Editorial - Page 2

Editorial Introduction: India and Travel Narratives

//
1.8K views

Somdatta Mandal

Former Professor of English, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. Email: somdattam@gmail.com

Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.00

Travelogues belong to an interdisciplinary realm where discourses like literature, history, politics, anthropology, geography, economics, ethnography and even linguistics cross one another thus turning it into a proper subject of cultural/intercultural studies. It can be used as a site for raising questions, not only of ideology but of subjectivity as well, as the travelling subject is as important in a travelogue as the country travelled to. Traditionally an identity-building enterprise, travel writing is particularly interesting, since the persona of the traveller tends to rest on a cluster of oppositional concepts such as home-away, centre-periphery, near-distant, etc. Travel writing is also the art of discovering the magic of ordinary persons, places and things. You can discover magic only if you can look beyond reality to the reality behind everything. The famous travel writers Hugh and Colleen Gantzer believe that seldom travel builds bridges between people and times and civilizations. But that they believe, is what travel is really all about. The urge to travel was built in our genes, driven by the magic of curiosity.

Though earlier not recognized as a canonical subject for writing research papers, in the last three decades, the protean and hybrid genre of travel writing have been accepted as one of the most interesting areas in transnational and cross-cultural research. The deluge of new publications related to this genre proves the enormous possibilities through which travel writing can be studied.  The nature of the writing includes several forms, namely letters, diaries, autobiographies or oral records but it is too complex and too varied to be subjected to any neat classification.

Indian travel writing is considered to be the product of the colonial encounter. It proliferated in the nineteenth century and borrowed the genre from English travel writing but with time a great deal else is yet to be discovered. One can trace the elements of travel writing to pre-colonial times as well. Elements of the travelogue exist in the fictional accounts of the digvijayas in the epics, the safarnamas, tirthya-mahatyas or devotional accounts of the pilgrimages undertaken by saints, religious heads and poets, and in the lyrical reminiscences of a homesick lover like the Yaksha in Kalidasa’s Meghdoot. Questions are often raised about the specific nature of Indian travel narratives. So when the call for papers for the special issue of this journal was announced, we made it clear that we would like to focus on the travel writings by Indians and thus hide the problems of definition. The travel writing could be within India or the journey undertaken maybe to anywhere in the world and can be written in either English or any regional language. The study can be on individual texts, overviews, and any other aspect of Indian travel narratives that can yield rare theoretical insights into the construction of culture, language, ideology and subjectivity. Also the time frame of the study was not defined and the sole criterion was that the writer must be Indian. When we received an unprecedented number of abstracts we were overwhelmed with the choice and range of topics proposed and it was quite difficult to make the final selection. So one criterion for selection was to choose lesser known and regional texts, many of them written in the bhasha languages. The other was to focus on texts and issues that were more contemporary, ranging from train travels, texts written for children, travel blogs, and even cinematic narrations.

As the final contents list will show, the diversity of subjects is really mind-boggling. Divided into seven sections, the papers prove once again the protean nature of Indian travel narratives. The ‘General Overviews’ section contains three articles, two of which focus on Bengali secular travel culture and texts penned by women. The third article talks about the Bjojpuri speakers who went as girmitiyas to work in various British plantations in different colonies around the world. Six articles comprise the second section entitled ‘Pilgrimages.’ These include nineteenth century travels of Hindus to the holy city of Benaras as well as to various places in the Himalayas, including Kedarnath, Badrinath, Kailash and Mansarovar. The hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and the tourist potentials of the recently inaugurated corridor for Sikh pilgrims to visit Kartarpur Sahib in Pakistan have also been addressed in two different articles. Tibet and mountaineering issues have been discussed in three articles of the third section through various perspectives. One paper focuses on the transformative agency of the Nanda Devi on Bill Aitken, another analyses two literary texts by Vikram Seth and Nabaneeta Dev Sen that narrate their sojourns in Tibet. The continuous exchange of scholars and scholarly texts between India and Tibet over the centuries is the subject of another essay. Apart from documenting their journeys, we are told how the scholars initiated huge influx of literary texts between these two ancient countries, including the birth of Buddhist literature in Tibet.

The North East has always been a neglected domain geographically, politically and literarily for the average pan-Indian public residing in the plains. Five very interesting articles on the Northeast give us an overview of travel narratives in Assamese literature from the 18th century onwards to the recently written Nandita Haksar’s Across the Chicken Neck: Travels in Northeast India (2013) which shows how Haksar seeks to ‘unmap’ the Northeast by writing her experiences with the people and places of Northeast India. The fifth section is titled ‘Travelling West.’ Six articles discuss travels to Victorian England, Afghanistan, Russia and several places in Africa from different perspectives.  While two of them discuss individual texts in details, others focus on different reasons for each person travelling to the west, be it for religion, education, business, politics, wanderlust, or otherwise. The sixth section is the longest and comprises of eleven articles that analyze individual travel texts in details and from different points of view. Some of the texts are old and quite canonical whereas others are very recent, written in this twenty-first century. The last two articles of this section offer interesting study of one author, Shivya Nath and complement each other in a particular way. While one article discusses her 2018 text The Shooting Star: A Girl, Her Backpack and the World as a journey of exploration and reconstruction of the feminine self,  the other analyses the blogspots the author maintains under the same title. It shows how travel narratives are also changing their nature in this age of technological advancement and instant communication.

In a sense of yoking heterogeneous elements together, the last miscellaneous section comprising six articles is in a way the most interesting. Very few people were aware of Solon Karthak’s Nepali travelogues till he was recently awarded the Sahitya Akademi prize for 2019 (in February this year) for an anthology of travel narratives he published way back in 2013.  Also many readers don’t know much about Bhakti Mathur’s illustrated Amma, Take Me To… series for children or considered narrations of journeying through Indian trains to be part of travel texts worthy of study. Studying film texts by theorizing the experience of travel in a Malayalam film, North 24 Kaatham by Anil Radhakrishnan or studying the Goopy Bagha trilogy of children’s films made by Satyajit Ray and his son Sandip Ray, from the postcolonial queer dimension just proves once again how studying Indian travel narratives know no bounds.

A final note is necessary before concluding this introduction. The contributors for this collection comprise of senior academicians as well as young research scholars in the field. So, one should not expect the standard of all the articles to be the same. But I earnestly hope that everyone will enjoy reading them as much as I have enjoyed editing them and ruminate on how ‘India and Travel Narratives’ can be read and analyzed from multifarious and endless perspectives.

3 June, 2020

Editorial: Reflections on Literature and Art at a Time of Pandemic

///
297 views

Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay

Profesor Titular, Miembro de Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (Nivel I), CONACyT, Mexico, Departamento de Arte y Empresa, Universidad de Guanajuato, Mexico. Chief Editor, Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities. Email: chiefeditor@rupkatha.com

 Volume 12, Number 2, April-June, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n2.00

Imagine the dystopia created by this viral holocaust. Incendiary piers start, burning bodies in wastelands. At night wastelands reportedly turn into a mass crematorium. At a University hospital in New Jersey, the bell rings every half an hour, announcing the passing away of a Covid victim. Ideas of nation states, frontiers, countries have only enclosed people in prisons of illusion.  Such unreal lineations become fault lines for nationalism, migrations, war and hierarchical exclusion. The Corona virus however is not impeded by such boundaries. It transmits from human to human; it affects people without distinction of nationality, economics, franchise, and turns humans into targets with a kind of Dawkinsian indifference.

