Academic literature on the topic 'Mágina (Spain : Imaginary place)'

The article is focused on the practical mechanisms of assembly management in egalitarian settings in a comparative perspective: on the one hand, I examine assemblies in what may be termed classic ethnographic settings (principally East African pastoralists); on the other hand, I turn to meetings in recent social movements (the Occupy movement in the United States and Slovenia; the 15M in Spain; Greece and Bosnia). I have two principal aims. First, I wish to identify and evaluate similarities and differences in the running of meetings with regard to processes of consensus building; the coordination of assemblies through the creation of roles and the menace of leadership; and the management of place, time, and speech. Second, I aim to evaluate current social movements' use of alterpolitics, intended as the practical and imaginary reference to group meetings of the historical, sectarian, or ethnic other.

Imperial expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been largely studied as a military and economic phenomenon. According to the widely accepted narrative, European empires expanded their power across the world following different ‘formal’ (direct) and ‘informal’ (indirect) strategies. This article argues that, beyond material forms of conquest and effective domination, empires also implemented their rule through the use of immateriality. We explore this phenomenon through a transnational and diachronic comparison of the cases of France in the 1860s and Spain in the 1920s. Both examples suggest that such notions as ‘civilization’, ‘race’, ‘spirit’, and ‘greatness’ not only underpinned the imaginary and the conceptualization of empire, but also actively produced powerful ‘immaterial’ means of domination, expansion, and influence. This work’s methodological approach relies on the conviction that concepts and significations are an integral part of politics. France and Spain did not have empires in Latin America in the periods under study, but they were imagined as being imperial powers in the Americas. This crafted an imperial mind-set that complemented the formal and informal imperial practices that France in the 1860s and Spain in the 1920s were undertaking in other parts of the world. We focus on intellectual and political projects and on practices of cultural diplomacy as two manifestations of these immaterial empires. By virtue of these projects and policies, French and Spanish leaders managed to create an image of France and Spain as deserving their ‘natural’ important place in the global scene. Immateriality served as an instrument to counterbalance the growth of competing powers, namely the United States, which, in the 1860s as well as the 1920s, was seen as a dangerous competitor in the so-called Western hemisphere. In this way, notions of Latinity and Hispanity competed with each other and, at the same time, targeted the ‘Anglo-Saxon’, ‘racial’, and ‘spiritual’ competitor.

<p class="Abstracttext">Small commercial establishments have the double condition of interior and exterior place, of public and private space and, therefore, also of culture –associated with the habitability of the interior– and by nature –linked to the unprotected exterior–. The result of this coexistence is the culturalization, through artifice, of nature within the commercial space. In the context of modernity, architectural projects emerge where nature also nourishes the imaginary quality of the business by building a new seductive spatiality through the metaphor of “typical elements from nature.” By means of a tour of modern stores in Spain (1929-1979), these being testing and research laboratories for their authors for larger-scale works, the design and execution of different scenographies for sales and commercial service are studied, from the approach through figurative representation of their elements –including direct use of these– to produce the materialisation of a metaphorical “interior landscape,” to the abstraction of the image of nature generating the environment and the envelope of a “landscape of the imagination.” A succinct journey that will take as its point of departure the cave –the primordial underworld– passing through the garden –the earthly – to end in the sky –the supra world–.</p>

Abstract: Historians of Mexico after its independence from Spain in 1821, especially during the era of rapid modernization under President Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911), speak generally of the strong French cultural influence on the middling and privileged classes in the Republic who viewed France as a model of emulation for national development. This afrancesamiento (Francophilia) is often taken for granted and few have questioned what "Frenchness" meant at a time when France itself was constructing a national identity, who were its greatest promoters in Mexico, and how did the Mexican experience compare with the Third Republic's (1870–1940) civilizing mission ( mission civilizatrice ) in France's formal colonies in Southeast Asia and Africa. The goal of this article is two-fold. The first is to advance the notion of certain members of the French immigrant community in Porfirian Mexico as cultural brokers, and the second is to place the French model of modernity to which these foreign residents and Mexican elites referred to in its domestic and larger imperial context. The influential Franco-Mexican Auguste Genin and his writings offer an illustrative case study through which to introduce and assess this. Particularly revealing is how Genin imagines the process by which the indigenous population of Mexico would be transformed into modern citizens and how this project—this imaginary construct—found a source of inspiration in the simultaneous French project to construct a French identity and a model ideology for overseas empire during the Third Republic.