Journal articles on the topic 'Pieles (Motion picture)'

A frame of frames, a piece of pieces, a length of lengths. Standard gauge on substandard; narrower, yes, but longer. An ECU that’s an ELS. Disjecta membra; Hollywood anthologized. A kind of autobiography of its maker, a kind of history of the institution from whose shards it is composed, the commercial motion picture industry. A mutual interrogation between 35mm and 16mm, the gauge of Hollywood, and the gauge of the amateur and independent.

The thesis focuses on the analysis of three program pieces - Catacombs, The Hut on Hen's Legs (Baba Yaga) and The Great Gate of Kiev from the Modest Mussorgsky's piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition. A starting point is the analysis of the wider context out of which the mentioned pieces originated which throws light on the stylistic characteristics of Romanticism, and provides grounds for a detailed pondering on the artistic creations of the iconic composer. The study can be valuable for the pianists and musical pedagogists, as the analysis in its essence explores the ways of interpretation of the mentioned compositions. The article PROGRAM CONTENT IN RELATION WITH COMPOSITIONAL AND TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS FOUND IN PIANO PIECES BY MODEST MUSSORGSKY consists of the following chapters: Introduction, Modest Mussorgsky - Features of Artistic Oeuvre and Musical Language, Pictures at an Exhibition: Catacombs, The Hut on Hen's Legs (Baba Yaga) and The Great Gate of Kiev - Analysis of the Contents and Performance Aspects, Conclusion and References. The introductory part offers an explanation of the research framework, presents the research methods and objectives and gives a short review of the literature used for the study. The following chapters are drafted in such a way as to offer to the reader the important information on the characteristics of Mussorgsky's oeuvre in order to provide for a well-founded introspection of the selected compositions. The central part of the thesis is reserved for the analysis of the compositions, first by presenting their program content, and then by focusing on its bonds with compositional and technical solutions found in each piece. In order to come up with fuller consideration of the employed means of expression and their role in evoking the specific contents, the work offers the author's own solutions, all backed up by notational examples and explanations. The piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky is a work of exceptional value, very inspiring for the performer. Pieces contrast with each other in tempo, character, as well as harmonic and expressive means. In addition to achieving it's unity, it is important that each piece is well conceived, that the main points are singled out and that the narrative of each piece is recognized and complied in the interpretation. Taking into account the atmosphere of the piece Catacombs, the performer should keep the chords long enough and move from one to the other without haste. Another important element of the performance is the acoustic connection of the chords without interruption and being out of context, so it is important to listen well to each chord, with a special focus on the sound level just before the next one. Baba Jaga's flight in a large attic is characterized by a constant vertical in the texture, largely composed of octaves and massive chords, frequent leaps and rapid changes of the register along the entire keyboard. In order to evoke the fierce and evil nature of the character, the composer establishes a characteristic rhythmic scheme. The witch's impatient and angry steps are represented by accents on the weak parts of the beat. The invoice is composed of unison, doubled or tripled octaves. With its sumptuous sound, in full piano capacity, the piece The great gate of Kiev completes the work in an imposing way. Inspired by folklore and church motifs, the composer pays tribute to the Russian people, historical heritage, tradition and cultural values. The grand fi nale opens with the long chords of E-flat major, a key that has often been associated with heroism and fame in the history of music. The massive sonority and triumphant character of this theme, which also closes the cycle, can be connected with the sound of a Russian folk melody sung by large masses of people, in a way that symbolizes the vitality of the national spirit. Mussorgsky's melodic line is characterized by a wide range of expressions, in accordance with the aesthetic and psychological principles of individual paintings; it less often contains "long breath" or longer motion in one direction. Of the selected pieces in this work, except in The great gate of Kiev, the melodic lines are mostly comprised of short motifs. The rhythmic component is extremely important for certain pieces of the cycle (among which is certainly baba yaga). Harmony includes unusual and frequent changes of tonal centers, as well as the appearance of modality. Particularly expressive properties of harmony can be observed in the Catacombs, where dissonances are supported by sharp dynamic extremes, with the aim of evoking the psychological state of the observer in the eclipse of ancient Christian hiding places and tombs. The fi nal considerations, which are focused on the contribution of the research, offer possible perspectives for further studies of pianistic poetics as a means of interpretation of program compositions. I believe that my research has contributed to the elucidation of possible perspectives for further reflections on pianistic poetics in the service of interpreting and evoking compositions of a programmatic character. Also, I hope that this work will be useful to all pianists who are looking for their own solutions and personal path to achieving high creative and artistic achievements.

As artificial intelligence technology has advanced, it has become commonplace to employ hand gesture detection to control virtual objects. The suggested system in this research is a hand gesture-controlled virtual mouse that uses AI algorithms to recognize hand gestures and transform them into mouse movements. People who have trouble using a conventional mouse or keyboard can use the system to provide an alternate interface. The suggested method takes pictures of the user's hand with a camera, which an AI program then utilizes to identify the motions the user is making. Since the development of computer technology, the method for constructing a process of human- computer interaction is advancing. The mouse is one of the best pieces of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) technology ever created. This article suggests an HCI-based virtual mouse system that makes use of hand movements and computer vision. webcam or built-in camera recordings of gestures that have been subjected to a color segmentation and detection procedure. This system uses a webcam or an integrated camera to capture frames. It then processes the frames to make them trackable, identifies various user motions, and executes mouse functions. In order to make the interaction more effective and dependable, this study suggests a vision-based system to control various mouse behaviors, such as left and right clicking, using hand gestures. This system uses a webcam or an integrated camera to capture frames. It then processes the frames to make them trackable, identifies various user motions, and executes mouse functions. Therefore, the suggested mouse solution removes the need for a device to use a mouse. Therefore, it can be seen that the development of HCI technology is advantageous. Keywords- HCI (Human Computer Interaction), Hand Gesture, Gesture Recognition, OpenCV, Media-pipe, pyAutoGUI.

As artificial intelligence technology has advanced, it has become commonplace to employee gesture detection to control virtual objects. The suggested system in this research is a hand gesture- controlled virtual mouse that uses AI algorithms to recognize hand gestures and transform them into mouse movements. People who have trouble using a conventional mouse or keyboard can use the system to provide an alternate interface. The suggested method takes pictures of the user's hand with a camera, which an AI program then utilizes to identify the motions the user is making. Since the development of computer technology, the method for constructing a process of human- computer interaction is advancing. The mouse is one of the best pieces of HCI (Human- Computer Interaction) technology ever created. This article suggests an HCI-based virtual mouse system that makes use of hand movements and computer vision. webcam or built-in camera recordings of gestures that have been subjected to a color segmentation and detection procedure. This system uses a webcam or an integrated camera to capture frames. It then processes the frames to make them trackable, identifies various user motions, and executes mouse functions. In order to make the interaction more effective and dependable, this study suggests a vision-based system to control various mouse behaviors, such as left and right clicking, using hand gestures. This system uses a webcam or an integrated camera to capture frames. It then processes the frames to make them trackable, identifies various user motions, and executes mouse functions. Therefore, the suggested mouse solution removes the need for a device to use a mouse. Therefore, it can be seen that the development of HCI technology is advantageous. Keywords- HCI(Human Computer Interaction), Hand Gesture, Gesture Recognition, OpenCV, Media-pipe, pyAutoGUI.

Background. The “melos” and “colourfulness” terms are used in various meanings both, in music and fine arts. The ambiguity of these concepts in our time of unlimited possibilities for creative experiment and bold search for new semantic levels, interest in establishing versatile inter-scientific relations allows us to apply innovative analytic methods to the works of art. Among these methods, intermedial inter-disciplinary researches seem to be extremely promising, especially when applied to such traditional, well-established forms of art as academic painting and music. The article uses the innovative method of intermedial research, which consists in attempts to trans-code the elements of the musical semiotic system into a pictorial one and vice versa. B. Asafyev (1987, р. 83) determined the “melos” in music as an abstract notion that unites all the forms of melody and the properties of melodiousness: the qualitative, expressive sides of all kinds of sound correlations as sequences in time. The consistent movement of sounds in a piece of music is called “a line” (for example, a “melodic line”) that gives the reason to see a certain parallel between music and painting. Accordingly, the concept of “melos” in music correlates with the concept of “linearity” (graphics) of a picture. The notion of “colourfulness” was first introduced in the fine arts. The colourfulness is a total of correlations of colour tones, hues, which create a certain unity and are an esthetic reflection of the colour diversity of reality (based on Bilodid, I., 1973, p. 232 and others). In musical science there is no well-established definition of this concept, however, we find such attempts: “Colourfulness [in original –’kolorit’ – translator’s note] (from the Latin ’color’) in music – is the predominant emotional colouring of one or another episode, which is achieved by using various registers, tones, harmonic and other expressive means” (FDSTAR. Electronic music. The site of composers, CJs and DJs). The adjoint concept “colouristics” is used, which is described as follows: “… colouristics – music of subtle and colorful sounds, in which all tones are distinguished (the beginning of the Etude in G sharp minor by Chopin, the scene of the transformation of fishes in the 4th Picture of “Sadko”, bell harmonies by M. P. Mussorgsky, S. V. Rachmaninoff)”(Maklygin, A., 1990, in Musical Encyclopedic Dictionary). The purpose of this article is an attempt to determine the correlation of melos and colourfulness in the musical and fine arts on the example of musical portraits and landscapes from the M. Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” cycle. Research results. The “Pictures at an Exhibition” piano cycle is created under impression of works by Viktor Hartmann, the artist, architect, and designer. The content of the cycle is a vivid example of music and painting interrelation, therefore it gives an occasion to detailed intermedial analysis to understand the melos and colourfulness correlation in the musical pictures. So, the peculiarities of the melos in “The Gnome” are the quick broken zigzag lines, contains brief chromatic motifs, separated by pauses, grace notes and trills. A special role is given to syncopation, which imitate the Gnome’s limping gait. The texture of M. Mussorgsky’s piece – the octave movement in the party of the right and the left hands without a clearly defined accompaniment can be seen as a musical analogy to colourfulness of V. Hartmann’s sketch with its transparent background. Thus, in Mussorgsky’s play “The Gnome”, melos prevails over colourfulness that coincides with the ratio of melos / color in V. Hartmann’s sketch, since the artist gave preference to drawing creating this picture as monochrome one. “The Old Castle” is extremely colourful, as the composer deals great importance to modal, harmonic and textural factors. In general, it can be argued that the composer inherits the ratio of drawing and colouring in the painting by V. Hartmann, embodying the overall emotional and colourful palette of the picture with the help of tonality (“mysterious” G sharp minor) and texture (basso ostinato as an expression of the statics of the massive old building). Melos prevails over colourfulness and expresses the individuality of images in the “Samuel” Goldenberg and “Schmuÿle”, the musical portrait based on two paintings by V. Hartmann (“Poor Jew”, “Rich Jew in the Fur Hat”). The melodic (linear) component of the work is represented by two musical themes. The first is a characterization of a rich man, in which ascending intonations are used as a symbol of his high social status, by analogy with the proudly raised head and upward glance in the painting by V. Hartmann. The melodic theme of a poor Jew with a downward motion corresponds with the image of the poor man’s stooped figure. “Colour” of the musical portrait, as in the V. Hartmann’s painting, serves only as a background. In the piece “Catacombs. Roman Tomb”, the colorfulness prevails over the melos, The “gloomy” tonality (B minor) and the figurative textural techniques used by the composer (the sound of the melody against the background of tremolo octaves in high register, which can be compared with flickering lantern light in the darkness of the tomb, also juxtaposition of the fragments of the theme in different registers, creating contrasts of light and darkness), clearly reflect the overall colouring of the painting by V. Hartmann. In the musical portrait “The Hut on Hen’s Legs (Baba Yaga)” melos prevails over colorfulness, because it is with the help of melodic means that the portrait of a fairy-tale character is depicted, while the coloristic component of the music in this composition corresponds to the sketch of V. Hartman (where the clock in the house’s form depicted) only partially and plays the role of a landscape background (tremolo and triplets in accompaniment performing a coloristic function). “The Bogatyr (Great) Gates (In the Capital in Kiev)” is based on V. Hartmann’s the architectural and painting project of the city gate. Melos of the composition is presented by three contrasting themes. The graphic drawing of some fragments of these themes associatively correlates with the individual elements of the graphics of V. Hartmann’s picture (the peaked line of the passage in the right hand’s party, the tremolo-like figures). The colourfulness of the piece expresses in part by its texture and tone (E Flat Major, according to N. Rimsky Korsakov, the tone of “walls and cities”). In V. Hartmann’s painting, the drawing prevails over colour; however, M. Mussorgsky rethought the melody / colourful ratio in the piece. Melos conveys only some of the features of the drawing, its most important lines, while textural and coloristic musical means reproduce both, the linear side of the image and colouristics as such, that is, the colouristic component dominates. Conclusions. 1. The melos/colourfulness correlation in M. Mussorgsky’s cycle is regulated as follows: melos prevails over colouring in the pieces “The Gnome”, “Samuel” Goldenberg and “Schmuÿle, “The Hut on Hen’s Legs (Baba Yaga)”; colourfulness prevails over melos in “The Old Castle”, “Catacombs. Roman Tomb”, “The Bogatyr Gate in Kyiv”. 2. The melos / colourfulness correlation in the analyzed pieces from M. Mussorgsky’s cycle corresponds with the melos / colourfulness correlation in the respective V. Hartmann’s paintings. The musical portrait of Baba Yaga in “The Hut on Hen”s legs” is an exception: V. Hartman painted the stylized clock as an example of decorative and applied art, but M. Mussorgsky emphasized the reflection of the fairy-tale image; as well as “The Bogatyr Gate”, where colouristics and volume prevail over grafics and planeness of the architectural sketch. 3. The main expressive means of creating a portrait, as a rule, is the melody (melos), and the landscape – tonality, texture, timbre (colourfulness). The intermedial analysis of the above portraits and landscapes from M. Mussorgsky’s piano cycle confirms this concept.

English Abstract: The notion of 'source' poses considerable problems for the study of silent film music. On the one hand, from a purely historical point of view, it is worth remembering that most of the music for the films of the silent era no longer exists. On the other hand, a vast repertoire of stock photoplay music has come down to us from the silent era, as an example of specialised publishing in the field of film music. Collections such as Kinothek, Motion Picture Moods, Filmharmonie , and many others consisted of original pieces that were not associated with a specific film but were designed to fit into standard narrative situations or to provide a common emotional aura. The practice of reusing and re-functionalising mood music pieces, constantly hovering between composition and compilation, raises philological questions concerning the multiple definition of the musical text, its author, and its performance. The score of a piece of stock photoplay music is not, in fact, the source of an opus in the strict sense of the term. It is not an aesthetically grounded entity, but rather an operational instruction at the service of a subsequent creative act: the one that will shape the musical accompaniment of a particular film screening in the cinema. The ubiquity of photoplay music is not the exception, but the rule. Indexing and cataloguing a source of stock photoplay music is not in itself useful historical knowledge if it is complemented by knowledge of its adaptive uses. These, however, are not to be found in the primary source, but must be reconstructed by consulting secondary sources of various kinds, from cue sheets to journalistic reviews, which only in their constellation give an account of the cinematic show as a whole. French Abstract: La notion de "source" pose des problèmes considérables pour l'étude de la musique de film muet. D'une part, d'un point de vue purement historique, il convient de rappeler que la plupart des musiques de films de l'époque du muet n'existent plus. D'autre part, un vaste ensemble de recueils d'incidentaux nous est parvenu de l'époque du muet, comme un exemple d'édition spécialisée dans le domaine de la musique de film. Des collections telles que Kinothek, Motion Picture Moods, Filmharmonie , et bien d'autres, étaient constituées de morceaux originaux qui n'étaient pas associés à un film spécifique, mais qui étaient conçus pour s'intégrer dans des situations narratives standard ou pour fournir une ambiance émotionnelle commune. La pratique de la réutilisation et de la refonctionnalisation des morceaux de musique d'ambiance, qui oscille constamment entre la composition et la compilation, soulève des questions philologiques concernant la définition multiple du texte musical, de son auteur et de son interprétation. La partition issue d'un catalogue d'incidentaux n'est pas, en effet, la source d'un opus au sens strict du terme. Elle n'est pas une entité esthétiquement fondée, mais plutôt une instruction opérationnelle au service d'un acte créatif ultérieur : à savoir le geste qui façonnera l'accompagnement musical de la projection d'un film particulier dans la salle de cinéma. L'omniprésence de ces recueils d'incidentaux n'est pas l'exception, mais la règle. Indexer et cataloguer ce type de source n'est pas en soi pertinent sur le plan historique si cette opération n'est pas complétée par une connaissance des utilisations spécifiques de ces sources. Cependant, ce savoir ne se trouve pas dans la source primaire. Il doit être reconstitué en consultant des sources secondaires de différentes natures, des feuilles de repérage aux critiques journalistiques, qui rendent compte, uniquement prises dans leur ensemble, du spectacle cinématographique dans sa globalité. German Abstract: Für die Erforschung von Stummfilmmusik wirft die Auffassung davon, was eine "Quelle" ist, erhebliche Probleme auf. Aus rein historischer Sicht ist daran zu erinnern, dass einerseits ein Großteil der Musik zu den Filmen der Stummfilmzeit nicht mehr existiert. Andererseits ist uns aus dieser Ära ein umfangreiches Repertoire an filmdramatischer Stimmungsmusik als Beispiel für spezialisierte Veröffentlichungen im Bereich Filmmusik überliefert. Sammlungen wie Kinothek, Motion Picture Moods, Filmharmonie und viele andere bestanden aus Originalstücken, die nicht mit einem bestimmten Film verbunden, sondern so gestaltet waren, dass sie in übliche Erzählsituationen passten oder eine allgemeingültige emotionale Aura vermitteln sollten. Die Praxis der Wiederverwendung und Umwidmung von Stimmungsmusiken transportierender Musik, die ständig zwischen Komposition und der Verwendung von Stimmungsmusiken pendelt, wirft philologische Fragen hinsichtlich der jeweiligen Definition von musikalischem Material, Urheber und der Aufführung auf. Eine Partitur eines Stimmungsmusikstückes ist tatsächlich nicht die Quelle eines Musikwerks im engeren Wortsinn. Es handelt sich dabei nicht um ein ästhetisch fundiertes Produkt, sondern eher um eine Handlungsanweisung im Dienste eines nachfolgenden schöpferischen Aktes: desjenigen, der die musikalische Untermalung einer bestimmten Filmvorführung im Kino prägen wird. Die Allgegenwärtigkeit von Stimmungsmusik ist nicht die Ausnahme, sondern die Regel. Das Indexieren und Katalogisieren einer Quelle von filmdramatischen Musikversatzstücken stellt alleine kein nützliches historisches Wissen dar, wenn es nicht durch das Wissen über deren adaptive Verwendung ergänzt wird. Dieses ist jedoch nicht in der Primärquelle zu finden, sondern muss durch Rückgriff auf Sekundärquellen verschiedenster Art rekonstruiert werden – von cue sheets bis hin zu journalistischen Rezensionen – was erst in der Gesamtschau einen Überblick über die filmische Aufführung als Ganzes ermöglicht.

