Niche Specialization and Conservation Biology of Cicindela nevadica lincolniana

As with many organisms across the globe, Cicindela nevadica lincolniana is threatened with extinction. Understanding ecological factors that contribute to extinction vulnerability and what methods aid in the recovery of those species is essential in developing successful conservation programs. Here we examine behavioral mechanisms for niche partitioning along with improving techniques for captive rearing protocol and increasing public awareness about the conservation of this local insect. Ovipositional selectivity was examined for Cicindela nevadica lincolniana, Cicindela circumpicta, Cicindela togata, Cicindela punctulata, and Cicindela fulgida. Models reflect that these species of co-occurring tiger beetles select different ranges of salinity in which to oviposit thereby reducing the potential for interspecific competition. In a second study, thermoregulatory niche partitioning was examined for the same complex of tiger beetle species. Time spent in the sun, on different substrates, and engaging in various behaviors associated with thermoregulation were significantly different during different parts of the day and between species. I continued along a previous line of study to develop a viable captive rearing program. So far fourteen adult Cicindela nevadica lincolniana have been successfully reared in captivity. Overwintering mortality has been determined as a key factor in the mortality of this species in captivity. Finally, I examined the potential for using the visual arts to promote the conservation of Cicindela nevadica lincolniana and associated saline wetlands. The results from surveys conducted at the exhibit suggest that art exhibits can have a strong positive impact on members of the community.

Performatividade narrativa: intersecções narrativas em performance, fotografia e vídeo

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Trabalhos 2010-2014: performatividade escultórica

This paper presentes my production between 2009 and 2014 during the course of Bachelor of Visual Arts at the Art Institute of UNESP. I focus especially on my sculpture production and the development of this language to photography and video as a way to record my actions and performances. My approach to these experiments are with other artists of the 1960s and 1970s; especially the minimalist and post-minimalist movement

Sophie Calle: entre imagens e palavras

A relação de Sophie Calle com dois textos ficcionais, de autoria de Hervé Guibert e Paul Auster, permite discutir um ponto central de sua poética: a atuação como performer, colocada por alguns críticos sob o signo do situacionismo. Como suas performances envolvem uma narrativa, foram analisados seus aspectos fotográficos e verbais, tendo como epicentro Suíte veneziana (1980). Qual o papel da fotografia nas narrativas de Calle, nas quais ela é personagem de si mesma? A fotografia é vestígio de acontecimentos reais e seu aspecto documental corrobora a neutralidade dos relatos escritos. É, ao mesmo tempo, fruto de um gesto performático, o qual, ao designar determinados fatos, converte a realidade em imagem.

Breve relato da Pós-Graduação em Artes Visuais da ECA-USP

Este texto foi preparado inicialmente para uma palestra aos alunos do PAE - Programa de Apoio ao Ensino, da ECA-USP, em 2002, quando se iniciava o processo do desmembramento do Programa de Artes em três programas autônomos, o que veio a se concretizar em julho de 2006. O texto foi retomado agora, em 2009, como um breve e parcial relato do período

Exploration time of static images implying different body movements causes time distortions

Studies of subjective time have adopted different methods to understand different processes of time perception. Four sculptures, with implied movement ranked as 1.5-, 3.0-, 4.5-, and 6.0-point stimuli on the Body Movement Ranking Scale, were randomly presented to 42 university students untrained in visual arts and ballet. Participants were allowed to observe the images for any length of time (exploration time) and, immediately after each image was observed, recorded the duration as they perceived it. The results of temporal ratio (exploration time/time estimation) showed that exploration time of images also affected perception of time, i.e., the subjective time for sculptures representing implied movement were overestimated.\

Percorsi di gender performance: fotografia tra arte e moda dagli anni Novanta ad oggi

