The role of the lateral occipital cortex in aesthetic appreciation of representational and abstract paintings: a TMS study.

Neuroimaging studies of aesthetic appreciation have shown that activity in the lateral occipital area (LO)—a key node in the object recognition pathway—is modulated by the extent to which visual artworks are liked or found beautiful. However, the available evidence is only correlational. Here we used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to investigate the putative causal role of LO in the aesthetic appreciation of paintings. In our first experiment, we found that interfering with LO activity during aesthetic appreciation selectively reduced evaluation of representational paintings, leaving appreciation of abstract paintings unaffected. A second experiment demonstrated that, although the perceived clearness of the images overall positively correlated with liking, the detrimental effect of LO TMS on aesthetic appreciation does not owe to TMS reducing perceived clearness. Taken together, our findings suggest that object-recognition mechanisms mediated by LO play a causal role in aesthetic appreciation of representational art.

Spaces of Visibility for the Migrants of Lampedusa: The Counter Narrative of the Aesthetic Discourse

Political, legal, and media discourse around ‘boat-migrants’ arriving in Lampedusa share a tendency to focus on an unnamed and anonymous mass of people in order to build and sustain a Border Spectacle revolving around immigration to Italy. In this context, where very little space is usually left to individual migrant voices, this article challenges this common understanding of immigration to Lampedusa by showing a different side of the story, a story told by the real actors of the Mediterranean passage, the migrants themselves, who, by relying on the realm of aesthetics, have managed to gain visibility and to become ‘subjects of power.’

Islamic Infrastructure Finance and Sustainable Development Goals

This was a very interesting discussion with the pioneers of Islamic finance regarding infrastructure finance and the sustainable development goals.

Cinematic and Aesthetic Cartographies of Subjective Mutation

This article examines the use of cinema as a mapping of subjective mutation in the work of Deleuze, Gauttari and Berardi. Drawing on Deleuze's distinction between the reduction of the art-work to the symptom and the idea of art as symptomatology, the article focuses on Berardi's use of cinematic examples, posing the question in each case of to what extent they function as symptomatologies or mere symptoms of cultural and subjective mutations in examples ranging from Bergman's Persona to Van Sant's Elephant to finish on speculations about Fincher's The Social Network as a critical engagement with subjective mutation in the 21st Century.