The concept of linear time as an irreversible succession of events dates back to the late 18th century. Though fundamental to the experience of music written thereafter, time's pure linearity was dented by technologies of mechanical reproduction during the early 20th century. Imagining possible temporal zigzags provided modernists such as Paul Hindemith and Renéé Clair with mechanical paradigms through which to explore the manipulation of time and motion——as infinitely divisible properties——in the decade that witnessed Lindbergh's transatlantic flight, the first radio broadcasts, and an increasing addiction to Edison's Duplex Telegraph wire. Apart from the modernism that exists on the historical timeline, this essay looks for a structural homology between historical and musical events in attempting to establish a distinct ““modernism of time”” for the 1920s; it argues that differing concepts of time were reflected in certain pieces from the early 20th century. Hindemith's one-act operatic epigram Hin und Zurüück (1927) plays with conceptions of time as a narrative of reversal from domestic disaster to ““happy beginning.”” The music, running forward and backward, evokes different processes of memory to illustrate this ““Time Axis Manipulation”” as it is intuitively lived by the stage characters. Clair's contrasting Dadaeque film Entr'acte (1924), set to Satie's music, is an illogical picture sequence that also embodies a construction of time, Instantanééisme, but denies that it can be understood. Both works were conceived as proportional, imperfect mirror forms, indicating an implicit temporal reversal, though from antithetical perspectives. Drawing on the master paradigm of Zeno's arrow, this enquiry explores qualities of musical and visual time as both construction and manipulation of the modernist imagination.

Background. The beginning of the development of musical art in Transcarpathia dates back to the end of the nineteenth century and lasts during the first third of the twentieth century. First of all, it was an interest in the genre of choral music (a synthetic genre based on the merging of the Word and Music), which fully corresponded to the enlightened spirit of life of the Transcarpathians under the political conditions of that time. And only in the second half of the twentieth century intensive blossoming of the varieties of instrumental (kind of «pure») music with its conceptually most complex types of creative thinking and adaptation to the methods of style transformation takes place. The piano music, one of the most abstract forms of the creative process, has revealed its peculiarities in this process. However, the researchers virtually never paid attention to piano pieces for children, which are naturally inferior by their practically necessary and didactically appropriate visual simplicity of musical vocabulary to the works of the so-called large genre. In addition, historically, the creative work of Transcarpathian composers has been considered only as a product of a purely regional significance. Therefore, it is important that the piano works of Transcarpathian composers for children should also be considered in the context of such integrity as the Intentional period of the music history, which has been defined as non-classical and at the same time permeated with the idea of global cultural synthesis Objectives. The essence of the tasks and the purpose is to present the "Child Album" by V. Telychko (the first in Transcarpathia sample of the genre of children’s musical album, 2016) as an example of the creation of the modern intonational image of the world - in its associative diversity and intentionality. Methods. A selection of research methods, namely, analytical (analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, systematization, classification and generalization), comparative, systemic, phenomenological, functional, has been used in view of the holistic approach – in the spirit of spiritual development of the world. In this regard, the interpretive potential of the concepts of the intonational model and the modal nature of musical themes as types of thinking by sound images is considered methodologically appropriate: both purposefully focus attention of the recipient on the sound «body» and the intonational "soul" of the musical matter in the integrity of the creative idea of the work, and also is didactically productive in terms of comprehension of the architectonics of the world of music as a world of musical ideas. Results. V. Telichko’s "Children’s Album" is a cyclic structure of the linear/plot type, where step-by-step compositional and dramaturgical organization of the whole ensures the principle of successive naming of new, but equal in figurative semantic content pieces. At the same time, it will be superfluous to reflect on the fact that the structure of cycles such as "album" is rarely evaluated as such that it is actually "filled in" (for example, with memorable photos or pictures), and only since then its "white" (from alba) of the blank/empty sheets is filled in with the semantics and the logic of placement of fixed events, phenomena, impressions, etc in a certain order. Against the background of such reflection the memory recalls such "albums" of romantics: all of them are based on the logic of the course of a day lived by a child (for example, P. I. Tchaikovsky). V. Telichko’s principle of collecting pieces "into the album" has such a life-justifiable logic – the gradual flow of events of the day, embodied in a child’s only perception of the world and itself. The semantic code of the composer’s plan is referenced in his dedication: "I devote my love to grandchildren Angelina and Anna" - expressing love for grandchildren, admiring their fantasy and energy, caring for the formation of their worldview on a certain system of values (family, native land, diversity of traditions of the countries of the world , historical memory): the pieces "Morning", "My Mother", "Our Grandmother" represent an idea of an ingenuous and happy feeling of a child in the family; "Anna’s Teddy-Bear", "Angelina’s Hobbyhorse" and "Angelina’s Waltz " represent a lively imagination of children, each of them having a favorite game "theme"; the plays "About Transcarpathia", "Kolomyika", "Tropotyanka", "Long road" and "It’s raining" are outlined by the situation of instructive stories of grandfather about the regionally formed traditions of the Transcarpathians, their spirit and uneasy destiny; while the pieces "On Scotland", "On Slovakia" and "On Japan" outline the interests of somewhat different cognitive significance - the intention to comprehend a certain national "otherness", which has its own color of its culture; in the end, "A Lullaby for Anna" creates, so to say, a backlash against the grand finale-prologue, consisting of the pieces "On Austria" (the cultural center of the European musical classicism) and "On Romania" (regionally closest to Transcarpathia country). Another signifying circumstance of the idea and plan of the cycle refers to the types of performances and personification of images, both as members of the family circle and as a certain social unity: in addition to the versions of solo performance, in a considerable number of plays there is ensemble performance in four and six hands; at the same time, each of the parts is composed as a certain texture layer, which in aggregate (duo, terzetto) gives the effect of an "orchestral" score. However, the most important thing is that for the instrumentalist performer, and for the listener or analyst (who is also a "listener"), the "Children’s Album" by V. Telichko is a test of the ability to perceive musical vocabulary in the form of a certain sound form/idea with which it is necessary to have a relationship according to the algorithm of personal identification. On the one hand, in the musical text there is an opportunity to recognize the classical models of musical vocabulary (cantilena, recitation, motility, general forms of motion, signaling, sound illustration); and on the other - due to the constructive interference of the classical techniques of the creation of musical matter (emancipated dissonance, the non-systemic character of the tonality, etc.) the meanings are accumulated. Another important component of the composer’s plan is to introduce a purely methodical (level of methodical reception) task of developing the technology of the game on the piano into the original sound form/idea, which first of all requires a skillful usage of all the fingers. Conclusions. As a research material the "Children’s Album" by a contemporary composer from Transcarpathia, V. Telichko provides several important and mutually perceptible scientific tasks directly related to musicology and pedagogical practice: testing of the theoretically updated analytical apparatus for tracking the intonational field of music and its thoughts and comprehension of the didactically expedient implementation of its results in the educational sphere; in particular, in terms of the prospective guideline for the development of musicality (a high measure of the ability to self-identification with the musical image) and the piano skills of a child musician.

Background. The beginning of the development of musical art in Transcarpathia dates back to the end of the nineteenth century and lasts during the first third of the twentieth century. First of all, it was an interest in the genre of choral music (a synthetic genre based on the merging of the Word and Music), which fully corresponded to the enlightened spirit of life of the Transcarpathians under the political conditions of that time. And only in the second half of the twentieth century intensive blossoming of the varieties of instrumental (kind of «pure») music with its conceptually most complex types of creative thinking and adaptation to the methods of style transformation takes place. The piano music, one of the most abstract forms of the creative process, has revealed its peculiarities in this process. However, the researchers virtually never paid attention to piano pieces for children, which are naturally inferior by their practically necessary and didactically appropriate visual simplicity of musical vocabulary to the works of the so-called large genre. In addition, historically, the creative work of Transcarpathian composers has been considered only as a product of a purely regional significance. Therefore, it is important that the piano works of Transcarpathian composers for children should also be considered in the context of such integrity as the Intentional period of the music history, which has been defined as non-classical and at the same time permeated with the idea of global cultural synthesis Objectives. The essence of the tasks and the purpose is to present the "Child Album" by V. Telychko (the first in Transcarpathia sample of the genre of children’s musical album, 2016) as an example of the creation of the modern intonational image of the world - in its associative diversity and intentionality. Methods. A selection of research methods, namely, analytical (analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, systematization, classification and generalization), comparative, systemic, phenomenological, functional, has been used in view of the holistic approach – in the spirit of spiritual development of the world. In this regard, the interpretive potential of the concepts of the intonational model and the modal nature of musical themes as types of thinking by sound images is considered methodologically appropriate: both purposefully focus attention of the recipient on the sound «body» and the intonational "soul" of the musical matter in the integrity of the creative idea of the work, and also is didactically productive in terms of comprehension of the architectonics of the world of music as a world of musical ideas. Results. V. Telichko’s "Children’s Album" is a cyclic structure of the linear/plot type, where step-by-step compositional and dramaturgical organization of the whole ensures the principle of successive naming of new, but equal in figurative semantic content pieces. At the same time, it will be superfluous to reflect on the fact that the structure of cycles such as "album" is rarely evaluated as such that it is actually "filled in" (for example, with memorable photos or pictures), and only since then its "white" (from alba) of the blank/empty sheets is filled in with the semantics and the logic of placement of fixed events, phenomena, impressions, etc in a certain order. Against the background of such reflection the memory recalls such "albums" of romantics: all of them are based on the logic of the course of a day lived by a child (for example, P. I. Tchaikovsky). V. Telichko’s principle of collecting pieces "into the album" has such a life-justifiable logic – the gradual flow of events of the day, embodied in a child’s only perception of the world and itself. The semantic code of the composer’s plan is referenced in his dedication: "I devote my love to grandchildren Angelina and Anna" - expressing love for grandchildren, admiring their fantasy and energy, caring for the formation of their worldview on a certain system of values (family, native land, diversity of traditions of the countries of the world , historical memory): the pieces "Morning", "My Mother", "Our Grandmother" represent an idea of an ingenuous and happy feeling of a child in the family; "Anna’s Teddy-Bear", "Angelina’s Hobbyhorse" and "Angelina’s Waltz " represent a lively imagination of children, each of them having a favorite game "theme"; the plays "About Transcarpathia", "Kolomyika", "Tropotyanka", "Long road" and "It’s raining" are outlined by the situation of instructive stories of grandfather about the regionally formed traditions of the Transcarpathians, their spirit and uneasy destiny; while the pieces "On Scotland", "On Slovakia" and "On Japan" outline the interests of somewhat different cognitive significance - the intention to comprehend a certain national "otherness", which has its own color of its culture; in the end, "A Lullaby for Anna" creates, so to say, a backlash against the grand finale-prologue, consisting of the pieces "On Austria" (the cultural center of the European musical classicism) and "On Romania" (regionally closest to Transcarpathia country). Another signifying circumstance of the idea and plan of the cycle refers to the types of performances and personification of images, both as members of the family circle and as a certain social unity: in addition to the versions of solo performance, in a considerable number of plays there is ensemble performance in four and six hands; at the same time, each of the parts is composed as a certain texture layer, which in aggregate (duo, terzetto) gives the effect of an "orchestral" score. However, the most important thing is that for the instrumentalist performer, and for the listener or analyst (who is also a "listener"), the "Children’s Album" by V. Telichko is a test of the ability to perceive musical vocabulary in the form of a certain sound form/idea with which it is necessary to have a relationship according to the algorithm of personal identification. On the one hand, in the musical text there is an opportunity to recognize the classical models of musical vocabulary (cantilena, recitation, motility, general forms of motion, signaling, sound illustration); and on the other - due to the constructive interference of the classical techniques of the creation of musical matter (emancipated dissonance, the non-systemic character of the tonality, etc.) the meanings are accumulated. Another important component of the composer’s plan is to introduce a purely methodical (level of methodical reception) task of developing the technology of the game on the piano into the original sound form/idea, which first of all requires a skillful usage of all the fingers. Conclusions. As a research material the "Children’s Album" by a contemporary composer from Transcarpathia, V. Telichko provides several important and mutually perceptible scientific tasks directly related to musicology and pedagogical practice: testing of the theoretically updated analytical apparatus for tracking the intonational field of music and its thoughts and comprehension of the didactically expedient implementation of its results in the educational sphere; in particular, in terms of the prospective guideline for the development of musicality (a high measure of the ability to self-identification with the musical image) and the piano skills of a child musician.

These days, PC vision has advanced to where a PC can perceive its client utilizing an essential picture handling calculation. Individuals are involving this vision in many pieces of day to day existence as of now of improvement, like face acknowledgment, variety identification, programmed vehicles, etc. PC vision is utilized in this examination to make an optical mouse and console that utilizations hand movements. The PC's camera will filter the picture of different developments made by an individual's hand, and the mouse or pointer will move in light of the development of the motions, including doing well and left clicks utilizing particular signals. Essentially, unique motions can be utilized to control the console, for example, a one-finger signal to pick a letters in order and a four figure signal to swipe left and right. Without any wires or different gadgets, it will work as a virtual mouse and console. The venture's just piece of equipment is a webcam, and the coding is finished in Python utilizing the Boa constrictor stage. The Raised body absconds are made first, and afterward a calculation is made by planning the mouse and console capabilities to the blemishes utilizing the imperfection computations. On the off chance that you map ping several them with the mouse and console, the PC will perceive the motion and answer fittingly

Motion pictures and the art of movie making started communicating with the audience and entertaining people decades before the first movie with dialogues came into existence. Pre-eminent directors and movie maestros reveled in the art of expressing emotions through their cinematic pieces without explicitly constructing them into dialogues. Wong Kar-wai, Chinese film director, is one such movie maker who gives his creations the wholeness and beauty of a painting. Through “In the Mood for Love”, “2046”, “Chungking express”, “Happy Together” etc. Wong Kar-wai, held art house audiences across the entire globe captive in his enigmatically beguiling form of art. His films are noted for its rhythmic unveiling of plot, photographic and semi-mask techniques and an intense personal flare. In the Mood for Love, often referred to as one of the greatest cinematic productions of the era, instantly earned the title of being a chef-d'œuvre with its unconventional take on a rather conventional story. The movie, starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Maggie Cheung Man-yuk, is deemed to be a classic for its unsurpassable cinematography, hauntingly messianic soundtrack and transfixing mise-en-scène which act as the major mediums through which the characters communicate their inner lives to the audience

As artificial intelligence technology has advanced, it has become commonplace to employ hand gesture detection to control virtual objects. The suggested system in this research is a hand gesture-controlled virtual mouse that uses AI algorithms to recognize hand gestures and transform them into mouse movements. People who have trouble using a conventional mouse or keyboard can use the system to provide an alternate interface. The suggested method takes pictures of the user's hand with a camera, which an AI program then utilizes to identify the motions the user is making. Since the development of computer technology, the method for constructing a process of human-computer interaction is advancing. The mouse is one of the best pieces of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) technology ever created. This article suggests an HCI-based virtual mouse system that makes use of hand movements and computer vision. webcam or built-in camera recordings of gestures that have been subjected to a color segmentation and detection procedure. This system uses a webcam or an integrated camera to capture frames. It then processes the frames to make them trackable, identifies various user motions, and executes mouse functions. In order to make the interaction more effective and dependable, this study suggests a vision-based system to control various mouse behaviors, such as left and right clicking, using hand gestures. This system uses a webcam or an integrated camera to capture frames. It then processes the frames to make them trackable, identifies various user motions, and executes mouse functions. Therefore, the suggested mouse solution removes the need for a device to use a mouse. Therefore, it can be seen that the development of HCI technology is advantageous. Keywords- HCI (Human Computer Interaction), Hand Gesture, Gesture Recognition, OpenCV, Media-pipe, pyAutoGUI.

Does the arrival of the network society mean we are now a culture of collectors, a society of sharers? We mused about these questions while assembling this M/C Journal issue, which has its genesis in a past event of ‘shared’ confusion. Alex Burns booked into Axel Bruns’s hotel room at the 1998 National Young Writer’s Festival (NYWF) in Newcastle. This ‘identity theft’ soon extended to discussion panels and sessions, where some audience members wondered if the NYWF program had typographical errors. We planned, over café latte at Haddon’s Café, to do a co-session at next year’s festival. By then the ‘identity theft’ had spread to online media. We both shared some common interests: the music of Robert Fripp and King Crimson, underground electronica and experimental turntablism, the Internet sites Slashdot and MediaChannel.org, and the creative possibilities of Open Publishing. “If you’re going to use a pseudonym,” a prominent publisher wrote to Alex Burns in 2001, “you could have created a better one than Axel Bruns.” We haven’t yet done our doppelgänger double-act at NYWF but this online collaboration is a beginning. What became clear during the editorial process was that some people and communities were better at sharing than others. Is sharing the answer or the problem: does it open new possibilities for a better, fairer future, or does it destroy existing structures to leave nothing but an uncontrollable mess? The feature article by Graham Meikle elaborates on several themes explored in his insightful book Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet (New York: Routledge, London: Pluto Press, 2002). Meikle’s study of the influential IndyMedia network dissects three ‘compelling founder’s stories’: the Sydney-based Active software team, the tradition of alternative media, and the frenetic energy of ‘DiY culture’. Meikle remarks that each of these ur-myths “highlights an emphasis on access and participation; each stresses new avenues and methods for new people to create news; each shifts the boundary of who gets to speak.” As the IndyMedia movement goes truly global, its autonomous teams are confronting how to be an international brand for Open Publishing, underpinned by a viable Open Source platform. IndyMedia’s encounter with the Founder’s Trap may have its roots in paradigms of intellectual property. What drives Open Source platforms like IndyMedia and Linux, Tom Graves proposes, are collaborative synergies and ‘win-win’ outcomes on a vast and unpredictable scale. Graves outlines how projects like Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation’s ‘GNU Public License’ challenge the Western paradigm of property rights. He believes that Open Source platforms are “a more equitable and sustainable means to manage the tangible and intangible resources of this world we share.” The ‘clash’ between the Western paradigm of property rights and emerging Open Source platforms became manifest in the 1990s through a series of file-sharing wars. Andy Deck surveys how the ‘browser war’ between Microsoft and Netscape escalated into a long-running Department of Justice anti-trust lawsuit. The Motion Picture Association of America targeted DVD hackers, Napster’s attempt to make the ‘Digital Jukebox in the Sky’ a reality was soon derailed by malicious lawsuits, and Time-Warner CEO Gerald Levin depicted pre-merger broadband as ‘the final battleground’ for global media. Whilst Linux and Mozilla hold out promise for a more altruistic future, Deck contemplates, with a reference to George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938), that Internet producers “must conform to the distribution technologies and content formats favoured by the entertainment and marketing sectors, or else resign themselves to occupying the margins of media activity.” File-sharing, as an innovative way of sharing access to new media, has had social repercussions. Marjorie Kibby reports that “global music sales fell from $41.5 billion in 1995 to $38.5 billion in 1999.” Peer-to-Peer networks like KaZaA, Grokster and Morpheus have surged in consumer popularity while commercial music file subscription services have largely fallen by the wayside. File-sharing has forever changed the norms of music consumption, Kibby argues: it offers consumers “cheap or free, flexibility of formats, immediacy, breadth of choice, connections with artists and other fans, and access to related commodities.” The fragmentation of Australian families into new diversities has co-evolved with the proliferation of digital media. Donell Holloway suggests that the arrival of pay television in Australia has resurrected the ‘house and hearth’ tradition of 1940s radio broadcasts. Internet-based media and games shifted the access of media to individual bedrooms, and changed their spatial and temporal natures. However pay television’s artificial limit of one television set per household reinstated the living room as a family space. It remains to be seen whether or not this ‘bounded’ control will revive family battles, dominance hierarchies and power games. This issue closes with a series of reflections on how the September 11 terrorist attacks transfixed our collective gaze: the ‘sharing’ of media connects to shared responses to media coverage. For Tara Brabazon the intrusive media coverage of September 11 had its precursor in how Great Britain’s media documented the Welsh mining disaster at Aberfan on 20 October 1966. “In the stark grey iconography of September 11,” Brabazon writes, “there was an odd photocopy of Aberfan, but in the negative.” By capturing the death and grief at Aberfan, Brabazon observes, the cameras mounted a scathing critique of industrialisation and the searing legacy of preventable accidents. This verité coverage forces the audience to actively engage with the trauma unfolding on the television screen, and to connect with their own emotions. Or at least that was the promise never explored, because the “Welsh working class community seemed out of time and space in 1960s Britain,” and because political pundits quickly harnessed the disaster for their own electioneering purposes. In the early 1990s a series of ‘humanitarian’ interventions and televised conflicts popularized the ‘CNN Effect’ in media studies circles as a model of how captivated audiences and global media vectors could influence government policies. However the U.S. Government, echoing the coverage of Aberfan, used the ‘CNN Effect’ for counterintelligence and consensus-making purposes. Alex Burns reviews three books on how media coverage of the September 11 carnage re-mapped our ‘virtual geographies’ with disturbing consequences, and how editors and news values were instrumental in this process. U.S. President George W. Bush’s post-September 11 speeches used ‘shared’ meanings and symbols, news values morphed into the language of strategic geography, and risk reportage obliterated the ideal of journalistic objectivity. The deployment of ‘embedded’ journalists during the Second Gulf War (March-April 2003) is the latest development of this unfolding trend. September 11 imagery also revitalized the Holocaust aesthetic and portrayal of J.G. Ballard-style ‘institutionalised disaster areas’. Royce Smith examines why, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, macabre photo-manipulations of the last moments became the latest Internet urban legend. Drawing upon the theoretical contributions of Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes and others, Smith suggests that these photo-manipulations were a kitsch form of post-traumatic visualisation for some viewers. Others seized on Associated Press wire photos, whose visuals suggested the ‘face of Satan’ in the smoke of the World Trade Center (WTC) ruins, as moral explanations of disruptive events. Imagery of people jumping from the WTC’s North Tower, mostly censored in North America’s press, restored the humanness of the catastrophe and the reality of the viewer’s own mortality. The discovery of surviving artwork in the WTC ruins, notably Rodin’s The Thinker and Fritz Koenig’s The Sphere, have prompted art scholars to resurrect this ‘dead art’ as a memorial to September 11’s victims. Perhaps art has always best outlined the contradictions that are inherent in the sharing of cultural artefacts. Art is part of our, of humanity’s, shared cultural heritage, and is celebrated as speaking to the most fundamental of human qualities, connecting us regardless of the markers of individual identity that may divide us – yet art is also itself dividing us along lines of skill and talent, on the side of art production, and of tastes and interests, on the side of art consumption. Though perhaps intending to share the artist’s vision, some art also commands exorbitant sums of money which buy the privilege of not having to share that vision with others, or (in the case of museums and galleries) to set the parameters – and entry fees – for that sharing. Digital networks have long been promoted as providing the environment for unlimited sharing of art and other content, and for shared, collaborative approaches to the production of that content. It is no surprise that the Internet features prominently in almost all of the articles in this ‘share’ issue of M/C Journal. It has disrupted the existing systems of exchange, but how the pieces will fall remains to be seen. For now, we share with you these reports from the many nodes of the network society – no doubt, more connections will continue to emerge. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Burns, Alex and Bruns, Axel. ""Share" Editorial" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/01-editorial.php>. APA Style Burns, A. & Bruns, A. (2003, Apr 23). "Share" Editorial. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/01-editorial.php>