On the other hand, though, the virus innervates solidarity in humans, which is manifest as the indivisibility of the herd. Yet, we are only capable of ignorant and conflicted response towards the possible evolution of, what Petrashov called, ‘noocenosic’ ecosystems. For Petrashov, biological agents like humans would have to compromise to co-exist or live with other powerful collectives like the virus and similar nanometrical entities that percolate through this wide world. On several occasions we may not have adequate knowledge about coping with threats that are so microscopic and intangible. Various respond activities have been proposed. Contrasted to proposals of precautionary survival aided by statistical indicators, we hear of views like that of some Swedish administrators who say that forced quarantine strategies are already conditioned by biopolitical responses to acts of war and terrorism. Epidemiological caution is supposedly built on a politics of panoptical surveillance. Hence it is not an indispensable tool in the management of the pandemic. Social evolutionary thinkers like Stephen Goundry speaks of the physically interactive gestures tht are necessary for social life and survival, and say that quarantining goes against natural human evolution.

2.

But the virus has forced us to reconsider what it means to live under the fear of death or even speciate extinction. This is where the artist’s personality comes at stake – since the artist, like all other human beings, is just another human being who has to respond to signals in its immediate environment, sometimes erroneously drifting, and sometimes doing the right thing. The virus has also generally coerced us to recognize true human worth out of the consciousness of our fragile life in the biological world. This global pandemic gives us a moment to reflect on the nervous and weedy layers of artifice that we have used to cover life’s raw and beautiful texture. The virus has instigated a psychosis in terms of not just statistical effects of disease and precipitant mental depression but from its threats to creative life. Biological virulence, is linked to media virulence, it turns human creativity into a whimpering shot in the dark. On a daily basis, we seem to be trapped in a world constantly manipulated by media pseudologies. There is little scope of independent thinking. Good examples of independent thinking are not hard to find though. Pepe Mujica, the former president of Uruguay, who was called “the poorest President” by the BBC, has a wonderful precept from Montevideo, where he tried to experiment with a lifestyle statement that was aimed at a distant and long-term amelioration of narcotic traffic in Central America. Mujica’s lessons were easy and difficult to achieve at the same time – he demonstrated that narcotic economy results from human greed of material things, not for substance abusers, which is another problem elsewhere, but for poor people in Uruguay, El Salvador, Colombia and other countries, who participated in the trade. Mujica’s own life, like Gandhi’s, was a demonstrable proof of this grand simplicity that touches the core of our humanity.

In a world where ‘art’ has become a product of investment economy, it is now time to acknowledge that anonymous art is better than art of the genius. Folk art is superior to masterpieces. Ritual is superior to art in a show-case. True novels are lived rather than parcelled out by the giant media. Neatness is more beautiful than décor and an unassuming home is more divinely aesthetic than a furnished salon with books printed by the media houses.

The project hence is to liberate humane expression from cinders of decadent royalty and big business, and from the fantasies spotlighted by newspapers and TV news. The virus forces us to confide in the warmth and love of home. It is the same love that preserves us at any time of want or hardship. Anthropophilia causes us to care for each other. It makes us committed and risk our life for others.  It is this capacity to empathise that saves us. Empathy, care, regard for others and for kin, are more important than any art that the media celebrates. The human being sacrifices love in order to become a monster of one’s passion – but no good comes out of it. The friendship of working class people is more precious than the social prestige commanded by the elite. The painted face of the news presenter secretly mocks at the ineptitude of the common man.

3.

The virus cannot be taken as an incentive to create “viral poetry”, as a testament of human art, like an Instagram post without any meaning beyond the instant. Browsing through the poetry section of last week’s Vanity Fair, we see on its page, the same incongruous union of contemporary “vanity” and “art”. The very title is pompous and instantaneous: “Why Poetry Is Having a Moment Amid the Global Quarantine”. As we read further we are introduced to the post-marketing world: “The poem is enjoying a bump in cultural relevance as the world sits at home and considers its surroundings. Why your timeline is possibly suddenly sprinkled with verse”. The Vanity Fair article is a precise reminder of how the same interweaving wealth of media magnate, collector, consumer and wealthy business personnel, fashion industry, ‘art’ is also actively spreading an idea of its own self-organizing poetry or art. The obnoxious twitter, the rigmarole of all things flashy and apple, blend wirh the empty tragedy of people locked at home.

The University in America, and many countries of Europe, has become a votary of the same class culture that prepares you for this world of quick sensations. In such times as now, we are compelled to ask “How does a novel apprised in New York impact the life of a villager in East Africa, or a lemon picker in Michoacan, or the trash collector in Kolkata’s marshlands. The media novelist, so gorgeously fetishized in the academy, is no more than a colonial and pseudo-progessive metrosexual. Museums worldwide have become abominable machines of the destruction of human spirit. The Metropoitan Museum of Modern Art once exhibited works of an indigenous artist. After the exhibition, the artist asked for a little compensation for transport and installation of the exhibits. The museum said, that they displayed his work was a lot of investmet in itself – and that he should be grateful for that. The MOMA arrogance exposes the real values of the art world. Consider the invisible way in which a critic in The New Yorker creates these neocolonial evaluations for a piece of painting. She says on the home page, “Museums know the desires of our hands. The special presence of paintings comes from their being at once untouchable and viscerally evocative of touch. (April 21, 2020)”. A piece of painting is never so important, that it will continue to invoke our presence for its self-fetishization.  Painting does not transcend life and humanity – it does not need to sit in a museum and make its own publicity look so arrogant and inhumane, waiting for its bidder, and its entry into the house of a collector.

4.

True human values lie in the honesty of the heart, even of it is not ‘artistic’ by the world’s standards. There may be true worth in the greatest of writings, but its appropriation by the industrial elite, has overshadowed its preciousness in a world of self-mesmerizing profanities. Creative writing should be undertaken in one’s own language, criticism should enrich one’s own culture and values. The unthinking study and glorification of Anglophone discourse, out of which we can scarcely escape, automatically aligns us to the media elite that tries to control the world’s markets. As long as we don’t shift our attention from the sufferings of our fellow humans we shall not render a disservice to people who speak the same language as ours, who reap the fruits, flowers and grain that sustain us. True beauty is tied to this simple life of communications.  The viral moment has now created a space of introspection. It lets us focus on the essential spark of life. Academic discussions have been alienating us for long time.  The best definition of creative process is to be creative, explore – each one, one’s true hope and dream. and to hope for expiation through a humble word. It would be time, in a world freed from the virus, to identify and negate the presence of all brands of elitism.

Editorial: Special Issue on Human Rights

/
255 views

Pramod K. Nayar

Professor, Department of English, the University of Hyderabad

Volume 11, Number 1, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n1.01

That the field of Literary Studies and Human Rights have been intersecting for some time to produce what has been termed an ‘interdiscipline’ is old news.

