndreou, Alex. “Anti-Homeless Spikes: ‘Sleeping Rough Opened My Eyes to the City’s Barbed Cruelty.’” The Guardian 19 Feb. 2015. 25 Aug. 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/18/defensive-architecture-keeps-poverty-undeen-and-makes-us-more-hostile>.Borromeo, Leah. “These Anti-Homeless Spikes Are Brutal. We Need to Get Rid of Them.” The Guardian 23 Jul. 2015. 25 Aug. 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/23/anti-homeless-spikes-inhumane-defensive-architecture>.Braun, Bruce. “Environmental Issues: Writing a More-than-Human Urban Geography.” Progress in Human Geography 29.5 (2005): 635–50. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden: Blackwell, 2005.Coates, Jamie. “Key Figure of Mobility: The Flâneur.” Social Anthropology 25.1 (2017): 28–41.Hall, Peter. “Crocodiles Spotted in Queensland: A Brief History of Sightings and Captures in the Southeast.” The Courier Mail 4 Jan. 2017. 20 Aug. 2017 <http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/crocodiles-spotted-in-queensland-a-brief-history-of-sightings-and-captures-in-the-southeast/news-story/5fbb2d44bf3537b8a6d1f6c8613e2789>.Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke UP, 2016.———. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Vol. 1. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.———. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Oxon: Routledge, 1991.Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Hinchliffe, Jessica, and Terri Begley. “Brisbane’s Angry Birds: Recordings No Deterrent for Nosey Ibis at South Bank.” ABC News 2 Jun. 2015. 25 Aug. 2017 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-06/recorded-bird-noise-not-detering-south-banks-angry-birds/6065610>.Low, Tim. The New Nature: Winners and Losers in Wild Australia. London: Penguin, 2002.Neimanis, Astrid, Cecilia Asberg, and Suzi Hayes. “Posthumanist Imaginaries.” Research Handbook on Climate Governance. Eds. K. Bäckstrand and E. Lövbrand. Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015. 480–90.Schliephake, Christopher. Urban Ecologies: City Space, Material Agency, and Environmental Politics in Contemporary Culture. Maryland: Lexington Books, 2014.Shaw, Debra Benita. “Streets for Cyborgs: The Electronic Flâneur and the Posthuman City.” Space and Culture 18.3 (2015): 230–42.Shields, Rob. “Fancy Footwork: Walter Benjamin’s Notes on Flânerie.” The Flâneur. Ed. Keith Tester. London: Routledge, 2014. 61–80.———. “Flânerie for Cyborgs.” Theory, Culture & Society 23.7-8 (2006): 209–20.Yusoff, Kathryn, and Jennifer Gabrys. “Climate Change and the Imagination.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 2.4 (2011): 516–34.Wilkins, Kim, and Joseph Diskett. 9 Fathom Deep. Brisbane: Story City, 2014. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1975.Wilson, Alexander. The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1991.

For those seeking a diversion from the drudgery of work there are a number of websites offering to take you away. Consider the case of wasteaminute.com. On the site there is everything from flash video games, soft-core pornography and animated nudity, to puzzles and parlour games like poker. In addition, the site offers links to video clips grouped in categories such as “funny,” “accidents,” or “strange.” With its bright yellow bubble letters and elementary design, wasteaminute will never win any Webby awards. It is also unlikely to be part of a lucrative initial public offering for its owner, a web marketing company based in Lexington, Kentucky. The internet ratings company Alexa gives wasteaminute a ranking of 5,880,401 when it comes to the most popular sites online over the last three months, quite some way behind sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Windows Live.Wasteaminute is not unique. There exists a group of websites, a micro-genre of sorts, that go out of their way to offer momentary escape from the more serious work at hand, with a similar menu of offerings. These include sites with names such as ishouldbeworking.com, i-am-bored.com, boredatwork.com, and drivenbyboredom.com. These web destinations represent only the most overtly named time-wasting opportunities. Video sharing sites like YouTube or France’s DailyMotion, personalised home pages like iGoogle, and the range of applications available on mobile devices offer similar opportunities for escape. Wasteaminute inspired me to think about the relationship between digital media technologies and waste. In one sense, the site’s offerings remind us of the Internet’s capacity to re-purpose old media forms from earlier phases in the digital revolution, like the retro video game PacMan, or from aspects of print culture, like crosswords (Bolter and Grusin; Straw). For my purposes, though, wasteaminute permits the opportunity to meditate, albeit briefly, on the ways media facilitate wasting time at work, particularly for those working in white- and no-collar work environments. In contemporary work environments work activity and wasteful activity exist on the same platform. With a click of a mouse or a keyboard shortcut, work and diversion can be easily interchanged on the screen, an experience of computing I know intimately from first-hand experience. The blurring of lines between work and waste has accompanied the extension of the ‘working day,’ a concept once tethered to the standardised work-week associated with modernity. Now people working in a range of professions take work out of the office and find themselves working in cafes, on public transportation, and at times once reserved for leisure, like weekends (Basso). In response to the indeterminate nature of when and where we are at work, the mainstream media routinely report about the wasteful use of computer technology for non-work purposes. Stories such as a recent one in the Washington Post which claimed that increased employee use of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter led to decreased productivity at work have become quite common in traditional media outlets (Casciato). Media technologies have always offered the prospect of making office work more efficient or the means for management to exercise control over employees. However, those same technologies have also served as the platforms on which one can engage in dilatory acts, stealing time from behind the boss’s back. I suggest stealing time at work may well be a “tactic,” in the sense used by Michel de Certeau, as a means to resist the rules and regulations that structure work and the working life. However, I also consider it to be a tactic in a different sense: websites and other digital applications offer users the means to take time back, in the form of ‘quick hits,’ providing immediate visual or narrative pleasures, or through interfaces which make the time-wasting look like work (Wagman). Reading sites like wasteaminute as examples of ‘office entertainment,’ reminds us of the importance of workers as audiences for web content. An analysis of a few case studies also reveals how the forms of address of these sites themselves recognise and capitalise on an understanding of the rhythms of the working day, as well as those elements of contemporary office culture characterised by interruption, monotony and surveillance. Work, Media, Waste A mass of literature documents the transformations of work brought on by industrialisation and urbanisation. A recent biography of Franz Kafka outlines the rigors imposed upon the writer while working as an insurance agent: his first contract stipulated that “no employee has the right to keep any objects other than those belonging to the office under lock in the desk and files assigned for its use” (Murray 66). Siegfried Kracauer’s collection of writings on salaried workers in Germany in the 1930s argues that mass entertainment offers distractions that inhibit social change. Such restrictions and inducements are exemplary of the attempts to make work succumb to managerial regimes which are intended to maximise productivity and minimise waste, and to establish a division between ‘company time’ and ‘free time’. One does not have to be an industrial sociologist to know the efforts of Frederick W. Taylor, and the disciplines of “scientific management” in the early twentieth century which were based on the idea of making work more efficient, or of the workplace sociology scholarship from the 1950s that drew attention to the ways that office work can be monotonous or de-personalising (Friedmann; Mills; Whyte). Historian JoAnne Yates has documented the ways those transformations, and what she calls an accompanying “philosophy of system and efficiency,” have been made possible through information and communication technologies, from the typewriter to carbon paper (107). Yates evokes the work of James Carey in identifying these developments, for example, the locating of workers in orderly locations such as offices, as spatial in nature. The changing meaning of work, particularly white-collar or bureaucratic labour in an age of precarious employment and neo-liberal economic regimes, and aggressive administrative “auditing technologies,” has subjected employees to more strenuous regimes of surveillance to ensure employee compliance and to protect against waste of company resources (Power). As Andrew Ross notes, after a deep period of self-criticism over the drudgery of work in North American settings in the 1960s, the subsequent years saw a re-thinking of the meaning of work, one that gradually traded greater work flexibility and self-management for more assertive forms of workplace control (9). As Ross notes, this too has changed, an after-effect of “the shareholder revolution,” which forced companies to deliver short-term profitability to its investors at any social cost. With so much at stake, Ross explains, the freedom of employees assumed a lower priority within corporate cultures, and “the introduction of information technologies in the workplace of the new capitalism resulted in the intensified surveillance of employees” (12). Others, like Dale Bradley, have drawn attention to the ways that the design of the office itself has always concerned itself with the bureaucratic and disciplinary control of bodies in space (77). The move away from physical workspaces such as ‘the pen’ to the cubicle and now from the cubicle to the virtual office is for Bradley a move from “construction” to “connection.” This spatial shift in the way in which control over employees is exercised is symbolic of the liquid forms in which bodies are now “integrated with flows of money, culture, knowledge, and power” in the post-industrial global economies of the twenty-first century. As Christena Nippert-Eng points out, receiving office space was seen as a marker of trust, since it provided employees with a sense of privacy to carry out affairs—both of a professional or of a personal matter—out of earshot of others. Privacy means a lot of things, she points out, including “a relative lack of accountability for our immediate whereabouts and actions” (163). Yet those same modalities of control which characterise communication technologies in workspaces may also serve as the platforms for people to waste time while working. In other words, wasteful practices utilize the same technology that is used to regulate and manage time spent in the workplace. The telephone has permitted efficient communication between units in an office building or between the office and outside, but ‘personal business’ can also be conducted on the same line. Radio stations offer ‘easy listening’ formats, providing unobtrusive music so as not to disturb work settings. However, they can easily be tuned to other stations for breaking news, live sports events, or other matters having to do with the outside world. Photocopiers and fax machines facilitate the reproduction and dissemination of communication regardless of whether it is it work or non-work related. The same, of course, is true for computerised applications. Companies may encourage their employees to use Facebook or Twitter to reach out to potential clients or customers, but those same applications may be used for personal social networking as well. Since the activities of work and play can now be found on the same platform, employers routinely remind their employees that their surfing activities, along with their e-mails and company documents, will be recorded on the company server, itself subject to auditing and review whenever the company sees fit. Employees must be careful to practice image management, in order to ensure that contradictory evidence does not appear online when they call in sick to the office. Over time the dynamics of e-mail and Internet etiquette have changed in response to such developments. Those most aware of the distractive and professionally destructive features of downloading a funny or comedic e-mail attachment have come to adopt the acronym “NSFW” (Not Safe for Work). Even those of us who don’t worry about those things are well aware that the cache and “history” function of web browsers threaten to reveal the extent to which our time online is spent in unproductive ways. Many companies and public institutions, for example libraries, have taken things one step further by filtering out access to websites that may be peripheral to the primary work at hand.At the same time contemporary workplace settings have sought to mix both work and play, or better yet to use play in the service of work, to make “work” more enjoyable for its workers. Professional development seminars, team-building exercises, company softball games, or group outings are examples intended to build morale and loyalty to the company among workers. Some companies offer their employees access to gyms, to game rooms, and to big screen TVs, in return for long and arduous—indeed, punishing—hours of time at the office (Dyer-Witheford and Sherman; Ross). In this manner, acts of not working are reconfigured as a form of work, or at least as a productive experience for the company at large. Such perks are offered with an assumption of personal self-discipline, a feature of what Nippert-Eng characterises as the “discretionary workplace” (154). Of course, this also comes with an expectation that workers will stay close to the office, and to their work. As Sarah Sharma recently argued in this journal, such thinking is part of the way that late capitalism constructs “innovative ways to control people’s time and regulate their movement in space.” At the same time, however, there are plenty of moments of gentle resistance, in which the same machines of control and depersonalisation can be customised, and where individual expressions find their own platforms. A photo essay by Anna McCarthy in the Journal of Visual Culture records the inspirational messages and other personalised objects with which workers adorn their computers and work stations. McCarthy’s photographs represent the way people express themselves in relation to their work, making it a “place where workplace politics and power relations play out, often quite visibly” (McCarthy 214). Screen SecretsIf McCarthy’s photo essay illustrates the overt ways in which people bring personal expression or gentle resistance to anodyne workplaces, there are also a series of other ‘screen acts’ that create opportunities to waste time in ways that are disguised as work. During the Olympics and US college basketball playoffs, both American broadcast networks CBS and NBC offered a “boss button,” a graphic link that a user could immediately click “if the boss was coming by” that transformed the screen to something was associated with the culture of work, such as a spreadsheet. Other purveyors of networked time-wasting make use of the spreadsheet to mask distraction. The website cantyouseeimbored turns a spreadsheet into a game of “Breakout!” while other sites, like Spreadtweet, convert your Twitter updates into the form of a spreadsheet. Such boss buttons and screen interfaces that mimic work are the presentday avatars of the “panic button,” a graphic image found at the bottom of websites back in the days of Web 1.0. A click of the panic button transported users away from an offending website and towards something more legitimate, like Yahoo! Even if it is unlikely that boss keys actually convince one’s superiors that one is really working—clicking to a spreadsheet only makes sense for a worker who might be expected to be working on those kinds of documents—they are an index of how notions of personal space and privacy play out in the digitalised workplace. David Kiely, an employee at an Australian investment bank, experienced this first hand when he opened an e-mail attachment sent to him by his co-workers featuring a scantily-clad model (Cuneo and Barrett). Unfortunately for Kiely, at the time he opened the attachment his computer screen was visible in the background of a network television interview with another of the bank’s employees. Kiely’s inauspicious click (which made his the subject of an investigation by his employees) continues to circulate on the Internet, and it spawned a number of articles highlighting the precarious nature of work in a digitalised environment where what might seem to be private can suddenly become very public, and thus able to be disseminated without restraint. At the same time, the public appetite for Kiely’s story indicates that not working at work, and using the Internet to do it, represents a mode of media consumption that is familiar to many of us, even if it is only the servers on the company computer that can account for how much time we spend doing it. Community attitudes towards time spent unproductively online reminds us that waste carries with it a range of negative signifiers. We talk about wasting time in terms of theft, “stealing time,” or even more dramatically as “killing time.” The popular construction of television as the “boob tube” distinguishes it from more ‘productive’ activities, like spending time with family, or exercise, or involvement in one’s community. The message is simple: life is too short to be “wasted” on such ephemera. If this kind of language is less familiar in the digital age, the discourse of ‘distraction’ is more prevalent. Yet, instead of judging distraction a negative symptom of the digital age, perhaps we should reinterpret wasting time as the worker’s attempt to assert some agency in an increasingly controlled workplace. ReferencesBasso, Pietro. Modern Times, Ancient Hours: Working Lives in the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso, 2003. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.Bradley, Dale. “Dimensions Vary: Technology, Space, and Power in the 20th Century Office”. Topia 11 (2004): 67-82.Casciato, Paul. “Facebook and Other Social Media Cost UK Billions”. Washington Post, 5 Aug. 2010. 11 Aug. 2010 ‹http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/05/AR2010080503951.html›.Cuneo, Clementine, and David Barrett. “Was Banker Set Up Over Saucy Miranda”. The Daily Telegraph 4 Feb. 2010. 21 May 2010 ‹http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/entertainment/sydney-confidential/was-banker-set-up-over-saucy-miranda/story-e6frewz0-1225826576571›.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Vol. 1. Berkeley: U of California P. 1988.Dyer-Witheford, Nick, and Zena Sharman. "The Political Economy of Canada's Video and Computer Game Industry”. Canadian Journal of Communication 30.2 (2005). 1 May 2010 ‹http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/1575/1728›.Friedmann, Georges. Industrial Society. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1955.Kracauer, Siegfried. The Salaried Masses. London: Verso, 1998.McCarthy, Anna. Ambient Television. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. ———. “Geekospheres: Visual Culture and Material Culture at Work”. Journal of Visual Culture 3 (2004): 213-21.Mills, C. Wright. White Collar. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1951. Murray, Nicholas. Kafka: A Biography. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004.Newman, Michael. “Ze Frank and the Poetics of Web Video”. First Monday 13.5 (2008). 1 Aug. 2010 ‹http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2102/1962›.Nippert-Eng, Christena. Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries through Everyday Life. Chicago: U. of Chicago P, 1996.Power, Michael. The Audit Society. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Ross, Andrew. No Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2004. Sharma, Sarah. “The Great American Staycation and the Risk of Stillness”. M/C Journal 12.1 (2009). 11 May 2010 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/122›. Straw, Will. “Embedded Memories”. Residual Media Ed. Charles Acland. U. of Minnesota P., 2007. 3-15.Whyte, William. The Organisation Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957. Wagman, Ira. “Log On, Goof Off, Look Up: Facebook and the Rhythms of Canadian Internet Use”. How Canadians Communicate III: Contexts for Popular Culture. Eds. Bart Beaty, Derek, Gloria Filax Briton, and Rebecca Sullivan. Athabasca: Athabasca UP 2009. 55-77. ‹http://www2.carleton.ca/jc/ccms/wp-content/ccms-files/02_Beaty_et_al-How_Canadians_Communicate.pdf›Yates, JoAnne. “Business Use of Information Technology during the Industrial Age”. A Nation Transformed by Information. Eds. Alfred D. Chandler & James W. Cortada. Oxford: Oxford UP., 2000. 107-36.