We (I, Robert Lawrence and, in a rare display of unity, all my online avatars and agents)hereby render and proclaim thisMANIFESTO OF PIECES AND BITS IN SERVICE OF CONTRADICTIONAL AESTHETICSWe start with the simple premise that art has the job of telling us who we are, and that through the modern age doing this job while KEEPING UP with accelerating cultural change has necessitated the invention of something we might call the avant-garde. Along the way there has been an on-again-off-again affair between said avant-garde and technology. We are now in a new phase of the new and the technology under consideration is the Internet.The recent hyperventilating about the term postInternet reflects the artworld’s overdue recognition of the effect of the Internet on the culture at large, and on art as a cultural practice, a market, and a historical process.I propose that we cannot fully understand what the Internet is doing to us through a consideration of what happens on the screen, nor by considering what happens in the physical space we occupy either before or behind the screen. Rather we must critically and creatively fathom the flow of cultural practice between and across these realms. This requires Hybrid art combining both physical and Internet forms.I do not mean to imply that single discipline-based art cannot communicate complexity, but I believe that Internet culture introduces complexities that can only be approached through hybrid practices. And this is especially critical for an art that, in doing the job of “telling us who we are”, wants to address the contradictory ways we now form and promote, or conceal and revise, our multiple identities through online social media profiles inconsistent with our fleshly selves.We need a different way of talking about identity. A history of identity:In the ancient world, individual identity as we understand it did not exist.The renaissance invented the individual.Modernism prioritized and alienated him (sic).Post-Modernism fragmented him/her.The Internet hyper-circulates and amplifies all these modalities, exploding the possibilities of identity.While reducing us to demographic market targets, the Web facilitates mass indulgence in perversely individual interests. The now common act of creating an “online profile” is a regular reiteration of the simple fact that identity is an open-ended hypothesis. We can now live double, or extravagantly multiple, virtual lives. The “me meme” is a ceaseless morph. This is a profound change in how identity was understood just a decade ago. Other historical transformations of identity happened over centuries. This latest and most radical change has occurred in the click of a mouse. Selfhood is now imbued with new complexity, fluidity and amplified contradictions.To fully understand what is actually happening to us, we need an art that engages the variant contracts of the physical and the virtual. We need a Hybrid art that addresses variant temporal and spatial modes of the physical and virtual. We need an art that offers articulations through the ubiquitous web in concert with the distinct perspectives that a physical gallery experience uniquely offers: engagement and removal, reflection and transference. Art that tells us who we are today calls for an aesthetics of contradiction. — Ro Lawrence (and all avatars) 2011, revised 2013, 2015, 2018. The manifesto above grew from an artistic practice beginning in 1998 as I started producing a website for every project that I made in traditional media. The Internet work does not just document or promote the project, nor is it “Netart” in the common sense of creative work restricted to a browser window. All of my efforts with the Internet are directly linked to my projects in traditional media and the web components offer parallel aesthetic voices that augment or overtly contradict the reading suggested by the traditional visual components of each project.This hybrid work grew out of a previous decade of transmedia work in video installation and sculpture, where I would create physical contexts for silent video as a way to remove the video image from the seamless flow of broadcast culture. A video image can signify very differently in a physical context that separates it from the flow of mass media and rather reconnects it to lived physical culture. A significant part of the aesthetic pleasure of this kind of work comes from nuances of dissonance arising from contradictory ways viewers had learned to read the object world and the ways we were then still learning to read the electronic image world. This video installation work was about “relocating” the electronic image, but I was also “locating” the electronic image in another sense, within the boundaries of geographic and cultural location. Linking all my projects to specific geographic locations set up contrasts with the spatial ubiquity of electronic media. In 1998 I amplified this contrast with my addition of extensive Internet components with each installation I made.The Way Things Grow (1998) began as an installation of sculptures combining video with segments of birch trees. Each piece in the gallery was linked to a specific geographic location within driving distance of the gallery exhibiting the work. In the years just before this piece I had moved from a practice of text-augmented video installations to the point where I had reduced the text to small printed handouts that featured absurd Scripts for Performance. These text handouts that viewers could take with them suggested that the work was to be completed by the viewer later outside the gallery. This to-be-continued dynamic was the genesis of a serial form in work going forward from then on. Thematic and narrative elements in the work were serialized via possible actions viewers would perform after leaving the gallery. In the installation for The Way Things Grow, there was no text in the gallery at all to suggest interpretations of this series of video sculptures. Even the titles offered no direct textual help. Rather than telling the viewers something about the work before them in the gallery, the title of each piece led the viewer away from the gallery toward serial actions in the specific geographic locations the works referred to. Each piece was titled with an Internet address.Figure 1: Lawrence, Robert, The Way Things Grow, video Installation with web components at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/grow.html, 1998.When people went to the web site for each piece they found only a black page referencing a physical horizon with a long line of text that they could scroll to right for meters. Unlike the determinedly embodied work in the gallery, the web components were disembodied texts floating in a black void, but texts about very specific physical locations.Figure 2: Lawrence, Robert, The Way Things Grow, partial view of webpage at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/growth_variant4.html, 1998.The texts began with the exact longitude and latitude of a geographical site in some way related to birch trees. ... A particularly old or large tree... a factory that turned birch trees into popsicle sticks and medical tongue depressors... etc. The website texts included directions to the site, and absurd scripts for performance. In this way the Internet component transformed the suite of sculptures in the gallery to a series of virtual, and possibly actual, events beyond the gallery. These potential narratives that viewers were invited into comprised an open-ended serial structure. The gallery work was formal, minimal, essentialist. On the web it was social, locative, deconstructive. In both locations, it was located. Here follows an excerpt from the website. GROWTH VARIANT #25: North 44:57:58 by West 93:15:56. On the south side of the Hennepin County Government Center is a park with 9 birch trees. These are urban birches, and they display random scratchings, as well as proclamations of affection expressed with pairs of initials and a “+” –both with and without encircling heart symbols. RECOMMENDED PERFORMANCE: Visit these urban birches once each month. Photograph all changes in their bark made by humans. After 20 years compile a document entitled, "Human Mark Making on Urban Birches, a Visual Study of Specific Universalities". Bring it into the Hennepin County Government Center and ask that it be placed in the archives.An Acre of Art (2000) was a collaborative project with sculptor Mark Knierim. Like The Way Things Grow, this new work, commissioned by the Minneapolis Art Institute, played out in the gallery, in a specific geographic location, and online. In the Art Institute was a gallery installation combining sculptures with absurd combinations of physical rural culture fitting contradictorily into an urban "high art" context. One of the pieces, entitled Landscape (2000), was an 18’ chicken coop faced with a gold picture frame. Inside were two bard rock hens and an iMac. The computer was programmed to stream to the Internet live video from the coop, the world’s first video chicken cam. As a work unfolding across a long stretch of time, the web cam video was a serial narrative without determined division into episodes. The gallery works also referenced a specific acre of agricultural land an hour from the Institute. Here we planted a row of dwarf corn at a diagonal to the mid-western American rural geometric grid of farmland. Visitors to the rural site could sit on “rural art furniture,” contemplate the corn growing, and occasionally witness absurd performances. The third stream of the piece was an extensive website, which playfully theorized the rural/urban/art trialectic. Each of the three locations of the work was exploited to provide a richer transmedia interpretation of the project’s themes than any one venue or medium could. Location Sequence is a serial installation begun in 1999. Each installation has completely different physical elements. The only consistent physical element is 72 segments of a 72” collapsible carpenter's ruler evenly spaced to wrap around the gallery walls. Each of the 72 segments of the ruler displays an Internet web address. Reversing the notion of the Internet as a place of rapid change compared to a more enduring physical world, in this case the Internet components do not change with each new episode of the work, while the physical components transform with each new installation. Thematically, all aspects of the work deal with various shades of meaning of the term "location." Beginning/Middle/End is a 30-year conceptual serial begun in 2002, presenting a series of site-specific actions, objects, or interventions combined with corresponding web pages that collectively negotiate concepts related to time, location, and narrative. Realizing a 30-year project via the web in this manner is a self-conscious contradiction of the culture of the instantaneous that the Internet manifests and propagates.The installation documented here was completed for a one-night event in 2002 with Szilage Gallery in St Petersburg, Florida. Bricks moulded with the URLs for three web sites were placed in a historic brick road with the intention that they would remain there through a historical time frame. The URLs were also projected in light on a creek parallel to the brick road and seen only for several hours. The corresponding web site components speculate on temporal/narrative structures crossing with geographic features, natural and manufactured.Figure 3: Lawrence, Robert, Beginning/Middle/End, site-specific installation with website in conjunction with 30-year series, http://www.h-e-r-e.com/beginning.html, 2002-32.The most recent instalment was done as part of Conflux Festival in 2014 in collaboration with painter Ld Lawrence. White shapes appeared in various public spaces in downtown Manhattan. Upon closer inspection people realized that they were not painted tags or stickers, but magnetic sheets that could be moved or removed. An optical scan tag hidden on the back of each shape directed to a website which encouraged people to move the objects to other locations and send a geo-located photo to the web site to trace the shape's motion through the world. The work online could trace the serial narrative of the physical installation components following the installation during Conflux Festival. Figure 4: Lawrence, Robert w/Lawrence, Ld, Gravity Ace on the Move, site-specific installation with geo-tracking website at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/gravityace/. Completed for Conflux Festival NYC, 2014, as part of Beginning/Middle/End.Dad's Boots (2003) was a multi-sited sculpture/performance. Three different physical manifestations of the work were installed at the same time in three locations: Shirakawa-go Art Festival in Japan; the Phipps Art Center in Hudson, Wisconsin; and at the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida. Physical components of the work included silent video projection, digital photography, computer key caps, and my father's boots. Each of these three different installations referred back to one web site. Because all these shows were up at the same time, the work was a distributed synchronous serial. In each installation space the title of the work was displayed as an Internet address. At the website was a series of popup texts suggesting performances focused, however absurdly, on reassessing paternal relationships.Figure 5: Lawrence, Robert, Dad’s Boots, simultaneous gallery installation in Florida, Wisconsin and Japan, with website, 2003. Coincidently, beginning the same time as my transmedia physical/Internet art practice, since 1998 I have had a secret other-life as a tango dancer. I came to this practice drawn by the music and the attraction of an after-dark subculture that ran by different rules than the rest of life. While my life as a tanguero was most certainly an escape strategy, I quickly began to see that although tango was different from the rest of the world, it was indeed a part of this world. It had a place and a time and a history. Further, it was a fascinating history about the interplays of power, class, wealth, race, and desire. Figure 6: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Intervention, site-specific dance interventions with extensive web components, 2007-12.As Marta Savigliano points out in Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, “Tango is a practice already ready for struggle. It knows about taking sides, positions, risks. It has the experience of domination/resistance from within. …Tango is a language of decolonization. So pick and choose. Improvise... let your feet do the thinking. Be comfortable in your restlessness. Tango” (17). The realization that tango, my sensual escape from critical thought, was actually political came just about the time I was beginning to understand the essential dynamic of contradiction between the physical and Internet streams of my work. Tango Intervention began in 2007. I have now, as of 2018, done tango interventions in over 40 cities. Overall, the project can be seen as a serial performance of contradictions. In each case the physical dance interventions are manifestations of sensual fantasy in public space, and the Internet components recontextualize the public actions as site-specific performances with a political edge, revealing a hidden history or current social situation related to the political economy of tango. These themes are further developed in a series of related digital prints and videos shown here in various formats and contexts.In Tango Panopticon (2009), a “spin off” from the Tango Intervention series, the hidden social issue was the growing video surveillance of public space. The first Tango Panopticon production was Mayday 2009 with people dancing tango under public video surveillance in 15 cities. Mayday 2010 was Tango Panopticon 2.0, with tangointervention.org streaming live cell phone video from 16 simultaneous dance interventions on 4 continents. The public encountered the interventions as a sensual reclaiming of public space. Contradictorily, on the web Tango Panopticon 2.0 became a distributed worldwide action against the growing spectre of video surveillance and the increasing control of public commons. Each intervention team was automatically located on an online map when they started streaming video. Visitors to the website could choose an action from the list of cities or click on the map pins to choose which live video to load into the grid of 6 streaming signals. Visitors to the physical intervention sites could download our free open source software and stream their own videos to tangointervention.org.Figure 7: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Panopticon 2.0, worldwide synchronous dance intervention with live streaming video and extensive web components, 2010.Tango Panopticon also has a life as a serial installation, initially installed as part of the annual conference of “Digital Resources for Humanities and the Arts” at Brunel University, London. All shots in the grid of videos are swish pans from close-ups of surveillance cameras to tango interveners dancing under their gaze. Each ongoing installation in the series physically adapts to the site, and with each installation more lines of video frames are added until the images become too small to read.Figure 8: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Panopticon 2.0 (For Osvaldo), video installation based on worldwide dance intervention series with live streaming video, 2011.My new work Equivalence (in development) is quite didactic in its contradictions between the online and gallery components. A series of square prints of clouds in a gallery are titled with web addresses that open with other cloud images and then fade into randomly loading excerpts from the CIA torture manual used at Guantanamo Bay Detention Center.Figure 9: Lawrence, Robert, Eauivalence, digital prints, excerpts from CIA Guantanamo Detention Center torture manual, work-in-progress.The gallery images recall Stieglitz’s Equivalents photographs from the early 20th century. Made in the 1920s to 30s, the Equivalents comprise a pivotal change in photographic history, from the early pictorial movement in which photography tried to imitate painting, and a new artistic approach that embraced features distinct to the photographic medium. Stieglitz’s Equivalents merged photographic realism with abstraction and symbolist undertones of transcendent spirituality. Many of the 20th century masters of photography, from Ansel Adams to Minor White, acknowledged the profound influence these photographs had on them. Several images from the Equivalents series were the first photographic art to be acquired by a major art museum in the US, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.My series Equivalence serves as the latest episode in a serial art history narrative. Since the “Pictures Generation” movement in the 1970s, photography has cannibalized its history, but perhaps no photographic body of work has been as quoted as Stieglitz’s Equivalents. A partial list includes: John Baldessari’s series Blowing Cigar Smoke to Match Clouds That Are the Same(1973), William Eggleston’s series Wedgwood Blue (1979), John Pfahl’s smoke stack series (1982-89), George Legrady’s Equivalents II(1993), Vik Muniz’sEquivalents(1997), Lisa Oppenheim (2012), and most recently, Berndnaut Smilde’s Nimbus Series, begun in 2012. Over the course of more than four decades each of these series has presented a unique vision, but all rest on Stieglitz’s shoulders. From that position they make choices about how to operate relative the original Equivalents, ranging from Baldessari and Muniz’s phenomenological playfulness to Eggleston and Smilde’s neo-essentialist approach.My series Equivalence follows along in this serial modernist image franchise. What distinguishes it is that it does not take a single position relative to other Equivalents tribute works. Rather, it exploits its gallery/Internet transmediality to simultaneously assume two contradictory positions. The dissonance of this positioning is one of my main points with the work, and it is in some ways resonant with the contradictions concerning photographic abstraction and representation that Stieglitz engaged in the original Equivalents series almost a century ago.While hanging on the walls of a gallery, Equivalence suggests the same metaphysical intentions as Stieglitz’s Equivalents. Simultaneously, in its manifestation on the Internet, my Equivalence series transcends its implied transcendence and claims a very specific time and place –a small brutal encampment on the island of Cuba where the United States abandoned any remaining claim to moral authority. In this illegal prison, forgotten lives drag on invisibly, outside of time, like untold serial narratives without resolution and without justice.Partially to balance the political insistence of Equivalence, I am also working on another series that operates with very different modalities. Following up on the live streaming technology that I developed for my Tango Panopticon public intervention series, I have started Horizon (In Development).Figure 10: Lawrence, Robert, Horizon, worldwide synchronous horizon interventions with live streaming video to Internet, work-in-progress.In Horizon I again use live cell phone video, this time streamed to an infinitely wide web page from live actions around the world done in direct engagement with the horizon line. The performances will begin and automatically come online live at noon in their respective time zone, each added to the growing horizontal line of moving images. As the actions complete, the streamed footage will begin endlessly looping. The project will also stream live during the event to galleries, and then HD footage from the events will be edited and incorporated into video installations. Leading up to this major event day, I will have a series of smaller instalments of the piece, with either live or recorded video. The first of these preliminary versions was completed during the Live Performers Workshop in Rome. Horizon continues to develop, leading to the worldwide synchronous event in 2020.Certainly, artists have always worked in series. However, exploiting the unique temporal dimensions of the Internet, a series of works can develop episodically as a serial work. If that work unfolds with contradictory thematics in its embodied and online forms, it reaches further toward an understanding of the complexities of postInternet culture and identity. ReferencesSaviligliano, Marta. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995.

