7 resultados para Art and mythology

em Duke University


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Confronting the rapidly increasing, worldwide reliance on biometric technologies to surveil, manage, and police human beings, my dissertation Informatic Opacity: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Aesthetics and Politics of Defacement charts a series of queer, feminist, and anti-racist concepts and artworks that favor opacity as a means of political struggle against surveillance and capture technologies in the 21st century. Utilizing biometric facial recognition as a paradigmatic example, I argue that today's surveillance requires persons to be informatically visible in order to control them, and such visibility relies upon the production of technical standardizations of identification to operate globally, which most vehemently impact non- normative, minoritarian populations. Thus, as biometric technologies turn exposures of the face into sites of governance, activists and artists strive to make the face biometrically illegible and refuse the political recognition biometrics promises through acts of masking, escape, and imperceptibility. Although I specifically describe tactics of making the face unrecognizable as "defacement," I broadly theorize refusals to visually cohere to digital surveillance and capture technologies' gaze as "informatic opacity," an aesthetic-political theory and practice of anti- normativity at a global, technical scale whose goal is maintaining the autonomous determination of alterity and difference by evading the quantification, standardization, and regulation of identity imposed by biometrics and the state. My dissertation also features two artworks: Facial Weaponization Suite, a series of masks and public actions, and Face Cages, a critical, dystopic installation that investigates the abstract violence of biometric facial diagramming and analysis. I develop an interdisciplinary, practice-based method that pulls from contemporary art and aesthetic theory, media theory and surveillance studies, political and continental philosophy, queer and feminist theory, transgender studies, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies.

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This dissertation centers on the relationship between art and politics in postwar Central America as materialized in the specific issues of racial and gendered violence that derive from the region's geopolitical location and history. It argues that the decade of the 1990s marks a moment of change in the region's cultural infrastructure, both institutionally and conceptually, in which artists seek a new visual language of experimental art practices to articulate and conceptualize a critical understanding of place, experience and knowledge. It posits that visual and conceptual manifestations of violence in Central American performance, conceptual art and installation extend beyond a critique of the state, and beyond the scope of political parties in perpetuating violent circumstances in these countries. It argues that instead artists use experimental practices in art to locate manifestations of racial violence in an historical system of domination and as a legacy of colonialism still witnessed, lived, and learned by multiple subjectivities in the region. In this postwar period artists move beyond the cold-war rhetoric of the previous decades and instead root the current social and political injustices in what Aníbal Quijano calls the `coloniality of power.' Through an engagement of decolonial methodologies, this dissertation challenges the label "political art" in Central America and offers what I call "visual disobedience" as a response to the coloniality of seeing. I posit that visual colonization is yet another aspect of the coloniality of power and indispensable to projects of decolonization. It offers an analysis of various works to show how visual disobedience responds specifically to racial and gender violence and the equally violent colonization of visuality in Mesoamerica. Such geopolitical critiques through art unmask themes specific to life and identity in contemporary Central America, from indigenous genocide, femicide, transnational gangs, to mass imprisonments and a new wave of social cleansing. I propose that Central American artists--beyond an anti-colonial stance--are engaging in visual disobedience so as to construct decolonial epistemologies in art, through art, and as art as decolonial gestures for healing.

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BACKGROUND: In Tanzania, HIV-1 RNA testing is rarely available and not standard of care. Determining virologic failure is challenging and resistance mutations accumulate, thereby compromising second-line therapy. We evaluated durability of antiretroviral therapy (ART) and predictors of virologic failure among a pediatric cohort at four-year follow-up. METHODS: This was a prospective cross-sectional study with retrospective chart review evaluating a perinatally HIV-infected Tanzanian cohort enrolled in 2008-09 with repeat HIV-1 RNA in 2012-13. Demographic, clinical, and laboratory data were extracted from charts, resistance mutations from 2008-9 were analyzed, and prospective HIV RNA was obtained. RESULTS: 161 (78%) participants of the original cohort consented to repeat HIV RNA. The average age was 12.2 years (55% adolescents ≥12 years). Average time on ART was 6.4 years with 41% receiving second-line (protease inhibitor based) therapy. Among those originally suppressed on a first-line (non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase based regimen) 76% remained suppressed. Of those originally failing first-line, 88% were switched to second-line and 72% have suppressed virus. Increased level of viremia and duration of ART trended with an increased number of thymidine analogue mutations (TAMs). Increased TAMs increased the odds of virologic failure (p = 0.18), as did adolescent age (p < 0.01). CONCLUSIONS: After viral load testing in 2008-09 many participants switched to second-line therapy. The majority achieved virologic suppression despite multiple resistance mutations. Though virologic testing would likely hasten the switch to second-line among those failing, methods to improve adherence is critical to maximize durability of ART and improve virologic outcomes among youth in resource-limited settings.

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The Carmelite friars were the last of the major mendicant orders to be established in Italy. Originally an eremitical order, they arrived from the Holy Land in the 1240s, decades after other mendicant orders, such as the Franciscans and Dominicans, had constructed churches and cultivated patrons in the burgeoning urban centers of central Italy. In a religious market already saturated with friars, the Carmelites distinguished themselves by promoting their Holy Land provenance, eremitical values, and by developing an institutional history claiming to be descendants of the Old Testament prophet Elijah. By the end of the 13th century the order had constructed thriving churches and convents and leveraged itself into a prominent position in the religious community. My dissertation analyzes these early Carmelite churches and convents, as well as the friars’ interactions with patrons, civic governments, and the urban space they occupied. Through three primary case studies – the churches and convents of Pisa, Siena and Florence – I examine the Carmelites’ approach to art, architecture, and urban space as the order transformed its mission from one of solitary prayer to one of active ministry.

