Trailers as mediatized performances: Investigating the use of promotional videos among Italian contemporary theatre artists

In the theatre sector, many companies, festivals and theatres have integrated promotional videos into their communication strategies. This recent development is undoubtedly due to the rise of social media and the increasing accessibility of video technologies, but also to the need for theatre companies to publicize their work in a media that combines creative autonomy with economic efficiency. Despite this widespread use, trailers in the performing arts have received little attention in academic literature. This article offers the first, exploratory study on the use of promotional videos in the field of contemporary theatre in Italy and on the connections between the current creation of digital promotional clips and the heritage of the Italian video-theatre. Through in-depth interviews with sixteen of the leading Italian companies, this research aims to bring out the role theatre trailers play for performance artists.

Dramaturgia nowych mediów i performans postcyfrowy. Projektowanie doświadczeń użytkownika we współczesnych sztukach performatywnych

The paper aims to answer the question – to what extent is the current reflection on user experience design in performing arts still valid? The text discusses the concept of post-digital performance (Causey); and the phenomenon of user experience design in the face of new media dramaturgy (Eckersall, Grehan, Scheer). From the perspective of these concepts and phenomena, I describe two works (To Like or Not to Like by Interrobang and Karen by Blast Theory). The text complements the discussion on performance artists’ approaches to media technologies. In this paper, I describe the changes in designing the relationships of performers and users (individualization and personalization) and the contexts of everyday media practices in artists’ strategies.

ARTS-BASED ACTION RESEARCH ON ENHANCING CHILDREN’S CREATIVITY THROUGH AFFECT WITHIN PARTICIPATORY PERFORMANCE ART AND PERFORMANCE PEDAGOGY

This article presents arts-based action research on enhancing children’s creativity through affect within participatory performance art and performance pedagogy. The study hypothesis was that children’s creativity can be enhanced by affect experienced at a performance site. The purpose of the study was to investigate the impact of children’s involvement in artistic performance on their creativity at a performance site. The impact of interactions at the site, the co-participating children,and the involved artists were monitored on a daily basis to collect qualitative data, which were analyzed using a general inductive approach. Objective themes relating to the variables were retrieved from the collected data and assigned codes, concepts, and keywords extracted from photographs,video recordings, and observation notes. The case under investigation was the “Nomadic Radical Academy 2020: The Good, the Bad, and the Art”, which built on a pilot event held in 2019. This research concluded that performance art can have a social and creative impact during an art event through children’s participation and can be used by performance artists and educators.

The Evidence Chamber: Playful Science Communication and Research Through Digital Storytelling

In a courtroom, it is essential that the scientific evidence is both understandable and understood, so that the strengths and limitations of that evidence, within the context of a legal case, can inform decision making. The Evidence Chamber brings together entertainment, public engagement with science and research into a public performance activity that is centred around digital storytelling and science communication. This experience engages public audiences with science and allows a better understanding of how people interpret scientific evidence. In this paper, we discuss how we created this experience as an in-person and fully virtual performance through successful collaboration between forensic science research, public audiences, public engagement professionals, the legal profession, and digital performance artists.

Aping Blackness: Reading and Evaluating Racialized Images in Cartagena, Colombia

Why are residents of a city racialized as Black overwhelmingly in favor of representations of Blackness that caricature Afro-descendants as subservient, hypersexual and licentious, jovial, uninhibited and libertine, primitive (folklorized), and violent? This article bridges the literatures on the sociology of culture and cognition, racial signification, and frame theory to explore the various sociomental lenses and schemata that people use to perceive racial symbols and evaluate their legitimacy. It uses semi-structured and open-ended photo-elicitation interviews, primarily with residents of a largely-Afro-descendant community in Cartagena, Colombia, to systematically generate a collection of readings and evaluations of racialized imagery, resulting in an empirical example of the socio-optical construction of race within the Colombian cultural context. These readings and evaluations of external cultural primers such as photographs of racialized performance and ritual reveal (1) how a Colombian Atlantic Coastal “optical community” connects the signifiers and signifieds of Blackness; (2) that racial frames evoke three primary schemas (personal, spatiotemporal, and explicitly ideological), which interpreters use to decode and evaluate images; (3) that interpreters read the racial frames transmitted by cultural producers (e.g., performance artists and festival goers) via the visual language of racialized imagery as collectively credible and/or personally salient, and that this visual resonance is how the racialized imagery gain legitimacy and; (4) that personal experience, cultural knowledge, and social location account for variations in whether people consider racialized imagery credible and salient and, as such, legitimate forms of recognition.