Years have come and gone and Bob is still around He’s tied up by his ankles and he’s hanging upside downA lifetime of infection and his lungs all filled with phlegmThe CF would’ve killed him if it weren’t for S&M Supermasochistic Bob has Cystic Fibrosis by Bob Flanagan. Soundtrack from 1997 documentary, Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan In the 1997 film, Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, artist Bob Flanagan quite literally lays himself bare to the viewer. This is a wrenching documentary which charts the dying Flanagan’s battles with cystic fibrosis (CF), and also explores the impact of this on his art and life. Sick also explores to an explicit degree the sadomasochist practices that permeated Flanagan’s private life and performance art practice, and which he used as a means of asserting control of the chronic pain and infirmity of his medical condition. Sick is not an easy watch. The film evokes feelings of fear, empathy, and horror. It challenges notions of taste and bad taste. It subjects the viewer to witness the vulnerability of the repeatedly tortured and invaded body of the artist, and of his eventual confrontation with death. As performance pieces go, this is an extreme example of body-based art. Where does this extraordinary piece stem from? From which traditions in art does it draw? To answer these questions, it is necessary to examine the framework of disability art, transgressive art, and also the tradition of medical Gothic, or the history of the Gothic body as a site of art—art that involves reading the body as carnivalesque, as degenerate, as ab-human, as abject entity. The Gothic Body as Site of Art The body has long been a site of exploration in medical practice and in artistic practice. The body has been displayed and examined in various forms, as subject, object, or abject entity through ossories, medical collections, museums of pathology, and freak shows. Paintings of crucifixions and martyrdoms, and practices of flagellation have glorified the tortured body of Christians as physical reminders of extreme piety. The abnormal or monstrous body has been a trope in art since the medieval period, often identified with ideas of evil or sin. Anatomical bodies have been referenced and explored by artists since the Renaissance. With the popular explosion of performance art in the 1960’s, bodily practices have been incorporated into site specific art. Artists’ bodies are offered for our gaze, and sometimes for interaction with, all within the context of performance. Although performance art originates in the early 20th century, it was exponents of the 1960’s that firmly aligned this practice with the site of the artist’s body. At this time, the body became a new focus of culture, with the rise in sexual freedom and the accepted use of nudity in performances and happenings. This resulted in the performance of body-based pieces such as Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964) and Interior Scroll (1975), Hermann Nitsch and the Viennese Actionists and their Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries (1962), and Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1971). This legacy of sexual, violent, or abject performances results in the creation of provocative and disturbing contemporary pieces such as Sick that confront the spectator with the vulnerabilities and limits of the living body. Today, contemporary culture is suffused with images of the body, both the idealised bodies of advertising and music videos, and the grotesque and transfigured bodies of contemporary art. Spooner has commented, “Contemporary Gothic is more obsessed with bodies than in any of its previous phases: bodies become spectacle, provoking disgust, modified, reconstructed and artificially augmented” (63). Today, culture’s preoccupation with the body runs the gamut from horror films obsessed with the penetrated body, to subcultural style and body manipulation, and the increasing popularity of plastic surgery makeovers on mainstream television. The body has never been so exposed, so open to the audience’s gaze. Key artists such as Damien Hirst, Mat Collishaw, the Chapman Brothers, Gabriela Friðriksdóttir, and Sue de Beer respond to this contemporary preoccupation by exploring the body in its manifold Gothic forms. This is a rich body of work that uses abject materials, references slasher movies, and plays with notions of identity, societal violence, body-horror, and the grotesque. This article looks specifically at works by contemporary transgressive artists that utilise their own bodies as site of performance, and the challenges to accepted tastes that this work poses. Performances by Bob Flanagan, Ron Athey, and Marina Abramovic are analysed in terms of boundaries, identity, and other implications in using the body of the artist as the site of art. Tropes of torture, pain. and body modification are examined as contesting the parameters of what body limits and of what is acceptable in contemporary art practice. An Intimate Canvas: The Artist’s Body as Site So what does it mean to use your own body as site of exploration? The work of artists who use their own bodies as a site of spectacle, as a medium of art, has several interesting implications. By its very nature, such an act is transgressive. It blurs the boundaries between artwork and artist. This creates an interesting tension between self and other and, indeed, arguably explores the notion of self as other. This work has an autobiographical function, in that it not only reveals universal themes of significance to the artist but, given the intimacy of the canvas, it also betrays personal preoccupations, and signifies the artist’s own relationship with the body and bodily practices. The use of the human body as canvas brings an intense physical and emotional proximity to the piece. The bodily traumas that are witnessed via performance art—whether it is Chris Burden being nailed to a Volkswagen (Trans-fixed, 1974) or Marina Abramović and Ulay collapsing, unconscious, lungs filled with carbon dioxide from reciprocal exchange of breaths (Breathing In/Breathing Out, 1977)—constitute an intimate link with the audience that arises from the shock of witnessing these transgressive acts. The body of the artist exposed in this way—a body normally only viewed by a partner, doctor or close family member—creates immediacy, giving the individual spectator in an intimate connection with the artist. Francesca Gavin, in her introductory essay to Hellbound: New Gothic Art, cites this voyeurism as essential to the experience of viewing Gothic art: “By looking at the violence or horror we become complicit in its creation, part of the cause—hence part of the discomfort in looking” (7). The first of these areas of discomfort to consider is the association of the body with pain, torture and mutilation, and the use of the artist’s body to explore this theme. Pushing the Limits: The Artist’s Body as Site of Pain The work of Marina Abramović has had a powerful effect on the contemporary landscape of body-based performance art that tests the limits of endurance of the corporeal body. Her past projects have focused on the uneasy power exchange between audience and performer. In Rhythm 0 (1974), her first long durational performance, Abramović offered her audience a choice of 72 objects including a gun, a hammer, sugar, and scissors, to be used on her own body, without any limitations on their deployment. This six-hour performance featured a motionless Abramović offering her body passively to the spectators to interact with. The intensity of the resulting video piece is remarkable; the recording of the performance captures the potential dissolution of the societal contract between artist and audience, a mutable discourse of agency and power. Abramović spoke of the sense of fear she experienced during this performance— “I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere” (quoted, Danieri 30). Her work plays constantly with the idea of boundaries and limits, often pushing her physical self past extraordinary barriers of pain and exertion, as in Rhythm 5 (1974) where she lost consciousness as a result of smoke inhalation and had to be rescued by the spectators. Amelia Jones has analysed these performances of pain as central to the artist’s desire to establish a connection with the audience during performances: “While pain cannot be shared, its effects can be projected onto others such that they become the site of suffering […] and the original sufferer can attain some semblance of self-containment (paradoxically, through the very penetration and violation of the body” (230). One could also argue that this sharing of experience also effectively normalises the abnormal body by establishing a common bond between viewer and performer. However, this work raises questions for the viewer. Is what these artists do self-harm, presented on a public stage? Is this ethical? And, importantly, is it within the bounds of taste? The answer, it would seem, lies in issues of agency and control and, of course, in the separation of art from life that occurs due to the act of performing itself. As Coogan puts it “[t]he performance frame is contingent and temporary, holding the performer in a liminal, provisional and suspended place” (1). While Abramović’s work experiments with bodily endurance and performative limits, other artists who produce autobiographical, body-based performance can be located within the world of medical discourse and performed disability. An artist who subverts the boundaries of the body, and taste alike, is Ron Athey, the HIV-positive artist who makes performance work based on blood rituals, torture, and cutting. His use of blood is central to his practice, and the fact that this blood, which is let through performances, contains the HIV virus, gives it a doubly abject aspect. His performance Excerpted Rites Transformation (1995) which took place at the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis caused an extreme reaction. During this performance Athey pierced own his skin with needles, and also cut into the skin of black artist Daryl Carlton in a mimicry of tribal scarification rituals that highlighted issues of race, then hung handkerchiefs dipped in Carlton’s blood on clotheslines that ran over the heads of the audience. Mary Abbe, an art critic with the Minneapolis Star Tribune who had not attended the performance, wrote an article about the danger posed to the audience by what she wrongly termed Athey’s blood. (Carlton is not HIV positive). It is clear from the tone of this response that such disease causes a profound dis-ease in the beholder. Bob Flanagan’s oeuvre also locates him in this tradition of artists who perform their disability on a public stage. Critics such as Kuppers consider Athey and Flanagan as artists who subvert the medical gaze (Foucault), refusing to accept the passive role of ‘patient’, and defiantly flaunting their abnormal bodies in the public arena. These bodies can also be considered as modified bodies. Sandahl has contextualised Athey’s performance as going beyond the parameters of the human body: “Athey’s radical cyborg identity is a temporary mode of survival, an alternative way of being in there here and now. A body not interested solely in cure nor submissive to medical interventions” (59). Kuppers, in The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art, reflects on Flanagan and Athey’s careers as disabled artists. She examines how Flanagan constructs his identity as a chronically ill artist, and his pain performances that allowed him to avoid attracting the sentimental pity associated with illness; replacing audience empathy with shock and often revulsion. Kuppers highlights Flanagan’s use of dark humour in his performances through songs like Fun to be Dead (1997), which work to subvert the dominance of his illness. In fact, Flanagan’s work often asserts his central belief that his relative longevity (he lived to be 43, a decade longer than most CF sufferers) was achieved by his ability to counter the pain of his chronic condition with the pain of his masochistic suffering. The stereotype that the masochist is snivelling and weak is actually not true. The masochist has to know his or her own body perfectly well and be in full control of their body, in order to give control to somebody else or to give control to pain. So the masochist is actually a very strong person. I think some of that strength is what I use to combat the illness. (Dick) Athey’s description of his relief at the act of cutting echoes Flanagan’s identification of these rites as way of asserting control over a dysfunctional body: “The sight of your own blood, brought forth from your own hand, spells an almost immediate relief, a release to the pressure valve. It’s a violation that you yourself now control.” What effect does this painful and masochistic art have on the audience? On the act of viewing? On taste itself? Taste and Transgression: Beyond the Parameters of the Body The notion of taste is a hotly debated area in contemporary art practice—arguments rage as to what constitutes good or bad taste. Woodward argues that “[B]ad taste often passes for avant-garde taste these days—so long as the artist signals ‘transgressive’ intent” (1). Grunenberg (1997) has addressed the problematic notion of the audience engagement with this mode of Gothic art, asking whether it has ilost its power to shock. He contends that with the contemporary saturation of all media with violent and shocking imagery, “the ability to be shocked and moved by real or fictitious images of horror has been showing positive signs of attrition.” Nevertheless, the proximity of performance, the immediacy of the artist’s body as canvas, the feelings of horror, empathy, and even wonder occasioned by the manipulation and excesses of the body, continue to draw audiences. The artist’s body as site of performance becomes a space in which the audience may inscribe their own narratives. The body is a locus of projection, almost ab-human, “a not-quite-human subject, characterised by its morphic variability, continually in danger of becoming not-itself, becoming other” (Hurley 3–4). As the artist’s body becomes ever more manipulated and pushed beyond boundaries of taste and pain, it forces artist and audience alike to ask what lies beyond the parameters of the body. Experimentation with torture methods, with cutting, with abject materials, seems to lead back inevitably to the notion of Gothic, othered body, and a desire to pass beyond the boundaries of the repeatedly invaded and wracked body. Once you transgress the boundaries of the body, the logical locus that lies beyond is death. Dick’s Sick documents Bob Flanagan’s death, which formed part of the agreement between documentary maker and artist before shooting. Flanagan hoped his body art would continue beyond death: “I want a wealthy collector to finance an installation in which a video camera will be placed in the coffin with my body, connected to a screen on the wall, and whenever he wants to, the patron can see how I’m coming along” (Dick). Playing with the shadow of death becomes a mode of performance itself. Abramović recalls her acceptance of this fact in her early performance pieces: “When I was in Yugoslavia I was always thinking that art was a kind of question between life and death and some of my performances really included the possibility of dying, you know, during the piece, it could happen” (quoted in McEvilley 15). She also records her fear experienced during Rhythm 0 (1974), stating “What I learned was that [... ]if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you” (quoted in Danieri 29). Death has receded from us in the 21st century. Death happens in hospitals, in the antiseptic confines of the Intensive Care Unit, it is medicated and mediated by medical staff. Traditional rituals of deathbed conversations and posthumous wakes are gradually disappearing. The discourse of death has grown silent except through the medium of the Gothic and especially the Gothic body, as the Gothic “consistently attempts to speak about the unspeakable—that is, death” (McGrath 154). Artists such as Abramović, Flanagan, and Athey function within this Gothic tradition. By insistently presenting their Gothic bodies, they force the audience to acknowledge death, transgression, and decay as realities. With collaborative partners, they mediate the process of surgery, torture, dying, and even the moment of death through photography and lens-based media. This use of media in capturing the moment also functions in a contemporary post-religious society as a mode of replication and, even, perhaps, of immortality. Bold, provocative, and challenging, the work of these transgressive artists continues to challenge the idea of bodily limits and boundaries and highlight the notion of the body as site of transformation. They continue to challenge our taste, our definition of art, and our comfort as audience. The words of Gavin come again to mind: “By looking at the violence or horror we become complicit in its creation, part of the cause—hence part of the discomfort in looking” (7). Using the artist’s body as site of performance forces us to challenge our conception of art, illness, life and death and leads to a reappraisal of taste itself. References Abbe, Mary. “Bloody Performance Draws Criticism.” Star Tribune 24 Mar. 1994. 1A. Abramovic, Marina. [website] 4 Feb. 2014. ‹http://www.marinaabramovicinstitute.org›. Athey, Ron. [website] 4 Feb. 2014. ‹http://ronatheynews.blogspot.ie›. Coogan, Amanda. “What is Performance Art?.” Irish Museum of Modern Art [website] (2011). 4 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.imma.ie/en/page_212496.htm›. Daneri, Anna, Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, L. Hegyi, SR Sanzio, & A. Vettese. Eds. Marina Abramović. Milan: Charta, 2002. Dick, Kirby. Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. Dir. Kirby Dick. 1997. Flanagan, Bob. [website] 4 Feb. 2014. ‹http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/terminals/flanagan/flanagan.html›. Gavin, Francesca. Hellbound: New Gothic Art. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2008. Grunenberg, Christoph. “Unsolved Mysteries: Gothic Tales from Frankenstein to the Hair Eating Doll.” Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art. Ed. Christoph Grunenberg. Boston: MIT Press, 1997. Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 160–212. Kuppers, Petra. The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. Mc Grath, Patrick. “Transgression and Decay.” Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art. Ed. Christoph Grunenberg. Boston: MIT Press, 1997. 153–58. Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. Sandahl, Carrie. “Performing Metaphors: Aids, Disability and Technology.” Contemporary Theatre Review 11.3–4 (2001): 49–60. Woodward, Richard B. “When Bad is Good.” ARTnews [website] (2012). 4 Feb. 2014. ‹http://www.artnews.com/2012/04/12/when-bad-is-good›. Zylinska, Joanna. The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age. London: Continuum, 2002.