My central questions are these: To what degree did the Carmelites’ Holy Land provenance inform the art and architecture they created for their central Italian churches? And to what degree was their visual culture instead a reflection of the mendicant norms of the time?

I have sought to analyze the Carmelites at the institutional level, to determine how the order viewed itself and how it wanted its legacy to develop. I then seek to determine how and if the institutional model was utilized in the artistic and architectural production of the individual convents. The understanding of Carmelite art as a promotional tool for the identity of the order is not a new one, however my work is the first to consider deeply the order’s architectural aspirations. I also consider the order’s relationships with its de facto founding saint, the prophet Elijah, and its patron, the Virgin Mary, in a more comprehensive manner that situates the resultant visual culture into the contemporary theological and historical contexts.

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“Globalizing the Sculptural Landscape of Isis and Sarapis Cults in Roman Greece,” asks questions of cross-cultural exchange and viewership of sculptural assemblages set up in sanctuaries to the Egyptian gods. Focusing on cognitive dissonance, cultural imagining, and manipulations of time and space, I theorize ancient globalization as a set of loosely related processes that shifted a community's connections with place. My case studies range from the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, including sanctuaries at Rhodes, Thessaloniki, Dion, Marathon, Gortyna, and Delos. At these sites, devotees combined mainstream Greco-Roman sculptures, Egyptian imports, and locally produced imitations of Egyptian artifacts. In the last case, local sculptors represented Egyptian subjects with Greco-Roman naturalistic styles, creating an exoticized visual ideal that had both local and global resonance. My dissertation argues that the sculptural assemblages set up in Egyptian sanctuaries allowed each community to construct complex narratives about the nature of the Egyptian gods. Further, these images participated in a form of globalization that motivated local communities to adopt foreign gods and reinterpret them to suit local needs.

I begin my dissertation by examining how Isis and Sarapis were represented in Greece. My first chapter focuses on single statues of Egyptian gods, describing their iconographies and stylistic tendencies through examples from Corinth and Gortyna. By comparing Greek examples with images of Sarapis, Isis, and Harpokrates from around the Mediterranean, I demonstrate that Greek communities relied on globally available visual tropes rather than creating site or region-specific interpretations. In the next section, I examine what other sources viewers drew upon to inform their experiences of Egyptian sculpture. In Chapter 3, I survey the textual evidence for Isiac cult practice in Greece as a way to reconstruct devotees’ expectations of sculptures in sanctuary contexts. At the core of this analysis are Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride, which offer a Greek perspective on the cult’s theology. These literary works rely on a tradition of aretalogical inscriptions—long hymns produced from roughly the late 4th century B.C.E. into the 4th century C.E. that describe the expansive syncretistic powers of Isis, Sarapis, and Harpokrates. This chapter argues that the textual evidence suggests that devotees may have expected their images to be especially miraculous and likely to intervene on their behalf, particularly when involved in ritual activity inside the sanctuary.

In the final two chapters, I consider sculptural programs and ritual activity in concert with sanctuary architecture. My fourth chapter focuses on sanctuaries where large amounts of sculpture were found in underground water crypts: Thessaloniki and Rhodes. These groups of statues can be connected to a particular sanctuary space, but their precise display contexts are not known. By reading these images together, I argue that local communities used these globally available images to construct new interpretations of these gods, ones that explored the complex intersections of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman identities in a globalized Mediterranean. My final chapter explores the Egyptian sanctuary at Marathon, a site where exceptional preservation allows us to study how viewers would have experienced images in architectural space. Using the Isiac visuality established in Chapter 3, I reconstruct the viewer's experience, arguing that the patron, Herodes Atticus, intended his viewer to inform his experience with the complex theology of Middle Platonism and prevailing elite attitudes about Roman imperialism.

Throughout my dissertation, I diverge from traditional approaches to culture change that center on the concepts of Romanization and identity. In order to access local experiences of globalization, I examine viewership on a micro-scale. I argue that viewers brought their concerns about culture change into dialogue with elements of cult, social status, art, and text to create new interpretations of Roman sculpture sensitive to the challenges of a highly connected Mediterranean world. In turn, these transcultural perspectives motivated Isiac devotees to create assemblages that combined elements from multiple cultures. These expansive attitudes also inspired Isiac devotees to commission exoticized images that brought together disparate cultures and styles in an eclectic manner that mirrored the haphazard way that travel brought change to the Mediterranean world. My dissertation thus offers a more theoretically rigorous way of modeling culture change in antiquity that recognizes local communities’ agency in producing their cultural landscapes, reconciling some of the problems of scale that have plagued earlier approaches to provincial Roman art.

These case studies demonstrate that cultural anxieties played a key role in how viewers experienced artistic imagery in the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean. This dissertation thus offers a new component in our understanding of ancient visuality, and, in turn, a better way to analyze how local communities dealt with the rise of connectivity and globalization.