As Lewis Carroll’s Alice comes to the end of her journey through the looking glass world, she has also come to the end of her patience with its strange power games and arbitrations. At every stage of the adventure, she has encountered someone who wants to dictate rules and protocols, and a lesson on table manners from the Red Queen finally triggers rebellion. “I can’t stand this any more,” Alice cries, as she seizes the tablecloth and hurls the entire setting into chaos (279). Then, catching hold of the Red Queen, she gives her a good shaking, until the rigid contours of the imperious figure become fuzzy and soft. At this point, the hold of the dream dissolves and Alice, awakening on the other side of the mirror, realises she is shaking the kitten. Queens have long been associated with ideas of transformation. As Alice is duly advised when she first looks out across the chequered landscape of the looking glass world, the rules of chess decree that a pawn may become a queen if she makes it to the other side. The transformation of pawn to queen is in accord with the fairy tale convention of the unspoiled country girl who wins the heart of a prince and is crowned as his bride. This works in a dual register: on one level, it is a story of social elevation, from the lowest to the highest rank; on another, it is a magical transition, as some agent of fortune intervenes to alter the determinations of the social world. But fairy tales also present us with the antithesis and adversary of the fortune-blessed princess, in the figure of the tyrant queen who works magic to shape destiny to her own ends. The Queen and the mirror converge in the cultural imaginary, working transformations that disrupt the order of nature, invert socio-political hierarchies, and flout the laws of destiny. In “Snow White,” the powers of the wicked queen are mediated by the looking glass, which reflects and affirms her own image while also serving as a panopticon, keep the entire realm under surveillance, to pick up any signs of threat to her pre-eminence. All this turbulence in the order of things lets loose a chaotic phantasmagoria that is prime material for film and animation. Two major film versions of “Snow White” have been released in the past few years—Mirror Mirror (2012) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)—while Tim Burton’s animated 3D rendition of Alice in Wonderland was released in 2010. Alice through the Looking Glass (2016) and The Huntsman: Winter’s War, the 2016 prequel to Snow White and the Huntsman, continue the experiment with state-of-the-art-techniques in 3D animation and computer-generated imaging to push the visual boundaries of fantasy. Perhaps this escalating extravagance in the creation of fantasy worlds is another manifestation of the ancient lore and law of sorcery: that the magic of transformation always runs out of control, because it disrupts the all-encompassing design of an ordered world. This principle is expressed with poetic succinctness in Ursula Le Guin’s classic story A Wizard of Earthsea, when the Master Changer issues a warning to his most gifted student: But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. (48)In Le Guin’s story, transformation is only dangerous if it involves material change; illusions of all kinds are ultimately harmless because they are impermanent.Illusions mediated by the mirror, however, blur the distinction Le Guin is making, for the mirror image supposedly reflects a real world. And it holds the seductive power of a projected narcissism. Seeing what we wish for is an experience that can hold us captive in a way that changes human nature, and so leads to dangerous acts with material consequences. The queen in the mirror becomes the wicked queen because she converts the world into her image, and in traditions of animation going back to Disney’s original Snow White (1937) the mirror is itself an animate being, with a spirit whose own determinations become paramount. Though there are exceptions in the annals of fairy story, powers of transformation are typically dark powers, turbulent and radically elicit. When they are mediated through the agency of the mirror, they are also the powers of narcissism and autocracy. Through a Glass DarklyIn her classic cultural history of the mirror, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet tracks a duality in the traditions of symbolism associated with it. This duality is already evident in Biblical allusions to the mirror, with references to the Bible itself as “the unstained mirror” (Proverbs 7.27) counterpointed by images of the mortal condition as one of seeing “through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13.12).The first of these metaphoric conventions celebrates the crystalline purity of a reflecting surface that reveals the spiritual identity beneath the outward form of the human image. The church fathers drew on Plotinus to evoke “a whole metaphysics of light and reflection in which the visible world is the image of the invisible,” and taught that “humans become mirrors when they cleanse their souls (Melchior-Bonnet 109–10). Against such invocations of the mirror as an intermediary for the radiating presence of the divine in the mortal world, there arises an antithetical narrative, in which it is portrayed as distorting, stained, and clouded, and therefore an instrument of delusion. Narcissus becomes the prototype of the human subject led astray by the image itself, divorced from material reality. What was the mirror if not a trickster? Jean Delumeau poses this question in a preface to Melchior-Bonnet’s book (xi).Through the centuries, as Melchior-Bonnet’s study shows, these two strands are interwoven in the cultural imaginary, sometimes fused, and sometimes torn asunder. With Venetian advances in the techniques and technologies of mirror production in the late Renaissance, the mirror gained special status as a possession of pre-eminent beauty and craftsmanship, a means by which the rich and powerful could reflect back to themselves both the self-image they wanted to see, and the world in the background as a shimmering personal aura. This was an attempt to harness the numinous influence of the divinely radiant mirror in order to enhance the superiority of leading aristocrats. By the mid seventeenth century, the mirror had become an essential accessory to the royal presence. Queen Anne of Austria staged a Queen’s Ball in 1633, in a hall surrounded by mirrors and tapestries. The large, finely polished mirror panels required for this kind of display were made exclusively by craftsmen at Murano, in a process that, with its huge furnaces, its alternating phases of melting and solidifying, its mysterious applications of mercury and silver, seemed to belong to the transformational arts of alchemy. In 1664, Louis XIV began to steal unique craftsmen from Murano and bring them to France, to set up the Royal Glass and Mirror Company whose culminating achievement was the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.The looking glass world of the palace was an arena in which courtiers and visitors engaged in the high-stakes challenge of self-fashioning. Costume, attitude, and manners were the passport to advancement. To cut a figure at court was to create an identity with national and sometimes international currency. It was through the art of self-fashioning that the many princesses of Europe, and many more young women of title and hereditary distinction, competed for the very few positions as consort to the heir of a royal house. A man might be born to be king, but a woman had to become a queen.So the girl who would be queen looks in the mirror to assess her chances. If her face is her fortune, what might she be? A deep relationship with the mirror may serve to enhance her beauty and enable her to realise her wish, but like all magical agents, the mirror also betrays anyone with the hubris to believe they are in control of it. In the Grimm’s story of “Snow White,” the Queen practises the ancient art of scrying, looking into a reflective surface to conjure images of things distant in time and place. But although the mirror affords her the seer’s visionary capacity to tell what will be, it does not give her the power to control the patterns of destiny. Driven to attempt such control, she must find other magic in order to work the changes she desires, and so she experiments with spells of self-transformation. Here the doubleness of the mirror plays out across every plane of human perception: visual, ethical, metaphysical, psychological. A dynamic of inherent contradiction betrays the figure who tries to engage the mirror as a servant. Disney’s original 1937 cartoon shows the vain Queen brewing an alchemical potion that changes her into the very opposite of all she has sought to become: an ugly, ill-dressed, and impoverished old woman. This is the figure who can win and betray trust from the unspoiled princess to whom the arts of self-fashioning are unknown. In Tarsem Singh’s film Mirror Mirror, the Queen actually has two mirrors. One is a large crystal egg that reflects back a phantasmagoria of palace scenes; the other, installed in a primitive hut on an island across the lake, is a simple looking glass that shows her as she really is. Snow White and the Huntsman portrays the mirror as a golden apparition, cloaked and faceless, that materialises from within the frame to stand before her. This is not her reflection, but with every encounter, she takes on more of its dark energies, until, in another kind of reversal, she becomes its image and agent in the wider world. As Ursula Le Guin’s sage teaches the young magician, magic has its secret economies. You pay for what you get, and the changes wrought will come back at you in ways you would never have foreseen. The practice of scrying inevitably leads the would-be clairvoyant into deeper levels of obscurity, until the whole world turns against the seer in a sequence of manifestations entirely contrary to his or her framework of expectation. Ultimately, the lesson of the mirror is that living in obscurity is a defining aspect of the human condition. Jorge Luis Borges, the blind writer whose work exhibits a life-long obsession with mirrors, surveys a range of interpretations and speculations surrounding the phrase “through a glass darkly,” and quotes this statement from Leon Bloy: “There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do . . . or what his real name is, his enduring Name in the register of Light” (212).The mirror will never really tell you who you are. Indeed, its effects may be quite the contrary, as Alice discovers when, within a couple of moves on the looking glass chessboard, she finds herself entering the wood of no names. Throughout her adventures she is repeatedly interrogated about who or what she is, and can give no satisfactory answer. The looking glass has turned her into an estranged creature, as bizarre a species as any of those she encounters in its landscapes.Furies“The furies are at home in the mirror,” wrote R. S. Thomas in his poem “Reflections” (265). They are the human image gone haywire, the frightening other of what we hope to see in our reflection. As the mirror is joined by technologies of the moving image in twentieth-century evolutions of the myth, the furies have been given a new lease of life on the cinema screen. In Disney’s 1937 cartoon of Snow White, the mirror itself has the face of a fury, which emerges from a pool of blackness like a death’s head before bringing the Queen’s own face into focus. As its vision comes into conflict with hers, threatening the dissolution of the world over which she presides, the mirror’s face erupts into fire.Computer-generated imaging enables an expansive response to the challenges of visualisation associated with the original furies of classical mythology. The Erinyes are unstable forms, arising from liquid (blood) to become semi-materialised in human guise, always ready to disintegrate again. They are the original undead, hovering between mortal embodiment and cadaverous decay. Tearing across the landscape as a flock of birds, a swarm of insects, or a mass of storm clouds, they gather into themselves tremendous energies of speed and motion. The 2012 film Snow White and the Huntsman, directed by Rupert Sanders, gives us the strongest contemporary realisation of the archaic fury. Queen Ravenna, played by Charlize Theron, is a virtuoso of the macabre, costumed in a range of metallic exoskeletons and a cloak of raven’s feathers, with a raised collar that forms two great black wings either side of her head. Powers of dematerialisation and rematerialisation are central to her repertoire. She undergoes spectacular metamorphosis into a mass of shrieking birds; from the walls around her she conjures phantom soldiers that splinter into shards of black crystal when struck by enemy swords. As she dies at the foot of the steps leading up to the great golden disc of her mirror, her face rapidly takes on the great age she has disguised by vampiric practices.Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen in Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a figure midway between Disney’s fairy tale spectre and the fully cinematic register of Theron’s Ravenna. Bonham Carter’s Queen, with her accentuated head and pantomime mask of a face, retains the boundaries of form. She also presides over a court whose visual structures express the rigidities of a tyrannical regime. Thus she is no shape-shifter, but energies of the fury are expressed in her voice, which rings out across the presence chamber of the palace and reverberates throughout the kingdom with its calls for blood. Alice through the Looking Glass, James Bobin’s 2016 sequel, puts her at the centre of a vast destructive force field. Alice passes through the mirror to encounter the Lord of Time, whose eternal rule must be broken in order to break the power of the murdering Queen; Alice then opens a door and tumbles in free-fall out into nothingness. The place where she lands is a world not of daydream but of nightmare, where everything will soon be on fire, as the two sides in the chess game advance towards each other for the last battle. This inflation of the Red Queen’s macabre aura and impact is quite contrary to what Lewis Carroll had in mind for his own sequel. In some notes about the stage adaptation of the Alice stories, he makes a painstaking distinction between the characters of the queen in his two stories.I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion—a blind and aimless Fury. The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm—she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of governesses. (86)Yet there is clearly a temptation to erase this distinction in dramatisations of Alice’s adventures. Perhaps the Red Queen as a ‘not unkindly’ governess is too restrained a persona for the psychodynamic mythos surrounding the queen in the mirror. The image itself demands more than Carroll wants to accord, and the original Tenniel illustrations give a distinctly sinister look to the stern chess queen. In their very first encounter, the Red Queen contradicts every observation Alice makes, confounds the child’s sensory orientation by inverting the rules of time and motion, and assigns her the role of pawn in the game. Kafka or Orwell would not have been at all relaxed about an authority figure who practises mind control, language management, and identity reassignment. But here Carroll offers a brilliant modernisation of the fairy story tradition. Under the governance of the autocratic queen, wonderland and the looking glass world are places in which the laws of science, logic, and language are overturned, to be replaced by the rules of the queen’s games: cards and croquet in the wonderland, and chess in the looking glass world. Alice, as a well-schooled Victorian child, knows something of these games. She has enough common sense to be aware of how the laws of gravity and time and motion are supposed to work, and if she boasts of being able to believe six impossible things before breakfast, this signifies that she has enough logic to understand the limits of possibility. She would also have been taught about species and varieties and encouraged to make her own collections of natural forms. But the anarchy of the queen’s world extends into the domain of biology: species of all kinds can talk, bodies dissolve or change size, and transmutations occur instantaneously. Thus the world-warping energies of the Erinyes are re-imagined in an absurdist’s challenge to the scientist’s universe and the logician’s mentality.Carroll’s instinct to tame the furies is in accord with the overall tone and milieu of his stories, which are works of quirky charm rather than tales of terror, but his two queens are threatening enough to enable him to build the narrative to a dramatic climax. For film-makers and animators, though, it is the queen who provides the dramatic energy and presence. There is an over-riding temptation to let loose the pandemonium of the original Erinyes, exploiting their visual terror and their classical association with metamorphosis. FashioningThere is some sociological background to the coupling of the queen and the mirror in fairy story. In reality, the mirror might assist an aspiring princess to become queen by enchanting the prince who was heir to the throne, but what was the role of the looking glass once she was crowned? Historically, the self-imaging of the queen has intense and nervous resonances, and these can be traced back to Elizabeth I, whose elaborate persona was fraught with newly interpreted symbolism. Her portraits were her mirrors, and they reflect a figure in whom the qualities of radiance associated with divinity were transferred to the human monarch. Elizabeth developed the art of dressing herself in wearable light. If she lacked for a halo, she made up for it with the extravagant radiata of her ruffs and the wreaths of pearls around her head. Pearls in mediaeval poetry carried the mystique of a luminous microcosm, but they were also mirrors in themselves, each one a miniature reflecting globe. The Ditchely portrait of 1592 shows her standing as a colossus between heaven and earth, with the changing planetary light cycle as background. This is a queen who rules the world through the mediation of her own created image. It is an inevitable step from here to a corresponding intervention in the arrangement of the world at large, which involves the armies and armadas that form the backdrop to her other great portraits. And on the home front, a regime of terror focused on regular public decapitations and other grisly executions completes the strategy to remaking the world according to her will. Renowned costume designer Eiko Ishioka created an aesthetic for Mirror Mirror that combines elements of court fashion from the Elizabethan era and the French ancien régime, with allusions to Versailles. Formality and mannerism are the keynotes for the palace scenes. Julia Roberts as the Queen wears a succession of vast dresses that are in defiance of human scale and proportion. Their width at the hem is twice her height, and 100,000 Svarovski crystals were used for their embellishment. For the masked ball scene, she makes her entry as a scarlet peacock with a high arching ruff of pure white feathers. She amuses herself by arranging her courtiers as pieces on a chess-board. So stiffly attired they can barely move more than a square at a time, and with hats surmounted by precariously balanced ships, they are a mock armada from which the Queen may sink individual vessels on a whim, by ordering a fatal move. Snow White and the Huntsman takes a very different approach to extreme fashioning. Designer Colleen Atwood suggests the shape-shifter in the Queen’s costumes, incorporating materials evoking a range of species: reptile scales, fluorescent beetle wings from Thailand, and miniature bird skulls. There is an obvious homage here to the great fashion designer Alexander McQueen, whose hallmark was a fascination with the organic costuming of creatures in feathers, fur, wool, scales, shells, and fronds. Birds were everywhere in McQueen’s work. His 2006 show Widows of Culloden featured a range of headdresses that made the models look as if they had just walked through a flock of birds in full flight. The creatures were perched on their heads with outstretched wings askance across the models’ faces, obscuring their field of vision. As avatars from the spirit realm, birds are emblems of otherness, and associated with metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. These resonances give a potent mythological aura to Theron’s Queen of the dark arts.Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman accordingly present strikingly contrasted versions of self-fashioning. In Mirror Mirror we have an approach driven by traditions of aristocratic narcissism and courtly persona, in which form is both rigid and extreme. The Queen herself, far from being a shape-shifter, is a prisoner of the massive and rigid architecture that is her costume. Snow White and the Huntsman gives us a more profoundly magical interpretation, where form is radically unstable, infused with strange energies that may at any moment manifest themselves through violent transformation.Atwood was also costume designer for Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, where an invented framing story foregrounds the issue of fashioning as social control. Alice in this version is a young woman, being led by her mother to a garden party where a staged marriage proposal is to take place. Alice, as the social underling in the match, is simply expected to accept the honour. Instead, she escapes the scene and disappears down a rabbit hole to return to the wonderland of her childhood. In a nice comedic touch, her episodes of shrinking and growing involve an embarrassing separation from her clothes, so divesting her also of the demure image of the Victorian maiden. Atwood provides her with a range of fantasy party dresses that express the free spirit of a world that is her refuge from adult conformity.Alice gets to escape the straitjacket of social formation in Carroll’s original stories by overthrowing the queen’s game, and with it her micro-management of image and behaviour. There are other respects, though, in which Alice’s adventures are a form of social and moral fashioning. Her opening reprimand to the kitten includes some telling details about her own propensities. She once frightened a deaf old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena and you’re a bone!” (147). Playing kings and queens is one of little Alice’s favourite games, and there is more than a touch of the Red Queen in the way she bosses and manages the kitten. It is easy to laud her impertinence in the face of the tyrannical characters she meets in her fantasies, but does she risk becoming just like them?As a story of moral self-fashioning, Alice through the Looking Glass cuts both ways. It is at once a critique of the Victorian social straitjacket, and a child’s fable about self-improvement. To be accorded the status of queen and with it the freedom of the board is also to be invested with responsibilities. If the human girl is the queen of species, how will she measure up? The published version of the story excludes an episode known to editors as “The Wasp in a Wig,” an encounter that takes place as Alice reaches the last ditch before the square upon which she will be crowned. She is about to jump the stream when she hears a sigh from woods behind her. Someone here is very unhappy, and she reasons with herself about whether there is any point in stopping to help. Once she has made the leap, there will be no going back, but she is reluctant to delay the move, as she is “very anxious to be a Queen” (309). The sigh comes from an aged creature in the shape of a wasp, who is sitting in the cold wind, grumbling to himself. Her kind enquiries are greeted with a succession of waspish retorts, but she persists and does not leave until she has cheered him up. The few minutes devoted “to making the poor old creature comfortable,” she tells herself, have been well spent.Read in isolation, the episode is trite and interferes with the momentum of the story. Carroll abandoned it on the advice of his illustrator John Tenniel, who wrote to say it didn’t interest him in the least (297). There is interest of another kind in Carroll’s instinct to arrest Alice’s momentum at that critical stage, with what amounts to a small morality tale, but Tenniel’s instinct was surely right. The mirror as a social object is surrounded by traditions of self-fashioning that are governed by various modes of conformity: moral, aesthetic, political. Traditions of myth and fantasy allow wider imaginative scope for the role of the mirror, and by association, for inventive speculation about human transformation in a world prone to extraordinary upheavals. ReferencesBorges, Jorge Luis. “Mirrors of Enigma.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Eds. Donald A. Yates and James Irby. New York: New Directions, 2007. 209–12. Carroll, Lewis. Alice through the Looking Glass. In The Annotated Alice. Ed. Martin Gardner. London: Penguin, 2000.The King James Bible.Le Guin, Ursula. The Earthsea Quartet. London: Penguin, 2012.Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine. The Mirror: A History. Trans. Katherine H. Jewett. London: Routledge, 2014.Thomas, R.S. “Reflections.” No Truce with the Furies, Collected Later Poems 1988–2000. Hexham, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2011.