Critics like Lynn Hunt, Joseph Slaughter, Elizabeth Goldberg, Alexandra Schultheis Moore and James Dawes, pioneering the field, and anthologies such as The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights (2016) and Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature (2012), to mention just two, produced in the recent years have more or less mapped the field thoroughly. Emphasizing the role of form, language and genre, while simultaneously alert to questions of injurability, trauma and the role of life-sustaining environments and collapsing social ontologies, critical work represented in these volumes have defined the field. Then, explorations in the visual imagery of Human Rights in works such as Visualizing Human Rights (2018) have begun to look at the visual sign systems – mainly photographs – in which the Human Rights theme has found its place. Other studies have traced Human Rights themes in children’s literature, dystopian fiction, popular films and of course canonical texts from literature – from Shakespeare to the sentimental novel.

What is abundantly clear from such works is that Human Rights discourses have taken multiple forms, tones and styles. Memoirs, fiction, popular culture can equally encode these discourses as an Amnesty Report – and in the process reach a wider audience too.

Literature’s ability to insert us, via the empathetic and sympathetic imagination, into the life and context of people unlike us ensures that we begin to relate to the generic and specific ‘human’. Thus, to see ourselves in cattle cars headed for Auschwitz (as Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello does in his eponymous novel) or in genocidal conditions is not to take away the victimhood of the protagonist. Rather it is a way of engaging with the world’s less fortunate. Imagining our broken bodies when we see that of others’, the loss of dignity – which we assume is natural and immanent – in others and even collective trauma of communities is a way of responding to the world.

That acts of imagination can contribute to the social imaginary is a truism, but a relevant one. Critical literacies arising from innovative texts and representational strategies force us to imagine alone certain lines. This work of cultural training is central to the development of a ‘Human Rights culture’. Such a Human Rights Culture and its attendant social imaginary is the aspiration and intention – to invoke faded conceptual categories of literary criticism! – of the Human Rights novel or poetry. Indeed, in James Dawes in The Novel of Human Rights argues that ‘most author who write contemporary rights novels do so with an ambient sense of moral purpose’ (18). Identifying two key plots – escape and justice – within the novel of Human Rights, Dawes believes that we ‘need broader regional or global frames for bringing together novels like, for instance, Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, and even the speculative fiction of China Mieville’ (19). Dawes too is gesturing at a discursive frame that is not limited by the national imaginaries of our time. Michael Galchinsky offers us a pithy formulation that summarises what I have said so far:

Human rights culture shares civic and ethical functions with human rights law, but while the orientation of the law is vertical, reaching down from government bodies to individuals, the orientation of rights culture tends to be horizontal, with the artist appealing as a human being directly to his or her fellows. In this way, works of human rights culture participate in the public sphere, in Habermas’s sense (Habermas Public Sphere 1991; Slaughter 2007). Along with the work of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), news media, and social media, culture helps construct the civil society in which human rights can be meaningful. The human rights artist assumes that neither the United Nations (UN) nor a national government can simply compel people to respect each other’s rights: people have to want to. The artist seeks to produce and reflect that desire to a national or global citizenry, striving to ground the formal rights system in an informal rights ethos. (2)

In other words Literature has a key role to play in the construction of a Human Rights imaginary that is shared and universal, a global lingua franca, if you will. If we assume that capitalism and its technologies (financial, juridical, communications, legal) set about constructing ‘Others’ out of certain groups and ethnic communities around the world, then Literature also gestures the arrival of a different kind of globalism: the global discourse of Human Rights.

The discourse may or may not approximate to achievement of any kind. As Gareth Griffiths puts it in his Introduction to The Social Work of Narrative: Human Rights and the Cultural Imaginary (2018),

Like human rights themselves the truths such narrative seeks to tell are perhaps inevitably deferred, always a promise of what might be rather than what is, a promise of what we seek than what we have achieved. (10)     

That is, Human Rights literature seeks to shape the imagination/imagining of what could and ought to be rather than what our (human) history has been. One hesitates to argue that Human Rights literature is primarily future-directed because it shapes the imagination for the future we wish to have, but this is an ideological position espoused, one believes, of such Literature. To (begin to) see the world and its unfortunates differently due to the critical and moral literacies induced by such literature is to see a future of humanity differently as well.

This special issue is committed to the above ideas. Essays, while examining in the main, literary texts, have also cut across genres and geocultural borders: the graphic journalism (or comics journalism) of Joe Sacco, Dalit writing, poetry from a specific geocultural location (northeastern India), plays, American fiction, fiction set in Indonesia and in the city of the world’s worst industrial disaster (Bhopal).  All essays are concerned with questions of representation, generic conventions and the development of characters – literary studies questions, in fact. But they also interested in exploring precarious lives, trauma, the discourse of pity, victim-agency, among others. We see the authors of these texts grapple with questions of form and content, displaying an awareness of the politics of disaster and governance (for example, Indra Sinha’s text, Animal’s People).

But we are also intensely aware of the missing components from this special issue: Human Rights and photography, Human Rights and climate change/environmental rights, therapeutic citizenships and rights, to name just three. The essays here also do not grapple with questions of evil and of the perpetrator – now the centrepiece of fiction such as Martin Amis’ The Zone of Interest and Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones. It also does not, unfortunately, deal with speculative fiction and fantasy to see if these also encode Human Rights themes. Clearly, much more needs to be done. But for now, this slim special issue.

I would like to thank all the contributors for putting up with demands for revisions, and to the Editor, Tarun Tapas Mukherjee, for leaving the decision over the selection of essays entirely to me.

References

Dawes, James. 2018. The Novel of Human Rights. Harvard UP

Galchinsky, Michael. 2016. The Modes of Human Rights Literature: Towards a Culture Without Borders. Palgrave-Macmillan

Griffiths, Gareth. 2018. ‘Introduction: Where Do We Come From? Who Are We? Where Are We Going?’, in Gareth Grifiths and Philip Mead (eds) The Social Work of Narrative: Human Rights and the Cultural Imaginary. Ibidem-Verlag,. 1-11

Editorial: Interrogating Cultural Translation

/
238 views

Hari M G

Assistant Professor, Department of English and Humanities, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, India. Email: harimg09@gmail.com

Volume 10, Number 1, 2018 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v10n1.01

‘Cultural translation’, a much debated and contested topic in Postcolonial studies as well as in Translation studies, in a way, is symptomatic of the postmodern problematisation of cultural identities. Translation Studies has reached a critical juncture where the attempt to ‘translate a culture’, invariably, leads to arguments on the appropriation involved in any type of discourse. Rather, when we discuss the accuracy of cultural representation through translation, it becomes an opening to contest the cultural appropriation that has been taken for granted in discourses in general.  Similarly, in postcolonial studies, ‘cultural translation’ has garnered academic attention since the publication of Homi K Bhabha’s essay “How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern space, postcolonial times and the trials of cultural translation” wherein he stresses the ‘translational’ nature of postcolonial discourse and identity construction. Both these perspectives can be placed within a broader postmodern/post structural approach of doubting certainties and being radically open to the ‘other’. In this sense, ‘cultural translation’ is an umbrella term which signifies the ‘in-between’ state of the cultural transactions of our times, across genres and disciplines. The nuanced thought on conceptualising culture is also significant for the fact that it is a counter-narrative to the institutionalised ‘othering’ which has gone to ridiculous levels in this post-truth age of digital media and social networking sites. It is in this context that the international conference on “Interrogating Cultural Translation: Literature and Fine Arts in Translation” organised by Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham in association with Caesurae Collective, placed ‘cultural translation’ within an interdisciplinary framework and thus, facilitated the discussion of the topic touching upon its varied implications. Keep Reading

Editorial: Volume IX, Number 3, 2017

//
163 views

Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay Ph.D
Associate Professor, Digital Arte y Empresa, Universidad de Guanajuato, Campus Irapuato-Salamanca, Mexico.