My project explores and compares different forms of gender performance in contemporary art and visual culture according to a perspective centered on photography. Thanks to its attesting power this medium can work as a ready-made. In fact during the 20th century it played a key role in the cultural emancipation of the body which (using a Michel Foucault’s expression) has now become «the zero point of the world». Through performance the body proves to be a living material of expression and communication while photography ensures the recording of any ephemeral event that happens in time and space. My questioning approach considers the gender constructed imagery from the 1990s to the present in order to investigate how photography’s strong aura of realism promotes and allows fantasies of transformation. The contemporary fascination with gender (especially for art and fashion) represents a crucial issue in the global context of postmodernity and is manifested in a variety of visual media, from photography to video and film. Moreover the internet along with its digital transmission of images has deeply affected our world (from culture to everyday life) leading to a postmodern preference for performativity over the more traditional and linear forms of narrativity. As a consequence individual borders get redefined by the skin itself which (dissected through instant vision) turns into a ductile material of mutation and hybridation in the service of identity. My critical assumptions are taken from the most relevant changes occurred in philosophy during the last two decades as a result of the contributions by Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze who developed a cross-disciplinary and comparative approach to interpret the crisis of modernity. They have profoundly influenced feminist studies so that the category of gender has been reassessed in contrast with sex (as a biological connotation) and in relation to history, culture, society. The ideal starting point of my research is the year 1990. I chose it as the approximate historical moment when the intersection of race, class and gender were placed at the forefront of international artistic production concerned with identity, diversity and globalization. Such issues had been explored throughout the 1970s but it was only from the mid-1980s onward that they began to be articulated more consistently. Published in 1990, the book "Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity" by Judith Butler marked an important breakthrough by linking gender to performance as well as investigating the intricate connections between theory and practice, embodiment and representation. It inspired subsequent research in a variety of disciplines, art history included. In the same year Teresa de Lauretis launched the definition of queer theory to challenge the academic perspective in gay and lesbian studies. In the meantime the rise of Third Wave Feminism in the US introduced a racially and sexually inclusive vision over the global situation in order to reflect on subjectivity, new technologies and popular culture in connection with gender representation. These conceptual tools have enabled prolific readings of contemporary cultural production whether fine arts or mass media. After discussing the appropriate framework of my project and taking into account the postmodern globalization of the visual, I have turned to photography to map gender representation both in art and in fashion. Therefore I have been creating an archive of images around specific topics. I decided to include fashion photography because in the 1990s this genre moved away from the paradigm of an idealized and classical beauty toward a new vernacular allied with lifestyles, art practices, pop and youth culture; as one might expect the dominant narrative modes in fashion photography are now mainly influenced by cinema and snapshot. These strategies originate story lines and interrupted narratives using models’ performance to convey a particular imagery where identity issues emerge as an essential part of fashion spectacle. Focusing on the intersections of gender identities with socially and culturally produced identities, my approach intends to underline how the fashion world has turned to current trends in art photography and in some case turned to the artists themselves. The growing fluidity of the categories that distinguish art from fashion photography represents a particularly fruitful moment of visual exchange. Varying over time the dialogue between these two fields has always been vital; nowadays it can be studied as a result of this close relationship between contemporary art world and consumer culture. Due to the saturation of postmodern imagery the feedback between art and fashion has become much more immediate and then increasingly significant for anyone who wants to investigate the construction of gender identity through performance. In addition to that a lot of magazines founded in the 1990s bridged the worlds of art and fashion because some of their designers and even editors were art-school graduates encouraging innovation. The inclusion of art within such magazines aimed at validating them as a form of art in themselves supporting a dynamic intersection for music, fashion, design and youth culture: an intersection that also contributed to create and spread different gender stereotypes. This general interest in fashion produced many exhibitions of and about fashion itself at major international venues such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Since then this celebrated success of fashion has been regarded as a typical element of postmodern culture. Owing to that I have also based my analysis on some important exhibitions dealing with gender performance like "Féminin-Masculin" at the Centre Pompidou of Paris (1995), "Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose. Gender performance in photography" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York (1997), "Global Feminisms" at the Brooklyn Museum (2007), "Female Trouble" at the Pinakothek der Moderne in München together with the workshops dedicated to "Performance: gender and identity" in June 2005 at the Tate Modern of London. Since 2003 in Italy we have had Gender Bender - an international festival held annually in Bologna - to explore the gender imagery stemming from contemporary culture. In few days this festival offers a series of events ranging from visual arts, performance, cinema, literature to conferences and music. Being aware that any method of research is neither race nor gender neutral I have traced these critical paths to question gender identity in a multicultural perspective taking account of the political implications too. In fact, if visibility may be equated with exposure, we can also read these images as points of intersection of visibility with social power. Since gender assignations rely so heavily on the visual, the postmodern dismantling of gender certainty through performance has wide-ranging effects that need to be analyzed. In some sense this practice can even contest the dominance of visual within postmodernism. My visual map in contemporary art and fashion photography includes artists like Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Hellen van Meene, Rineke Dijkstra, Ed Templeton, Ryan McGinley, Anne Daems, Miwa Yanagi, Tracey Moffat, Catherine Opie, Tomoko Sawada, Vanessa Beecroft, Yasumasa Morimura, Collier Schorr among others.

