Informalilty in the Social and Culture Life in the City Centre of Nairobi

We live in a world of advanced technology, stiff global competition and rapid transformation of all facets of life and as a result architecture has not been spared. These transformations affect the social relations, cultural consumption and political economy that have influenced the manner in which people perform in and out of space in the city centres. The residents have adopted strategies for negotiating through the spaces sanitized by authorities and other agents. The public spaces provide the background materials for informal urban practices that are sometimes deemed illegal yet are necessary for animating the city spaces. Cities market themselves ecstatically beyond the baroque with a more visible presence of the contending parties through trademarks, public relations invasively advertised in streets, monuments (signature buildings or projects), and language. This paper comes out of a research carried out in Nairobi in February and March 2007. It examined how the notions of globalisation are reflected in the life in the city centre; the impacts on the quality of life of users of the city centre and how informal urbanism has developed as copying strategy to deal with the transformations due to liberalization and globalization.

Regarding the Real: Cinema, Documentary, and the Visual Arts

Regarding the Real: Cinema, Documentary, and the Visual Arts develops an interdisciplinary approach to documentary film, focusing on its cultural and formal relations to other visual arts, such as animation, assemblage, photography, painting, sculpture, and architecture. The book considers the work of figures whose preferred film language is associative and fragmentary, and for whom the documentary is an endlessly open form, an unstable expressive phenomenon that cannot but interrogate the validity of its own narratives and representational modes. Combining close analysis with cultural history, Regarding the Real calls for a re-assessment of the influence of the modern arts in subverting the structures of realism typically associated with documentary filmmaking.

A experiência barroca e a identidade local na Semana Santa de Campanha, Minas Gerais

Este trabalho analisa a formação de uma sensibilidade barroca em Minas Gerais a partir da orientação participativa e altamente emotiva das festas coloniais, cujo legado se mantem presente nas festas religiosas de muitas antigas cidades mineradoras do estado. Enfocando as celebrações da Semana Santa na cidade sul-mineira de Campanha, o texto mostra como este evento anual era organizado pela Irmandade do Santíssimo Sacramento, passando então às mãos de uma comissão local após a extinção da irmandade. Se até meados do século XIX, havia músicos semi-profissionais contratados para tocar e cantar nas celebrações, a música foi assumida progressivamente por grupos de amadores. Assim, a festa passou a ser entendida como uma produção local e a cada ano a população renova o seu orgulho campanhense, ao contemplar sua capacidade de produzir um evento tão ‘maravilhoso’.

This paper analyses the formation of a baroque sensibility in the State of Minas Gerais (Brazil) that derives from the participatory and highly emotive orientation of the colonial festivals, the legacy of which is still present in many former mining towns in the region. By focusing upon the Holy Week celebrations in Campanha, a small town in southern Minas Gerais, the text shows how this annual event was organized by the Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament, but was then transferred to a local committee after the confraternity was made extinct. If up to the mid 19th century there were semi-professional musicians to perform for the celebrations, responsibility for the music was slowly taken over by amateur groups. In this way the festival came to be understood as a local affair, and each year the population renews its pride in itself for its capacity to stage such a ‘marvelous’ event.

First record of a chiton from the Palaeocene of Denmark (Polyplacophora : Leptochitonidae) and its phylogenetic affinities

Anew species of fossil polyplacophoran from the Danian (Lower Palaeocene) of Denmark is described from over 450 individual disarticulated plates. The polyplacophorans originate from the 'nose-chalk' in the classical Danish locality of Fakse Quarry, an unconsolidated coral limestone in which aragonitic mollusc shells are preserved through transformation into calcite. In plate architecture and sculpture, the new Danish material is similar to Recent Leptochiton spp., but differs in its underdeveloped apophyses and high dorsal elevation (height/width ca. 0.54). Cladistic analysis of 55 original shell characters coded for more than loo Recent and fossil species in the order Lepiclopleurida shows very high resolution of interspecific relationships, but does not consistently recover traditional genera or subgenera. Inter-relationships within the suborder Lepidopleurina are of particular interest as it is often considered the most 'basal' neoloricate lineage. In a local context, the presence of chitons in the faunal assemblage of Fakse contributes evidence of shallow depositional depth for at least some elements of this Palaeocene seabed, a well-studied formation of azooxanthellic coral limestones. This new record for Denmark represents a well-dated and ecologically well-understood fossil chiton with potential value for understanding the radiation of the Neotoricata.

Bach

For nearly two centuries Johann Sebastian Bach has been regarded as a cornerstone of Western musical culture. His music inspired subsequent generations of composers and philosophers alike, and continues to capture our imaginations in many ways. Bach studies is part of this picture, often seen as providing excellent examples of musicological scholarship. The editor has chosen 31 published articles which, in his view, not only represent a broad spectrum of the scholarly discussions on Bach's life and works, but will also facilitate the on-going study of Bach's creative genius. The articles have been selected to ensure that this volume will be considered useful for not only those students who are currently engaging in Bach studies at universities but also for more seasoned Bach scholars as they consider the future direction of Bach studies. The editor contextualises the significance of each article in the introduction.