Volume IX, Number 3, 2017 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v9n3.01

The collection of articles for this issue generally helps in the development of new insights for objects as they are perceived by media culture, and the new literacies. One important part of this critical process is to reflect on the interface with technology but still maintain a kind of humanistic respect for emerging communications and trans-valuations. New statics of interpretation is necessary in a radically changing scenario of effects. The qualitative approach gains ground in such scenarios. Perhaps descriptive variations may be syncretically harmonized to this change in social transactions. Analytics of this socially mediated perception of culture, art and expressive formats should help us understand finite, but proven aspects of our global culture all conditioned by, and conditioning, the economy, and its availability of resources and fruits. How would social media statistics apply to collective decisions? Does interpretation have a destined locus of values, or is it being mediated beyond control or comprehension?

Again, one particular word that seems to grip attention in the media discourse today is ‘establishment’ – a very old word indicative of situatedness and the inability to move, or the quality of being stationary. There is a distrust of the establishment since the growth of socialism -today ‘establishment’ is perceived in a radically different way by many citizens in a high-fidelity free capitalist country like the USA. People still retain their distrust and anger at the establishment but the semantic game players may have changed position. Acknowledgedly, the ‘establishment’ is perceived not as a stationary object but as a process or evolution of the status of individuals in an economic turn – as one section tends to reap the harvests of trade, business and employment opportunities, and thus get richer – and acquire benefits of the system whereas another section goes down, being unable to survive on the unlevelled playing ground. There is a growing disparity -as members of the establishment have been better off, and have been continuing to grow their possessions while others remain a victim of that process.

The necessity of finding an answer to the question of disparity, and poverty between nations, and within nations, have engaged human thought to a point of futility. There is no easy answer to the realities of social existence, with several variables determining the way things are adjudged. Or perhaps there is.

 

 

Editorial: Special Issue dedicated to the Bicentennial of Mexican Independence

//
156 views

Reynaldo Thompson

School of Digital Arts, Universidad de Guanajuato, Mexico. Email: thompson@ugto.mx

Volume 2, Number 3, 2010 I PDF Version

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n3.01

On the occasion of the bicentennial anniversary of Independence in different countries of Latin America and the centennial of the Mexican Revolution in 2010, we are bringing out this issue with a view to celebrating and exploring the past and the present. The rich culture, geography and national resources in Latin America, united by the Iberian languages that function like irrigating blood keep the organs alive and moving. The anniversary may not happen during the best years of those nations; however it is a good time for reflection, criticism and balance of what those new republics have achieved and what it continues to be: the ghost in the everyday life of its inhabitants. No doubt some countries have grown faster, economically, culturally or demographically speaking; though corruption, poverty, insecurity and improvisation are among the problems that are still affecting what was called, the New World after two hundred years of self-governance. In this issue writers from various parts of the planet have critically focused on the history and culture of Latin America.

Editorial, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2010

/
170 views

Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay

Volume 2, Number 1, 2010 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n1.01

The visual capacity is an excellent addition to the bogey of sense buds that we have –it definitely enhances capabilities of maneuver and movement, along with instrumentation of an entire spectrum of sensory or tactile reflexes, but its epistemic function is that of bridging, of taking us through the phenomenon of vision to that other territory. The special edition on Visual Arts has been designed with the aim of getting to employ  visual signs for making connections through terminals that are al so nonlinear and unpredictable, just as they are.

Full Text PDF

Editorial

/
217 views

Ex-territories and Technological Art: An Overview of a Latin American Heritage

Reynaldo Thompson

Associate Professor, Department of Art and Management, University of Guanajuato, Mexico. Email: thompson@ugto.mx  

Volume 9, Number 2, 2017 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v9n2.01

The word EXTERRATORIALITIES itself brings to mind different historical and contemporary events and facts.  On the one hand, we have the exodus expressed in the Bible and on the other, we have contemporary migrations in a more closer knowledge civilization. Migrations is not new, and in order to get a glimpse of some important facts that had shaped the present trajectory of immigration in Latin America, I invite you to read the book The Open Veins of Latin America (1971) written by the Uruguayan journalist and writer Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015).  In the book, he briefly but clearly analyzes the history of colonialism and its modern manifests, focusing on the massive exploitation of natural resources during the period of European colonialism and then the American domination of Latin America. In the last century, and because of the wealth of natural resources in Mexico, the country came into conflict with different transnational companies: for instance, before the WWII the oil industry was owned by the Standard Oil and was property of the Rockefellers; it was nationalized by Mexican President Lazaro Cárdenas in 1938.   The other industrial house Light and Power, now named Comisión Federal de Electricidad was nationalized in 1937, although before nationalization it belonged to North American companies. Today both enterprises belong to the state, unfortunately with great levels of mismanagement inside.  Eduardo Galeano argues in his book that the oil business is run by a powerful cartel established in 1928 by Standard Oil, Shell and British Petroleum, with which Gulf and Texaco joined later.

The phenomenon of migration to the US has an important effect on the Mexican economy. In recent years however, as a result of better performance within the nation and a recognizable growth in investments from Japan, Germany and United States among other countries, and because of more efficient financial institutions within Mexico, the migration from Mexico to the US has been decreasing, as the Pew Research Center in Washington demonstrates[i].

Mexican artist, Marcela Armas had reflected on the use of energy (as also petroleum energy) in her artworks by using elements directly related to businesses that extract or exploit natural resources. Marcela’s artworks include the use of high voltage power as in Resistencia (2009) or the use of scrap from an automobile in the work now called CeNIT (2007). In her art installations the abuse of natural resources is always in focus. In Resistencia we see a reflection on the use and exploitation of not only electrical energy, but also human energy, implying cheap hand labor.