Introduction The exhibition of an artist’s work is traditionally accepted as representing the final stage of the creative process (Staniszewski). This article asks, however, whether this traditional view can be reassessed so that the curatorial practice of mounting an exhibition becomes, itself, a creative outcome feeding into work that may still be in progress, and that simultaneously operates as a learning and teaching tool. To provide a preliminary examination of the issue, we use a single case study approach, taking an example of practice currently used at an Australian university. In this program, internal and external students work together to develop and deliver an exhibition of their own work in progress. The exhibition space has a professional website (‘CQUniversity Noosa Exhibition Space’), many community members and the local media attend exhibition openings, and the exhibition (which runs for three to four weeks) becomes an outcome students can include in their curriculum vitae. This article reflects on the experiences, challenges, and outcomes that have been gained through this process over the past twelve months. Due to this time frame, the case study is exploratory and its findings are provisional. The case study is an appropriate method to explore a small sample of events (in this case exhibitions) as, following Merriam, it allows the construction of a richer picture of an under-examined phenomenon to be constructed. Although it is clear that this approach will not offer results which can be generalised, it can, nevertheless, assist in opening up a field for investigation and constructing a holistic account of a phenomenon (in this case, the exhibition space as authentic learning experience and productive teaching tool), for, as Merriam states, “much can be learned from a particular case” (51). Jennings adds that even the smallest case study is useful as it includes an “in-depth examination of the subject with which to confirm or contest received generalizations” (14). Donmoyer extends thoughts on this, suggesting that the single case study is extremely useful as the “restricted conception of generalizability … solely in terms of sampling and statistical significance is no longer defensible or functional” (45). Using the available student course feedback, anonymous end-of-term course evaluations, and other available information, this case study account offers an example of what Merriam terms a “narrative description” (51), which seeks to offer readers the opportunity to engage and “learn vicariously from an encounter with the case” (Merriam 51) in question. This may, we propose, be particularly productive for other educators since what is “learn[ed] in a particular case can be transferred to similar situations” (Merriam 51). Breaking Ground exhibition, CQUniversity Noosa Exhibition Space, 2014. Photo by Ulrike Sturm. Background The Graduate Certificate of Creative Industries (Creative Practice) (CQU ‘CB82’) was developed in 2011 to meet the national Australian Quality Framework agency’s Level 8 (Graduate Certificate) standards in terms of what is called in their policies, the “level” of learning. This states that, following the program, graduates from this level of program “will have advanced knowledge and skills for professional or highly skilled work and/or further learning … [and] will apply knowledge and skills to demonstrate autonomy, well-developed judgment, adaptability and responsibility as a practitioner or learner” (AQF). The program was first delivered in 2012 and, since then, has been offered both two and three terms a year, attracting small numbers of students each term, with an average of 8 to 12 students a term. To meet these requirements, such programs are sometimes developed to provide professional and work-integrated learning tasks and learning outcomes for students (Patrick et al., Smith et al.). In this case, professionally relevant and related tasks and outcomes formed the basis for the program, its learning tasks, and its assessment regime. To this end, each student enrolled in this program works on an individual, self-determined (but developed in association with the teaching team and with feedback from peers) creative/professional project that is planned, developed, and delivered across one term of study for full- time students and two terms for part- timers. In order to ensure the AQF-required professional-level outcomes, many projects are designed and/or developed in partnership with professional arts institutions and community bodies. Partnerships mobilised utilised in this way have included those with local, state, and national bodies, including the local arts community, festivals, and educational support programs, as well as private business and community organisations. Student interaction with curation occurs regularly at art schools, where graduate and other student shows are scheduled as a regular events on the calendar of most tertiary art schools (Al-Amri), and the curated exhibition as an outcome has a longstanding tradition in tertiary fine arts education (Webb, Brien, and Burr). Yet in these cases, it is ultimately the creative work on show that is the focus of the learning experience and assessment process, rather than any focus on engagement with the curatorial process itself (Dally et al.). When art schools do involve students in the curatorial process, the focus usually still remains on the students' creative work (Sullivan). Another interaction with curation is when students undertaking a tertiary-level course or program in museum, and/or curatorial practice are engaged in the process of developing, mounting, and/or critiquing curated activities. These programs are, however, very small in number in Australia, where they are only offered at postgraduate level, with the exception of an undergraduate program at the University of Canberra (‘215JA.2’). By adopting “the exhibition” as a component of the learning process rather than its end product, including documentation of students’ work in progress as exhibition pieces, and incorporating it into a more general creative industries focused program, we argue that the curatorial experience can become an interactive learning platform for students ranging from diverse creative disciplines. The Student Experience Students in the program under consideration in this case study come from a wide spectrum of the creative industries, including creative writing, film, multimedia, music, and visual arts. Each term, at least half of the enrolments are distance students. The decision to establish an on-campus exhibition space was an experimental strategy that sought to bring together students from different creative disciplines and diverse locations, and actively involve them in the exhibition development and curatorial process. As well as their individual project work, the students also bring differing levels of prior professional experience to the program, and exhibit a wide range of learning styles and approaches when developing and completing their creative works and exegetical reflections. To cater for the variations listed above, but still meet the program milestones and learning outcomes that must (under the program rules) remain consistent for each student, we employed a multi-disciplinary approach to teaching that included strategies informed by Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences (Gardner, Frames of Mind), which proposed and defined seven intelligences, and repeatedly criticised what he identified as an over-reliance on linguistic and logical indices as identifiers of intelligence. He asserted that these were traditional indicators of high scores on most IQ measures or tests of achievement but were not representative of overall levels of intelligence. Gardner later reinforced that, “unless individuals take a very active role in what it is that they’re studying, unless they learn to ask questions, to do things hands on, to essentially re-create things in their own mind and transform them as is needed, the ideas just disappear” (Edutopia). In alignment with Gardner’s views, we have noted that students enrolled in the program demonstrate strengths in several key intelligence areas, particularly interpersonal, musical, body-kinaesthetic, and spacial/visual intelligences (see Gardner, ‘Multiple Intelligences’, 8–18). To cater for, and further develop, these strengths, and also for the external students who were unable to attend university-based workshop sessions, we developed a range of resources with various approaches to hands-on creative tasks that related to the projects students were completing that term. These resources included the usual scholarly articles, books, and textbooks but were also sourced from the print and online media, guest speaker presentations, and digital sites such as You Tube and TED Talks, and through student input into group discussions. The positive reception of these individual project-relevant resources is evidenced in the class online discussion forums, where consecutive groups of students have consistently reflected on the positive impact these resources have had on their individual creative projects: This has been a difficult week with many issues presenting. As part of our Free Writing exercise in class, we explored ‘brain dumping’ and wrote anything (no matter how ridiculous) down. The great thing I discovered after completing this task was that by allowing myself to not censor my thoughts by compiling a writing masterpiece, I was indeed “free” to express everything. …. … I understand that this may not have been the original intended goal of Free Writing – but it is something I would highly recommend external students to try and see if it works for you (Student 'A', week 5, term 1 2015, Moodle reflection point). I found our discussion about crowdfunding particularly interesting. ... I intend to look at this model for future exhibitions. I think it could be a great way for me to look into developing an exhibition of paintings alongside some more commercial collateral such as prints and cards (Student 'B', week 6, term 1 2015, Moodle reflection point). In class I specifically enjoyed the black out activity and found the online videos exceptional, inspiring and innovating. I really enjoyed this activity and it was something that I can take away and use within the classroom when educating (Student 'C', week 8, term 1 2015, Moodle reflection point). The application of Gardner’s principles and strategies dovetailed with our framework for assessing learning outcomes, where we were guided by Boud’s seven propositions for assessment reform in higher education, which aim to “set directions for change, designed to enhance learning achievements for all students and improve the quality of their experience” (26). Boud asserts that assessment has most effect when: it is used to engage students in productive learning; feedback is used to improve student learning; students and teachers become partners in learning and assessment; students are inducted into the assessment practices of higher education; assessment and learning are placed at the centre of subject and program design; assessment and learning is a focus for staff and institutional development; and, assessment provides inclusive and trustworthy representation of student achievement. These propositions were integral to the design of learning outcomes for the exhibition. Teachers worked with students, individually and as a group, to build their capacity to curate the exhibition, and this included such things as the design and administration of invitations, and also the physical placement of works within the exhibition space. In this way, teachers and students became partners in the process of assessment. The final exhibition, as a learning outcome, meant that students were engaged in productive learning that placed both assessment and knowledge at the centre of subject and project design. It is a collation of creative pieces that embodies the class, as a whole; however, each piece also represents the skills and creativity of individual students and, in this way, are is a trustworthy representations of student achievement. While we aimed to employ all seven recommendations, our main focus was on ensuring that the exhibition, as an authentic learning experience, was productive and that the students were engaged as responsible and accountable co-facilitators of it. These factors are particularly relevant as almost all the students were either currently working, or planning to work, in their chosen creative field, where the work would necessarily involve both publication, performance, and/or exhibition of their artwork plus collaborative practice across disciplinary boundaries to make this happen (Brien). For this reason, we provided exhibition-related coursework tasks that we hoped were engaging and that also represented an authentic learning outcome for the students. Student Curatorship In this context, the opportunity to exhibit their own works-in-progress provided an authentic reason, with a deadline, for students to both work, and reflect, on their creative projects. The documentation of each student’s creative process was showcased as a stand-alone exhibition piece within the display. These exhibits not only served not only to highlight the different learning styles of each student, but also proved to inspire creativity and skill development. They also provided a working model whereby students (and potential enrollees) could view other students’ work and creative processes from inception to fully-realised project outcomes. The sample online reflections quoted above not only highlight the effectiveness of the online content delivery, but this engagement with the online forum also allowed remote students to comment on each other’s projects as well as to and respond to issues they were encountering in their project planning and development and creative practice. It was essential that this level of peer engagement was fostered for the curatorial project to be viable, as both internal and external students are involved in designing the invitation, catalogue, labels, and design of the space, while on-campus students hang and label work according to the group’s directions. Distance students send in items. This is a key point of this experiment: the process of curating an exhibition of work from diverse creative fields, and from students located thousands of kilometres apart, as a way of bringing cohesion to a diverse cohort of students. That cohesiveness provided an opportunity for authentic learning to occur because it was in relation to a task that each student apparently understood as personally, academically, and professionally relevant. This was supported by the anonymous course evaluation comments, which were overwhelmingly positive about the exhibition process – there were no negative comments regarding this aspect of the program, and over 60 per cent of the class supplied these evaluations. This also met a considerable point of anxiety in the current university environment whereby actively engaging students in online learning interactions is a continuing issue (Dixon, Dixon, and Axmann). A key question is: what relevance does this curatorial process have for a student whose field is not visual art, but, for instance, music, film, or writing? By displaying documentation of work in progress, this process connects students of all disciplines with an audience. For example, one student in 2014 who was a singer/songwriter, had her song available to be played on a laptop, alongside photographs of the studio when she was recording her song with her band. In conjunction with this, the cover artwork for her CD, together with the actual CD and CD cover, were framed and exhibited. Another student, who was also a musician but who was completing a music history project, sent in pages of the music transcriptions he had been working on during the course. This manuscript was bound and exhibited in a way that prompted some audience members to commented that it was like an artist’s book as well as a collection of data. Both of these students lived over 1,000 kilometres from the campus where the exhibition was held, but they were able to share with us as teaching staff, as well as with other students who were involved in the physical setting up of the exhibition, exactly how they envisaged their work being displayed. The feedback from both of these students was that this experience gave them a strong connection to the program. They described how, despite the issue of distance, they had had the opportunity to participate in a professional event that they were very keen to include on their curricula vitae. Another aspect of students actively participating