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind is a unique interactive 360° video experience of the Mar Menor that manifests the Anthropocene effects on the landscape as augmented, surreal and metaphysical interpretations of the artist’s experiences, during their residency and available secondary scientific data of the Mar Menor ecosystem. Through environmental, social, economic and cultural observations and encounters the team developed an immersive 360° environment that incorporates video and audio recordings with augmented, imaginary and predicted realities transformed from scientific data in obscure and profound guises. This 360° telematic installation incorporating live audience interaction within the original 360° video experience was exhibited at the Centro Cultural Puertas de Castilla in Murcia in May 2019. This collaborative project was developed following a ten-day residency on the Mar Menor, a 170 km² saltwater lagoon on the south-east coast of Spain in September 2018, where the majority of the primary research took place by gathering 360° video material from observations, experiences and interviews. The project has been developed by a team of three UK artists, each bringing specialist experience and knowledge of 360° video to undertake the research and create a unique understanding and manifestation of the changing ecosystem of the Mar Menor. This collaborative project includes and combines Paul Sermon’s co-located telematic experiences in 360° live video environments, Charlotte Gould’s immersive 360° animated augmented reality and Jeremiah Ambrose’s gaze-controlled navigation through 360° video narratives. This practice-based team of artists undertook this research using a range of video and gaming software and advanced hardware devices, including Insta360 Pro 8K video cameras and Oculus Rift head-mounted-displays in conjunction with live video switchers. This has produced a range of ultra HD 360° outputs involving stereo 8K and real-time 4K environments with augmented live 360° video and animation sequences through live chroma-keying effects.

By offering a critical discourse analysis of selected Victorian travelogues of the second half of the nineteenth century, the paper aims to demonstrate to what extent Victorian discursive representations of Italy carried in themselves a highly standardised representation of Southern Europe as both an imaginary geography and as a political culture in a perceived state of moral and political decadence. In Victorian travelogues, the European South was imagined as a counter-geography of modernity and, as such, it was ideologically utilised for legitimising the specific trajectory of Northern modernity, seen as the antipode to the perceived state of backwardness of the European South. The myth of decadence of the European South served the purpose of constituting the South as a premodern moral geography embedded in a state of decadence, while at the same time legitimising British modernity as the only proper organic trajectory of historical evolution. This paper aims to demonstrate how Victorian travelogues, as channels for dissemination of Victorian political imagination, became platforms for consolidation of a specific moral geography of the European South built upon the myth of decadence. In addition, this paper argues that the unification of Italy in 1871 signalises a turning point in development of the myth of decadence of the European South in Victorian travelogues. While pre-1871 Victorian travelogues perceived signs of decadence as the ultimate proof of the country’s incompatibility with Northern or Protestant modernity, post-1871 travelogues conceived decadence as the quintessence of the idealised Romantic or even Gothic nature of Italy and critiqued modernisation as desacralisation of Italy as a place of memorialisation of the past. The travelogues critically analysed in the paper are: T. A. Trollope’s Impressions of a Wanderer in Italy, Switzerland, France and Spain as well as his A Lenten Journey in Umbria and the Marches, William Baxter’s The Tagus and the Tiber, Frances Elliot’s Diary of an Idle Woman in Italy, and George Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea.

Globalisation has brought about great social and economic impact, as well as great challenges. Major developments have taken place in the mobility of capital and, to a lesser extent, of goods; not so in the mobility of people seeking asylum due to persecution and war. This article approaches the phenomenon of migration, particularly of refugees, as learning content for early childhood. The research is presented from a qualitative approach based on the results of a project on this topic implemented in a rural school in Spain. The results of the data analysis reveal that children attribute external reasons, of survival, to the refugees’ forced departure from their country of origin. The children’s imaginary reproduces the social construction of adults on the status and situation of refugees, and they also show a critical attitude towards the violation of human rights and the abuse of fellow children. Finally, respect, cultural empathy and social commitment in the face of injustice are presented as fundamental values for education in global citizenship from the earliest stages of schooling.