The Case against Non-Moral Blame

Non-moral blame seems to be widespread and widely accepted in everyday life—tolerated at least, but often embraced. We blame athletes for poor performance, artists for bad or boring art, scientists for faulty research, and voters for flawed reasoning. This chapter argues that non-moral blame is never justified, that is, it’s never a morally permissible response to a non-moral failure. Having explained what blame is and how non-moral blame differs from moral blame, the chapter presents the argument in four steps. First, it argues that many (perhaps most) apparent cases of non-moral blame are actually cases of moral blame. Second, it argues that even if non-moral blame is pro tanto permissible—because its target is blameworthy for their substandard performance—it often (perhaps usually) fails to meet other permissibility conditions, such as fairness or standing. Third, it goes further and challenges the claim that non-moral blame is ever even pro tanto permissible. Finally, it considers a number of arguments in support of non-moral obligations and argues that none of them succeeds.

Generative Adversarial Networks for Facial Image Inpainting and Super-Resolution

Inpainting helps to fill in the lost data in visual images. Inpainting techniques also refer to unusual image editing in distorted regions. These include areas that are noisy, blurred and watery areas. The most appropriate pixel values must be replaced in these regions to achieve good performance. Artists used to play it, and still now, pieces that are not in the picture can be inpainted in the same manner, though it takes more time. In the present age of automation, inpainting can be automated to obtain quicker and better outcomes by deep learning technologies. In this area, many of the latest techniques have been created, however, many methods produce blurred findings and data loss. Two adversarial networks are used to achieve this task, where first network aims at inpainting and the second network aims at super-resolution. The input generated as a part of first stage network is passed on to the second stage super-resolution network to overcome blurriness that is caused in the initial inpainting network. The network efficiency is determined in terms of increased PSNR obtained which is 28.19 dB with less training period of approximately 14 hours in comparison with other network models which performs similar task.

Embodied Memory and Alternative Futures

Through the Peace Ride, the Compton Cowboys, as activists and performance artists within the Black Lives Matter movement, materialized the long legacy of Black men and women riders in the United States. These protest bodies on horseback imagine alternative futures for Black communities through embodied memory and a rewriting of the archive.

ANCIENT GREEK SCULPTURE IN THE 20TH CENTURY WESTERN ART

Ancient Greek art and culture had served as a significant guide for Western civilisation for centuries. Greek philosophy, literature and mythology as well as art and architecture had a major impact on artists especially in the periods of Renaissance and Neoclassicism. It is interesting to see that Ancient Greek sculpture has still been inspiring for the 20th century western painters, sculptors and performance artists. This article will focus on the visual representations of four statues -Apollo Belvedere, Venus of Milo, Nike of Samothrace and Sleeping Ariadne- in the imagination of artists working in various styles. Depictions of aforenamed statues and their novel and distinctive interpretations had been the subject of this descriptive research. 20th century creations have been scanned for traces of Ancient Greek sculpture. These timeless paragons of Classical and Hellenistic periods acquired a fresh life thanks to the 20th century art world’s admiration and respect for the Ancient Greek sculpture. It can be concluded that by juxtaposing classical and contemporary imagery, artists created memorable and engrossing works. Keywords: Ancient Greek Sculpture, 20th century, Western Art