In one of the earliest films about a whistleblower, On the Waterfront (1954), the dock worker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), who also works for the union boss and mobster Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), decides to testify in court against him and uncover corruption and murder. By doing so he will not only suffer retribution from Friendly but also be seen as a “stool pigeon” by his co-workers, friends, and neighbours who will shun him, and he will be “marked” forever by his deed. Nonetheless, he decides to do the right thing. Already it is clear that in most cases the whistleblowers are not simply the ones who reveal things, but they themselves are also revealed.My aim in this article is to explore the depiction of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange in fiction film and its connection to what I would like to call, with Slavoj Žižek, “Hollywood ideology”; the heroisation of the “ordinary guy” against a big institution or a corrupt individual, as it is the case in Snowden (2016) on the one hand, and at the same time the impossibility of true systemic critique when the one who is criticising is “outside of the system”, as Assange in The Fifth Estate (2013). Both films also rely on the notion of individualism and convey conflicting messages in regard to understanding the perception of whistleblowers today. Snowden and AssangeAlthough there are many so called “whistleblower films” since On the Waterfront, like Serpico (1973), All the President’s Men (1976), or Silkwood (1983), to name but a few (for a comprehensive list see https://ew.com/movies/20-whistleblower-movies-to-watch/?), in this article I will focus on the most recent films that deal with Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. These are the most prominent cases of whistleblowing in the last decade put to film. They are relevant today also regarding their subject matter—privacy. Revealing secrets that concern privacy in this day and age is of importance and is pertinent even to the current Coronavirus crisis, where the question of privacy again arises in form of possible tracking apps, in the age of ever expanding “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff).Even if Assange is not strictly speaking a whistleblower, an engagement with his work in this context is indispensable since his outsider status, up to a point, resembles those of Snowden or Manning. They are not only important because they can be considered as “authentic heroe[s] of our time” (Žižek, Pandemic, 7), but also because of their depiction which differs in a very crucial way: while Snowden is depicted as a “classic” whistleblower (an American patriot who did his duty, someone from the “inside”), Assange’s action are coming from the outside of the established system and are interpreted as a selfish act, as it is stated in the film: “It was always about him.”Whistleblowers In his Whistleblower’s Handbook, Kohn writes: “who are these whistleblowers? Sometimes they are people you read about with admiration in the newspaper. Other times they are your co-workers or neighbours. However, most whistleblowers are regular workers performing their jobs” (Kohn, xi). A whistleblower, as the employee or a “regular worker”, can be regarded as someone who is a “nobody” at first, an invisible “cog in the wheel” of a certain institution, a supposedly devoted and loyal worker, who, through an act of “betrayal”, becomes a “somebody”. They do something truly significant, and by doing so becomes a hero to some and a traitor to others. Their persona suddenly becomes important.The wrongdoings that are uncovered by the whistleblower are for the most part not simply isolated missteps, but of a systemic nature, like the mass surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) uncovered by Snowden. The problem with narratives that deal with whistleblowing is that the focus inevitably shifts from the systemic problem (surveillance, war crimes, etc.) to the whistleblower as an individual. Moretti states that the interest of the media regarding whistleblowing, if one compares the reactions to the leaking of the “Pentagon Papers” regarding the Vietnam War in the 1970s by Daniel Ellsberg and to Snowden’s discoveries, shifted from the deed itself to the individual. In the case of Ellsberg, Moretti writes:the legitimate questions were not about him and what motivated him, but rather inquiry on (among other items) the relationship between government and media; whether the U.S. would be damaged militarily or diplomatically because of the release of the papers; the extent to which the media were acting as watchdogs; and why Americans needed to know about these items. (8)This shift of public interest goes along, according to Moretti, with the corporate ownership of media (7), where profit is the primary goal and therefore sensationalism is the order of the day, which is inextricably linked to the focus on the “scandalous” individual. The selfless and almost self-effacing act of whistleblowing becomes a narrative that constructs the opposite: yet another determined individual that through their sheer willpower achieves their goal, a notion that conforms to neoliberal ideology.Hollywood IdeologyThe endings of All the President’s Men and The Harder They Fall (1956), another early whistleblower film, twenty years apart, are very similar: they show the journalist eagerly typing away on his typewriter a story that will, in the case of the former, bring down the president of the United States and in the latter, bring an end to arranged fights in the boxing sport. This depiction of the free press vanquishing the evil doers, as Žižek states it, is exactly the point where “Hollywood ideology” becomes visible, which is:the ideology of such Hollywood blockbusters as All the President’s Men and The Pelican Brief, in which a couple of ordinary guys discover a scandal which reaches up to the president, forcing him to step down. Corruption is shown to reach the very top, yet the ideology of such works resides in their upbeat final message: what a great country ours must be, when a couple of ordinary guys like you and me can bring down the president, the mightiest man on Earth! (“Good Manners”)This message is of course part of Hollywood’s happy-ending convention that can be found even in films that deal with “serious” subject matters. The point of the happy end in this case is that before it is finally reached, the film can show corruption (Serpico), wrongdoings of big companies (The Insider, 1999), or sexual harassment (North Country, 2005). It is important that in the end all is—more or less—good. The happy ending need not necessarily be even truly “happy”—this depends on the general notion the film wants to convey (see for instance the ending of Silkwood, where the whistleblower is presumed to have been killed in the end). What is important in the whistleblower film is that the truth is out, justice has been served in one way or the other, the status quo has been re-established, and most importantly, there is someone out there who cares.These films, even when they appear to be critical of “the system”, are there to actually reassure their audiences in the workings of said system, which is (liberal) democracy supported by neoliberal capitalism (Frazer). Capitalism, on the other hand, is supported by the ideology of individualism which functions as a connecting tissue between the notions of democracy, capitalism, and film industry, since we are admiring exceptional individuals in performing acts of great importance. This, in turn, is encapsulated by the neoliberal mantra—“anyone can make it, only if they try heard enough”. As Bauman puts it more concretely, the risks and contradictions in a society are produced socially but are supposed to be solved individually (46).Individualism, as a part of the neoliberal capitalist ideology, is described already by Milton Friedman, who sees the individual as the “ultimate entity in the society” and the freedom of the individual as the “ultimate goal” within this society (12). What makes this an ideology is the fact that, in reality, the individual, or in the context of the market, the entrepreneur, is always-already tethered to and supported by the state, as Varoufakis has successfully proven (“Varoufakis/Chomsky discussion”). Therefore individualism is touted as an ideal to strive for, while for neoliberalism in order to function, the state is indispensable, which is often summed up in the formula “socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor” (Polychroniou). The heroic Hollywood individual, as shown in the whistleblower film, regardless of real-life events, is the perfect embodiment of individualist ideology of neoliberal capitalism—we are not seeing a stylised version of it, a cowboy or a masked vigilante, but a “real” person. It is paradoxically precisely the realism that we see in such films that makes them ideological: the “based on a true story” preamble and all the historical details that are there in order to create a fulfilling cinematic experience. All of this supports its ideology because, as Žižek writes, “the function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel” (Sublime Object 45). All the while Snowden mostly adheres to Hollywood ideology, The Fifth Estate also focuses on individualism, but goes in a different direction, and is more problematic – in the former we see the “ordinary guy” as the American hero, in the latter a disgruntled individual who reveals secrets of others for strictly personal reasons.SnowdenThere is an aspect of the whistleblower film that rings true and that is connected to Michel Foucault’s notion of power (“Truth and Power”). Snowden, through his employment at the NSA, is within a power relations network of an immensely powerful organisation. He uses “his” power, to expose the mass surveillance by the NSA. It is only through his involvement with this power network that he could get insight into and finally reveal what NSA is doing. Foucault writes that these resistances to power from the inside are “effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised; resistance to power does not have to come from elsewhere to be real … It exists all the more by being in the same place as power” (Oushakine 206). In the case of whistleblowing, the resistance to power must come exactly from the inside in order to be effective since whistleblowers occupy the “same place as power” that they are up against and that is what in turn makes them “powerful”.Fig. 1: The Heroic Individual: Edward Snowden in SnowdenBut there is an underside to this. His “relationship” to the power structure he is confronting greatly affects his depiction as a whistleblower within the film—precisely because Snowden, unlike Assange, is someone from inside the system. He can still be seen as a patriot and a “disillusioned idealist” (Scott). In the film this is shown right at the beginning as Snowden, in his hotel room in Hong Kong, tells the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) his name and who he is. The music swells and the film cuts to Snowden in uniform alongside other soldiers during a drill, when he was enlisted in the army before work for the NSA.Snowden resembles many of Stone’s typical characters, the all-American patriot being disillusioned by certain historical events, as in Born on the 4th of July (1989) and JFK (1991), which makes him question the government and its actions. It is generally of importance for a mainstream Hollywood film that the protagonist is relatable in order for the audiences to sympathise with them (Bordwell and Thompson 82). This is important not only regarding personal traits but, I would argue, also political views of the character. There needs to be no doubt in the mind of American audiences when it comes to films that deal with politics, that the protagonists are patriots.Stone’s film profits from this ambivalence in Snowden’s own political stance: at first he is more of a right winger who is a declared fan of Ayn Rand’s conservative-individualist manifesto Atlas Shrugged, then, after meeting his future partner Lindsey Mills, he turns slightly to the left, as he at one point states his support for President Obama. This also underlines the films ambiguity, as Oliver Stone openly stated about his Vietnam War film Platoon (1986) that “it could be embraced by … the right and the left. Essentially, most movies make their money in the middle” (Banff Centre). As Snowden takes the lie detector test as a part of the process of becoming a CIA agent, he confirms, quite sincerely it seems, that he thinks that the United States is the “greatest country in the world” and that the most important day in his life was 9/11. This again confirms his patriotic stance.Snowden is depicted as the exceptional individual, and at the same time the “ordinary guy”, who, through his act of courage, defied the all-powerful USA. During the aforementioned job interview scene, Snowden’s superior, Corbin O’Brian (Rhys Ifans), quotes Ayn Rand to him: “one man can stop the motor of the world”. Snowden states that he also believes that. The quote could serve as the film’s tagline, as a “universal truth” that seems to be at the core of American values and that also coincides with and reaffirms neoliberal ideology. Although it is undeniable that individuals can accomplish extraordinary feats, but when there is no systemic change, those can remain only solitary achievements that are only there to support the neoliberal “cult of the individual”.Snowden stands in total contrast to Assange in regard to his character and private life. There is nothing truly “problematic” about him, he seems to be an almost impeccable person, a “straight arrow”. This should make him a poster boy for American democracy and freedom of speech, and Stone tries to depict him in this way.Still, we are dealing with someone who cannot simply be redeemed as a patriot who did his duty. He cannot be unequivocally hailed as an all-American hero since betraying state secrets (and betrayal in general) is seen as a villainous act. For many Americans, and for the government, he will forever be remembered as a traitor. Greenwald writes that most of the people in the US, according to some surveys, still want to see Snowden in prison, even if they find that the surveillance by the NSA was wrong (365).Snowden remains an outcast and although the ending is not quite happy, since he must live in Russian exile, there is still a sense of an “upbeat final message” that ideologically colours the film’s ending.The Fifth EstateThe Fifth Estate is another example of the ideological view of the individual, but in this case with a twist. The film tries to be “objective” at first, showing the importance and impact of the newly established online platform WikiLeaks. However, towards the end of the film, it proceeds to dismantle Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) with the “everyone has secrets” platitude, which effectively means that none of us should ever try to reveal any secrets of those in power, since all of us must have our own secrets we do not want revealed. The film is shown from the perspective of Assange’s former disgruntled associate Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl), who wrote a book about his time at WikiLeaks on which the film is partly based on (Inside WikiLeaks). We see Assange through his eyes and delve into personal moments that are supposed to reveal the “truth” about the individual behind the project. In a cynical twist, it is Daniel who is the actual whistleblower, who reveals the secrets of WikiLeaks and its founder.Assange, as it is said in the film, is denounced as a “messiah” or a “prophet”, almost a cult leader who only wants to satisfy his perverse need for other people’s secrets, except that he is literally alone and has no followers and, unlike real cult leaders, needs no followers. The point of whistleblowing is exactly in the fact that it is a radical move, it is a big step forward in ending a wrongdoing. To denounce the radical stance of WikiLeaks is to misunderstand and undermine the whole notion of whistleblowing as a part of true changes in a society.The cult aspects are often referred to in the film when Assange’s childhood is mentioned. His mother was supposed to be in a cult, called “The Family”, and we should regard this as an important (and bad) influence on his character. This notion of the “childhood trauma” seems to be a crutch that is supposed to serve as a characterisation, something the scriptwriting-guru Robert McKee criticises as a screenwriting cliché: “do not reduce characters to case studies (an episode of child abuse is the cliché in vogue at the moment), for in truth there are no definitive explanations for anyone’s behaviour” (376).Although the film does not exaggerate the childhood aspect, it is still a motive that is supposed to shed some light into the “mystery” that is Assange. And it also ties into the question of the colour of his hair as a way of dismantling his lies. In a flashback that resembles a twist ending of an M. Night Shyamalan thriller, it turns out that Assange actually dyes his hair white, witnessed in secret by Daniel, instead of it turning naturally white, as Assange explains on few occasions but stating different reasons for it. Here he seems like a true movie villain and resembles the character of the Joker from The Dark Knight (2008), who also tells different stories about the origin of his facial scars. This mystery surrounding his origin makes the villain even more dangerous and, what is most important, unpredictable.Žižek also draws a parallel between Assange and Joker of the same film, whom he sees as the “figure of truth”, as Batman and the police are using lies in order to “protect” the citizens: “the film’s take-home message is that lying is necessary to sustain public morale: only a lie can redeem us” (“Good Manners”). Rather than interpreting Assange’s role in a positive way, as Žižek does, the film truly establishes him as a villain.Fig. 2: The Problematic Individual: Julian Assange in The Fifth EstateThe Fifth Estate ends with another cheap psychologisation of Assange on Daniel’s part as he describes the “true purpose” of WikiLeaks: “only someone so obsessed with his own secrets could’ve come up with a way to reveal everyone else’s”. This faux-psychological argument paints the whole WikiLeaks endeavour as Assange’s ego-trip and makes of him an egomaniac whose secret perverted pleasure is to reveal the secrets of others.Why is this so? Why are Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men depicted as heroes and Assange is not? The true underlying conflict here is between classic journalism; where journalists can publish their pieces and get the acclaim for publishing the “new Pentagon Papers”, once again ensuring the freedom of the press and “inter-systemic” critique. This way of working of the press, as the films show, always pays off. All the while, in reality, very little changes since, as Žižek writes, the “formal functioning of power” stays in place. He further states about WikiLeaks:The true targets here weren’t the dirty details and the individuals responsible for them; not those in power, in other words, so much as power itself, its structure. We shouldn’t forget that power comprises not only institutions and their rules, but also legitimate (‘normal’) ways of challenging it (an independent press, NGOs, etc.). (“Good Manners”)In the very end, the “real” journalism is being reinforced as the sole vehicle of criticism, while everything else is “extremism” and, again, can only stem from a frustrated, even “evil”, individual. If neoliberal individualism is the order of the day, then the thinking must also revolve around that notion and cannot transcend that horizon.ConclusionŽižek expresses the problem of revealing the truth in our day and age by referring to the famous fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, where a child is the only one who is naive and brave enough to state that the emperor is in fact naked. But for Žižek today,in our cynical era, such strategy no longer works, it has lost its disturbing power, since everyone now proclaims that the emperor is naked (that Western democracies are torturing terrorist suspects, that wars are fought for profit, etc., etc.), and yet nothing happens, nobody seems to mind, the system just goes on functioning as if the emperor were fully dressed. (Less than Nothing 92)The problem with the “Collateral Murder”, a video of the killing of Iraqi civilians by the US Army, leaked by Wikileaks and Chelsea Manning, that was presented to the public, for instance, was according to accounts in Inside Wikileaks and Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, that it did not have the desired impact. The public seems, in the end, to be indifferent to such reveals since it effectively cannot do anything about it. The return to the status quo after these reveals supports this stance, as Greenwald writes that after Snowden’s leaks there was no substantial change within the system; during the Obama administration, there was even an increase of criminal investigations of whistleblowers with an emergence of a “climate of fear” (Greenwald 368). Many whistleblower films assure us that in the end the system works; the good guys always win, the antagonists are punished, and laws have been passed. This is not to be accepted simply as a Hollywood convention, something that we also “already know”, but as an ideological stance, since these films are taken more seriously than films with similar messages but within other mainstream genres. Snowden shows that only individualism has the power to challenge the system, while The Fifth Estate draws the line that should not be crossed when it comes to privacy as a “universal” good because, again, “everyone has secrets”. Such representations of whistleblowing and disruption only further cement the notion that in our societies no real change is possible because it seems unnecessary. Whistleblowing as an act of revelation needs therefore to be understood as only one small step made by the individual that in the end depends on how society and the government decide to act upon it.References All the President’s Men. Dir. Alan J. Pakula. 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Penguin Books, 2000. 111-33.Frazer, Nancy. “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump – and Beyond.” American Affairs 1.4 (2017). 19 May. 2020 <https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/progressive-neoliberalism-trump-beyond/>.Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.“Full Transcript of the Yanis Varoufakis/Noam Chomsky NYPL Discussion.” Yanisvaroufakis.eu, 28 June 2016. 15 Mar. 2020 <https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2016/06/28/full-transcript-of-the-yanis-varoufakis-noam-chomsky-nypl-discussion/>.Greenwald, Glenn. Die globale Überwachung: Der Fall Snowden, die amerikanischen Geheimdienste und die Folgen. München: Knaur, 2015.The Harder They Fall. Dir. Mark Robson. Columbia Pictures. 1956.The Insider. Dir. Michael Mann. Touchstone Pictures, Mann/Roth Productions (a.o.). 1999.JFK. Dir. Oliver Stone. Warner Bros., 1991.Kohn, Stephen Martin. The Whistleblower’s Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Doing What’s Right and Protecting Yourself. 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Hemdake, Cinema ‘84. 1986.Polychroniou, C.J. “Socialism for the Rich, Capitalism for the Poor: An Interview with Noam Chomsky.” Truthout, 11 Dec. 2016. 25 May 2020 <https://truthout.org/articles/socialism-for-the-rich-capitalism-for-the-poor-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky/>.Scott, A.O. “Review: ‘Snowden,’ Oliver Stone’s Restrained Portrait of a Whistle-Blower.” The New York Times, 15 Sep. 2016. 5 May 2020 <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/movies/snowden-review-oliver-stone-joseph-gordon-levitt.html>. Serpico. Dir. Sidney Lumet. Artists Entertainment Complex, Produzioni De Laurentiis. 1973. Silkwood. Dir. Mike Nichols. ABC Motion Pictures. 1983.Snowden. Dir. Oliver Stone. Krautpack Entertainment, Wild Bunch (a.o.). 2016.Žižek, Slavoj. “Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks.” Los Angeles Review of Books 33.2 (2011). 15 May 2020 <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n02/slavoj-zizek/good-manners-in-the-age-of-wikileaks>.———. Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso, 2013.———. Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World. New York: Polity, 2020.———. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 2008.Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future and the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs, 2020.