Well, you couldn't control the situation to that extent. The world just comes in on top of you. It creeps under the door. It falls out of the sky. It's all around. (Leunig) Like the world that cartoonist Michael Leunig describes, ambience is all around. Everywhere you go. You cannot get away from it. You cannot hide from it. You cannot be without it. For ambience is that which surrounds us, that which pervades. Always-on. Always by-your-side. Always already. Here, there and everywhere. Super-surround-sound. Immersive. Networked and cloudy. Ubiquitous. Although you cannot avoid ambience, you may ignore it. In fact, ambience is almost as ignored as it is pervasive. For the most part, our attention is given over to what’s in front of us, what we pick up, what we handle, what is in focus. Instead of ambience, our phenomenal existence is governed by what we bring into the foreground of our lives. Our attention is, almost by definition, occupied not by what is ambient, but what is salient (Jaaniste, Approaching Ch. 1). So, when Brian Eno coined the term Ambient Music in the 1970s (see Burns; Radywyl; and Ensminger in this issue), he was doing something strange. He was bringing ambience, as an idea and in its palpable sonic dimension, into salience. The term, and the penchant for attuning and re-thinking our connections to our surroundings, caught on. By the end of the twentieth century, it was deemed by one book author worthy of being called the ambient century (Prendergast). Eno is undoubtedly the great populariser of the term, but there’s a backstory to ambience. If Spitzer’s detailed semantic analysis of ‘ambience’ and its counterpart ‘milieu’ published back in the 1940s is anything to go by, then Newtonian physics had a lot to do with how ambience entered into our Modern vernacular. Isaac Newton’s laws and theories of gravity and the cosmos offered up a quandary for science back then: vast amounts of empty space. Just like we now know that most of an atom is empty space, within which a few miserly electrons, protons, neutrons and other particle fly about (and doesn’t that seem weird given how solid everything feels?) so too it is with planets, stars, galaxies whose orbits traverse through the great vacuum of the universe. And that vacuum Newton called ambience. But maybe outer-space, and ambience, is not actually empty. There could be dark matter everywhere. Or other things not yet known, observed or accounted for. Certainly, the history of our thinking around ambience since its birth in physics has seen a shift from vacuity to great density and polyphony. Over time, several ‘spaces’ became associated with ambience, which we might think of as the great scapes of our contemporary lives: the natural environment, the built environment, the social world, the aesthetic worlds encountered ‘within’ artefacts, and the data-cloud. Now is not the time or place to give a detailed history of these discursive manoeuvres (although some key clues are given in Spizter; and also Jaaniste, Approaching). But a list of how the term has been taken up after Eno–across the arts, design, media and culture–reveals the broad tenets of ambience or, perhaps, the ambience of ambience. Nowadays we find talk of (in alphabetical order): ambient advertising (Quinion), aesthetics (Foster), architecture (CNRS; Sample), art (Desmarias; Heynen et al.), calculus (Cardelli), displays (Ambient Displays Reserch Group; Lund and Mikael; Vogel and Balakrishnan), fears (Papastergiadis), findability (Morville), informatics (Morville), intelligence (Weber et al.), media (Meeks), narratives (Levin), news (Hagreaves and Thomas), poetics (Morton), television (McCarthy), and video (Bizzocchi). There’s probably more. Time, then, to introduce the authors assembled for this special ‘ambient’ issue of M/C Journal. Writing from the globe, in Spain, Ukraine, Canada, United Sates, and New Zealand, and from cities across Australia, in Melbourne, Canberra and Perth, they draw on and update the ambience of ambience. Alison Bartlett, in our feature article, begins with bodies of flesh (and sweat and squinting) and bodies of thought (including Continental theory). She draws us into a personal, present tense and tensely present account of the way writing and thinking intertwine with our physical locality. The heat, light and weathered conditions of her place of writing, now Perth and previously Townsville, are evoked, as is some sort of teased out relation with Europe. If we are always immersed in our ambient conditions, does this effect and affect everything we do, and think? Bruce Arnold and Margalit Levin then shift