Resistencia (2009) was put together with a heated metallic wire resistance – one made out of steel chords that seemed to outline the Mexican border with the United States (in recent days the subject is implicated with the polemics of building a wall for which Mexicans would have to pay, as the new president of the US claims). The idea of the border is not only a territorial and a geographical limit; it also represents the limits of the rule of nations confined by its limits.  Traditionally and after losing 2.5 millions square Km in the XIX century to the United States, Mexicans had started emigrating to the US, looking for opportunities of jobs and realizing an American Dream. In Marcela Armas’ work Resistencia – the incandescent light of the electrical resistance is so attractive that it invites us to touch it; it appears perhaps like the fatal magnet that invites one to cross the dangerous limits of the border and achieve success and prosperity through work, determination and initiative. Armas’ work Resistencia highlights two main circumstances around the subject of the border. First is the idea of national limits, the second is the sizzling subject of an invisible wall between two countries, one the most ‘powerful’ in the world and the other being the poorer people of Latin America.

Next, in another artwork, called the Cenit the artist projects the exploitation of raw materials, that as we mentioned, are owned by the state. CeNIT (Zenith) consists of burnt-out oil from a car, a catheter and a hydraulic pump. The first object is normally the scrap of an automobile, while the thin plastic hose is usually used in hospitals to provide serum or blood to the patient, and the pump may be a symbol of the heart. In this case, the catheter forms the silhouette of a cityscape, emphasizing on the theme of energy as a source of life for urban areas. The time invested to complete the profile of the city, with the oil in the catheter is 15 hours. At the end of the tour when the scraps shape the cityscape, the burnt oil leaks from a symbolic cargo ship on to the clean white wall of the gallery, which may in turn be a metaphor of the ocean itself. The narrative describes a visual process of energy-exploitation in a metropolis with all its ambitions of power, development and progress.  The work of Marcela Armas is just one of the few examples of innovative use of technology in achieving an art, one produced as a representative artistic vision of people living in the south of the Rio Grande.

The emergence of new Media Art in Latin America is an extraordinary heritage but it has been under-represented in the art historical discourse. Power structures operate not only like economies but also in the form of cultural imperialism. Pioneer Latin-American artists have neither been recognized nor absorbed into mainstream literature. Here, I may refer to our heritage preservation project called the Digital Art in Latin America especially oriented toward a perception of a digital art prototype that evolved as a response to infiltrations of technology into Latin America. Our emphasis is first, on the rise of those forms of proto-electronic art in the mid twentieth century in terms, which were initially represented in structural invariances of optical and also pre-digital templates. Leading artists like Julio LeParc (in Argentina) was experimenting with projection of light on reflective materials. In Brazil, Abraham Palatnik tried transpositioning colors through mechanical movements. Waldemar Cordeiro and Otávio Donasci were similar innovators, the first using punch card applications, and the other, video and performance. Chilean Carlos Martinoya and Naum Joel created the Abstratoscopio Cromatico, to anticipate an entirely new artistic usage of polarized light effects, which the world had never witnessed before. In Mexico, Manuel Felguerez, produced innovative pictorial compositions using paleocomputational programming language in an age when the PC was nonexistent. Pola Weiss embraced video art at a time when Nam June Paik was building his installations in North America.  She was the first techno artist using video to express her creative concerns; however Weiss did not only embrace Video art, she was also exploring mass media communications like TV in order to engage the viewer with the artwork. Performance was also among her preferred forms.

The archival project on digital heritage preservation is an attempt to save the history of this transformation in the arts and to restore the place of Latin-American artists in the trajectory. It is an archival project in the making that seeks therefore to set across a view of new age in the arts in the intersection of a new universe. Intersections of art and technology commenced earlier depending on the country under consideration. For instance, Argentina, Chile and Brazil were some of the first countries who started exploring different media related to technology, and filtering out those used traditionally in the visual arts, like canvas and oil on painting or stone and wood in sculpture. Julio LeParc in Argentina produced a large body of work using light projected on different materials such as polished metal, plastic, glass and crystal, all exhibited at the Venice Biennial in 1966. Later and depending on the advances in technology, some artists started incorporating mechanical systems or machines and later electronic components or more complex devices, like computers.

So, even the media as well as the geographic context were diverse yet none of these artists’ names are either recognized or acknowledged in books on Western new media history; perhaps we need to follow the aims expressed in Israeli artists Amir and Sela’s new book Extraterritorialities in Occupied Worlds.

The project aims [is] not only to draw on existing definitions of extraterritoriality but seeks to reload it with new meaning, searching for ways in which the notion of extraterritoriality could produce a critique of discriminating power structures and re-articulate new practical, conceptual and poetic possibilities[ii].

Our idea here is that since we are living in a more inter-related world, art historians and scholars in developed countries may look for different interpretations and forms of art, not only produced within the limits of their nations, but also from more peripheral regions. After all, as Bauman states in the same book I mentioned above, Globalization is nothing more than a totalitarian extensión of their logic on all aspects of life[iii]. From that perspective, globalization expresses a high level of cultural imperialism and favors the powerful.

Here I want to go back to the Digital Arts in LatinAmerica (DALA) project that seeks recognition of those pioneers that contributed to the development of contemporary hybridization of art in Latin America but have been systematically neglected and expunged from its rightful place in the universal history of art. In a visualization work by the German scholar Maximilian Schich and his project Humanity’s Cultural History Latin America has almost no representation at all when compared to the arts produced in the power enclaves of Europe or the United States.  To be more precise it is not only Latin America that is under represented:  Africa and Asia – the new giants are all also systematically under-represented. Even in the maps of the UNESCO world heritage sites we discover a real and unforgivable misrepresentation of history and data base, similar to the one Dr. Schich’s tends to fallaciously promote. Therefore we have no time to waste if we were to write our own history before its perdition. Yuval Noah Harari states in Sapiens. A brief history of humankind:  

“There is no evidence that history acts for the benefit of humans because we lack an objective scale on which to measure that benefit.  Different cultures define the good differently, and we do not have a definitive yardstick to judge between them. The victors, of course, always believe that their definition is correct. However, why should we believe the winners?”[iv]

And as it happens along time, history has mostly been written by those who hold power, however our task may be to preserve the memory of those who oexplored new ways to interpret the world.  There are already some institutions addressing the issue and investing their resources to save that memory. An interesting case is brought before us in Extraterritorialities in Occupied Worlds, in the work of Victoria Bernal who emphasizes the experience of those not living in their own country, especially at a time when inter-connection in the digital age contributes so enormously to bring people together. Bernal exemplifies with the help of the Eritrean diaspora.

Diaspora possesses no territory; they exist, not through occupying space, but by transcending it. Migrants, refugees, diasporas, and similar populations live in ambiguous and simultaneous relationships with multiple territorial locations and communities[v].

In case of the DALA Project, we see that many of the artists that contributed to the development of new pathways in art and technology were artists sometimes living in other countries, especially Europe or the United States; some of others came to Latin America from other countries and established themselves here.

From our perspective it is important to keep trace and memory of all those figures moving out of dominant cultures who as Harari explains may be victims of a new sort of exclusion.

These racist theories, prominent and respectable for many decades, have become anathema both among scientists and among politicians. People continue to wage a heroic struggle against racism without realizing that the battle front has changed, and that the place of racism in imperial ideology has now been replaced by “culturalism.” This term does not exist but it is time we invented it. […] We no longer say: “It is in his blood.” Now we say: “It is in its culture”[vi].