Augmented Reality—The Liminal Zone Within the larger context of the post-desktop technological philosophy and practice, an increasing number of efforts are directed towards finding solutions for integrating as close as possible virtual information into specific real environments; a short list of such endeavors include Wi-Fi connectivity, GPS-driven navigation, mobile phones, GIS (Geographic Information System), and various technological systems associated with what is loosely called locative, ubiquitous and pervasive computing. Augmented Reality (AR) is directly related to these technologies, although its visualization capabilities and the experience it provides assure it a particular place within this general trend. Indeed, AR stands out for its unique capacity (or ambition) to offer a seamless combination—or what I call here an effect of convergence—of the real scene perceived by the user with virtual information overlaid on that scene interactively and in real time. The augmented scene is perceived by the viewer through the use of different displays, the most common being the AR glasses (head-mounted display), video projections or monitors, and hand-held mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets, increasingly popular nowadays. One typical example of AR application is Layar, a browser that layers information of public interest—delivered through an open-source content management system—over the actual image of a real space, streamed live on the mobile phone display. An increasing number of artists employ this type of mobile AR apps to create artworks that consist in perceptually combining material reality and virtual data: as the user points the smartphone or tablet to a specific place, virtual 3D-modelled graphics or videos appear in real time, seamlessly inserted in the image of that location, according to the user’s position and orientation. In the engineering and IT design fields, one of the first researchers to articulate a coherent conceptualization of AR and to underlie its specific capabilities is Ronald Azuma. He writes that, unlike Virtual Reality (VR) which completely immerses the user inside a synthetic environment, AR supplements reality, therefore enhancing “a user’s perception of and interaction with the real world” (355-385). Another important contributor to the foundation of AR as a concept and as a research field is industrial engineer Paul Milgram. He proposes a comprehensive and frequently cited definition of “Mixed Reality” (MR) via a schema that includes the entire spectrum of situations that span the “continuum” between actual reality and virtual reality, with “augmented reality” and “augmented virtuality” between the two poles (283). Important to remark with regard to terminology (MR or AR) is that especially in the non-scientific literature, authors do not always explain a preference for either MR or AR. This suggests that the two terms are understood as synonymous, but it also provides evidence for my argument that, outside of the technical literature, AR is considered a concept rather than a technology. Here, I use the term AR instead of MR considering that the phrase AR (and the integrated idea of augmentation) is better suited to capturing the convergence effect. As I will demonstrate in the following lines, the process of augmentation (i.e. the convergence effect) is the result of an enhancement of the possibilities to perceive and understand the world—through adding data that augment the perception of reality—and not simply the product of a mix. Nevertheless, there is surely something “mixed” about this experience, at least for the fact that it combines reality and virtuality. The experiential result of combining reality and virtuality in the AR process is what media theorist Lev Manovich calls an “augmented space,” a perceptual liminal zone which he defines as “the physical space overlaid with dynamically changing information, multimedia in form and localized for each user” (219). The author derives the term “augmented space” from the term AR (already established in the scientific literature), but he sees AR, and implicitly augmented space, not as a strictly defined technology, but as a model of visuality concerned with the intertwining of the real and virtual: “it is crucial to see this as a conceptual rather than just a technological issue – and therefore as something that in part has already been an element of other architectural and artistic paradigms” (225-6). Surely, it is hard to believe that AR has appeared in a void or that its emergence is strictly related to certain advances in technological research. AR—as an artistic manifestation—is informed by other attempts (not necessarily digital) to merge real and fictional in a unitary perceptual entity, particularly by installation art and Virtual Reality (VR) environments. With installation art, AR shares the same spatial strategy and scenographic approach—they both construct “fictional” areas within material reality, that is, a sort of mise-en-scène that are aesthetically and socially produced and centered on the active viewer. From the media installationist practice of the previous decades, AR inherited the way of establishing a closer spatio-temporal interaction between the setting, the body and the electronic image (see for example Bruce Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor [1970], Peter Campus’s Interface [1972], Dan Graham’s Present Continuous Pasts(s) [1974], Jeffrey Shaw’s Viewpoint [1975], or Jim Campbell’s Hallucination [1988]). On the other hand, VR plays an important role in the genealogy of AR for sharing the same preoccupation for illusionist imagery and—at least in some AR projects—for providing immersive interactions in “expanded image spaces experienced polysensorily and interactively” (Grau 9). VR artworks such as Paul Sermon, Telematic Dreaming (1992), Char Davies’ Osmose (1995), Michael Naimark’s Be Now Here (1995-97), Maurice Benayoun’s World Skin: A Photo Safari in the Land of War (1997), Luc Courchesne’s Where Are You? (2007-10), are significant examples for the way in which the viewer can be immersed in “expanded image-spaces.” Offering no view of the exterior world, the works try instead to reduce as much as possible the critical distance the viewer might have to the image he/she experiences. Indeed, AR emerged in great part from the artistic and scientific research efforts dedicated to VR, but also from the technological and artistic investigations of the possibilities of blending reality and virtuality, conducted in the previous decades. For example, in the 1960s, computer scientist Ivan Sutherland played a crucial role in the history of AR contributing to the development of display solutions and tracking systems that permit a better immersion within the digital image. Another important figure in the history of AR is computer artist Myron Krueger whose experiments with “responsive environments” are fundamental as they proposed a closer interaction between participant’s body and the digital object. More recently, architect and theorist Marcos Novak contributed to the development of the idea of AR by introducing the concept of “eversion”, “the counter-vector of the virtual leaking out into the actual”. Today, AR technological research and the applications made available by various developers and artists are focused more and more on mobility and ubiquitous access to information instead of immersivity and illusionist effects. A few examples of mobile AR include applications such as Layar, Wikitude—“world browsers” that overlay site-specific information in real-time on a real view (video stream) of a place, Streetmuseum (launched in 2010) and Historypin (launched in 2011)—applications that insert archive images into the street-view of a specific location where the old images were taken, or Google Glass (launched in 2012)—a device that provides the wearer access to Google’s key Cloud features, in situ and in real time. Recognizing the importance of various technological developments and of the artistic manifestations such as installation art and VR as predecessors of AR, we should emphasize that AR moves forward from these artistic and technological models. AR extends the installationist precedent by proposing a consistent and seamless integration of informational elements with the very physical space of the spectator, and at the same time rejects the idea of segregating the viewer into a complete artificial environment like in VR systems by opening the perceptual field to the surrounding environment. Instead of leaving the viewer in a sort of epistemological “lust” within the closed limits of the immersive virtual systems, AR sees virtuality rather as a “component of experiencing the real” (Farman 22). Thus, the questions that arise—and which this essay aims to answer—are: Do we have a specific spatial dimension in AR? If yes, can we distinguish it as a different—if not new—spatial and aesthetic paradigm? Is AR’s intricate topology able to be the place not only of convergence, but also of possible tensions between its real and virtual components, between the ideal of obtaining a perceptual continuity and the inherent (technical) limitations that undermine that ideal? Converging Spaces in the Artistic Mode: Between Continuum and Discontinuum As key examples of the way in which AR creates a specific spatial experience—in which convergence appears as a fluctuation between continuity and discontinuity—I mention three of the most accomplished works in the field that, significantly, expose also the essential role played by the interface in providing this experience: Living-Room 2 (2007) by Jan Torpus, Under Scan (2005-2008) by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Hans RichtAR (2013) by John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer. The works illustrate the three main categories of interfaces used for AR experience: head-attached, spatial displays, and hand-held (Bimber 2005). These types of interface—together with all the array of adjacent devices, software and tracking systems—play a central role in determining the forms and outcomes of the user’s experience and consequently inform in a certain measure the aesthetic and socio-cultural interpretative discourse surrounding AR. Indeed, it is not the same to have an immersive but solitary experience, or a mobile and public experience of an AR artwork or application. The first example is Living-Room 2 an immersive AR installation realized by a collective coordinated by Jan Torpus in 2007 at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts FHNW, Basel, Switzerland. The work consists of a built “living-room” with pieces of furniture and domestic objects that are perceptually augmented by means of a “see-through” Head Mounted Display. The viewer perceives at the same time the real room and a series of virtual graphics superimposed on it such as illusionist natural vistas that “erase” the walls, or strange creatures that “invade” the living-room. The user can select different augmenting “scenarios” by interacting with both the physical interfaces (the real furniture and objects) and the graphical interfaces (provided as virtual images in the visual field of the viewer, and activated via a handheld device). For example, in one of the scenarios proposed, the user is prompted to design his/her own extended living room, by augmenting the content and the context of the given real space with different “spatial dramaturgies” or “AR décors.” Another scenario offers the possibility of creating an “Ecosystem”—a real-digital world perceived through the HMD in which strange creatures virtually occupy the living-room intertwining with the physical configuration of the set design and with the user’s viewing direction, body movement, and gestures. Particular attention is paid to the participant’s position in the room: a tracking device measures the coordinates of the participant’s location and direction of view and effectuates occlusions of real space and then congruent superimpositions of 3D images upon it. Figure 1: Jan Torpus, Living-Room 2 (Ecosystems), Augmented Reality installation (2007). Courtesy of the artist. Figure 2: Jan Torpus, Living-Room 2 (AR decors), Augmented Reality installation (2007). Courtesy of the artist.In this sense, the title of the work acquires a double meaning: “living” is both descriptive and metaphoric. As Torpus explains, Living-Room is an ambiguous phrase: it can be both a living-room and a room that actually lives, an observation that suggests the idea of a continuum and of immersion in an environment where there are no apparent ruptures between reality and virtuality. Of course, immersion is in these circumstances not about the creation of a purely artificial secluded space of experience like that of the VR environments, but rather about a dialogical exercise that unifies two different phenomenal levels, real and virtual, within a (dis)continuous environment (with the prefix “dis” as a necessary provision). Media theorist Ron Burnett’s observations about the instability of the dividing line between different levels of experience—more exactly, of the real-virtual continuum—in what he calls immersive “image-worlds” have a particular relevance in this context: Viewing or being immersed in images extend the control humans have over mediated spaces and is part of a perceptual and psychological continuum of struggle for meaning within image-worlds. Thinking in terms of continuums lessens the distinctions between subjects and objects and makes it possible to examine modes of influence among a variety of connected experiences. (113) It is precisely this preoccupation to lessen any (or most) distinctions between subjects and objects, and between real and virtual spaces, that lays at the core of every artistic experiment under the AR rubric. The fact that this distinction is never entirely erased—as Living-Room 2 proves—is part of the very condition of AR. The ambition to create a continuum is after all not about producing perfectly homogenous spaces, but, as Ron Burnett points out (113), “about modalities of interaction and dialogue” between real worlds and virtual images. Another way to frame the same problematic of creating a provisional spatial continuum between reality and virtuality, but this time in a non-immersive fashion (i.e. with projective interface means), occurs in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Under Scan (2005-2008). The work, part of the larger series Relational Architecture, is an interactive video installation conceived for outdoor and indoor environments and presented in various public spaces. It is a complex system comprised of a powerful light source, video projectors, computers, and a tracking device. The powerful light casts shadows of passers-by within the dark environment of the work’s setting. A tracking device indicates where viewers are positioned and permits the system to project different video sequences onto their shadows. Shot in advance by local videographers and producers, the filmed sequences show full images of ordinary people moving freely, but also watching the camera. As they appear within pedestrians’ shadows, the figurants interact with the viewers, moving and establishing eye contact. Figure 3: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Under Scan (Relational Architecture 11), 2005. Shown here: Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom, 2008. Photo by: Antimodular Research. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 4: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Under Scan (Relational Architecture 11), 2005. Shown here: Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom, 2008. Photo by: Antimodular Research. Courtesy of the artist. One of the most interesting attributes of this work with respect to the question of AR’s (im)possible perceptual spatial continuity is its ability to create an experientially stimulating and conceptually sophisticated play between illusion and subversion of illusion. In Under Scan, the integration of video projections into the real environment via the active body of the viewer is aimed at tempering as much as possible any disparities or dialectical tensions—that is, any successive or alternative reading—between real and virtual. Although non-immersive, the work fuses the two levels by provoking an intimate but mute dialogue between the real, present body of the viewer and the virtual, absent body of the figurant via the ambiguous entity of the shadow. The latter is an illusion (it marks the presence of a body) that is transcended by another illusion (video projection). Moreover, being “under scan,” the viewer inhabits both the “here” of the immediate space and the “there” of virtual information: “the body” is equally a presence in flesh and bones and an occurrence in bits and bytes. But, however convincing this reality-virtuality pseudo-continuum would be, the spatial and temporal fragmentations inevitably persist: there is always a certain break at the phenomenological level between the experience of real space, the bodily absence/presence in the shadow, and the displacements and delays of the video image projection. Figure 5: John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer, Hans RichtAR, augmented reality installation included in the exhibition “Hans Richter: Encounters”, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013. Courtesy of the artists. Figure 6: John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer, Hans RichtAR, augmented reality installation included in the exhibition “Hans Richter: Encounters”, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013. Courtesy of the artists. The third example of an AR artwork that engages the problem of real-virtual spatial convergence as a play between perceptual continuity and discontinuity, this time with the use of hand-held mobile interface is Hans RichtAR by John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer. The work is an AR installation included in the exhibition “Hans Richter: Encounters” at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in 2013. The project recreates the spirit of the 1929 exhibition held in Stuttgart entitled Film und Foto (“FiFo”) for which avant-garde artist Hans Richter served as film curator. Featured in the augmented reality is a re-imaging of the FiFo Russian Room designed by El Lissitzky where a selection of Russian photographs, film stills and actual film footage was presented. The users access the work through tablets made available at the exhibition entrance. Pointing the tablet at the exhibition and moving around the room, the viewer discovers that a new, complex installation is superimposed on the screen over the existing installation and gallery space at LACMA. The work effectively recreates and interprets the original design of the Russian Room, with its scaffoldings and surfaces at various heights while virtually juxtaposing photography and moving images, to which the authors have added some creative elements of their own. Manipulating and converging real space and the virtual forms in an illusionist way, AR is able—as one of the artists maintains—to destabilize the way we construct representation. Indeed, the work makes a statement about visuality that complicates the relationship between the visible object and its representation and interpretation in the virtual realm. One that actually shows the fragility of establishing an illusionist continuum, of a perfect convergence between reality and represented virtuality, whatever the means employed. AR: A Different Spatial Practice Regardless the degree of “perfection” the convergence process would entail, what we can safely assume—following the examples above—is that the complex nature of AR operations permits a closer integration of virtual images within real space, one that, I argue, constitutes a new spatial paradigm. This is the perceptual outcome of the convergence effect, that is, the process and the product of consolidating different—and differently situated—elements in real and virtual worlds into a single space-image. Of course, illusion plays a crucial role as it makes permeable the perceptual limit between the represented objects and the material spaces we inhabit. Making the interface transparent—in both proper and figurative senses—and integrating it into the surrounding space, AR “erases” the medium with the effect of suspending—at least for a limited time—the perceptual (but not ontological!) differences between what is real and what is represented. These aspects are what distinguish AR from other technological and artistic endeavors that aim at creating more inclusive spaces of interaction. However, unlike the CAVE experience (a display solution frequently used in VR applications) that isolates the viewer within the image-space, in AR virtual information is coextensive with reality. As the example of the Living-Room 2 shows, regardless the degree of immersivity, in AR there is no such thing as dismissing the real in favor of an ideal view of a perfect and completely controllable artificial environment like in VR. The “redemptive” vision of a total virtual environment is replaced in AR with the open solution of sharing physical and digital realities in the same sensorial and spatial configuration. In AR the real is not denounced but reflected; it is not excluded, but integrated. Yet, AR distinguishes itself also from other projects that presuppose a real-world environment overlaid with data, such as urban surfaces covered with screens, Wi-Fi enabled areas, or video installations that are not site-specific and viewer inclusive. Although closely related to these types of projects, AR remains different, its spatiality is not simply a “space of interaction” that connects, but instead it integrates real and virtual elements. Unlike other non-AR media installations, AR does not only place the real and virtual spaces in an adjacent position (or replace one with another), but makes them perceptually convergent in an—ideally—seamless way (and here Hans RichtAR is a relevant example). Moreover, as Lev Manovich notes, “electronically augmented space is unique – since the information is personalized for every user, it can change dynamically over time, and it is delivered through an interactive multimedia interface” (225-6). Nevertheless, as our examples show, any AR experience is negotiated in the user-machine encounter with various degrees of success and sustainability. Indeed, the realization of the convergence effect is sometimes problematic since AR is never perfectly continuous, spatially or temporally. The convergence effect is the momentary appearance of continuity that will never take full effect for the viewer, given the internal (perhaps inherent?) tensions between the ideal of seamlessness and the mostly technical inconsistencies in the visual construction of the pieces (such as real-time inadequacy or real-virtual registration errors). We should note that many criticisms of the AR visualization systems (being them practical applications or artworks) are directed to this particular aspect related to the imperfect alignment between reality and digital information in the augmented space-image. However, not only AR applications can function when having an estimated (and acceptable) registration error, but, I would state, such visual imperfections testify a distinctive aesthetic aspect of AR. The alleged flaws can be assumed—especially in the artistic AR projects—as the “trace,” as the “tool’s stroke” that can reflect the unique play between illusion and its subversion, between transparency of the medium and its reflexive strategy. In fact this is what defines AR as a different perceptual paradigm: the creation of a convergent space—which will remain inevitably imperfect—between material reality and virtual information.References Azuma, Ronald T. “A Survey on Augmented Reality.” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 6.4 (Aug. 1997): 355-385. < http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/knowledge_base/ARfinal.pdf >. Benayoun, Maurice. World Skin: A Photo Safari in the Land of War. 1997. Immersive installation: CAVE, Computer, video projectors, 1 to 5 real photo cameras, 2 to 6 magnetic or infrared trackers, shutter glasses, audio-system, Internet connection, color printer. Maurice Benayoun, Works. < http://www.benayoun.com/projet.php?id=16 >. Bimber, Oliver, and Ramesh Raskar. Spatial Augmented Reality. Merging Real and Virtual Worlds. Wellesley, Massachusetts: AK Peters, 2005. 71-92. Burnett, Ron. How Images Think. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. Campbell, Jim. Hallucination. 1988-1990. Black and white video camera, 50 inch rear projection video monitor, laser disc players, custom electronics. Collection of Don Fisher, San Francisco. Campus, Peter. Interface. 1972. Closed-circuit video installation, black and white camera, video projector, light projector, glass sheet, empty, dark room. Centre Georges Pompidou Collection, Paris, France. Courchesne, Luc. Where Are You? 2005. Immersive installation: Panoscope 360°. a single channel immersive display, a large inverted dome, a hemispheric lens and projector, a computer and a surround sound system. Collection of the artist. < http://courchel.net/# >. Davies, Char. Osmose. 1995. Computer, sound synthesizers and processors, stereoscopic head-mounted display with 3D localized sound, breathing/balance interface vest, motion capture devices, video projectors, and silhouette screen. Char Davies, Immersence, Osmose. < http://www.immersence.com >. Farman, Jason. Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media. New York: Routledge, 2012. Graham, Dan. Present Continuous Past(s). 1974. Closed-circuit video installation, black and white camera, one black and white monitor, two mirrors, microprocessor. Centre Georges Pompidou Collection, Paris, France. Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Translated by Gloria Custance. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: MIT Press, 2003. Hansen, Mark B.N. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, 2001-2012. < http://www.etymonline.com >. Manovich, Lev. “The Poetics of Augmented Space.” Visual Communication 5.2 (2006): 219-240. Milgram, Paul, Haruo Takemura, Akira Utsumi, Fumio Kishino. “Augmented Reality: A Class of Displays on the Reality-Virtuality Continuum.” SPIE [The International Society for Optical Engineering] Proceedings 2351: Telemanipulator and Telepresence Technologies (1994): 282-292. Naimark, Michael, Be Now Here. 1995-97. Stereoscopic interactive panorama: 3-D glasses, two 35mm motion-picture cameras, rotating tripod, input pedestal, stereoscopic projection screen, four-channel audio, 16-foot (4.87 m) rotating floor. Originally produced at Interval Research Corporation with additional support from the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Paris, France. < http://www.naimark.net/projects/benowhere.html >. Nauman, Bruce. Live-Taped Video Corridor. 1970. Wallboard, video camera, two video monitors, videotape player, and videotape, dimensions variable. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Novak, Marcos. Interview with Leo Gullbring, Calimero journalistic och fotografi, 2001. < http://www.calimero.se/novak2.htm >. Sermon, Paul. Telematic Dreaming. 1992. ISDN telematic installation, two video projectors, two video cameras, two beds set. The National Museum of Photography, Film & Television in Bradford England. Shaw, Jeffrey, and Theo Botschuijver. Viewpoint. 1975. Photo installation. Shown at 9th Biennale de Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris, France.