The Institutional Framework around Successful Art Forms in Communist Czechoslovakia

Mr. Michl posed the question of how the institutional framework that the former communist regime set up around art production contributed to the success of Czech applied arts. In his theoretical review of the question he discussed the reasons for the lack of success of socialist industrial design as opposed to what he terms pre-industrial arts (such as art glass), and also for the current lack of interest into art institutions of the past regime. His findings in the second, historical section of his work were based largely on interviews with artists and other insiders, as an initial attempt to use questionnaires was unsuccessful. His original assumption that the institutional framework was imposed on artists against their will in fact proved mistaken, as it turned out to have been proposed by the artists themselves. The basic blueprint for communist art institutions was the Memorandum document published on behalf of Czechoslovak visual artists in March 1947, i.e. before the communist coup of February 1948. Thus, while the communist state provided a beneficial institutional framework for artists' work, it was the artists themselves who designed this framework. Mr. Michl concludes that the text of the memorandum appealed to the general left-wing and anti-market sentiments of the immediate post-war period and by this and by later working through the administrative channels of the new state, the artists succeeded in gaining all of their demands over the next 15 years. The one exception was artistic freedom, although this they came to enjoy, if only by default and for a short time, during the ideological thaw of the 1960s. Mr. Michl also examined the art-related legislative framework in detail and looked at the main features of key art institutions in the field, such as the Czech Fund for Visual Arts and the 1960s art export enterprise Art Centrum, which opened the doors into foreign markets for artists.

Post-Empire Imaginaries? Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires

Empires as political entities may be a thing of the past, but as a concept, empire is alive and kicking. From heritage tourism and costume dramas to theories of the imperial idea(l): empire sells. Post-Empire Imaginaries? Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires presents innovative scholarship on the lives and legacies of empires in diverse media such as literature, film, advertising, and the visual arts. Though rooted in real space and history, the post-empire and its twin, the post-imperial, emerge as ungraspable ideational constructs. The volume convincingly establishes empire as welcoming resistance and affirmation, introducing post-empire imaginaries as figurations that connect the archives and repertoires of colonial nostalgia, postcolonial critique, post-imperial dreaming.

Narraciones autobiográficas : relato, reconstrucción y sentido : de la experiencia escolar a la práctica docente

El presente trabajo evidencia como los procesos autobiográficos posibilitan tomar conciencia de las teorías implícitas que estructuran “un modo de ser y hacer docencia". Cuestiona nuestros propios modelos docentes e interroga a los posibles lectores a partir del descubrimiento de sentidos que atraviesan los relatos de los alumnos. Enfocando lo disciplinar rescata núcleos problemáticos del arte como la dialéctica entre el modelo académico tradicional y el modelo discursivo contemporáneo entre otros. Cuestiona además el rol docente y sus cualidades en un proceso educativo concreto: enseñar artes visuales. “Desde hace cien años, toda escritura es un ejercicio de domesticación o de repulsión frente a esa Forma-Objeto que el escritor encuentra fatalmente en su camino, que necesita mirar, afrontar, asumir, y que nunca puede destruir sin destruirse a sí mismo como escritor. La Forma se suspende frente a la mirada como un objeto, hágase lo que se haga es un escándalo: espléndida, aparece pasada de moda; anárquica, es asocial; particular en relación con el tiempo o con los hombres, de cualquier modo es soledad." Roland Barthes. El grado cero de la escritura