in the curation of an exhibition which features work from diverse disciplines is that these students get a true sense of the collaborative interconnectedness of the disciplines of the creative industries (Brien). By way of example, the exhibit of the singer/songwriter referred to above involved not only the student and her band, but also the photographer who took the photographs, and the artist who designed the CD cover. Students collaboratively decided how this material was handled in the exhibition catalogue – all these names were included and their roles described. Breaking Ground exhibition, CQUniversity Noosa Exhibition Space, 2014. Photo by Ulrike Sturm. Outcomes and Conclusion We believe that the curation of an exhibition and the delivery of its constituent components raises student awareness that they are, as creatives, part of a network of industries, developing in them a genuine understanding of the way the creating industries works as a profession outside the academic setting. It is in this sense that this curatorial task is an authentic learning experience. In fact, what was initially perceived as a significant challenge—, that is, exhibiting work in progress from diverse creative fields—, has become a strength of the curatorial project. In reflecting on the experiences and outcomes that have occurred through the implementation of this example of curatorial practice, both as a learning tool and as a creative outcome in its own right, a key positive indicator for this approach is the high level of student satisfaction with the course, as recorded in the formal, anonymous university student evaluations (with 60–100 per cent of these completed for each term, when the university benchmark is 50 per cent completion), and the high level of professional outcomes achieved post-completion. The university evaluation scores have been in the top (4.5–5/.5) range for satisfaction over the program’s eight terms of delivery since 2012. Particularly in relation to subsequent professional outcomes, anecdotal feedback has been that the curatorial process served as an authentic and engaged learning experience because it equipped the students, now graduates, of the program with not only knowledge about how exhibitions work, but also a genuine understanding of the web of connections between the diverse creative arts and industries. Indeed, a number of students have submitted proposals to exhibit professionally in the space after graduation, again providing anecdotal feedback that the experience they gained through our model has had a sustaining impact on their creative practice. While the focus of this activity has been on creative learning for the students, it has also provided an interesting and engaging teaching experience for us as the program’s staff. We will continue to gather evidence relating to our model, and, with the next iteration of the exhibition project, a more detailed comparative analysis will be attempted. At this stage, with ethics approval, we plan to run an anonymous survey with all students involved in this activity, to develop questions for a focus group discussion with graduates. We are also in the process of contacting alumni of the program regarding professional outcomes to map these one, two, and five years after graduation. We will also keep a record of what percentage of students apply to exhibit in the space after graduation, as this will also be an additional marker of how professional and useful they perceive the experience to be. In conclusion, it can be stated that the 100 per cent pass rate and 0 per cent attrition rate from the program since its inception, coupled with a high level (over 60 per cent) of student progression to further post-graduate study in the creative industries, has not been detrimentally affected by this curatorial experiment, and has encouraged staff to continue with this approach. References Al-Amri, Mohammed. “Assessment Techniques Practiced in Teaching Art at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman.” International Journal of Education through Art 7.3 (2011): 267–282. AQF Levels. Australian Qualifications Framework website. 18 June 2015 ‹http://www.aqf.edu.au/aqf/in-detail/aqf-levels/›. Boud, D. Student Assessment for Learning in and after Courses: Final Report for Senior Fellowship. Sydney: Australian Learning and Teaching Council, 2010. 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Flyvbjerg, Bent. “Five Misunderstandings about Case-Study Research.” Qualitative Inquiry 12.2 (2006): 219–245. Gardner, H. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, New York: Basic Books, 1983. ———. Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons in Theory and Practice, New York: Basic Books, 2006. George Lucas Education Foundation. 2015 Edutopia – What Works in Education. 16 June 2015 ‹http://www.edutopia.org/multiple-intelligences-howard-gardner-video#graph3›. Gerring, John. “What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good For?” American Political Science Review 98.02 (2004): 341–354. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. “Museums and Communication: An Introductory Essay.” Museum, Media, Message 1 (1995): 1. Jennings, Paul. The Public House in Bradford, 1770-1970. Keele: Keele University Press, 1995. Levy, Jack S. “Case Studies: Types, Designs, and Logics of Inference.” Conflict Management and Peace Science 25.1 (2008): 1–18. Merriam, Sharan B. 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This article will look at the use of personal photographs that attempt to convey a sense of social activism as a reaction against global terrorism. Moreover, I argue that the photographs uploaded to the site “We’re Not Afraid”, which began after the London bombings in 2005, presents a forum to promote the pleasures of western cultural values as a defence against the anxiety of terror. What is compelling are the ways in which the Website promotes, seemingly, everyday modalities through what may be deemed as the domestic snapshot. Nevertheless, the aura from the context of these images operates to arouse the collective memory of terrorism and violence. It promotes photography’s spectacular power. To begin it is worthwhile considering the ways in which the spectacle of terrorism is mediated. For example, the bombs activated on the London Underground and at Tavistock Square on the 7th of July 2005 marked the day that London became a victim of ‘global’ terrorism, re-instilling the fear projected by the media to be alarmed and to be suspicious. In the shadow of the terrorist events of September 11, as well as the Madrid Bombings in 2004, the incidents once again drew attention to the point that in the Western world ‘we’ again can be under attack. Furthermore, the news media plays a vital role in mediating the reality and the spectacle of terrorist attacks in the display of visual ‘proof’. After the London bombings of 7 July 2005, the BBC Website encouraged photo submissions of the incidents, under the heading “London Explosions: Your Photos”, thus promoting citizen journalism. Within six hours the BBC site received more that 1000 photographs. According to Richard Sambrook, director of the BBC’s World Service and Global News division, “people were participating in our coverage in way we had never seen before” (13). Other news Websites, such as Reuters and MSNBC also set up a similar call and display of the incidents. The images taken by everyday people and survivors‚ suggest a visceral response to the trauma of terrorism in which they became active participants in the reportage. Leading British newspapers further evoked the sensational terror of the incidents through the captioning of horrific images of destruction. It contextualised them within the realm of fascination and fear with headlines such as “London’s Day of Terror” from the Guardian, “Terror Comes to London” from the Independent and “Al-Qa’eda Brings Terror to the Heart of London” from the Daily Telegraph (“What the Papers Say”). Roland Barthes notes that “even from the perspective of a purely immanent analysis, the structure of the photograph is not an isolated structure; it is in communication with at least one other structure, namely the text – title, caption or article – accompanying every press photograph” (16). He suggested that, with the rise to prominence of ‘the press photograph’ as a mode of visual communication, the traditional relationship between image and text was inverted: “it is not the image which comes to elucidate or ‘realize’ the text, but the latter which comes to sublimate, patheticize or rationalize the image” (25). Frederic Jameson raises a very important point in regards to the role the media plays in terror. He suggests that the Western media is not only affected by a permanent condition of amnesia, but that this has become its primary ‘informational function’ (20). Hence, terror images are constantly repeated for their affect. “When combined with the media, terrorism’s reality-making power is astounding: its capacity to blend the media’s sensational stories, old mythical stereotypes, and a burning sense of moral wrath” (Zulaika and Douglass ix). Susan Sontag, in her 2003 book Regarding the Pain of Others, also discusses the assault of images (116). She argues that “the iconography of suffering has a long pedigree. The sufferings most often deemed worthy of representation are those understood to be the product of wrath, divine or human” (40). Furthermore, globalisation has profoundly changed the rhetoric of terrorism in which the uses of photographs for political means are ubiquitous. Sontag argues that “it seems as if there is a greater quantity of such news than before” (116). Nevertheless, she stresses, “it seems normal to turn away from images that simply make us feel bad” (116). Rather, than the focus on images of despair, the “We’re Not Afraid” Website provides a reaction against visual assaults. The images suggest a turning away from the iconography of terror and suffering to a focus on everyday western middle-class modalities. The images on the site consist of domestic ritual photographic practices, such as family snapshots. The images were disseminated following what has been referred to as the ‘incidents’ by the British press of the attacks on 7 July on the London transport system. Significantly, rather than being described as an event, such as the September 11 terrorist assaults were, the term ‘incidents’ suggests that everyday modalities, the everyday ways of being, may not be affected despite the terror of the attacks. It is, perhaps, a very British approach to the idea of ‘moving on’ despite adversity, which the Website advocates. The Website invites the general public to upload personal photographs captioned with the phrase “We’re not afraid” to “show that terrorists would not change the way people lived their lives” (Clarke).The Website began on 7 July 2005 and during the first week the site received, at times, up to 15 images a minute from across the world (Nikkah). Notably, within days of the Website’s launch it received over 3500 images and 11 million hits (Clarke).The images taken by everyday people and survivors‚ suggest a visceral response to the incidents. These images seem to support Susan Sontag’s argument from On Photography, in which she argues that photography is mainly a social rite, a defence against anxiety, and a tool of power (8). The images present a social activism for the predominantly white middle-class online participants and, as such, is subversive in its move away from the contextualised sensational images of violence that abound in the mainstream press. According to the site’s creator, London Web designer, Alfie Dennen “the idea for this site came from a picture of one of the bombed trains sent from a mobile phone to Dennen’s own weblog. Someone else added the words ‘We’re Not Afraid’ alongside the image” (“‘Not Afraid’ Website Overwhelmed”). Hence, in Dennen’s Weblog the terror and trauma of the train images of the London underground, that were circulated in the main stream press, have been recontextualised by the caption to present defiance and survival. The images uploaded onto the Website range from personal snapshots to manipulated photographs which all bear the declaration: ‘We are not afraid’. Currently, there are 770 galleries with 24 images per gallery amounting to around 18500 images that have been sent to the site. The photographs provide a crack in the projected reality of terrorism and the iconography of suffering as espoused by the mainstream media. The Website claims: We’re not afraid is an outlet for the global community to speak out against the acts of terror that have struck London, Madrid, New York, Baghdad, Basra, Tikrit, Gaza, Tel-Aviv, Afghanistan, Bali, and against the atrocities occurring in cities around the world each and every day. It is a worldwide action for people not willing to be cowed by terrorism and fear mongering. It suggests that: The historical response to these types of attacks has been a show of deadly force; we believe that there is a better way. We refuse to respond to aggression and hatred in kind. Instead, we who are not afraid will continue to live our lives the best way we know how. We will work, we will play, we will laugh, we will live. We will not waste one moment, nor sacrifice one bit of our freedom, because of fear. We are not afraid. (“we’re not afraid.com: Citizens for a secure world, united against terror.”) The images evoke the social memory of our era of global terrorism. Arguably, the events since September 11 have placed the individual in a protection mode. The photographs represent, as Sontag espouses, a tool against the anxiety of our time. This is a turn away from the visual iconography of despair. As such, rather than images of suffering they are images of survival, or life carrying on as usual. Or, more precisely, the images represent depictions of everyday western middle-class existence. The images range from family snaps, touristic photographs, pictures of the London underground and some manipulated images all containing the words ‘We’re Not Afraid’. Dennen “said the site had become a symbol for people to show solidarity with London and say they will not be cowed by the bombings” (“‘Not Afraid’ Website Overwhelmed”). The photographs also serve as a form of protection of western middle-class values and lifestyle that may be threatened by terrorist acts. Of consideration is that “personal photographs not only bind us to our own pasts – they bind us to the pasts of the social groups to which we belong” (Gye 280). The images on the site may be described as a “revocation of social power through visibility” and as such photography is considered a “performance of power” (Frosh 46). Barthes asserts that “formerly, the image illustrated the text (made it clearer); today, the text loads the image, burdening it with a culture, a moral, an imagination” (25). The images loaded onto the Website “We’re Not Afraid’ assumes notions of resilience and defiance which can be closely linked to Anglo-American cultural memory and imagination. Significantly, efforts to influence ‘heart and minds’ through support of touring exhibitions were common in the earlier days of the Cold War. Sontag argues that “photographic collections can be used to substitute a world” (162). The images exalted a universal humanism, similarly to the images on the “We’re Not Afraid” site. Many exhibits were supported throughout the 1950s, often under the auspices of the USIA (United States Information Agency). A famous example is the photography exhibit ‘The Family of Man’ which travelled to 28 countries between 1955-59 and was seen by 9 million people (Kennedy 316). It contained 503 images, 273 photographers from 68 nations “it posited humanity as a universal ideal and human empathy as a compensatory response to the threat of nuclear annihilation” (Kennedy 322). Significantly, Liam Kennedy asserts that, the Cold War rhetoric surrounding the exhibition blurred the boundaries between art, information and propaganda. The exhibition has been critiqued ideologically as an imperialist project, most notably by Allan Sekula in which he states “the worldliness of photography is the outcome, not of any immanent universality of meaning, but of a project of global domination” (96). In more recent times an exhibition, backed by the US State Department titled ‘After September 11: Images from Ground Zero’, by photojournalist/art photographer Joel Meyorowitz travelled to more than 60 countries and assisted in shaping and maintaining a public memory of the attacks of the World Trade Centre and its aftermath (Kennedy 315). Similar, to ‘The Family of Man’, it adds an epic quality to the images. As Kennedy points