A young woman in bikini bottoms and a vest top scrunched up to just below her breasts stands facing the camera. Behind her lies the neatened clutter of domestic space with family photographs arranged next to a fish tank. As this gently buzzes in its fluorescent pool of light, she begins to speak: I’ve just finished eating my McDonald’s meal, which was one of the new quarter pounders with the bacon and the cheese and ten nuggets and a large fries but I have not finished my drink. Pausing to hold up her drink to the camera, she shakes the takeaway cup to assess how much remains inside. With her other hand she gently pats her uncovered stomach, saying: I’m feeling very full and very tight on the top… very very tight like, here and here too… like a drum …Very full! But I know that I can probably fit more with liquids so I’m going to top it off with the rest of this drink and them I’m going to fill in all the spaces with the rest of the drink. After drinking the Dr Pepper before the screen fades to black, she says: I think next time I gotta get the double quarter pounder. I probably could take it, I could probably take on that double quarter pounder with the nuggets. So I’ll have to try that next time for you guys. This video on You Tube is one of many on the Internet labelled BBW, which stands for Big Beautiful Woman. This term dates back to the 1979 launch of BBW Magazine, a fashion and lifestyle magazine for women. As it was then, BBW is also used within spaces of size acceptance, such as among the women participating in Alexandra Lescaze’s documentary All of Me, which charts the lives of friends who met through the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. In such spaces, as on Internet blogs and discussion pages, BBW is employed to assert the desirability, rather than abjection, of a fat female body; it thereby counters the “stigma that still is associated with being a large person in a small society” as one of the women in All of Me, Dawn, puts it. BBW is also a term that features frequently in ‘fat forums’. These are adult content cyberspaces for, as one homepage states, “plus size models and their admirers.” Alongside these, there is also a genre of BBW pornography in which sexually explicit activity takes place. This is found on dedicated websites as well as in sub-sections of more ‘mainstream’ porn sites. In these latter the videos that feature BBWs are often labelled “fat fetish.” Against this background, this article draws on content analysis conducted between 2013 and 2015 of forty videos posted on You Tube by women who self-identify as fat (see Longhurst) and, specifically, as BBWs. In particular, it focuses on videos to which eating is central. In these, eating is either performed on camera or has taken place just before filming began. In the latter instance eating and its bodily resonances are visible in two ways: the BBW might describe the meal just eaten or her feeling of fullness, or there may be a textual description such as “after a big mac.” These videos have so far received little scholarly attention other than through a lens of sex, as enactments of “fat pornography” (cf. Kulick). Yet, analysing them as porn risks privileging an imagised rather than lived body and implicitly engaging only with a spectator’s viewpoint. It thereby potentially repeats the power dynamics it seeks to interrogate. This article instead suggests that there are key distinctions between these videos and porn. Although a discussion of gender and sexuality is precluded by limited space, focusing on eating offers a way to unpick this analytic conflation whilst also recognising how wider entanglements among sex, power and fat may texture the videos. As such, whilst being careful not to reduce the BBWs in these videos to no more than eating bodies, this focus seeks primarily to pay attention to their agency and embodiment. Drawing on literature that has critically engaged with fat from a variety of perspectives (cf. Evans Braziel and LeBesco; Forth and Leitch; Rothblum and Solovay), this discussion is particularly shaped by recent work that has sought to take account of lived experiences of moving through and encountering the world with a fat female body (cf. Murray; Tischner). In order to think through this, the article reflects on the Internet as a space not only of visuality, but also of viscerality. Defined by Robyn Longhurst et al. as “the sensations, moods and ways of being that emerge from our sensory engagement with the material and discursive environments in which we live” (334), viscerality has been argued to be a way in which to reflect on identity and power by paying attention to the materiality of everyday experiences (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, taste and visceral). It attends to the simultaneity of politics and intimacy as social relations are forged “at the level of the guts” (Probyn 1). In turn, recent attention to eating has suggested this to be an act that forges social connections at myriad scales (see Abbots and Lavis) as people, places and objects are brought into encounter by ingestion and digestion. An attention to what eating is and does in these videos therefore recognises power dynamics between BBWs and viewing Others, whilst also not taking these to preclude other modalities of agency. It elucidates the co-production of bodily materialities and lived experiences, whilst also tracing the multi-directional slippages between consuming and becoming the Other. Engaging with affects and socialities set in motion by eating offers up a vision of this as an act that may be shared among bodies in ways at once disembodied but visceral. Visuality The homepage of a pornographic website describing itself as “the home of BBWs” suggests that the viewer click on links to see women diving into the kinkiest fetishes and activities you’d ever want to see BBWs do! From face-sitting and squashing, to eating anything and everything, these big fat chicks do it. It goes on to state that “these girls are massive, like their stomachs and appetites” and, illustrating assumptions regarding whose gaze is turned on this page, that “your dick won’t know what to do with itself!” The juxtaposition of the seemingly mundane, and also individual, activity of eating with overtly sexual and corporeally social activities such as face-sitting, suggests that to think through BBW videos focused on eating and trace their divergences from porn, we perhaps first need to attend to this wider landscape in which eating features as “kinky fetish”; it involves recognising intersections as well as disconnects. An undercurrent of sex does resonate through some of the eating videos posted on You Tube by BBWs. Although women are clothed and no sexual activity takes place, many of the titles contain the words “sexy BBW.” Likewise, the language used by participants to talk about their bodies during or after eating is often sexually inflected. Just as the BBW above said of her Dr Pepper that she could “take it,” others talk of being “filled” in a way that folds food into an imaginary of penetrative sex. Bodily boundaries are also shown to be porous in further ways as fat is described as “bursting out of trousers.” A woman eating ice cream directs the camera downwards, saying, “look at that, my underwear’s rolling right down […] my tummy cannot be contained anymore.” Furthermore, to shift our analytic positioning for a moment, it is clear that the BBWs in these videos are regarded as sexually desirable by viewers. A You Tube video in which a woman eats a burger is accompanied by a viewer’s comment: Hello beautiful, I wish that I was there so I could do the fondling and caressing of your beautiful, fat belly while you just concentrated on eating your food. This contrasts to other viewers whose derogatory comments range from the denigrating “you are so ugly and disgusting” to the rather less articulate “eww.” These clearly highlight the “derision and even repulsion” (Lupton 3. See also Cain et al., Erdman Farrell) often directed at, especially female, fat. In contrast, by establishing a fat female – and indeed eating – body as desirable, these videos instead denote themselves as spaces of fat acceptance. Self-identified BBW and adult actress April Flores links her work in porn films to a wider politics of fat acceptance, saying: I want to have my work be a catalyst for change in people seeing fat women as sexual beings. Because we are, and we're not viewed that way. Right now, fat women are relegated to being the punch line and I want my work to change that. (Flores quoted in Wischhover) Flores would seem to articulate a neoliberal narrative of pornography as female empowerment (see Gill) here and it is important to recognise the connections between this and a wider context of disempowerment and stigma. Yet, the power dynamics of gaining social and sexual acceptance through a desiring gaze are also problematic. They highlight, as Rachel Colls puts it, “what the risks are for fat, female bodies and a re-framing of fatness more generally when designating acceptance according to a particular space and to ‘an’ admiring audience” (19). This links the pornographic works of April Flores with the eating videos that are the focus of this article. In both spaces, being visually consumed by an Other is invested with the power to circumscribe one’s own body as acceptable. In one video, a woman who has just finished eating pulls up her top to show her belly. Looking directly into the camera, she asks “do you like that?” A well-known self-described BBW, Donna Simpson, has poignantly written about her decision to shut down her website after years of charging 19 dollars a month to watch her eat (Simpson). She states that “the bottom line is that it was a fantasy created for men […] It’s about control” (quoted in Rose). One way in which control manifested was in how largely-male members of her website not only watched her eat but also directed this, circumscribing what she did and did not put into her own body. Although the financial transaction of the membership fee underpinned this access to Donna Simpson by offering the possibility of one-on-one video chats, there is some similar interaction afforded by the comments posted in response to the eating videos on You Tube. Beneath a video of a woman eating cake, one viewer has written “you’re adorable” to which the BBW herself has replied “you're sweet! thank you.” As such, accompanying these videos there are many requests from viewers centred on eating and food, along the lines of “eat this for me.” These are sometimes responded to in follow-up videos or with links to a paying website like Donna Simpson’s. Such requests demonstrate diverse self-positionings on the part of viewers; the more overtly sexual, such as “eat me” and “I wish to be that cake,” are joined by the expression of desire to be close to the BBW: Wow you are one big sexy fatty with a Huge Blubber Belly!! that thing is soo sexy. I would kill to see you waddling to the buffet bar with your fat jiggling and leading the way. But, to more explicitly address the problematic dynamics of power that have resonated through this discussion so far, these comments are commonly joined by a desire to feed the woman in the video. One viewer writes, “I’d love to get a huge funnel and tube and pour gallons upon gallons of beer down your throat and watch your belly expand!!” These words (at least seek to) intervene in and shape the body of the BBW to whom they are directed. It has been suggested that food “and its relations to bodies is fundamentally about power” (Goody 37) and directions to “eat an éclair for me,” for example, draw forth the power dynamics here by illustrating the co-production of corporeal materialities; the BBWs’ body fat is (at least to a certain extent) made and mediated by viewers. Moreover, in this process, some viewers not only position themselves as feeders but also assume the existence of a feeder off-camera, thereby framing the woman’s eating as always directed by an Other rather than autonomous. This aligns these videos with a wider context of feederism (see Giovanelli and Peluso) and this is sometimes made explicit; beneath one video, a viewer writes somewhat aggressively “your feeder's nice with you, you'd be twice that size with me.” The first half of this article has recognised the setting of these videos within a wider cyber-landscape of porn/power/fat/stigma entanglements. Yet, to suggest that although “the single most striking thing about this genre of pornography is that the women who are pictured do not engage in sex” (Kulick 79) and argue that they instead “have food” (79) reveals the problem with calling them porn and ending our analysis there. It defines the videos, and thus the women in them, through that which is absent, swapping sex for food. This risks repeating in analysis “the kind of harmful behavior in which men reduce fat women to sexual objects” (Saguy 553) by implicitly aligning with the viewer. To avoid this necessitates engaging with the BBWs themselves, their modes of embodiment and lived materialities. As Don Kulick notes, “most of the camera work is focused on their stomachs” (79) and it is here that such an engagement begins. Viscerality Reclaiming the ubiquitous imagery of “headless fatties” (Cooper) in media discussions of obesity, one video begins with a full-screen shot of a woman’s stomach. The camera pans to reveal a box of chocolates balanced on her lap and a hand reaches down to take one. Over the next three wordless minutes, as her fingers move between half-glimpsed chocolate box and unseen mouth, the woman rubs her belly with her other hand, folding and kneading her fat before letting it tumble onto her thighs. In other videos BBWs hold their stomachs to the camera to show how “full of food,” as one woman puts it, these are. Others adjust their position, clothing and webcams to enable a better view of their stomachs, or as they are more habitually called, their “bellies.” Rather than read this focus simply as a fetishisation of dislocated body parts, which echoes pornography, here bellies take on significance precisely because they are the “site of incorporation” (Carden-Coyne and Forth 1); they are indexical of eating. Momentarily altering our viewpoint to elucidate this, on the comment board of another video a viewer has simply written “digestion yeah!” Bellies, thus, gain meaning from eating rather than the other way around. This shift from visuality to viscerality draws us back to the viewpoint of the BBWs; their agency, pleasure and lived materiality is brought literally into the line of the camera. In another video, a woman rubs her belly sensuously. To elucidate the contours of this embodied performance, the video’s tagline reads: A family size lasagne a double milkshake a pound of butter melted in mash potatoes with a can of cheese for lunch wait till i get finished stuffing myself becoming fat is the ultimate pleasure. This woman is not alone in asserting the pleasure of becoming fat. Juxtaposed with articulations of the pleasures of food, together these statements suggest that eating on camera is not so much directed outwards to a desiring gaze. Rather, it is turned inwards as women look down at their bodies, roll food around their mouths and lick their fingers. A video in which a woman eats in her parked car begins: Okay, for lunch I’ve got some fried chicken; it’s two pieces with fries, and there’s lots of ketchup here… I also got a gravy and a macaroni salad to go with it… on yeah and I did pay an extra dollar for an extra piece of chicken so it’s three pieces of chicken. Here the BBW’s eating and its pleasures map the space of this video as closed. Yet her simultaneous narration also opens up this savoured moment of ingestion to a listening and viewing Other. This suggests that it may be not so much bodies that are shared or desired in these videos (as they are in pornography, perhaps), but rather the act of eating itself; these spaces invoke a “mimetic desire” (Girard) to be in this food-consuming moment. In another video a woman talks the viewer through the various flavours of cotton candy in her hand before deciding to try the pink vanilla. After taking a bite she offers this to the camera, saying, “you can eat that part […] does it melt on your tongue?” Although the sharing of eating is verbally articulated here, there are many other instances in which this is less explicit but also present, as visceral viewing becomes a moment of eating from afar (Lavis). That viewers often leave comments such as “I can taste that burger” suggests that these videos engender “vicarious consumption” (Kirkwood) that may be a form of eating as affective as taking food into the mouth. As such, here we glimpse the multi-directional flows of agency, affect and sociality engendered by eating. Recent explorations of eating bodies have seen these as entangled in myriad social and material relations. By engaging with eating as instigating encounters between bodies and worlds, this work has thereby argued that “in the act of placing food in the mouth, landscapes, people, objects and imaginings not only juxtapose with and fold into one another, but are also reconstituted and reordered” (Abbots and Lavis 5. See also Probyn). Against this background, “vicarious consumption” (Kirkwood) offered by these videos folds the bodies of viewer and viewed together to reconfigure taken-for-granted notions of outsides and insides, eater and eaten. Visceral viewing as embodied consumption recognises eating as an act that may be shared and thereby take place among many bodies at once. It has been suggested that an attention to viscerality engages with “contextualized and interactive versions of the self and other” (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, visceral, 1273). As such, as consuming the Other slip-slides into becoming Other through mimetic eating, it is now viewers’ bodily materialities that are affected and reshaped; their hungering, salivating bodies are mediated by the BBWs’ moments of eating. In this reversal, our sense of the power dynamics of these videos shifts. As eating becomes shared and contingently and dynamically distributed across bodies, power too is dissipated between the actors that perhaps co-produce these (eating) spaces and bodies. Thus, these videos offer participants on both side of the lens the possibility of being caught up in affective flows, whilst also being “articulating subjects” (Probyn 17) who “reforge new meanings, new identities” (17) through eating. Conclusion By engaging with videos in which self-identified Big Beautiful Women eat online, this article has reflected on the diverse imaginings, socialities and flows of power that texture these spaces. Paying attention to eating has afforded an alternative view of these videos, challenging a pornographic reading by recognising other intimacies and affective connections. As such, this discussion has sought to re-prioritise the experiences and agency of the BBWs in the videos themselves, whilst also interrogating how their bodies may be patrolled and even produced by the gaze of Others. Thus, whilst being careful not to reduce the BBWs to no more than food – “dehumanised as symbols of cultural fear: the body, the belly, the arse, food” as Charlotte Cooper puts it - an attention to eating has responded to her suggestion to “try to get a hold of their humanity” in analysis. This article therefore set out to explore how a visceral attention might forge a more nuanced understanding of these videos. Yet, in so doing, it has also become clear that they inform wider theorisations of eating. Thinking through what eating is and where its boundaries lie in these spaces has illustrated that this is an act that may take diverse forms and be shared among bodies that are spatially and temporally apart. That the visceral viewing of an Other’s ingestion and digestion may itself be a form of eating offers a novel way to think through contingent and affective connections among foods, bodies and persons. References Abbots, Emma-Jayne, and Anna Lavis (eds.) Why We Eat, How We Eat: Contemporary Encounters between Foods and Bodies. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. All of Me. Dir. Alexandra Lescaze. Mighty Fine Films, 2013. Cain, Trudie, Kerry Chamberlain and Ann Dupuis. “Bound Bodies: Navigating the Margins of Fat Bodies and Clothes.” Fat: Culture and Materiality, eds. Christopher Forth and Alison Leitch. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. 123-40. Carden-Coyne, Ana, and Christopher Forth. “The Belly and Beyond: Body, Self and Culture in Ancient and Modern Times.” Cultures of the Abdomen: Diet, Digestion and Fat in the Modern World, eds. Christopher Forth and Ana Carden-Coyne. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 1-11. Colls, Rachel. “Big Girls Having Fun: Reflections on a ‘Fat Accepting Space’.” Somatechnics 2 (2012): 18–37. Cooper, Charlotte. “Headless Fatties.” 2012. 20 Dec. 2014 ‹http://www.charlottecooper.net/docs/fat/headless_fatties.htm›. Erdman Farrell, Amy. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. New York: New York UP, 2011. Evans Braziel, Jana, and Kathleen LeBesco. Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001. Forth, Christopher, and Alison Leitch. Fat: Culture and Materiality. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Gill, Rosalind. “Critical Respect: The Difficulties and Dilemmas of Agency and ‘Choice’ for Feminism.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 14 (2007): 69–80. Giovanelli, Dina, and Natalie Peluso. “Feederism: A New Sexual Pleasure and Subculture.” The Handbook of New Sexuality Studies, ed. Steven Seidman. Oxford: Routledge, 2006. 309–314.Girard, René. Anorexia and Mimetic Desire. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2013. Goody, Jack. Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982. Hayes-Conroy, Allison, and Jessica Hayes-Conroy. “Taking Back Taste: Feminism, Food and Visceral Politics.” Gender, Place & Culture 15.5 (2008): 461–473. Hayes-Conroy, Jessica, and Allison Hayes-Conroy. “Visceral Geographies: Mattering, Relating, and Defying.” Geography Compass 4.9 (2010): 1273–83. Kirkwood, Katherine. “Tasting But Not Tasting: MasterChef Australia and Vicarious Consumption.” M/C Journal 17.1 (2014). 10 May 2015 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/761›. Kulick, Don. “Porn.” Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession, eds. Don Kulick and Anne Meneley. New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2005. 77-92. Lavis, Anna. “Imagined Materialities and Material Imaginings: Food, Bodies and the ‘Stuff’ of (Not) Eating.” Gastronomica, forthcoming 2016. Longhurst, Robyn. “Fat Bodies: Developing Geographical Research Agendas”. Progress in Human Geography 29.3 (2005): 247-59. Longhurst Robyn, Lynda Johnston, and Elsie Ho. “A Visceral Approach: Cooking ‘at Home’ with Migrant Women in Hamilton, New Zealand.” Trans Inst Br Geog NSr 34 (2009): 333–345. Lupton, Deborah. Fat. London: Routledge, 2013. Murray, Samantha. “Doing Politics or Selling Out? Living the Fat Body.” Women's Studies 34 (2005): 265-77. Probyn, Elspeth. Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities. London: Routledge, 2000. Saguy, Abigail. “Sex, Inequality, and Ethnography: Response to Erich Goode.” Qualitative Sociology 25.4 (2002): 549-56. Tischner, Irmgard. Fat Lives: A Feminist Psychological Exploration. Hove: Routledge, 2013. Rose, Lisa. “Once 600 Pounds, Mom from Old Bridge Puts Down the Fork and Turns Off the Webcam.” New Jersey.com 18 Dec. 2011. 29 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/12/once_600_pounds_mom_from_old_b.htm›. Rothblum, Esther, and Sandra Solovay (eds.). The Fat Studies Reader. New York: New York UP, 2009. Simpson, Donna. “A Fat Christmas Story!” The Huffington Post 21 Dec. 2011. 24 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.huffingtonpost.com/donna-simpson/a-fat-christmas-story_b_1163496.html›. Wischhover, Cheryl. "I Want People to See Fat Women as Sexual Beings. Because We Are: April Flores, BBW Porn Performer of the Year, Talks about Reclaiming the Term ‘Fat Girl’.” Cosmopolitan 10 Mar. 2015. 22 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/news/a37554/april-flores-bbw-porn-performer-fat-acceptance›.