gear, from the rural and natural to the densely mediated contemporary urban locale. Urban ambience, as they say, is no longer about learning to avoid (or love?) harsh industrial noises, but it’s about interactivity, surveillance and signalling. They ambivalently present the ambient city as a dialectic, where feeling connected and estranged go hand-in-hand. Next we explore one outcome or application of the highly mediated, iPhone and Twitter-populated city. Alfred Hermida has previously advanced the idea of ‘ambient journalism’ (Hermida, Twittering), and in his M/C Journal piece he outlines the shift from ambient news (which relies on multiple distribution points, but which relays news from a few professional sources) to a journalism that is ambiently distributed across citizens and non-professional para-journalists. Alex Burns takes up Hermida’s framework, but seeks to show how professional journalism might engage in complex ways with Twitter and other always-on, socially-networked data sources that make up the ‘awareness system’ of ambient journalism. Burns ends his provocative paper by suggesting that the creative processes of Brian Eno might be a model for flexible approaches to working with the ambient data fields of the Internet and social grid. Enter the data artist, the marginal doodler and the darkened museum. Pau Waelder examines the way artists have worked with data fields, helping us to listen, observe and embody what is normally ignored. David Ensminger gives a folklorist-inspired account of the way doodles occupy the ambient margins of our minds, personalities and book pages. And Natalia Radywyl navigates the experiences of those who encountered the darkened and ambiguously ambient Screen Gallery of the Australian Centre for Moving Image, and ponders on what this mean for the ‘new museum’. If the experience of doodles and darkened galleries is mainly an individual thing, the final two papers delve into the highly social forms of ambience. Pauline Cheong explores how one particular type of community, Christian churches in the United States, has embraced (and sometimes critiqued) the use of Twitter to facilitate the communal ambience, 140 characters at a time. Then Christine Teague with Lelia Green and David Leith report on the working lives of transit officers on duty on trains in Perth. This is a tough ambience, where issues of safety, fear, confusion and control impact on these workers as much as they try to influence the ambience of a public transport network. The final paper gives us something to pause on: ambience might be an interesting topic, but the ambience of some people and some places might be unpalatable or despairing. Ambience is morally ambivalent (it can be good, bad or otherwise), and this is something threading through many of the papers before us. Who gets to control our ambient surrounds? Who gets to influence them? Who gets to enjoy them, take advantage of them, ignore them? For better or worse. The way we live with, connect to and attune to the ambience of our lives might be crucially important. It might change us. And it might do so on many levels. As is now evident, all the great scapes, as I called them, have been taken up in this issue. We begin with the natural environment (Bartlett’s weather) and the urban built environment (Arnold and Levin; and also Radywyl). Then we enter the data-cloud (Herminda; Burns; Waelder, and also Cheong), shifting into the aesthetic artefact (Waelder; Ensminger; Radywyl), and then into the social sphere (Cheong; Teague, Green and Leith). Of course, all these scapes, and the authors’ concerns, overlap. Ambience is a multitude, and presses into us and through us in many ways. References Ambient Displays Research Group. “Ambient Displays Research Group.” 25 July 2006 ‹http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/CS/io/ambient/›. Bizzocchi, Jim. “Ambient Video: The Transformation of the Domestic Cinematic Experience.” Media Environments and the Liberal Arts Conference, 10-13 June 2004, Rochester Institute of Technology, New York. 26 July 2006 ‹http://www.dadaprocessing.com› [third version of this essay]. Cardelli, Luca. “Mobility and Security.” Lecture notes for Marktoberdorf Summer School 1999, summarising several Ambient Calculus papers by Luca Cardelli & Andrew Gordon. Foundations of Secure Computation. Eds. Friedrich L. Bauer and Ralf Steinbrüggen. NATO Science Series. Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Foundations of Secure Computation, Marktoberdorf, Germany, 27 July - 8 Aug. 1999. 3-37. ‹http://lucacardelli.name/Papers/Mobility%20and%20Security.A4.pdf›. CNRS. “UMR CNRS 1563: Ambiances architecturales et urbaines”. 