In this exclusionary phenomenon, nationalism has played a key role in dominant Western countries, especially those with strong and powerful economies. Eduardo Galeano explains while focusing on the United States.

The North American feat would have not needed explanation if it had not been animated, from its very beginning, by the most fervent of nationalism[vii].

However as Bernal explains by focusing on Eritreans:

“Eritrian websites reveal the creativity of the less powerful to construct new spaces and strategies of political participation and to expand the boundaries of what can be publicly expressed”.[viii]

Thus the DALA project may exist in space as a website with no other purpose than to remember those who had opened up new forms of expression in a globalized world, where monoculturalism denies them their own existence.   Again Bernal argues:

“Websites may serve as extraterritorial when the aspect of virtual space is foregrounded, offering a space that has no particular location but is everywhere and accessible form anywhere.  The ambiguity of location on the Internet thus makes possible different forms of territorialization, deterritorialization, reterritorialization and, extraterritoriality”.[ix]

So, the aim of the Digital Arts in Latin America project is to take control of our own history and destiny, artists had demonstrated that creativity and determination to achieve a goal is far more powerful than military methods that governed the subcontinent for many decades.  Bernal sees the internet as a tool of liberation – she explains.

Yet the Internet remains an inspiration, stimulating imaginaries of an unbound world where borders are crossed with ease and intimacies transcend distance, where collaboration and community persist on the basis of mutual interest rather than on representation, and where new spaces of creativity and connection continue to be sited[x].

Like Eritreans who gained independence by uniting themselves against the forces that prevented them to grow, DALA aims for autonomy and awareness of a colonialist era in the art, science and technology.

Notes

[i] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/11/mexico-and-immigration-to-us/. Consulted 13 the May 2017.  11.3 millions of undocumented migrans in the US and 50 % are Mexicans.

[ii] Amir, Mayaan. Sela, Ruti.  (2016) Extraterritorialities in Occupied Worlds.  Punctum Books.  P. 14

[iii] Ibid. p 77

[iv] Harari, Yuval Noah (2014). De animales a dioses. Breve historia de la humanidad. Editorial Debate. Mexico. P. 269 My translation: No hay pruebas de que la historia actúe en beneficio de los humanos porque carecemos de una escala objetiva en la que medir dicho beneficio. Diferentes culturas definen de manera distinta el bien, y no tenemos una vara de medir definitiva para juzgar entre ellas.  Los vencedores, desde luego, creen siempre que su definición es la correcta.  No obstante, ¿por qué habríamos de creer a los vencedores?.

[v] Amir and Sela. P. 188

[vi] Harari (2014). P. 334. My translation. Estas teorías racistas, prominentes y respetables durante muchas décadas, se han convertido en anatema tanto entre los científicos como entre los políticos.  La gente continua librando una lucha heroica contra el racismo sin darse cuenta de que el frente de la batalla ha cambiado, y que el lugar del racismo en la ideología imperial ha sido sustituido ahora por el “culturalismo”. Este termino no existe pero ya es hora de que lo inventemos.  […] Ya no decimos: “Está en su sangre”.  Ahora decimos: “Está en su cultura”

[vii] Galeano, Eduardo. (1971) Las venas abiertas de América Latina. Colección Alba Bicentenario. Habana, Cuba.

[viii] Amir and Sela (2016) p.168

[ix] Amir and Sela (2016) p. 161

[x] Amir and Sela (2016) p. 170

Editorial: The Second Dimension in Art

//
278 views

Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay Ph.D
Associate Professor, Digital Arte y Empresa, Universidad de Guanajuato, Campus Irapuato-Salamanca, Mexico.

Volume 9, Number 1, 2017 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v9n1.01

The question of art in the context of the more general concept of creativity has to be addressed from the foundations of science. The subjective notion of creativity, which still persists in the humanist attitude to things, has to be resolved and broken, indeed abrogated as it were, as an infantilic, or exilic dream. Admittedly the idea of a creative generator ensconced in the human soul does not stand the test of empirical query. It may turn out to be true if possibilities of other dimensions of resources and energy were assumed to be true – the question whether a “spirit”- like medium is part of the dynamics (as the ancients had suggested) is one which may not yet be encompassed by the perceptual instruments available to science. It is difficult to visualize gravity as described in the physics of relativity for example – for which there is a mathematical model, already in place in the hypothesized model of the “curvature of space” for example. Einstein’s explanation of gravity could be encountered as a mathematical possibility, although as easily as a tangible working mechanism.

For the arts empirical analysis is headed in two directions. One is titled ambitiously, as neuroaesthetics, and the other broader term involves studies on the psychology of what is called creativity – or in short “creativity studies”, which is again a broader rubric for studies on a greater variety of design and creative pursuits, and activities for the contemporary industry. Semantically, again the term ‘innovation’ is used more loosely with science and technological creativity or design. But these were very relevant issues to my enquiries as a student of the arts, and since an artist or designer, when one makes this choice, of wanting to create something ‘artistic’, under the social precepts of the genre and given one’s temperament – one already proposes a trajectory for oneself, that is one’s life and career, in an unremitting passion for designing something novel and unique – a desire to express oneself, to make the object of expression better and more perfect following an insatiable commitment that consumes everything else, like a fire, autonomous and ungovernable as it would seem. If there is ever a model of an artist’s autobiographical reflection for one’s personal diary then these would be the problems one had to face and understand. Creativity or art is no longer therefore assumed to have its origins in a story – because the priorities and contexts for an investigation have changed. The creative process is a function of the behaviorally engaging hominid, just as there is improvisatory behavior in other species in different chains of mutation. The animal sensitivity to the crude and enormous expanse of landscapes, the ocean, the rugged terrain of mountains, canyons, gorges, and then towards food, and shelter – and toward moments on a social frame, or toward emerging technological urbanscapes, or interplanetary vistas.

From a behavioralist perspective there was perhaps only one reference that finally seemed to me to be more pertinent for understanding the creative process. Since creative life seemed to be a full reflection of a total mental-physiological reflex system to tasks at first the Aristotelian term “praxis” appeared to me to be rather inclusive and comprehensive – as it indicated a broad overall attitude or tendency in the life of an artist. There are no long term goals that describe a creative project; although some aspects of Erikson’s developmental psychology recognizes this life-long engagement behaviors in a post adolescent contexts. The creative individual would adopt this pragmatic approach in the obsessions of a life-time. In fact the classical term “praxis” – I discovered – was ensconced in a Greek phrase praxis teleia (Gilbert Murray 1956). So what Aristotle means is that creative arts are fostered with practice, which is aimed with a telos or sense of an end -which suggests perfection, the true mark of the arts. Indeed Murray points out in his commentary on the Poetics there is a need to merge praxis with a more difficult, non-temporal concept of energeia or soul-drive. Behavioral creativity could be understood as praxis, which implies performing repetitive actions that could integrate the different classes of actions that carried formative sentiments in the components of their media. Finally praxis would be a state of performances in which the created objects would elicit pleasure. Therefore to confer on this sense of creativity we would have to refer to this Aristotelian element of praxis teleia or energeia but only in an empirical sense- since it does justice not just to art, but to the belief system involving a faith or hope in a an aesthetically satisfactory life. Creativity also inspires every aspect of life and its actions (as is said in Nichomachean Ethics for example)- of a moral as well as intellectual type, and is integral to what is metaphorically a journey of a souls – as would be defined by its energeia. Behaviorally as well ‘creativity’ implicates the whole of an individual, and seeks to define the outer limits of one’s efforts, of trying to elicit a more felicitous experience in things. Perhaps something of a synoptic bur discreet list of the tendencies present in creative tasks helps us better understand what goes on through the creative life, and with Guilford’s (1950) description of this larger system of creativity – and then Torrance’e attempts to quantify creative output on a psychometric scale came out a change in our view of creativity – which became mathematical, quantitative idea of innovative tasks (Torrance 1963; 1988). I refer to the notion of praxis since it best describes the scientific temperament for understanding one such basic instinct as creativity.