Literary critics have mainly read Herman Melville’s short story “I and My Chimney” (1856) as allegory. This article elaborates on the tradition of interpreting Melville’s text allegorically by relating it to Fredric Jameson’s post-structural reinterpretation of allegory. In doing so, it argues that the story is not a simple example of allegory but rather an auto-reflexive engagement with allegory that reflects the cultural and historical ambivalences of the time in which Melville was writing. The suggestion is that Melville deliberately used signifiers (or the lack thereof) of directionality and place to reframe the overt context of his allegory (Civil War divisions of North and South) through teasing reference to the contemporaneous emergence of Manifest Destiny as an East-West historical spatialization. To this extent, from a literary-historical perspective, Melville’s text presents as an enquiry into the relationship between the obvious allegorical elements of a text and the literal or material elements that may either support or, as in this case, problematize traditional allegorical modes. In some ways, Melville’s story faintly anticipates Jameson’s post-structural theory of allegory as produced over a century later. “I and My Chimney” may also be linked to later texts, such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which shift the directionality of American Literary History, in a definite way, from a North-South to an East-West axis. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books may also be mentioned here. While, in recent years, some literary critics have produced readings of Melville’s story that depart from the traditional emphasis on its allegorical nature, this article claims to be the first to engage with “I and My Chimney” from within an allegorical perspective also informed by post-structural thinking. To do this, it focuses on the setting or directionality of the story, and on the orientating details of the titular chimney.Written and published shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War (1861-1865), which pitted North against South, Melville’s story is told in the first person by a narrator with overweening affection for the chimney he sees as an image of himself: “I and my chimney, two gray-headed old smokers, reside in the country. We are, I may say, old settlers here; particularly my old chimney, which settles more and more every day” (327). Within the merged identity of narrator and chimney, however, the latter takes precedence, almost completely, over the former: “though I always say, I and my chimney, as Cardinal Wolsey used to say, I and my King, yet this egotistic way of speaking, wherein I take precedence of my chimney, is hardly borne out by the facts; in everything, except the above phrase, my chimney taking precedence of me” (327). Immediately, this sentence underscores a disjunction between words (“the above phrase”) and material circumstances (“the facts”) that will become crucial in my later consideration of Melville’s story as post-structural allegory.Detailed architectural and architectonic descriptions manifesting the chimney as “the one great domineering object” of the narrator’s house characterize the opening pages of the story (328). Intermingled with these descriptions, the narrator recounts the various interpersonal and business-related stratagems he has been forced to adopt in order to protect his chimney from the “Northern influences” that would threaten it. Numbered in this company are his mortgagee, the narrator’s own wife and daughters, and Mr. Hiram Scribe—“a rough sort of architect” (341). The key subplot implicated with the narrator’s fears for his chimney concerns its provenance. The narrator’s “late kinsman, Captain Julian Dacres” built the house, along with its stupendous chimney, and upon his death a rumour developed concerning supposed “concealed treasure” in the chimney (346). Once the architect Scribe insinuates, in correspondence to the chimney’s alter ego (the narrator), “that there is architectural cause to conjecture that somewhere concealed in your chimney is a reserved space, hermetically closed, in short, a secret chamber, or rather closet” the narrator’s wife and daughter use Scribe’s suggestion of a possible connection to Dacres’s alleged hidden treasure to reiterate their calls for the chimney’s destruction (345):Although they had never before dreamed of such a revelation as Mr. Scribe’s, yet upon the first suggestion they instinctively saw the extreme likelihood of it. In corroboration, they cited first my kinsman, and second, my chimney; alleging that the profound mystery involving the former, and the equally profound masonry involving the latter, though both acknowledged facts, were alike preposterous on any other supposition than the secret closet. (347)To protect his chimney, the narrator bribes Mr. Scribe, inviting him to produce a “‘little certificate—something, say, like a steam-boat certificate, certifying that you, a competent surveyor, have surveyed my chimney, and found no reason to believe any unsoundness; in short, any—any secret closet in it’” (351). Having enticed Scribe to scribe words against himself, the narrator concludes his tale triumphantly: “I am simply standing guard over my mossy old chimney; for it is resolved between me and my chimney, that I and my chimney will never surrender” (354).Despite its inherent interest, literary critics have largely overlooked “I and My Chimney”. Katja Kanzler observes that “together with much of [Melville’s] other short fiction, and his uncollected magazine pieces in particular, it has never really come out of the shadow of the more epic texts long considered his masterpieces” (583). To the extent that critics have engaged the story, they have mainly read it as traditional allegory (Chatfield; Emery; Sealts; Sowder). Further, the allegorical trend in the reception of Melville’s text clusters within the period from the early 1940s to the early 1980s. More recently, other critics have explored new ways of reading Melville’s story, but none, to my knowledge, have re-investigated its dominant allegorical mode of reception in the light of the post-structural engagements with allegory captured succinctly in Fredric Jameson’s work (Allison; Kanzler; Wilson). This article acknowledges the perspicacity of the mid-twentieth-century tradition of the allegorical interpretation of Melville’s story, while nuancing its insights through greater attention to the spatialized materiality of the text, its “geomorphic” nature, and its broader historical contexts.E. Hale Chatfield argues that “I and My Chimney” evidences one broad allegorical polarity of “Aristocratic Tradition vs. Innovation and Destruction” (164). This umbrella category is parsed by Sealts as an individualized allegory of besieged patriarchal identity and by Sowder as a national-level allegory of anxieties linked to the antebellum North-South relationship. Chatfield’s opposition works equally well for an individual or for communities of individuals. Thus, in this view, even as it structures our reception of Melville’s story, allegory remains unproblematized in itself through its internal interlocking. In turn, “I and My Chimney” provides fertile soil for critics to harvest an allegorical crop. Its very title inveigles the reader towards an allegorical attitude: the upstanding “I” of the title is associated with the architecture of the chimney, itself also upstanding. What is of the chimney is also, allegorically, of the “I”, and the vertical chimney, like the letter “I”, argues, as it were, a north-south axis, being “swung vertical to hit the meridian moon,” as Melville writes on his story’s first page (327). The narrator, or “I”, is as north-south as is his narrated allegory.Herman Melville was a Northern resident with Southern predilections, at least to the extent that he co-opted “Southern-ness” to, in Katja Kanzler’s words, “articulate the anxiety of mid-nineteenth-century cultural elites about what they perceive as a cultural decline” (583). As Chatfield notes, the South stood for “Aristocratic Tradition”; the North, for “Innovation and Destruction” (164). Reflecting the conventional mid-twentieth-century view that “I and My Chimney” is a guileless allegory of North-South relations, William J. Sowder argues that itreveals allegorically an accurate history of Southern slavery from the latter part of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth—that critical period when the South spent most of its time and energy apologizing for the existence of slavery. It discloses the split which Northern liberals so ably effected between liberal and conservative forces in the South, and it lays bare the intransigence of the traditional South on the Negro question. Above everything, the story reveals that the South had little in common with the rest of the Union: the War between the States was inevitable. (129-30)Sowder goes into painstaking detail prosecuting his North-South allegorical reading of Melville’s text, to the extent of finding multiple correspondences between what is allegorizing and what is being allegorized within a single sentence. One example, with Sowder’s allegorical interpolations in square brackets, comes from a passage where Melville is writing about his narrator’s replaced “gable roof” (Melville 331): “‘it was replaced with a modern roof [the cotton gin], more fit for a railway woodhouse [an industrial society] than an old country gentleman’s abode’” (Sowder 137).Sowder’s argument is historically erudite, and utterly convincing overall, except in one crucial detail. That is, for a text supposedly so much about the South, and written so much from its perspective—Sowder labels the narrator a “bitter Old Southerner”—it is remarkable how the story is only very ambiguously set in the South (145). Sowder distances himself from an earlier generation of commentators who “generally assumed that the old man is Melville and that the country is the foothills of the Massachusetts Berkshires, where Melville lived from 1850 to 1863,” concluding, “in fact, I find it hard to picture the narrator as a Northerner at all: the country which he describes sounds too much like the Land of Cotton” (130).Quite obviously, the narrator of any literary text does not necessarily represent its author, and in the case of “I and My Chimney”, if the narrator is not inevitably coincident with the author, then it follows that the setting of the story is not necessarily coincident with “the foothills of the Massachusetts Berkshires.” That said, the position of critics prior to Sowder that the setting is Massachusetts, and by extension that the narrator is Melville (a Southern sympathizer displaced to the North), hints at an oversight in the traditional allegorical reading of Melville’s text—related to its spatializations—the implications of which Sowder misses.Think about it: “too much like the Land of Cotton” is an exceedingly odd phrase; “too much like” the South, but not conclusively like the South (Sowder 130)! A key characteristic of Melville’s story is the ambiguity of its setting and, by extension, of its directionality. For the text to operate (following Chatfield, Emery, Sealts and Sowder) as a straightforward allegory of the American North-South relationship, the terms “north” and “south” cannot afford to be problematized. Even so, whereas so much in the story reads as related to either the South or the North, as cultural locations, the notions of “south-ness” and “north-ness” themselves are made friable (in this article, the lower case broadly indicates the material domain, the upper case, the cultural). At its most fundamental allegorical level, the story undoes its own allegorical expressions; as I will be arguing, the materiality of its directionality deconstructs what everything else in the text strives (allegorically) to maintain.Remarkably, for a text purporting to allegorize the North as the South’s polar opposite, nowhere does the story definitively indicate where it is set. The absence of place names or other textual features which might place “I and My Chimney” in the South, is over-compensated for by an abundance of geographically distracting signifiers of “place-ness” that negatively emphasize the circumstance that the story is not set definitively where it is set suggestively. The narrator muses at one point that “in fact, I’ve often thought that the proper place for my old chimney is ivied old England” (332). Elsewhere, further destabilizing the geographical coordinates of the text, reference is made to “the garden of Versailles” (329). Again, the architect Hiram Scribe’s house is named New Petra. Rich as it is with cultural resonances, at base, Petra denominates a city in Jordan; New Petra, by contrast, is place-less.It would appear that something strange is going on with allegory in this deceptively straightforward allegory, and that this strangeness is linked to equally strange goings on with the geographical and directional relations of north and south, as sites of the historical and cultural American North and South that the story allegorizes so assiduously. As tensions between North and South would shortly lead to the Civil War, Melville writes an allegorical text clearly about these tensions, while simultaneously deconstructing the allegorical index of geographical north to cultural North and of geographical south to cultural South.Fredric Jameson’s work on allegory scaffolds the historically and materially nuanced reading I am proposing of “I and My Chimney”. Jameson writes:Our traditional conception of allegory—based, for instance, on stereotypes of Bunyan—is that of an elaborate set of figures and personifications to be read against some one-to-one table of equivalences: this is, so to speak, a one-dimensional view of this signifying process, which might only be set in motion and complexified were we willing to entertain the more alarming notion that such equivalences are themselves in constant change and transformation at each perpetual present of the text. (73)As American history undergoes transformation, Melville foreshadows Jameson’s transformation of allegory through his (Melville’s) own transformations of directionality and place. In a story about North and South, are we in the south or the north? Allegorical “equivalences are themselves in constant change and transformation at each perpetual present of the text” (Jameson 73). North-north equivalences falter; South-south equivalences falter.As noted above, the chimney of Melville’s story—“swung vertical to hit the meridian moon”—insists upon a north-south axis, much as, in an allegorical mode, the vertical “I” of the narrator structures a polarity of north and south (327). However, a closer reading shows that the chimney is no less complicit in the confusion of north and south than the environs of the house it occupies:In those houses which are strictly double houses—that is, where the hall is in the middle—the fire-places usually are on opposite sides; so that while one member of the household is warming himself at a fire built into a recess of the north wall, say another member, the former’s own brother, perhaps, may be holding his feet to the blaze before a hearth in the south wall—the two thus fairly sitting back to back. Is this well? (328)Here, Melville is directly allegorizing the “sulky” state of the American nation; the brothers are, as it were, North and South (328). However, just as the text’s signifiers of place problematize the notions of north and south (and thus the associated cultural resonances of capitalized North and South), this passage, in queering the axes of the chimneys, further upsets the primary allegory. The same chimney that structures Melville’s text along a north-south or up-down orientation, now defers to an east-west axis, for the back-to-back and (in cultural and allegorical terms) North-South brothers, sit at a 90-degree angle to their house’s chimneys, which thus logically manifest a cross-wise orientation of east-west (in cultural and allegorical terms, East-West). To this extent, there is something of an exquisite crossover and confusion of cultural North and South, as represented by the two brothers, and geographical/architectural/architectonic north and south (now vacillating between an east-west and a north-south orientation). The North-South cultural relationship of the brothers distorts the allegorical force of the narrator’s spine-like chimney (not to mention of the brother’s respective chimneys), thus enflaming Jameson’s allegorical equivalences. The promiscuous literality of the smokestack—Katja Kanzler notes the “astonishing materiality” of the chimney—subverts its main allegorical function; directionality both supports and disrupts allegory (591). Simply put, there is a disjunction between words and material circumstances; the “way of speaking… is hardly borne out by the facts” (Melville 327).The not unjustified critical focus on “I and My Chimney” as an allegory of North-South cultural (and shortly wartime) tensions, has not kept up with post-structural developments in allegorical theory as represented in Fredric Jameson’s work. In part, I suggest, this is because critics to date have missed the importance to Melville’s allegory of its extra-textual context. According to William J. Sowder, “Melville showed a lively interest in such contemporary social events as the gold rush, the French Revolution of 1848, and the activities of the English Chartists” (129). The pity is that readings of “I and My Chimney” have limited this “lively interest” to the Civil War. Melville’s attentiveness to “contemporary social events” should also encompass, I suggest, the East-West (east-west) dynamic of mid-nineteenth century American history, as much as the North-South (north-south) dynamic.The redialing of Melville’s allegory along another directional axis is thus accounted for. When “I and My Chimney” was published in 1856, there was, of course, at least one other major historical development in play besides the prospect of the Civil War, and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny ran, not to put it too finely, along an East-West (east-west) axis. Indeed, Manifest Destiny is at least as replete with a directional emphasis as the discourse of Civil War North-South opposition. As quoted in Frederick Merk’s Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History, Senator Daniel S. Dickinson states to the Senate, in 1848, “but the tide of emigration and the course of empire have since been westward” (Merk 29). Allied to this tradition, of course, is the well-known contemporaneous saying, “go West, young man, go West” (“Go West, Young Man”).To the extent that Melville’s text appears to anticipate Jameson’s post-structural theory of allegory, it may be linked, I suggest, to Melville’s sense of being at an intersection of American history. The meta-narrative of national history when “I and My Chimney” was produced had a spatial dimension to it: north-south directionality (culturally, North-South) was giving way to east-west directionality (culturally, East-West). Civil War would soon give way to Manifest Destiny; just as Melville’s texts themselves would, much later admittedly, give way to texts of Manifest Destiny in all its forms, including Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. Equivalently, as much as the narrator’s wife represents Northern “progress” she might also be taken to signify Western “ambition”.However, it is not only that “I and My Chimney” is a switching-point text of geo-history (mediating relations, most obviously, between the tendencies of Southern Exceptionalism and of Western National Ambition) but that it operates as a potentially generalizable test case of the limits of allegory by setting up an all-too-simple allegory of North-South/north-south relations which is subsequently subtly problematized along the lines of East-West/east-west directionality. As I have argued, Melville’s “experimental allegory” continually diverts words (that is, the symbols allegory relies upon) through the turbulence of material circumstances.North, or north, is simultaneously a cultural and a geographical or directional coordinate of Melville’s text, and the chimney of “I and My Chimney” is both a signifier of the difference between N/north and S/south and also a portal to a 360-degrees all-encompassing engagement of (allegorical) writing with history in all its (spatialized) manifestations.ReferencesAllison, J. “Conservative Architecture: Hawthorne in Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” South Central Review 13.1 (1996): 17-25.Chatfield, E.H. “Levels of Meaning in Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” American Imago 19.2 (1962): 163-69.Emery, A.M. “The Political Significance of Melville’s Chimney.” The New England Quarterly 55.2 (1982): 201-28.“Go West, Young Man.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia 29 Sep. 2017. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_West,_young_man>.Jameson, F. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15 (1986): 65-88.Kanzler, K. “Architecture, Writing, and Vulnerable Signification in Herman Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” American Studies 54.4 (2009): 583-601.Kerouac, J. On the Road. London: Penguin Books, 1972.Melville, H. “I and My Chimney.” Great Short Works of Herman Melville. New York: Perennial-HarperCollins, 2004: 327-54.Merk, F. Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963.Sealts, M.M. “Herman Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” American Literature 13 (May 1941): 142-54.Sowder, W.J. “Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney:’ A Southern Exposure.” Mississippi Quarterly 16.3 (1963): 128-45.Wilder, L.I. Little House on the Prairie Series.Wilson, S. “Melville and the Architecture of Antebellum Masculinity.” American Literature 76.1 (2004): 59-87.