Interview with Paul DeMarinis

Since the early 1970s, the American electronic media artist Paul DeMarinis (b. 1948, Cleveland, Ohio, USA) has created works that re-imagine modes of communication and reinvent the technologies that enable communication. His works (see Table 1) have taken shape as recordings, performances, electronic inventions, and site-specific and interactive installations; many are considered landmarks in the histories of electronic music and media art. Paul DeMarinis pioneered live performance with computers, collaborated on landmark works with artists like David Tudor and Robert Ashley, undertook several tours with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and brought to life obscure technologies such as the flame loudspeaker (featured in his 2004 sculpture Firebirds). His interactive installation The Music Room (1982), commissioned by Frank Oppenheimer for the Exploratorium in San Francisco, was the first automatic music work to reach a significant audience. His album Music As A Second Language (1991) marks one of the most extensive explorations of the synthesized voice and speech melodies to date. Installations like The Edison Effect (1989-1993), in which lasers scan ancient recordings to produce music, and The Messenger (1998/2005), in which electronic mail messages are displayed on alphabetic telegraph receivers, illustrate a creative process that Douglas Kahn (1994) has called "reinventing invention." [etc]

Fauna

Stapleton’s self designed instrument, the BoSS (Bonsai Sound Sculpture, 2010) combines with Rose’s circular breathed baritone, multi-phonic and harmonic textures, to explore other sound worlds through real time interaction/composition. The method of exploration commits to a free improvisation aesthetic whereby the music is created at the point of performance. Encountering one another’s music while performing at the ‘Call them Improvisers’ performance at SARC, an ensemble directed by Evan Parker (November 2010) an affinity to the possibilities of one another’s particular approach became immediately apparent. This strongly identified connection led them to further explore the musical possibilities within the parameters created by the duo setting. Duo activities include concerts at Ausland (Berlin), SARC (Belfast), Sowieso (Berlin), Wendel (Berlin), and a recording with Elmar Susse in Hoffnungskirche, Pankow released by the California-based pfMENTUM record label in 2013.

This output is published in the form of an audio CD on the pfMENTUM record label.

Marvell's Latin Poetry and the Art of Punning

This chapter analyses Marvell’s linguistic ingenuity as exemplified by his Latin poetic corpus. Here, it is argued, a pseudo Lucretian sensitivity to the parallelism between the structure of Latin words and the structure of the world co-exists with a linguistic methodology that is essentially Marinesque. Close examination of the Latin poems as a whole assesses the nature and significance of etymological play, paronomasia, puns on juxtaposed Latin words, on place names, and on personal names. It is suggested that such devices demonstrate ways in which the neo-Latin poetic text can serve both as a linguistic microcosm of the literary contexts in which they are employed, and as a re-invention of the artifice, extravagant conceits, and baroque wit of Marinism. The result is a neo-Latin ‘echoing song’ that is both intra- and intertextual. Through bilingual punning and phonological wit Marvell plays with a classical language only to demonstrate its transformative potential. The chapter concludes by offering a new reading of Hortus in relation to the garden sections of Marino’s L’Adone, in which an extravagantly luscious setting confounds the senses and is mirrored linguistically by word-clusters and labyrinthine punning.

Marie Sallé as muse, Handel's music for mime

Considers Handel's musical response to a dancer-choreographer in line with then-current styles of dance

Proxemics: The World is a Deaf Machine

A multi-channel sound installation involving fixed loudspeakers and multiple mp3 players, commissioned by the Sainsbury Centre of Visual Arts, Norwich as a response to the sculpture of Ian Tyson and the architecture of Denys Lasdun.

Sound Art and Spatial Practices: Situating Sound Installation Art Since 1958

This dissertation examines the emergence and development of sound installation art, an under-recognized tradition that has developed between music, architecture, and media art practices since the late 1950s. Unlike many musical works, which are concerned with organizing sounds in time, sound installations organize sounds in space; they thus necessitate new theoretical and analytical models that take into consideration the spatial situated-ness of sound. Existing discourses on “spatial sound” privilege technical descriptions of sound localization. By contrast, this dissertation examines the ways in which concepts of space are socially, culturally, and politically construed, and how spatially-organized sound works reflect and resist these different constructions. Using an interdisciplinary methodology of critical spatial analysis and critical studies in music, this dissertation explores such topics as: conceptions of acoustic space in postwar Western art music, architecture, and media theory; the development of sound installation art in relation to philosophies of everyday life and social space; the historical links between musical performance, conceptual art, and sound sculpture; the body as a site for sound installations; and sonicspatial strategies that confront politics of race and gender. Through these different investigations, this dissertation proposes an “ontopological” model for considering sound: a critical model of analysis and reception that privileges an understanding of sound in relation to ontologies of space and place.