out that: To be sure this latter exhibit has been more overtly designed as propaganda, yet it also carries the cachet of ‘culture’ (most obviously, via the signature of a renowned photographer) and is intended to transmit a universal message that transcends the politics of difference. (Kennedy 323) The Website “We’re Not Afraid’ maintains the public memory of terrorism, without the horror of suffering. With a ‘universal message’ similar to the aforementioned exhibitions, it attempts to transcends the politics of difference by addressing the ‘we’ as the ‘everyday’ citizen. It serves as a gallery space and similarly evokes western romantic universal ideals conveyed in the exhibition ‘The Family of Man’, whilst its aesthetic forms avoid the stylististically captured scenes of ‘After September 11’. As stated earlier, the site had over 11 million hits in the first few weeks; as such the sheer number of viewers exceeds that of any formal photographic exhibition. Moreover, unlike these highly constructed art exhibitions from leading professional photographers, the Website significantly presents a democratic form of participation in which the ‘personal is political’. It is the citizen journalist. It is the ‘everyday’ person, as evidenced in the predominant snapshot aesthetics and the ordinariness in the images that are employed. Kris Cohen, in his analysis of photoblogging suggests that this aesthetic emphasises the importance in “photoblogging of not thinking too much, of the role that instinct plays in the making of photographs and the photoblog” (890). As discussed, previously, the overwhelming response and contributions to the Website within days of its launch seems to suggest this. The submission of photographs suggests a visceral response to the incidents from the ‘people’ in the celebration of the ‘everyday’ and the mundane. It also should be noted that “there are now well over a million documented blogs and photoblogs in the world”, with most appearing since 2003 (Cohen 886). As Cohen suggests “their newfound popularity has provoked a gentle storm of press, along with a significant number of utopic scenarios in which blogs feature as the next emancipatory mass media product”(886). The world-wide press coverage for the “We’re Not Afraid’ site is one key example that promotes this “utopian vision of transfigured citizens and in Benedict Anderson’s well used term an ‘imagined community” (Goggin xx). Nevertheless, the defiant captioning of the images also returns us historically to the social memory of the London Blitz 1940-41 in which the theme of a transfigured community was employed and in which the London underground and shelters became a signifier for the momentum of “We’re Not Afraid’. Barthes explained in Mythologies about the “the sight of the ‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history” (11). What I want to argue is that the mythology surrounding the London bombings articulated in the Website “We’re Not Afraid’ is determined by 20th Century history of the media and the cultural imaginary surrounding predominantly British values*.** *The British Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, asserted that “qualities of creativity built on tolerance, openness and adaptability, work and self improvement, strong communities and families and fair play, rights and responsibilities and an outward looking approach to the world that all flow from our unique island geography and history.” (“Blair Defines British Values”). These values are suggested in the types of photographs uploaded onto the activist Website, as such notions of the British Empire are evoked. Moreover, in his address following the incident, “Blair harkened back to the ‘Blitz spirit’ that saw Londoners through the dark days of Nazi bombing during World War II — and, by association, to Winston Churchill, the wartime leader whose determined, moving speeches helped steel the national resolve” (“Blair Delivers”). In his Churchillian cadence he paid “tribute to the stoicism and resilience of the people of London who have responded in a way typical of them”. He said Britain would show “by our spirit and dignity” that “our values will long outlast” the terrorists. He further declared that “the purpose of terrorism is just that. It is to terrorize people and we will not be terrorized” (“Blair Delivers”). The mythology of the Blitz and “the interpretive context at the time (and for some years thereafter) can be summarized by the phrase ‘the People’s War’—a populist patriotism that combined criticism of the past with expectations of social change and inclusive messages of shared heritage and values” (Field 31). The image conveyed is of a renewed sense of community. The language of triumph against adversity and the endurance of ordinary citizens are also evoked in the popular press of the London incidents. The Times announced: Revulsion and resolve: Despite the shock, horror and outrage, the calm shown in London was exemplary. Ordinary life may be inconvenienced by the spectre of terror, yet terrorism will not force free societies to abandon their fundamental features. An attack was inevitable. The casualties were dreadful. The terrorists have only strengthened the resolve of Britain and its people. (“What the Papers Say”) Similarly the Daily Express headline was “We Britons Will Never Be Defeated” (“What the Papers Say”). The declaration of “We’re not afraid” alongside images on the Website follows on from this trajectory. The BBC reported that the Website “‘We’re not afraid’ gives Londoners a voice” (“Not Afraid Website Overwhelmed”). The BBC has also made a documentary concerning the mission and the somewhat utopian principles presented. Similarly discussion of the site has been evoked in other Weblogs that overwhelmingly praise it and very rarely question its role. One example is from a discussion of “We’re Not Afraid” on another activist site titled “World Changing: Change Your Thinking”. The contributor states: Well, I live in the UK and I am afraid. I’m also scared that sites like We’re Not Afraid encourage an unhealthy solidarity of superiority, nationalism and xenophobia – perpetuating a “we’re good” and “they’re evil” mentality that avoids the big picture questions of how we got here. Posted by: John Norris at July 8, 2005 03:45 AM Notably, this statement also reiterates the previous argument on cultural diplomacy presented by theorists in regards to the exhibitions of ‘The Family of Man’ and ‘After September 11’ in which the images are viewed as propaganda, promoting western cultural values. This is also supported by the mood of commentary in the British press since the London bombings, in which it is argued that “Britain and the British way of life are under threat, the implication being that the threat is so serious that it may ultimately destroy the nation and its values” (King). The significance of the Website is that it represents a somewhat democratic medium in its call for engagement and self-expression. Furthermore, the emancipatory photography of self and space, presented in the “We’re Not Afraid” site, echoes Blair’s declaration of “we will not be terrorized”. However, it follows similar politically conservative themes that were evoked in the Blitz, such as community, family and social stability, with tacit reference to social fragmentation and multi-ethnicity (Field 41-42). In general, as befitted the theme of “a People’s War,” the Blitz imagery was positive and sympathetic in the way it promoted the endurance of the ordinary citizen. Geoffrey Field suggests “it offered an implicit rejoinder to the earlier furor—focusing especially on brave, caring mothers who made efforts to retain some semblance of family under the most difficult circumstances and fathers who turned up for work no matter how heavy the bombing had been the night before” (24). Images on the Website consist of snapshots of babies, families, pets, sporting groups, people on holiday and at celebrations. It represents a, somewhat, global perspective of middle-class values. The snapshot aesthetic presents, what Liz Kotz refers to as, the “aesthetics of intimacy”. It is a certain kind of photographic work which is quasi-documentary and consists of “colour images of individuals, families, or groupings, presented in an apparently intimate, unposed manner, shot in an off-kilter, snapshot style, often a bit grainy, unfocused, off-colour” (204). These are the types of images that provide the visual gratification of solidarity amongst its contributors and viewers, as it seemingly appears more ‘real’. Yet, Kotz asserts that these type of photographs also involve a structure of power relations “that cannot be easily evaded by the spontaneous performance before the lens” (210). For example, Sarah Boxer importantly points out that “We’re Not Afraid”, set up to show solidarity with London, seems to be turning into a place where the haves of the world can show that they’re not afraid of the have-nots” (1). She argues that “there’s a brutish flaunting of wealth and leisure” (1). The iconography in the images of “We’re not Afraid” certainly promotes a ‘memorialisation’ of the middle-class sphere. The site draws attention to the values of the global neoliberal order in which capital accumulation is paramount. It, nevertheless, also attempts to challenge “the true victory of terrorism”, which Jean Baudrillard circumspectly remarks is in “the regression of the value system, of all the ideology of freedom and free movement etc… that the Western world is so proud of, and that legitimates in its eyes its power over the rest of the world”. Self-confidence is conveyed in the images. Moreover, with the subjects welcoming gaze to the camera there may be a sense of narcissism in publicising what could be considered mundane. However, visibility is power. For example, one of the contributors, Maryland USA resident Darcy Nair, said “she felt a sense of helplessness in the days after 9/11. Posting on the We’re Not Afraid may be a small act, but it does give people like her a sense that they’re doing something” (cited in Weir). Nair states that: It seems that it is the only good answer from someone like me who’s not in the government or military…There are so many other people who are joining in. When bunches of individuals get together – it does make me feel hopeful – there are so many other people who feel the same way. (cited in Weir) Participation in the Website conveys a power which consists of defiantly celebrating western middle-class aesthetics in the form of personal photography. As such, the personal becomes political and the private becomes public. The site offers an opportunity for a shared experience and a sense of community that perhaps is needed in the era of global terrorism. It could be seen as a celebration of survival (Weir). The Website seems inspirational with its defiant message. Moreover, it also has postings from various parts of the world that convey a message of triumph in the ‘everyday’. The site also presents the ubiquitous use of photography in a western cultural tradition in which idealised constructions are manifested in ‘Kodak’ moments and in which the domestic space and leisure times are immortalised and become, significantly, the arena of activism. As previously discussed Sontag argues that photography is mainly a social rite, a defence against anxiety, and a tool of power (8). The Website offers the sense of a global connection. It promotes itself as “citizens for a secure world, united against terror”. It attempts to provide a universal solidarity, which appears uplifting. It is a defence against anxiety in which, in the act of using personal photographs, it becomes part of the collective memory and assists in easing the frustration of not being able to do anything. As Sontag argues “often something looks, or is felt to look ‘better’ in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things” (81). Rather than focus on the tragic victim of traditional photojournalism, in which the camera is directed towards the other, the site promotes the sharing and triumph of personal moments. In the spotlight are ‘everyday’ modalities from ‘everyday people’ attempting to confront the rhetoric of terrorism. In their welcoming gaze to the camera the photographic subjects challenge the notion of the sensational image, the spectacle that is on show is that of middle-class modalities and a performance of collective power. Note Themes from this article have been presented at the 2005 Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Conference in Sydney, Australia and at the 2006 Association for Cultural Studies Crossroads Conference in Istanbul, Turkey. References Barthes, Roland. “The Photographic Message.” Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Noonday Press, 1977 [1961]. 15-31. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Vintage, 1993 [1972]. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Spirit of Terrorism.” Trans. Rachel Bloul. La Monde 2 (2001). < http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-the-spirit-of-terrorism.html >. “Blair Defines British Values.” BBC News 28 Mar. 2000. < http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/693591.stm >. “Blair Delivers a Classically British Rallying Cry.” Associated Press 7 July 2005. < http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8502984/ >. Boxter, Sarah. “On the Web, Fearlessness Meets Frivolousness.” The York Times 12 July 2005. < http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/arts/design/12boxe.html?ex= 1278820800&en=e3b207245991aea8&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss >. Clarke, R. “Web Site Shows Defiance to Bombers: Thousands Send Images to Say ‘We Are Not Afraid.’” CNN International 12 July 2005. < http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/07/11/london.website/ >. “CJ Bombings in London.” MSNBC TV Citizen Journalist. < http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8499792/ >. Cohen, Kris R. “What Does the Photoblog Want?” Media, Culture & Society 27.6 (2005): 883-901. Dennen, Alfie. “We’renotafraid.com: Citizens for a Secure World, United Against Terror.” < http://www.werenotafraid.com/ >. Field, Geoffrey. “Nights Underground in Darkest London: The Blitz, 1940–1941.” International Labor and Working-Class History 62 (2002): 11-49. Frosh, Paul. “The Public Eye and the Citizen-Voyeur: Photography as a Performance of Power.” Social Semiotics 11.1 (2001): 43-59. Gye, Lisa. “Picture This: The Impact of Mobile Camera Phones on Personal Photographic Practices.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 22.2 (2007): 279-288. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern. New York: Verso, 1998. 1-20. Kennedy, Liam. “Remembering September 11: Photography as Cultural Diplomacy.” International Affairs 79.2 (2003): 315-326. King, Anthony. “What Does It Mean to Be British?” Telegraph 27 May 2005. < http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/27/ nbrit27.xml >. Kotz, Liz. “The Aesthetics of Intimacy.” In D. Bright (ed.), The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire. London: Routledge, 1998. 204-215. “London Explosions: Your Photos.” BBC News 8 July 2005 < http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/4660563.stm >. Nikkhah, Roya. “We’restillnotafraid.com.” Telegraph co.uk 23 July 2005. < http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/24/ nseven224.xml >. “‘Not Afraid’ Website Overwhelmed.” BBC News 12 July 2005. < http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/england/london/4674425.stm >. Norris, John. “We’re Not Afraid”. World Changing: Change Your Thinking. < http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003069.html >. “Reuters: You Witness News.” < http://www.reuters.com/youwitness >. Sambrook, Richard. “Citizen Journalism and the BBC.” Nieman Reports (Winter 2005): 13-16. Sekula, Allan. “The Traffic in Photographs.” In Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photoworks 1973-1983. Halifax Nova Scotia: Nova Scotia College Press, 1984. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. Sontag. Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1977. Weir, William. “The Global Community Support and Sends a Defiant Message to Terrorists.” Hartford Courant 14 July 2005. < http://www.uchc.edu/ocomm/newsarchive/news05/jul05/notafraid.html >. We’renot afraid.com: Citizens for a Secure World, United against Terror. < http://www.werenotafraid.com >. “What the Papers Say.” Media Guardian 8 July 2005. < http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/jul/08/pressandpublishing.terrorism1 >. Zulaika, Joseba, and William A. Douglass. Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism. New York: Routledge, 1996.