Nueva mímesis, imágenes y otredades en Intemperie, de Roger Pla

Escrita entre 1966 y 1969 y publicada en 1973 por Emecé en Argentina y Círculo de lectores en España, Intemperie es una de las más importantes narraciones de Roger Pla (1912-1982) y una de las más notables novelas argentinas de la década de 1970-1980. Además, fue finalista en el prestigioso Premio Seix Barral, edición de 1969, en la época del esplendor del Boom y del Postboom. Poco conocida por la crítica académica, Intemperie fue también un éxito de lectores al momento de la edición, notable aspecto porque es, al mismo tiempo, un texto complejo y experimental que deconstruye tiempo y espacio para construir nuevas ideas, imágenes y perspectivas acerca de una posible realidad total. Este ensayo examina diferentes aspectos clave en relación a características experimentales y tópicas de Intemperie, incluyendo la influencia de las artes visuales en la estética de la novela, el tema de la Otredad y el posible valor de aquella obra literaria en el desarrollo del sistema literario argentino.

Arqueologías del ¿Futuro? : Cartografía estética aplicada a territorios específicos

Los Territorios Específicos condicionados socioambiental y/o físicoculturalmente son sistematizados en base a sus cualidades éticas y estéticas en su sentido filosófico y formal respectivamente. Los mismos surgen como entidades orgánicamente integradas a nivel de las prácticas culturales en función de una performatividad autopoiética con gradientes y resonancias ampliamente debatidas académicamente y/o, a través de producciones específicas de las artes visuales contemporáneas. La Cartografía Estética propuesta se conforma de un corpus de obras plásticas y teóricas que, en la trayectoria expositiva abordada para este estudio, conforman una constelación de ejes temáticos y procedimentales en vinculación a los modos de producción en artes visuales. Estos nódulos o modos de hacer en artes visuales, se integran en una fascinante e interesante red epistemológica que, a la luz de las obras de arte seleccionadas son transparentadas no sólo en su complejidad epistémica sino que también son confrontados a interesantes gestos y guiños visuales a modo de cita y figuras conceptuales que en sentido moebiano remisionan formas de inscripción de obra y de la legibilidad de la misma conformando un alfabeto visual contemporáneo indispensable a la hora de pensar y entender la producción artística del último siglo en general y de las artes visuales latinoamericanas y chilenas en particular, todas ellas conforman una panorámica global en lo que hoy se conoce y divulga como arte actual. La unidad espacial abordada como Territorios Específicos se constituyen críticamente por conformar zonas y áreas marginales, espacios residuales y limítrofes, a la vez que contenedores y contenido de resistencia asistémica facilitado por un desinterés administrativo consecuente a su calidad de margen residual naturalizado y sus contenidos subyacentes. Metodológicamente, esta investigación ha sido cuidadosamente sistematizada a partir de herramientas de análisis y medición provenientes de las ciencias sociales y otras más afín a las de la ingeniería como arquitectura y urbanismo y de otras ciencias fronterizas de las biofísicas como la arqueología, etnografía y antropología, adaptadas todas a un interesantísimo protocolo instrumental replicable para las artes visuales. Este compendio procedimental comprende acciones de arte de sitio específico realizadas en una franja costera de 30 kilómetros que abarca desde la ciudad de Valdivia hasta 'La Reserva de Curiñanco' en la recientemente inaugurada XIV Región de Los Ríos en Chile. Estas acciones son confrontadas y tensionadas tanto a nivel de la crítica especializada como de sus afluentes epistemológicos colindantes con las ciencias humanas, donde, este corpus de obra contemporáneas, curatorías, proyectos de sitio y debates especializados, aportan considerablemente a la construcción de futuros posibles no solo de las artes visuales en particular y de las ciencias humanas en general, sino que además conllevan un debate ineludible para el desafío implicado en el debate territorio/globalización