Again, that creativity has not been amenable to a good definition in modern neuroscience points to an important factor in recognizing the trajectory of the process. So why praxis – in this context. Because praxis refers to ‘doing’ or task execution of some sort -but this is exactly the empirical – or more specifically the behavioral quality of creative pursuits that are discussed in Guilford (1950), Torrance (1963) and Amabile (Amabile 1966). When Aristotle already defined praxis in Poetics, and in Book II of Nichomachean Ethics he was recognizing the contextual fruition of the human instinct to act in a creative way. I would say that praxis clarifies the non-subjectivist understanding of creativity and design innovation that has been appropriated for our contemporary pursuits of art and design — this is one common ground between classicism and empirical neuroaesthetics that I found, like the ground beneath one’s feet (for aesthetes still being groomed in a humanist tradition in the last decades of the twentieth century). But the problem of creativity was important because any effort to resolve the process down to its neurobehavioral components meant that we could apply to test and reinforce training for it, or eliciting guidelines for what Guilford called “divergent thinking”.

Indeed creative life composits its own search and destiny for itself; as such it has no use except to be available like a working manual – I shall briefly describe how one could be lead to the analytical part of the creative process. There is no explanation however for the compelling energy which drives creative people – ones who are now thought of as having a larger range of resources in terms of the choices available to them and their willingness to experiment with newer designs, and adopt newer formats. The only ground on which we find a semblance of the old perception of creativity as a kind of subjectively realised drive – is when, as Murray (way back in the middle of the last century) was saying with a faint classical suggestion that praxis could be incorporated with energeia – perhaps with reference to energeia as a tendency, with that sense of immanence that drives humans, and promotes innovations, both technological and ideational – and leads to the phases of transformative social life, and determines much of the way the belief system is absorbed and adapted to the needs of a renewed, and superior livelihood.

This practical or pragmatic energy of creativity may have been once assumed to have been this force capable of impelling an individual, and this is perhaps more in singular conformity with observed facts of life. The creative person has an energy-level and a strange obsession with tasks involving problem-solving strategies and – as modern behavioralists would like to believe, a tendency to re-adapt to priorities, in their attempt to revisit moments of heightened flow in executing and reinstating the design. Among other things behavioralism is the best option that we have in the context of the state-of-art of thinking about these formative aspects of life.

The journey of placing art in this empirical context – for me – began with the need first to understand the frame of visual art. The quest stood against the received discourse – but a longer period of contemplation guided me to believe that there was something unique about the arts. This included the visual arts, theater, music – although I had not yet deeply started thinking about it, and revision of issues set me on a trail. I felt I discovered something – and I wanted to find proof for it. This was a difficult task, given my physical conditions but the battle is also perhaps the same for everyone. I could objectify this discovery in terms of images – a few of these I shall show here. Discovery is culmination of a search, and for this project which I began it all started taking shape quite early – but I started articulating it once I got involved in my research the first time I came to the America. One aspect of this search of mine has taken shape entirely on this new continent, and its bearings are with me. Creativity, in the visual realm generates interesting results, and are not delimited by time or space – but ever accessible to the mind of the artist. In visual arts praxis – the limits are offset by the satisfaction derived from the continuous transmutation of frames and – the scientific resolution of imagery. Much hair has been split in the cognitive sciences regarding this discovery. What does the visual image represent – the acknowledgement that the visual image, whether it is in its two dimensional or three dimensional manifest, could correspond to a recognizable object in the world. Gibson had made this claim in the seventies- I felt that the artistic image, like that of a portrait of a face seen from an angle – or the shape of the body, or even any optical symbol seemed – in several instances to gain a character or a special quality.

If Gibson’s and Neisser’s study of the image were revealing of the spatial correspondences the research in cognitive science was no more than mute, if not oblivious, of the positive mental stress provoked by the artistic image. The paradox is that creativity here stands in need of an emotive component – and this research had been lacking.

A project developed from a humble University Grants Commission fund in India gave me this impetus to explore the emotive processing component of art and creativity – the fun element that is so crucial for survival and progress. The opportunity then was to tell others that there was this strange quality in the more artistic or crafted images – earlier I was groping around for a term. It seemed to me fit to call this property of the visual image “miniaturization”, in the absence of any word which to my mind could explain the process. What are the cognitive networks responsible for this kind of evocation? He had produced a photo and then asked me if I knew that this BW picture was in fact used by Cezanne to create a portrait. Because painting takes these visual cues and transmutes them into a stylized and textured format – here to me was a basis of all the visual arts, but more so the secret that explains the trajectory of creativity in its most elusive and precious manifest. The photograph was that of an Old Lady with a Rosary

Figure 1. Photograph original for Old Lady with a Rosary

Figure 2. Old Lady with a Rosary

Figure 3. Photograph of Gertrude Stein

Figure 4. Picasso Portrait of Gertrude Stein

Figure 5. Portrait of Jaqueline Roque

Figure 6. Portrait of a Woman 1907, Mask.

In all of these images what was mainly happening was -stylization. Looking intently upon this image reveals or carries us to a second dimension of visuality, a dimension marking a qualitative disjunction. We could re-frame the question this way that the cognitive invariants of the images are similar – in the more realistic impressions the parallels are visible, we do not fail to recognize the person in question. But unlike Renaissance portraits, the simulations of Holbein for example, the distracted innovativeness of such renderings are stupendous examples of divergent creativity. The creative energy is manifest in the vitality with which the art is made not to resemble the source, or the photograph but because of the ability of the artist to incorporate cognitive stimuli that only retains a limited amount of semblance and a greater freedom in divergence.

This liberation of the anxiety that the image represses creates the new image of the artist, If the origin of creativity takes for its departure the saddened and incommodious space of existence then the vision of the artist now creates a separate or ‘demarcated’ plane of perception. This to my mind is an important discovery – not because it may have the potential of catching something in the cognitive process that has not been identified with the degree of clarity that it deserves, but also because it fits in with the indices of what I held on were the best precepts of aesthetic creativity – this principle had to be registered and examined but also verified for extreme cases of divergence in creative design, and especially for non-events, which invited new opportunities in closet anthropology. The re-alteration of visual cues is not an easy task: it could only be successfully achieved with praxis, and re-arrangement of stimulus. The cognitive process that elicits such information for the visual system is also worth studying, although this could make us drift outward in uncharted maps of the brain.