This article will look at the use of personal photographs that attempt to convey a sense of social activism as a reaction against global terrorism. Moreover, I argue that the photographs uploaded to the site “We’re Not Afraid”, which began after the London bombings in 2005, presents a forum to promote the pleasures of western cultural values as a defence against the anxiety of terror. What is compelling are the ways in which the Website promotes, seemingly, everyday modalities through what may be deemed as the domestic snapshot. Nevertheless, the aura from the context of these images operates to arouse the collective memory of terrorism and violence. It promotes photography’s spectacular power. To begin it is worthwhile considering the ways in which the spectacle of terrorism is mediated. For example, the bombs activated on the London Underground and at Tavistock Square on the 7th of July 2005 marked the day that London became a victim of ‘global’ terrorism, re-instilling the fear projected by the media to be alarmed and to be suspicious. In the shadow of the terrorist events of September 11, as well as the Madrid Bombings in 2004, the incidents once again drew attention to the point that in the Western world ‘we’ again can be under attack. Furthermore, the news media plays a vital role in mediating the reality and the spectacle of terrorist attacks in the display of visual ‘proof’. After the London bombings of 7 July 2005, the BBC Website encouraged photo submissions of the incidents, under the heading “London Explosions: Your Photos”, thus promoting citizen journalism. Within six hours the BBC site received more that 1000 photographs. According to Richard Sambrook, director of the BBC’s World Service and Global News division, “people were participating in our coverage in way we had never seen before” (13). Other news Websites, such as Reuters and MSNBC also set up a similar call and display of the incidents. The images taken by everyday people and survivors‚ suggest a visceral response to the trauma of terrorism in which they became active participants in the reportage. Leading British newspapers further evoked the sensational terror of the incidents through the captioning of horrific images of destruction. It contextualised them within the realm of fascination and fear with headlines such as “London’s Day of Terror” from the Guardian, “Terror Comes to London” from the Independent and “Al-Qa’eda Brings Terror to the Heart of London” from the Daily Telegraph (“What the Papers Say”). Roland Barthes notes that “even from the perspective of a purely immanent analysis, the structure of the photograph is not an isolated structure; it is in communication with at least one other structure, namely the text – title, caption or article – accompanying every press photograph” (16). He suggested that, with the rise to prominence of ‘the press photograph’ as a mode of visual communication, the traditional relationship between image and text was inverted: “it is not the image which comes to elucidate or ‘realize’ the text, but the latter which comes to sublimate, patheticize or rationalize the image” (25). Frederic Jameson raises a very important point in regards to the role the media plays in terror. He suggests that the Western media is not only affected by a permanent condition of amnesia, but that this has become its primary ‘informational function’ (20). Hence, terror images are constantly repeated for their affect. “When combined with the media, terrorism’s reality-making power is astounding: its capacity to blend the media’s sensational stories, old mythical stereotypes, and a burning sense of moral wrath” (Zulaika and Douglass ix). Susan Sontag, in her 2003 book Regarding the Pain of Others, also discusses the assault of images (116). She argues that “the iconography of suffering has a long pedigree. The sufferings most often deemed worthy of representation are those understood to be the product of wrath, divine or human” (40). Furthermore, globalisation has profoundly changed the rhetoric of terrorism in which the uses of photographs for political means are ubiquitous. Sontag argues that “it seems as if there is a greater quantity of such news than before” (116). Nevertheless, she stresses, “it seems normal to turn away from images that simply make us feel bad” (116). Rather, than the focus on images of despair, the “We’re Not Afraid” Website provides a reaction against visual assaults. The images suggest a turning away from the iconography of terror and suffering to a focus on everyday western middle-class modalities. The images on the site consist of domestic ritual photographic practices, such as family snapshots. The images were disseminated following what has been referred to as the ‘incidents’ by the British press of the attacks on 7 July on the London transport system. Significantly, rather than being described as an event, such as the September 11 terrorist assaults were, the term ‘incidents’ suggests that everyday modalities, the everyday ways of being, may not be affected despite the terror of the attacks. It is, perhaps, a very British approach to the idea of ‘moving on’ despite adversity, which the Website advocates. The Website invites the general public to upload personal photographs captioned with the phrase “We’re not afraid” to “show that terrorists would not change the way people lived their lives” (Clarke).The Website began on 7 July 2005 and during the first week the site received, at times, up to 15 images a minute from across the world (Nikkah). Notably, within days of the Website’s launch it received over 3500 images and 11 million hits (Clarke).The images taken by everyday people and survivors‚ suggest a visceral response to the incidents. These images seem to support Susan Sontag’s argument from On Photography, in which she argues that photography is mainly a social rite, a defence against anxiety, and a tool of power (8). The images present a social activism for the predominantly white middle-class online participants and, as such, is subversive in its move away from the contextualised sensational images of violence that abound in the mainstream press. According to the site’s creator, London Web designer, Alfie Dennen “the idea for this site came from a picture of one of the bombed trains sent from a mobile phone to Dennen’s own weblog. Someone else added the words ‘We’re Not Afraid’ alongside the image” (“‘Not Afraid’ Website Overwhelmed”). Hence, in Dennen’s Weblog the terror and trauma of the train images of the London underground, that were circulated in the main stream press, have been recontextualised by the caption to present defiance and survival. The images uploaded onto the Website range from personal snapshots to manipulated photographs which all bear the declaration: ‘We are not afraid’. Currently, there are 770 galleries with 24 images per gallery amounting to around 18500 images that have been sent to the site. The photographs provide a crack in the projected reality of terrorism and the iconography of suffering as espoused by the mainstream media. The Website claims: We’re not afraid is an outlet for the global community to speak out against the acts of terror that have struck London, Madrid, New York, Baghdad, Basra, Tikrit, Gaza, Tel-Aviv, Afghanistan, Bali, and against the atrocities occurring in cities around the world each and every day. It is a worldwide action for people not willing to be cowed by terrorism and fear mongering. It suggests that: The historical response to these types of attacks has been a show of deadly force; we believe that there is a better way. We refuse to respond to aggression and hatred in kind. Instead, we who are not afraid will continue to live our lives the best way we know how. We will work, we will play, we will laugh, we will live. We will not waste one moment, nor sacrifice one bit of our freedom, because of fear. We are not afraid. (“we’re not afraid.com: Citizens for a secure world, united against terror.”) The images evoke the social memory of our era of global terrorism. Arguably, the events since September 11 have placed the individual in a protection mode. The photographs represent, as Sontag espouses, a tool against the anxiety of our time. This is a turn away from the visual iconography of despair. As such, rather than images of suffering they are images of survival, or life carrying on as usual. Or, more precisely, the images represent depictions of everyday western middle-class existence. The images range from family snaps, touristic photographs, pictures of the London underground and some manipulated images all containing the words ‘We’re Not Afraid’. Dennen “said the site had become a symbol for people to show solidarity with London and say they will not be cowed by the bombings” (“‘Not Afraid’ Website Overwhelmed”). The photographs also serve as a form of protection of western middle-class values and lifestyle that may be threatened by terrorist acts. Of consideration is that “personal photographs not only bind us to our own pasts – they bind us to the pasts of the social groups to which we belong” (Gye 280). The images on the site may be described as a “revocation of social power through visibility” and as such photography is considered a “performance of power” (Frosh 46). Barthes asserts that “formerly, the image illustrated the text (made it clearer); today, the text loads the image, burdening it with a culture, a moral, an imagination” (25). The images loaded onto the Website “We’re Not Afraid’ assumes notions of resilience and defiance which can be closely linked to Anglo-American cultural memory and imagination. Significantly, efforts to influence ‘heart and minds’ through support of touring exhibitions were common in the earlier days of the Cold War. Sontag argues that “photographic collections can be used to substitute a world” (162). The images exalted a universal humanism, similarly to the images on the “We’re Not Afraid” site. Many exhibits were supported throughout the 1950s, often under the auspices of the USIA (United States Information Agency). A famous example is the photography exhibit ‘The Family of Man’ which travelled to 28 countries between 1955-59 and was seen by 9 million people (Kennedy 316). It contained 503 images, 273 photographers from 68 nations “it posited humanity as a universal ideal and human empathy as a compensatory response to the threat of nuclear annihilation” (Kennedy 322). Significantly, Liam Kennedy asserts that, the Cold War rhetoric surrounding the exhibition blurred the boundaries between art, information and propaganda. The exhibition has been critiqued ideologically as an imperialist project, most notably by Allan Sekula in which he states “the worldliness of photography is the outcome, not of any immanent universality of meaning, but of a project of global domination” (96). In more recent times an exhibition, backed by the US State Department titled ‘After September 11: Images from Ground Zero’, by photojournalist/art photographer Joel Meyorowitz travelled to more than 60 countries and assisted in shaping and maintaining a public memory of the attacks of the World Trade Centre and its aftermath (Kennedy 315). Similar, to ‘The Family of Man’, it adds an epic quality to the images. As Kennedy points out that: To be sure this latter exhibit has been more overtly designed as propaganda, yet it also carries the cachet of ‘culture’ (most obviously, via the signature of a renowned photographer) and is intended to transmit a universal message that transcends the politics of difference. (Kennedy 323) The Website “We’re Not Afraid’ maintains the public memory of terrorism, without the horror of suffering. With a ‘universal message’ similar to the aforementioned exhibitions, it attempts to transcends the politics of difference by addressing the ‘we’ as the ‘everyday’ citizen. It serves as a gallery space and similarly evokes western romantic universal ideals conveyed in the exhibition ‘The Family of Man’, whilst its aesthetic forms avoid the stylististically captured scenes of ‘After September 11’. As stated earlier, the site had over 11 million hits in the first few weeks; as such the sheer number of viewers exceeds that of any formal photographic exhibition. Moreover, unlike these highly constructed art exhibitions from leading professional photographers, the Website significantly presents a democratic form of participation in which the ‘personal is political’. It is the citizen journalist. It is the ‘everyday’ person, as evidenced in the predominant snapshot aesthetics and the ordinariness in the images that are employed. Kris Cohen, in his analysis of photoblogging suggests that this aesthetic emphasises the importance in “photoblogging of not thinking too much, of the role that instinct plays in the making of photographs and the photoblog” (890). As discussed, previously, the overwhelming response and contributions to the Website within days of its launch seems to suggest this. The submission of photographs suggests a visceral response to the incidents from the ‘people’ in the celebration of the ‘everyday’ and the mundane. It also should be noted that “there are now well over a million documented blogs and photoblogs in the world”, with most appearing since 2003 (Cohen 886). As Cohen suggests “their newfound popularity has provoked a gentle storm of press, along with a significant number of utopic scenarios in which blogs feature as the next emancipatory mass media product”(886). The world-wide press coverage for the “We’re Not Afraid’ site is one key example that promotes this “utopian vision of transfigured citizens and in Benedict Anderson’s well used term an ‘imagined community” (Goggin xx). Nevertheless, the defiant captioning of the images also returns us historically to the social memory of the London Blitz 1940-41 in which the theme of a transfigured community was employed and in which the London underground and shelters became a signifier for the momentum of “We’re Not Afraid’. Barthes explained in Mythologies about the “the sight of the ‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history” (11). What I want to argue is that the mythology surrounding the London bombings articulated in the Website “We’re Not Afraid’ is determined by 20th Century history of the media and the cultural imaginary surrounding predominantly British values*.** *The British Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, asserted that “qualities of creativity built on tolerance, openness and adaptability, work and self improvement, strong communities and families and fair play, rights and responsibilities and an outward looking approach to the world that all flow from our unique island geography and history.” (“Blair Defines British Values”). These values are suggested in the types of photographs uploaded onto the activist Website, as such notions of the British Empire are evoked. Moreover, in his address following the incident, “Blair harkened back to the ‘Blitz spirit’ that saw Londoners through the dark days of Nazi bombing during World War II — and, by association, to Winston Churchill, the wartime leader whose determined, moving speeches helped steel the national resolve” (“Blair Delivers”). In his Churchillian cadence he paid “tribute to the stoicism and resilience of the people of London who have responded in a way typical of them”. He said Britain would show “by our spirit and dignity” that “our values will long outlast” the terrorists. He further declared that “the purpose of terrorism is just that. It is to terrorize people and we will not be terrorized” (“Blair Delivers”). The mythology of the Blitz and “the interpretive context at the time (and for some years thereafter) can be summarized by the phrase ‘the People’s War’—a populist patriotism that combined criticism of the past with expectations of social change and inclusive messages of shared heritage and values” (Field 31). The image conveyed is of a renewed sense of community. The language of triumph against adversity and the endurance of ordinary citizens are also evoked in the popular press of the London incidents. The Times announced: Revulsion and resolve: Despite the shock, horror and outrage, the calm shown in London was exemplary. Ordinary life may be inconvenienced by the spectre of terror, yet terrorism will not force free societies to abandon their fundamental features. An attack was inevitable. The casualties were dreadful. The terrorists have only strengthened the resolve of Britain and its people. (“What the Papers Say”) Similarly the Daily Express headline was “We Britons Will Never Be Defeated” (“What the Papers Say”). The declaration of “We’re not afraid” alongside images on the Website follows on from this trajectory. The BBC reported that the Website “‘We’re not afraid’ gives Londoners a voice” (“Not Afraid Website Overwhelmed”). The BBC has also made a documentary concerning the mission and the somewhat utopian principles presented. Similarly discussion of the site has been evoked in other Weblogs that overwhelmingly praise it and very rarely question its role. One example is from a discussion of “We’re Not Afraid” on another activist site titled “World Changing: Change Your Thinking”. The contributor states: Well, I live in the UK and I am afraid. I’m also scared that sites like We’re Not Afraid encourage an unhealthy solidarity of superiority, nationalism and xenophobia – perpetuating a “we’re good” and “they’re evil” mentality that avoids the big picture questions of how we got here. Posted by: John Norris at July 8, 2005 03:45 AM Notably, this statement also reiterates the previous argument on cultural diplomacy presented by theorists in regards to the exhibitions of ‘The Family of Man’ and ‘After September 11’ in which the images are viewed as propaganda, promoting western cultural values. This is also supported by the mood of commentary in the British press since the London bombings, in which it is argued that “Britain and the British way of life are under threat, the implication being that the threat is so serious that it may ultimately destroy the nation and its values” (King). The significance of the Website is that it represents a somewhat democratic medium in its call for engagement and self-expression. Furthermore, the emancipatory photography of self and space, presented in the “We’re Not Afraid” site, echoes Blair’s declaration of “we will not be terrorized”. However, it follows similar politically conservative themes that were evoked in the Blitz, such as community, family and social stability, with tacit reference to social fragmentation and multi-ethnicity (Field 41-42). In general, as befitted the theme of “a People’s War,” the Blitz imagery was positive and sympathetic in the way it promoted the endurance of the ordinary citizen. Geoffrey Field suggests “it offered an implicit rejoinder to the earlier furor—focusing especially on brave, caring mothers who made efforts to retain some semblance of family under the most difficult circumstances and fathers who turned up for work no matter how heavy the bombing had been the night before” (24). Images on the Website consist of snapshots of babies, families, pets, sporting groups, people on holiday and at celebrations. It represents a, somewhat, global perspective of middle-class values. The snapshot aesthetic presents, what Liz Kotz refers to as, the “aesthetics of intimacy”. It is a certain kind of photographic work which is quasi-documentary and consists of “colour images of individuals, families, or groupings, presented in an apparently intimate, unposed manner, shot in an off-kilter, snapshot style, often a bit grainy, unfocused, off-colour” (204). These are the types of images that provide the visual gratification of solidarity amongst its contributors and viewers, as it seemingly appears more ‘real’. Yet, Kotz asserts that these type of photographs also involve a structure of power relations “that cannot be easily evaded by the spontaneous performance before the lens” (210). For example, Sarah Boxer importantly points out that “We’re Not Afraid”, set up to show solidarity with London, seems to be turning into a place where the haves of the world can show that they’re not afraid of the have-nots” (1). She argues that “there’s a brutish flaunting of wealth and leisure” (1). The iconography in the images of “We’re not Afraid” certainly promotes a ‘memorialisation’ of the middle-class sphere. The site draws attention to the values of the global neoliberal order in which capital accumulation is paramount. It, nevertheless, also attempts to challenge “the true victory of terrorism”, which Jean Baudrillard circumspectly remarks is in “the regression of the value system, of all the ideology of freedom and free movement etc… that the Western world is so proud of, and that legitimates in its eyes its power over the rest of the world”. Self-confidence is conveyed in the images. Moreover, with the subjects welcoming gaze to the camera there may be a sense of narcissism in publicising what could be considered mundane. However, visibility is power. For example, one of the contributors, Maryland USA resident Darcy Nair, said “she felt a sense of helplessness in the days after 9/11. Posting on the We’re Not Afraid may be a small act, but it does give people like her a sense that they’re doing something” (cited in Weir). Nair states that: It seems that it is the only good answer from someone like me who’s not in the government or military…There are so many other people who are joining in. When bunches of individuals get together – it does make me feel hopeful – there are so many other people who feel the same way. (cited in Weir) Participation in the Website conveys a power which consists of defiantly celebrating western middle-class aesthetics in the form of personal photography. As such, the personal becomes political and the private becomes public. The site offers an opportunity for a shared experience and a sense of community that perhaps is needed in the era of global terrorism. It could be seen as a celebration of survival (Weir). The Website seems inspirational with its defiant message. Moreover, it also has postings from various parts of the world that convey a message of triumph in the ‘everyday’. The site also presents the ubiquitous use of photography in a western cultural tradition in which idealised constructions are manifested in ‘Kodak’ moments and in which the domestic space and leisure times are immortalised and become, significantly, the arena of activism. As previously discussed Sontag argues that photography is mainly a social rite, a defence against anxiety, and a tool of power (8). The Website offers the sense of a global connection. It promotes itself as “citizens for a secure world, united against terror”. It attempts to provide a universal solidarity, which appears uplifting. It is a defence against anxiety in which, in the act of using personal photographs, it becomes part of the collective memory and assists in easing the frustration of not being able to do anything. As Sontag argues “often something looks, or is felt to look ‘better’ in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things” (81). Rather than focus on the tragic victim of traditional photojournalism, in which the camera is directed towards the other, the site promotes the sharing and triumph of personal moments. In the spotlight are ‘everyday’ modalities from ‘everyday people’ attempting to confront the rhetoric of terrorism. In their welcoming gaze to the camera the photographic subjects challenge the notion of the sensational image, the spectacle that is on show is that of middle-class modalities and a performance of collective power. Note Themes from this article have been presented at the 2005 Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Conference in Sydney, Australia and at the 2006 Association for Cultural Studies Crossroads Conference in Istanbul, Turkey. References Barthes, Roland. “The Photographic Message.” Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Noonday Press, 1977 [1961]. 15-31. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Vintage, 1993 [1972]. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Spirit of Terrorism.” Trans. Rachel Bloul. La Monde 2 (2001). http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-the-spirit-of-terrorism.html>. “Blair Defines British Values.” BBC News 28 Mar. 2000. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/693591.stm>. “Blair Delivers a Classically British Rallying Cry.” Associated Press 7 July 2005. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8502984/>. Boxter, Sarah. “On the Web, Fearlessness Meets Frivolousness.” The York Times 12 July 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/arts/design/12boxe.html?ex= 1278820800&en=e3b207245991aea8&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss>. Clarke, R. “Web Site Shows Defiance to Bombers: Thousands Send Images to Say ‘We Are Not Afraid.’” CNN International 12 July 2005. http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/07/11/london.website/>. “CJ Bombings in London.” MSNBC TV Citizen Journalist. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8499792/>. Cohen, Kris R. “What Does the Photoblog Want?” Media, Culture & Society 27.6 (2005): 883-901. Dennen, Alfie. “We’renotafraid.com: Citizens for a Secure World, United Against Terror.” http://www.werenotafraid.com/>. Field, Geoffrey. “Nights Underground in Darkest London: The Blitz, 1940–1941.” International Labor and Working-Class History 62 (2002): 11-49. Frosh, Paul. “The Public Eye and the Citizen-Voyeur: Photography as a Performance of Power.” Social Semiotics 11.1 (2001): 43-59. Gye, Lisa. “Picture This: The Impact of Mobile Camera Phones on Personal Photographic Practices.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 22.2 (2007): 279-288. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern. New York: Verso, 1998. 1-20. Kennedy, Liam. “Remembering September 11: Photography as Cultural Diplomacy.” International Affairs 79.2 (2003): 315-326. King, Anthony. “What Does It Mean to Be British?” Telegraph 27 May 2005. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/27/ nbrit27.xml>. Kotz, Liz. “The Aesthetics of Intimacy.” In D. Bright (ed.), The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire. London: Routledge, 1998. 204-215. “London Explosions: Your Photos.” BBC News 8 July 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/4660563.stm>. Nikkhah, Roya. “We’restillnotafraid.com.” Telegraph co.uk 23 July 2005. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/24/ nseven224.xml>. “‘Not Afraid’ Website Overwhelmed.” BBC News 12 July 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/england/london/4674425.stm>. Norris, John. “We’re Not Afraid”. World Changing: Change Your Thinking. http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003069.html>. “Reuters: You Witness News.” http://www.reuters.com/youwitness>. Sambrook, Richard. “Citizen Journalism and the BBC.” Nieman Reports (Winter 2005): 13-16. Sekula, Allan. “The Traffic in Photographs.” In Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photoworks 1973-1983. Halifax Nova Scotia: Nova Scotia College Press, 1984. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. Sontag. Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1977. Weir, William. “The Global Community Support and Sends a Defiant Message to Terrorists.” Hartford Courant 14 July 2005. http://www.uchc.edu/ocomm/newsarchive/news05/jul05/notafraid.html>. We’renot afraid.com: Citizens for a Secure World, United against Terror. http://www.werenotafraid.com>. “What the Papers Say.” Media Guardian 8 July 2005. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/jul/08/pressandpublishing.terrorism1>. Zulaika, Joseba, and William A. Douglass. Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism. New York: Routledge, 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Allmark, Panizza. "Photography after the Incidents: We’re Not Afraid!." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/06-allmark.php>. APA Style Allmark, P. (Apr. 2008) "Photography after the Incidents: We’re Not Afraid!," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/06-allmark.php>.

I first came across etoy in Linz, Austria in 1995. They turned up at Ars Electronica with their shaved heads, in their matching orange bomber jackets. They were not invited. The next year they would not have to crash the party. In 1996 they were awarded Arts Electronica’s prestigious Golden Nica for web art, and were on their way to fame and bitterness – the just rewards for their art of self-regard. As founding member Agent.ZAI says: “All of us were extremely greedy – for excitement, for drugs, for success.” (Wishart & Boschler: 16) The etoy story starts on the fringes of the squatters’ movement in Zurich. Disenchanted with the hard left rhetorics that permeate the movement in the 1980s, a small group look for another way of existing within a commodified world, without the fantasy of an ‘outside’ from which to critique it. What Antonio Negri and friends call the ‘real subsumption’ of life under the rule of commodification is something etoy grasps intuitively. The group would draw on a number of sources: David Bowie, the Sex Pistols, the Manchester rave scene, European Amiga art, rumors of the historic avant gardes from Dada to Fluxus. They came together in 1994, at a meeting in the Swiss resort town of Weggis on Lake Lucerne. While the staging of the founding meeting looks like a rerun of the origins of the Situationist International, the wording of the invitation might suggest the founding of a pop music boy band: “fun, money and the new world?” One of the – many – stories about the origins of the name Dada has it being chosen at random from a bilingual dictionary. The name etoy, in an update on that procedure, was spat out by a computer program designed to make four letter words at random. Ironically, both Dada and etoy, so casually chosen, would inspire furious struggles over the ownership of these chancey 4-bit words. The group decided to make money by servicing the growing rave scene. Being based in Vienna and Zurich, the group needed a way to communicate, and chose to use the internet. This was a far from obvious thing to do in 1994. Connections were slow and unreliable. Sometimes it was easier to tape a hard drive full of clubland graphics to the underside of a seat on the express train from Zurich to Vienna and simply email instructions to meet the train and retrieve it. The web was a primitive instrument in 1995 when etoy built its first website. They launched it with a party called etoy.FASTLANE, an optimistic title when the web was anything but. Coco, a transsexual model and tabloid sensation, sang a Japanese song while suspended in the air. She brought media interest, and was anointed etoy’s lifestyle angel. As Wishart and Bochsler write, “it was as if the Seven Dwarfs had discovered their Snow White.” (Wishart & Boschler: 33) The launch didn’t lead to much in the way of a music deal or television exposure. The old media were not so keen to validate the etoy dream of lifting themselves into fame and fortune by their bootstraps. And so etoy decided to be stars of the new media. The slogan was suitably revised: “etoy: the pop star is the pilot is the coder is the designer is the architect is the manager is the system is etoy.” (Wishart & Boschler: 34) The etoy boys were more than net.artists, they were artists of the brand. The brand was achieving a new prominence in the mid-90s. (Klein: 35) This was a time when capitalism was hollowing itself out in the overdeveloped world, shedding parts of its manufacturing base. Control of the circuits of commodification would rest less on the ownership of the means of production and more on maintaining a monopoly on the flows of information. The leading edge of the ruling class was becoming self-consciously vectoral. It controlled the flow of information about what to produce – the details of design, the underlying patents. It controlled the flows of information about what is produced – the brands and logos, the slogans and images. The capitalist class is supplanted by a vectoral class, controlling the commodity circuit through the vectors of information. (Wark) The genius of etoy was to grasp the aesthetic dimension of this new stage of commodification. The etoy boys styled themselves not so much as a parody of corporate branding and management groupthink, but as logical extension of it. They adopted matching uniforms and called themselves agents. In the dada-punk-hiphop tradition, they launched themselves on the world as brand new, self-created, self-named subjects: Agents Zai, Brainhard, Gramazio, Kubli, Esposto, Udatny and Goldstein. The etoy.com website was registered in 1995 with Network Solutions for a $100 fee. The homepage for this etoy.TANKSYSTEM was designed like a flow chart. As Gramazio says: “We wanted to create an environment with surreal content, to build a parallel world and put the content of this world into tanks.” (Wishart & Boschler: 51) One tank was a cybermotel, with Coco the first guest. Another tank showed you your IP number, with a big-brother eye looking on. A supermarket tank offered sunglasses and laughing gas for sale, but which may or may not be delivered. The underground tank included hardcore photos of a sensationalist kind. A picture of the Federal Building in Oklamoma City after the bombing was captioned in deadpan post-situ style “such work needs a lot of training.” (Wishart & Boschler: 52) The etoy agents were by now thoroughly invested in the etoy brand and the constellation of images they had built around it, on their website. Their slogan became “etoy: leaving reality behind.” (Wishart & Boschler: 53) They were not the first artists fascinated by commodification. It was Warhol who said “good art is good business.”(Warhol ) But etoy reversed the equation: good business is good art. And good business, in this vectoral age, is in its most desirable form an essentially conceptual matter of creating a brand at the center of a constellation of signifiers. Late in 1995, etoy held another group meeting, at the Zurich youth center Dynamo. The problem was that while they had build a hardcore website, nobody was visiting it. Agents Gooldstein and Udatny thought that there might be a way of using the new search engines to steer visitors to the site. Zai and Brainhard helped secure a place at the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts where Udatny could use the computer lab to implement this idea. Udatny’s first step was to create a program that would go out and gather email addresses from the web. These addresses would form the lists for the early examples of art-spam that etoy would perpetrate. Udatny’s second idea was a bit more interesting. He worked out how to get the etoy.TANKSYSTEM page listed in search engines. Most search engines ranked pages by the frequency of the search term in the pages it had indexed, so etoy.TANKSYSTEM would contain pages of selected keywords. Porn sites were also discovering this method of creating free publicity. The difference was that etoy chose a very carefully curated list of 350 search terms, including: art, bondage, cyberspace, Doom, Elvis, Fidel, genx, heroin, internet, jungle and Kant. Users of search engines who searched for these terms would find dummy pages listed prominently in their search results that directed them, unsuspectingly, to etoy.com. They called this project Digital Hijack. To give the project a slightly political aura, the pages the user was directed to contained an appeal for the release of convicted hacker Kevin Mitnick. This was the project that won them a Golden Nica statuette at Ars Electronica in 1996, which Gramazio allegedly lost the same night playing roulette. It would also, briefly, require that they explain themselves to the police. Digital Hijack also led to the first splits in the group, under the intense pressure of organizing it on a notionally collective basis, but with the zealous Agent Zai acting as de facto leader. When Udatny was expelled, Zai and Brainhard even repossessed his Toshiba laptop, bought with etoy funds. As Udatny recalls, “It was the lowest point in my life ever. There was nothing left; I could not rely on etoy any more. I did not even have clothes, apart from the etoy uniform.” (Wishart & Boschler: 104) Here the etoy story repeats a common theme from the history of the avant gardes as forms of collective subjectivity. After Digital Hijack, etoy went into a bit of a slump. It’s something of a problem for a group so dependent on recognition from the other of the media, that without a buzz around them, etoy would tend to collapse in on itself like a fading supernova. Zai spend the early part of 1997 working up a series of management documents, in which he appeared as the group’s managing director. Zai employed the current management theory rhetoric of employee ‘empowerment’ while centralizing control. Like any other corporate-Trotskyite, his line was that “We have to get used to reworking the company structure constantly.” (Wishart & Boschler: 132) The plan was for each member of etoy to register the etoy trademark in a different territory, linking identity to information via ownership. As Zai wrote “If another company uses our name in a grand way, I’ll probably shoot myself. And that would not be cool.” (Wishart & Boschler:: 132) As it turned out, another company was interested – the company that would become eToys.com. Zai received an email offering “a reasonable sum” for the etoy.com domain name. Zai was not amused. “Damned Americans, they think they can take our hunting grounds for a handful of glass pearls….”