2007. 9 Feb. 2007 ‹http://www.archi.fr/RECHERCHE/annuaireg/pdf/UMR1563.pdf›. Desmarias, Charles. “Nothing Compared to This: Ambient, Incidental and New Minimal Tendencies in Contemporary Art.” Catalogue essay for exhibition curated by Charles Desmarais at Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, 25 Sep. - 28 Nov. 2004. Foster, Cheryl. “The Narrative and the Ambient in Environmental Aesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism 56.2 (Spring 1998): 127-137. Hargreaves, Ian, and James Thomas. “New News, Old News.” ITC/BSC (October 2002). 3 May 2010 ‹http://legacy.caerdydd.ac.uk/jomec/resources/news.pdf›. Herminda, Alfred. “Twittering the News: The Emergence of Ambient Journalism.” Journalism Practice (11 March 2010). 3 May 2010 ‹http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a919807525›. Heynen, Julian, Kasper Konig, and Stefani Jansen. Ambiance: Des deux cơtes du Rhin. To accompany an exhibition of the same name at K21 Kuntstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf, 15 Oct. 2005 – 12 Feb. 2006. Köln: Snoeck. Jaaniste, Luke. Approaching the Ambient: Creative Practice and the Ambient Mode of Being. Doctoral thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2007. 3 May 2010 ‹http://www.lukejaaniste.com/writings/phd›. Leunig, Michael. “Michael Leunig”. Enough Rope with Andrew Denton. ABC Television, 8 May 2006. 3 May 2010 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/transcripts/s1632918.htm›. Lund, Andreas, and Mikael Wiberg. “Ambient Displays beyond Convention.” HCI 2004, The 18th British HCI Group Annual Conference, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, 6-10 Sep. 2004. 18 Oct. 2005 ‹http://www.informatik.umu.se/~mwiberg/designingforattention_workshop_lund_wiberg.pdf›. Manovich, Lev. “Soft Cinema: Ambient Narratives.” Catalogue for the Soft Cinema Project presented at Future Cinema: The Cinemtic Imaginary after Film at ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, 16 Nov. 2002 - 30 March 2003. McCarthy, Anna. Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. Meeks, Cyan. Ambient Media: Meanings and Implications. Masters of Fine Arts thesis, Graduate School of the State University of New York, Department of Media Study, August 2005. Morton, Timothy. “Why Ambient Poetics?: Outline for a Depthless Ecology.” The Wordsworth Circle 33.1 (Winter 2002): 52-56. Morville, Peter. Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become. O’Reilly Media, 2005. Papastergiadis, Nikos. “Ambient Fears.” Artlink 32.1 (2003): 28-34. Prendergast, Mark. The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Trance, the Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age. London: Bloomsbury, 2000. Quinion, Michael. “Ambient Advertising.” World Wide Words 5 Sep. 1998. 3 Aug. 2006 ‹http://www.worldwidewords.org/turnsofphrase/tp-amb1.htm›. Sample, Hilary. “Ambient Architecture: An Environmental Monitoring Station for Pasadena, California.” 306090 07: Landscape with Architecture. 306090 Architecture Journal 7 (Sep. 2004): 200-210. Spitzer, Leo. “Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics (Part 2).” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3.2 (Dec. 1942): 169–218. Vogel, Daniel, and Ravin Balakrishnan. “Interactive Public Ambient Displays: Transitioning from Implicit to Explicit, Public to Personal, Interaction with Multiple Users.” Proceedings of the 18th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. Large Public Displays session, Santa Fe. New York: ACM Press. 137-146. Weber, W., J.M. Rabaey, and E. Aarts. Eds. Ambient Intelligence. Berlin: Springer, 2005.

This chapter examines the ways in which knowledge of nature below ground was shaped and deployed in the everyday pursuit of mining in the Andes under colonial rule. The silver mines of Potosí were a fundamental reference point as well as a center of diffusion for understandings of subterranean nature. Nevertheless, geological knowledge also took shape at other sites. The central focus of this piece is a petition to Philip II of Spain made in 1596 by a miner who sought privileges for a newly established silver mining community in the central Andes. In examining this petition, the chapter proposes that the production of geological knowledge was localized and highly relational, shaped by the particularities of place and by competition between different mining sites. Further, the chapter demonstrates that manuscript sources, although little-studied in this context, can yield rich insights into early modern geological theories in colonial Peru.