Una articulación de arte y política : Dislocaciones y rupturas en la poética de Edgardo Antonio Vigo (1968-1975)

Esta tesis, que integra los estudios de la Sociología del Arte, se centra en la vinculación de la poética del artista Edgardo Antonio Vigo (1928 - 1997) con la política y lo político, así como con los procesos sociales más generales entre 1968 y 1975. Vigo ocupó una posición emergente en el desarrollo del arte platense y desplegó producciones que emprendieron una poética rupturista con lo establecido por algunos de los cánones tradicionales del arte y sus instituciones, y elaboró propuestas estéticas innovadoras que abarcaban las artes visuales en sus diversas formas. Se analizan en esta tesis los modos por los que Vigo al mismo tiempo que apunta a cuestionar las estructuras y manifestaciones de las Bellas Artes, lo hace con las formas dominantes de la cultura a través de obras y textos que tendían a desestabilizar los roles de autor, espectador y obra, así como a involucrarse de distintos modos en los acontecimientos políticos de la época. Se estudian, además, las producción de acciones artísticas en el espacio público, que Vigo llamó señalamientos, la utilización y apropiación del discurso y aspectos materiales de lo judicial-administrativo y la edición de la revista ensamblada Hexágono '71 (1971 -1975). En estas zonas de la poética de Vigo se consideran las diversas relaciones entre arte y política, las cuales no han sido lineales ni unidireccionales, sino modos de distorsionar y disentir con las jerarquías, lugares y funciones de los sujetos y objetos del entramado social. Para la realización de la tesis se produjo un diseño metodológico cualitativo, se utilizaron fuentes documentales y entrevistas. Se desarrolla un análisis de las obras del artista, más que remitiéndolas a una corriente artística particular, haciendo foco en su relación con la situación social y política, especialmente en sus vinculaciones con el particular proceso de subjetivación política de la época. Se procuró para ello realizar una investigación que se detenga de manera pormenorizada en el trabajo artístico y sus particularidades (materiales, técnicas, formas, estrategias de intervención), así como en sus discursos escritos, plasmados en ensayos, artículos y otros textos, para avanzar desde allí hacia un análisis interpretativo y comprensivo de las conexiones y de los efectos que perseguía tal trabajo con los procesos políticos. Se presentan en los Anexos matrices de datos de los señalamientos y de Hexágono '71, así como un índice razonado de la misma

Aprender a ser docentes con el cine de Miyazaki

El presente artículo plantea la incorporación del cine como argumento válido para la formación del profesorado. Consideramos que el cine incluye suficientes mecanismos para involucrar la educación en artes visuales, la educación en medios, y la educación musical. Entre los directores más relevantes del panorama internacional, proponemos la figura de Hayao Miyazaki. Este creador japonés ha sabido atraer a públicos de todas las edades y culturas a lo largo de su dilatada carrera profesional. La calidad técnica de los trabajos de Miyazaki va acompañada de una serie de valores que resultan muy válidos para incorporar acciones educativas de respeto al medio natural y a las tradiciones culturales. Pensamos que los maestros de educación primaria han de estar preparados para fomentar este tipo de valores entre el alumnado. Tanto la educación artística como el cine son entornos muy atractivos para lograrlo. Hemos observado y analizado a un grupo de estudiantes de grado de Maestro de primaria mientras miraban la película Ponyo en el acantilado. Planteamos un mayor uso del cine como recurso educativo (Ambrós y Breu, 2007; Fedorov, 2010). Animamos al profesorado y al alumnado a realizar nuevas lecturas críticas y personales del cine, indagando más allá del conocimiento del medio como mero entretenimiento (Clarembeaux, 2010; Hernández, 2000; Huerta, 2006)