. (Wishart & Boschler: 133) On an invitation from Suzy Meszoly of C3, the etoy boys traveled to Budapest to work on “protected by etoy”, a work exploring internet security. They spent most of their time – and C3’s grant money – producing a glossy corporate brochure. The folder sported a blurb from Bjork: “etoy: immature priests from another world” – which was of course completely fabricated. When Artothek, the official art collection of the Austrian Chancellor, approached etoy wanting to buy work, the group had to confront the problem of how to actually turn their brand into a product. The idea was always that the brand was the product, but this doesn’t quite resolve the question of how to produce the kind of unique artifacts that the art world requires. Certainly the old Conceptual Art strategy of selling ‘documentation’ would not do. The solution was as brilliant as it was simple – to sell etoy shares. The ‘works’ would be ‘share certificates’ – unique objects, whose only value, on the face of it, would be that they referred back to the value of the brand. The inspiration, according to Wishart & Boschsler, was David Bowie, ‘the man who sold the world’, who had announced the first rock and roll bond on the London financial markets, backed by future earnings of his back catalogue and publishing rights. Gramazio would end up presenting Chancellor Viktor Klima with the first ‘shares’ at a press conference. “It was a great start for the project”, he said, “A real hack.” (Wishart & Boschler: 142) For this vectoral age, etoy would create the perfect vectoral art. Zai and Brainhard took off next for Pasadena, where they got the idea of reverse-engineering the online etoy.TANKSYSTEM by building an actual tank in an orange shipping container, which would become etoy.TANK 17. This premiered at the San Francisco gallery Blasthaus in June 1998. Instant stars in the small world of San Francisco art, the group began once again to disintegrate. Brainhard and Esposito resigned. Back in Europe in late 1998, Zai was preparing to graduate from the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts. His final project would recapitulate the life and death of etoy. It would exist from here on only as an online archive, a digital mausoleum. As Kubli says “there was no possibility to earn our living with etoy.” (Wishart & Boschler: 192) Zai emailed eToys.com and asked them if them if they would like to place a banner ad on etoy.com, to redirect any errant web traffic. Lawyers for eToys.com offered etoy $30,000 for the etoy.com domain name, which the remaining members of etoy – Zai, Gramazio, Kubli – refused. The offer went up to $100,000, which they also refused. Through their lawyer Peter Wild they demanded $750,000. In September 1999, while etoy were making a business presentation as their contribution to Ars Electronica, eToys.com lodged a complaint against etoy in the Los Angeles Superior Court. The company hired Bruce Wessel, of the heavyweight LA law firm Irell & Manella, who specialized in trademark, copyright and other intellectual property litigation. The complaint Wessel drafted alleged that etoy had infringed and diluted the eToys trademark, were practicing unfair competition and had committed “intentional interference with prospective economic damage.” (Wishart & Boschler: 199) Wessel demanded an injunction that would oblige etoy to cease using its trademark and take down its etoy.com website. The complaint also sought to prevent etoy from selling shares, and demanded punitive damages. Displaying the aggressive lawyering for which he was so handsomely paid, Wessel invoked the California Unfair Competition Act, which was meant to protect citizens from fraudulent business scams. Meant as a piece of consumer protection legislation, its sweeping scope made it available for inventive suits such as Wessel’s against etoy. Wessel was able to use pretty much everything from the archive etoy built against it. As Wishart and Bochsler write, “The court papers were like a delicately curated catalogue of its practices.” (Wishart & Boschler: 199) And indeed, legal documents in copyright and trademark cases may be the most perfect literature of the vectoral age. The Unfair Competition claim was probably aimed at getting the suit heard in a Californian rather than a Federal court in which intellectual property issues were less frequently litigated. The central aim of the eToys suit was the trademark infringement, but on that head their claims were not all that strong. According to the 1946 Lanham Act, similar trademarks do not infringe upon each other if there they are for different kinds of business or in different geographical areas. The Act also says that the right to own a trademark depends on its use. So while etoy had not registered their trademark and eToys had, etoy were actually up and running before eToys, and could base their trademark claim on this fact. The eToys case rested on a somewhat selective reading of the facts. Wessel claimed that etoy was not using its trademark in the US when eToys was registered in 1997. Wessel did not dispute the fact that etoy existed in Europe prior to that time. He asserted that owning the etoy.com domain name was not sufficient to establish a right to the trademark. If the intention of the suit was to bully etoy into giving in, it had quite the opposite effect. It pissed them off. “They felt again like the teenage punks they had once been”, as Wishart & Bochsler put it. Their art imploded in on itself for lack of attention, but called upon by another, it flourished. Wessel and eToys.com unintentionally triggered a dialectic that worked in quite the opposite way to what they intended. The more pressure they put on etoy, the more valued – and valuable – they felt etoy to be. Conceptual business, like conceptual art, is about nothing but the management of signs within the constraints of given institutional forms of market. That this conflict was about nothing made it a conflict about everything. It was a perfectly vectoral struggle. Zai and Gramazio flew to the US to fire up enthusiasm for their cause. They asked Wolfgang Staehle of The Thing to register the domain toywar.com, as a space for anti-eToys activities at some remove from etoy.com, and as a safe haven should eToys prevail with their injunction in having etoy.com taken down. The etoy defense was handled by Marcia Ballard in New York and Robert Freimuth in Los Angeles. In their defense, they argued that etoy had existed since 1994, had registered its globally accessible domain in 1995, and won an international art prize in 1996. To counter a claim by eToys that they had a prior trademark claim because they had bought a trademark from another company that went back to 1990, Ballard and Freimuth argued that this particular trademark only applied to the importation of toys from the previous owner’s New York base and thus had no relevance. They capped their argument by charging that eToys had not shown that its customers were really confused by the existence of etoy. With Christmas looming, eToys wanted a quick settlement, so they offered Zurich-based etoy lawyer Peter Wild $160,000 in shares and cash for the etoy domain. Kubli was prepared to negotiate, but Zai and Gramazio wanted to gamble – and raise the stakes. As Zai recalls: “We did not want to be just the victims; that would have been cheap. We wanted to be giants too.” (Wishart & Boschler: 207) They refused the offer. The case was heard in November 1999 before Judge Rafeedie in the Federal Court. Freimuth, for etoy, argued that federal Court was the right place for what was essentially a trademark matter. Robert Kleiger, for eToys, countered that it should stay where it was because of the claims under the California Unfair Competition act. Judge Rafeedie took little time in agreeing with the eToys lawyer. Wessel’s strategy paid off and eToys won the first skirmish. The first round of a quite different kind of conflict opened when etoy sent out their first ‘toywar’ mass mailing, drawing the attention of the net.art, activism and theory crowd to these events. This drew a report from Felix Stalder in Telepolis: “Fences are going up everywhere, molding what once seemed infinite space into an overcrowded and tightly controlled strip mall.” (Stalder ) The positive feedback from the net only emboldened etoy. For the Los Angeles court, lawyers for etoy filed papers arguing that the sale of ‘shares’ in etoy was not really a stock offering. “The etoy.com website is not about commerce per se, it is about artist and social protest”, they argued. (Wishart & Boschler: 209) They were obliged, in other words, to assert a difference that the art itself had intended to blur in order to escape eToy’s claims under the Unfair Competition Act. Moreover, etoy argued that there was no evidence of a victim. Nobody was claiming to have been fooled by etoy into buying something under false pretences. Ironically enough, art would turn out in hindsight to be a more straightforward transaction here, involving less simulation or dissimulation, than investing in a dot.com. Perhaps we have reached the age when art makes more, not less, claim than business to the rhetorical figure of ‘reality’. Having defended what appeared to be the vulnerable point under the Unfair Competition law, etoy went on the attack. It was the failure of eToys to do a proper search for other trademarks that created the problem in the first place. Meanwhile, in Federal Court, lawyers for etoy launched a counter-suit that reversed the claims against them made by eToys on the trademark question. While the suits and counter suits flew, eToys.com upped their offer to settle to a package of cash and shares worth $400,000. This rather puzzled the etoy lawyers. Those choosing to sue don’t usually try at the same time to settle. Lawyer Peter Wild advised his clients to take the money, but the parallel tactics of eToys.com only encouraged them to dig in their heels. “We felt that this was a tremendous final project for etoy”, says Gramazio. As Zai says, “eToys was our ideal enemy – we were its worst enemy.” (Wishart & Boschler: 210) Zai reported the offer to the net in another mass mail. Most people advised them to take the money, including Doug Rushkoff and Heath Bunting. Paul Garrin counseled fighting on. The etoy agents offered to settle for $750,000. The case came to court in late November 1999 before Judge Shook. The Judge accepted the plausibility of the eToys version of the facts on the trademark issue, which included the purchase of a registered trademark from another company that went back to 1990. He issued an injunction on their behalf, and added in his statement that he was worried about “the great danger of children being exposed to profane and hardcore pornographic issues on the computer.” (Wishart & Boschler: 222) The injunction was all eToys needed to get Network Solutions to shut down the etoy.com domain. Zai sent out a press release in early December, which percolated through Slashdot, rhizome, nettime (Staehle) and many other networks, and catalyzed the net community into action. A debate of sorts started on investor websites such as fool.com. The eToys stock price started to slide, and etoy ‘warriors’ felt free to take the credit for it. The story made the New York Times on 9th December, Washington Post on the 10th, Wired News on the 11th. Network Solutions finally removed the etoy.com domain on the 10th December. Zai responded with a press release: “this is robbery of digital territory, American imperialism, corporate destruction and bulldozing in the way of the 19th century.” (Wishart & Boschler: 237) RTMark set up a campaign fund for toywar, managed by Survival Research Laboratories’ Mark Pauline. The RTMark press release promised a “new internet ‘game’ designed to destroy eToys.com.” (Wishart & Boschler: 239) The RTMark press release grabbed the attention of the Associated Press newswire. The eToys.com share price actually rose on December 13th. Goldman Sachs’ e-commerce analyst Anthony Noto argued that the previous declines in the Etoys share price made it a good buy. Goldman Sachs was the lead underwriter of the eToys IPO. Noto’s writings may have been nothing more than the usual ‘IPOetry’ of the time, but the crash of the internet bubble was some months away yet. The RTMark campaign was called ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’. It used the Floodnet technique that Ricardo Dominguez used in support of the Zapatistas. As Dominguez said, “this hysterical power-play perfectly demonstrates the intensions of the new net elite; to turn the World Wide Web into their own private home-shopping network.” (Wishart & Boschler: 242) The Floodnet attack may have slowed the eToys.com server down a bit, but it was robust and didn’t crash. Ironically, it ran on open source software. Dominguez claims that the ‘Twelve Days’ campaign, which relied on individuals manually launching Floodnet from their own computers, was not designed to destroy the eToys site, but to make a protest felt. “We had a single-bullet script that could have taken down eToys – a tactical nuke, if you will. But we felt this script did not represent the presence of a global group of people gathered to bear witness to a wrong.” (Wishart & Boschler: 245) While the eToys engineers did what they could to keep the site going, eToys also approached universities and businesses whose systems were being used to host Floodnet attacks. The Thing, which hosted Dominguez’s eToys Floodnet site was taken offline by The Thing’s ISP, Verio. After taking down the Floodnet scripts, The Thing was back up, restoring service to the 200 odd websites that The Thing hosted besides the offending Floodnet site. About 200 people gathered on December 20th at a demonstration against eToys outside the Museum of Modern Art. Among the crowd were Santas bearing signs that said ‘Coal for eToys’. The rally, inside the Museum, was led by the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping: “We are drowning in a sea of identical details”, he said. (Wishart & Boschler: 249-250) Meanwhile etoy worked on the Toywar Platform, an online agitpop theater spectacle, in which participants could act as soldiers in the toywar. This would take some time to complete – ironically the dispute threatened to end before this last etoy artwork was ready, giving etoy further incentives to keep the dispute alive. The etoy agents had a new lawyer, Chris Truax, who was attracted to the case by the publicity it was generating. Through Truax, etoy offered to sell the etoy domain and trademark for $3.7 million. This may sound like an insane sum, but to put it in perspective, the business.com site changed hands for $7.5 million around this time. On December 29th, Wessel signaled that eToys was prepared to compromise. The problem was, the Toywar Platform was not quite ready, so etoy did what it could to drag out the negotiations. The site went live just before the scheduled court hearings, January 10th 2000. “TOYWAR.com is a place where all servers and all involved people melt and build a living system. In our eyes it is the best way to express and document what’s going on at the moment: people start to about new ways to fight for their ideas, their lifestyle, contemporary culture and power relations.” (Wishart & Boschler: 263) Meanwhile, in a California courtroom, Truax demanded that Network Solutions restore the etoy domain, that eToys pay the etoy legal expenses, and that the case be dropped without prejudice. No settlement was reached. Negotiations dragged on for another two weeks, with the etoy agents’ attention somewhat divided between two horizons – art and law. The dispute was settled on 25th January. Both parties dismissed their complaints without prejudice. The eToys company would pay the etoy artists $40,000 for legal costs, and contact Network Solutions to reinstate the etoy domain. “It was a pleasure doing business with one of the biggest e-commerce giants in the world” ran the etoy press release. (Wishart & Boschler: 265) That would make a charming end to the story. But what goes around comes around. Brainhard, still pissed off with Zai after leaving the group in San Francisco, filed for the etoy trademark in Austria. After that the internal etoy wranglings just gets boring. But it was fun while it lasted. What etoy grasped intuitively was the nexus between the internet as a cultural space and the transformation of the commodity economy in a yet-more abstract direction – its becoming-vectoral. They zeroed in on the heart of the new era of conceptual business – the brand. As Wittgenstein says of language, what gives words meaning is other words, so too for brands. What gives brands meaning is other brands. There is a syntax for brands as there is for words. What etoy discovered is how to insert a new brand into that syntax. The place of eToys as a brand depended on their business competition with other brands – with Toys ‘R’ Us, for example. For etoy, the syntax they discovered for relating their brand to another one was a legal opposition. What made etoy interesting was their lack of moral posturing. Their abandonment of leftist rhetorics opened them up to exploring the territory where media and business meet, but it also made them vulnerable to being consumed by the very dialectic that created the possibility of staging etoy in the first place. By abandoning obsolete political strategies, they discovered a media tactic, which collapsed for want of a new strategy, for the new vectoral terrain on which we find ourselves. Works Cited Negri, Antonio. Time for Revolution. Continuum, London, 2003. Warhol, Andy. From A to B and Back Again. Picador, New York, 1984. Stalder, Felix. ‘Fences in Cyberspace: Recent events in the battle over domain names’. 19 Jun 2003. <http://felix.openflows.org/html/fences.php>. Wark, McKenzie. ‘A Hacker Manifesto [version 4.0]’ 19 Jun 2003. http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html. Klein, Naomi. No Logo. Harper Collins, London, 2000. Wishart, Adam & Regula Bochsler. Leaving Reality Behind: etoy vs eToys.com & Other Battles to Control Cyberspace Ecco Books, 2003. Staehle, Wolfgang. ‘<nettime> etoy.com shut down by US court.’ 19 Jun 2003. http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9912/msg00005.html Links http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9912/msg00005.htm http://felix.openflows.org/html/fences.html http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Wark, McKenzie. "Toywars" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/02-toywars.php>. APA Style Wark, M. (2003, Jun 19). Toywars. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/02-toywars.php>