Even if we had to preserve this sanctuary of ideas for the visual image we could then explore the other boundaries of creativity In fact the visual system was just one of the means of doing this- creative transmutation builds outlines of creative tasks, the lineaments which are meant to dissolve and the superstructures that are supposed to rise. The debris of things resurrects things to come in all the arts, music, digital realities, and technological posthumanism. This brief essay would show us why this process is important for the cognitive system – the suspected presence of an over-arching cognitive ‘process’ may be a reality , although any amount of research to show that there is a master-plan for a neural process that generates or evokes creative divergence now could only fall too short of being satisfactory; because of the enormous amount of data involved and the unknown functions within brain areas and the the dimension of networking involved -that this search under the instruments and capabiities of integration that we have on a conscious level is only a distant dream. This secret once uncovered might enlighten us on the road toward machine intelligence and independent autonomous creators.

The discovery of this premise in visual innovations should indicate something more precise – in response to the question elicited in the section on alteration of visual invariants by the artist and the penetration into a second dimension of effects. The ‘secret’ could be found in another approach to the creativity question – which I felt again only helped in comprehending how creative precepts are born and what are the elements responsible for their attractiveness.

Emotions

The transmuted image created an opportunity for me to understand what this other dimensionality might be like. Visual art crystallises a graph of a feeling through a synoptical, and totemic externalization of the subjects of representation – including in such contemporary art pieces as in the weird bionic insects designed by robotic artists from San Miguel de Allende – in the machinic caricature. In the juxtaposition of the comic and non-deleteriously happy perspective of everything that seems so predictable and clever in real life – there is the same reduction, or miniaturization at work. Miniaturization is just a visual aspect however because these artworks – like the paintings we discussed – were stylized miniatures – we could also call them “aggrandizements” depending on the components of the image that we choose to look at. In Cezanne’s Woman with the Rosary, Picasso’s Masks, and the great musical contrapuntal suggestions of Mozart, and Nam Jun Paik’s K-456 robotic installation – there is an undiminishing humor that redeems the past and resurrects the dead original or model to life. The interest that creative transformation generates is not attained with disposition, or disruption of expectations in gesticulation – perhaps it might involve simulation of a physical action, what is of essence here is emotion. The way a space-time module is reduced in creative production -that is stylized, miniaturised or aggrandized just as features miniaturized or aggrandized together -as in a binary recombination (we do not know if a formula exists) but in general the bipolarity of juxtaposed components only accentuates certain unexpected reflexes in our sensory packet. This is the reason behind the emotional focus that determines the artistic image – in fact for me ‘divergence’ represents this cognitive-emotive shift from one level of sensoriality to another level of heightened or attentive, sometimes singularly emotive transition. If we are to include the wider rubric of creativity for the wider ambit of non-art species, like technological innovation, design, or consumer outreach – and then machine design or architecture, and then virtual reality, (which are not -strictly speaking – spatially located but only perceptual cues and more radically divergent dispositions, then creativity still consists of this peculiar emotive evocation of an antecedent. How does the effect come about – in what angles of reception or appropriation does this work – perhaps the neural correlates are multinodal: indeed all experiments tend to show that an emotively symbolic visual pattern would involve an affectation of pre-frontal cortex just as much as as it would invite the norepinephrine and dopamine transmitters to generate effects. The cerebral process is at this stage beyond the purview, and indeed not much research on what Oshin Vartanian called neuroaesthetics discusses emotive resources of the arts. Probably in neuroaesthetics -as much as in more specific instances of research on this creative process there first needs to be an acknowledgement of this enfocussed miniature that evolves as a result creative practice.

Hereby I am perhaps coming close to take a call – creativity has hardly anything to do with non-emotive evocation even though non-emotive creativity may still qualify as a type of divergence. In twenty years of research by Guilford however we don not have any evidence of likening the emotive structure of divergence to the creativity question – in an earlier generation of Western criticism there was greater sanity in the acknowledgement of, I believe, what plausibly exists, the “demarcative” mental state of emotions. But demarcative may be problematic. Though creativity results in emotive conditions or reflexes these are not essentially different but may merely represent intensities on a spectrum. This is a view to which I am more strongly inclined under present states of enquiry -hints of which arise in the research on what modern cognitive studies refer to as valence states – rather than emotion alone. Such dichotomies do not exist in the art experience -even though they do so in analytical treatment of issues of creativity. So creativity

  1. Involves emotive circuits and reflexes
  2. Art objects provoke valence intensity for a positive state of emotions
  3. Creativity leads to automatism –

These are some of the problems in aesthetics -a description or psychometric analysis of such emotions may help us in defining a better trajectory for wellbeing and social progress – it could also have therapeutic potential for a good deal of manic-depressive states. These are some of the other issues that we need to explore.

Editorial

//
215 views
Volume 8, Number 4, 2016

Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay Ph.D
Associate Professor, Digital Arte y Empresa, Universidad de Guanajuato, Campus Irapuato-Salamanca, Mexico.

Volume 8, Number 4, 2016 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v8n4.01

The focus for this issue has been human sciences – perhaps a term that indicates toward a total scientific orientation, that is an approach based on observation, experiment and hypothesis testing, as much as codifying the phenomenal properties of human life by means of predictive mathematical models. In short, the question is to understand the complex and biologically advanced nature of the human corpus, and the array of intricate functions and behaviors visible in the social sphere. To accomplish this task is also to ask for a mysterious version of material nature, no less fascinating than a mystical or religious myth of creation.

            It would be erroneous to suggest that an initiative for human sciences has been the product of European enlightenment, and its post-modern variations. The skeptical temperament also writes the genesis of a universe. A good Indian example is Charvaka. In the West, Sextus Empiricus emphasized on the possibility of knowledge, and the importance of empirical understanding. All other systems of knowledge are fancy toys that promote idle speculative conundrums.

            The question that we should posit logically is how we should define the scientific initiative for human arts and intuitions, and for culture. The answer is already on the way. The development of anthropology and cognitive sciences tends to re-invent the problems that were once relegated to philosophy, and psychology. But this is only a brand simple way of advocacy for the social sciences. The arts could benefit from a science based approach if its qualities were harnessed for our world, which is so full of unexpected quirks, and possibilities non sequitur. Technologies have rendered the older artistic and expressive formats obsolete.

            But all the more interesting is the vision of the new knowledge that is beginning to emerge with science based approaches to some profound human questions. I find the disconnectedness and?  focalization of paradigm very interesting. It is as if we only know about localized structures. The experimental proof of a certain activity or trend in human society gives us certitude about that particular aspect ?w?hich has been investigated, and no more?, ?and neither is there certainty that the conclusion may not be challenged, modified or abrogated and hence bringing about unpredictable connections in the concatenation.  Perhaps the sciences promote a regard for the method, more than that of any inference. But the sciences offer the conviction that this is the best we could do to resolve the crises and torrents of life.

You might be interested in

1 2 3