Late Works (1933–1941)

This chapter traces the development of Woolf’s late feminist politics and aesthetic experimentalism, focusing on her penultimate and final novels, The Years (1937) and Between the Acts (1941), and her anti-war pamphlet, Three Guineas (1938). It reads across these texts and Woolf’s wider writings from 1933–1941, including essays, unpublished drafts, and her fictional biography Flush (1933), to identify key strands of social and political enquiry in Woolf’s late works. The chapter pays particular attention to Woolf’s late analysis of the role of art in society and her evolving feminist-pacifist critique of the links between patriarchy, nationalism, fascism, and war. Rejecting a narrative of creative decline, the chapter highlights the productive relationship between political engagement and formal experiment in Woolf’s late works.

PeppeRecycle: Improving Children’s Attitude Toward Recycling by Playing with a Social Robot

In this paper, we investigate the use of a social robot as an engaging interface of a serious game intended to make children more aware and well disposed towards waste recycle. The game has been designed as a competition between the robot Pepper and a child. During the game, the robot simultaneously challenges and teaches the child how to recycle waste materials. To endow the robot with the capability to play as a game opponent in a real-world context, it is equipped with an image recognition module based on a Convolutional Neural Network to detect and classify the waste material as a child would do, i.e. by simply looking at it. A formal experiment involving 51 primary school students is carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the game in terms of different factors such as the interaction with the robot, the users’ cognitive and affective dimensions towards ecological sustainability, and the propensity to recycle. The obtained results are encouraging and draw promising scenarios for educational robotics in changing children’s attitudes toward recycling. Indeed Pepper turns out to be positively evaluated by children as a trustful and believable companion and this allows children to be concentrated on the “memorization” task during the game. Moreover, the use of real objects as waste items during the game turns out to be a successful approach not only for perceived learning effectiveness but also for the children’s engagement.

Lethal in Two Languages

This chapter explores the parallels and disjunctions between Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Flann O’Brien, with particular reference to the extent to which formal experiment in both writers owes as much to the specific circumstances of Irish culture, politics, and language in the middle decades of the twentieth century as it does to European modernism and postmodernism. The chapter examines the centrality of both writers’ detailed knowledge of the Irish language and its narrative traditions to their experimental prose fictions. The chapter argues that Ó Cadhain’s insight into lives blighted by economic injustice and bureaucratic tyranny has lost little of its political urgency in the half-century since his death, while Ó Nualláin’s work continues to deride a world in which absurdity insists on being taken seriously and the distortion of language is a defining attribute of power.

Deformed Beauty?

The last of Felix Mendelssohn’s series of popular and influential concert overtures, the Overture to the Tale of the Fair Melusina of 1835 remains the least familiar of these works. It is also the most unusual with regard to formal design in its purposeful confounding of introduction and sonata-form elements alongside the dialogic relation of clearly gendered thematic materials. Such calculated ‘deformation’ of classic and early Romantic sonata form has been understood as a means of generating a kind of musical-narrative content, though the precise relation of formal experiment to such narrative content has remained elusive. This chapter reconsiders the problematic relation of experimental formal procedure to the narrative dimension and the role this may have played in the composer’s subsequent abandonment of the quasi-programmatic concert overture genre, despite his unparalleled artistic success in the field.

Die «bösen Reichen»

In the Middle Ages, not only philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, but also numerous troubadours have discussed with commitment issues of private property and its social obligations – up to expropriation. The discussion mainly took place in the context of their continuous polemics from about 1150 to 1300 in the form of sirventes and partimens, but also cansos, against the «evil rich barons», the rics malvatz. The antipathy towards this «incarnation of Malvestatz» and figure of greed, avarice and all varieties of immorality finds its outlet in many denunciations and hateful verbal aggressions in a wide rhetorical range – up to demands for prohibition of inheritance claims and suggestions for expropriation. The motivations for these insulting tirades are multiple and partly overlap: The ric malvatz is hated as rich and powerful and therefore often successful rival in love as well as one who refuses himself or his fortune for the Crusade, as a miser who denies the equality (including the poor) before God and above all as a territorial prince who tramples on his socio-cultural duty to promote and stabilize the troubadouresque cultural activity with its cultural-productive structure resulting from an important social compromise. It is remarkable, but also enigmatic, in which way a troubadour (Trobaire de Villa-Arnaut) combines his polemic against the rics malvatz with a formal experiment and how he legitimizes it with a clear reference to Giraut de Borneil.

The Usability Testing of VR Interface for Tourism Apps

Virtual reality (VR) is considered to be an emerging technology. This study compared the usability differences of VR travel software, such as Google Street View, VeeR VR, and Sites in VR, for mobile phones. In the pilot study, three post-graduate students and one interface expert were invited to participate in the designed experimental tasks to provide opinions on the first draft of the questionnaire. Next, thirty college students were recruited to join the formal experiment. After operating the VR interface, they were asked to fill out the questionnaire, and a semi-structured interview was conducted. The results are described as follows: (1) Intuitive operation is required to allow people to select objects smoothly; (2) the chosen object requires a feedback mode to inform the user that the object has been selected; (3) the speed of the feedback mode should be adjustable to fulfil the needs of most people; (4) the contrast of icon color needs to be improved to ensure the most efficient verification of the operations; and (5) a search button or reminder function can be added to aid first-time users.

Points

The closing scene of Hamletentangles the play’s tragedy in a series of problems relating to intention, accident, and physical dexterity. Showing how many of the epistemological difficulties intrinsic to the play’s climax arise from legal and social issues around the status and purpose of the early modern duel, this chapter argues that Shakespeare used the occasion of swordplay to launch a daring formal experiment. Hamlet’s subjectivity disappears into the fencing-match, and it is uncertain whether he achieves his revenge against Claudius by accident, in spontaneous reaction, or with full intent. The sovereignty of Hamletthe artwork is thus connected inextricably to its realization on the stage. For it is only in a specific performance of Hamlet that the problem of Hamlet’s intention can be provisionally resolved.

The Kino-Eye Montage Procedure as a Formal Experiment

This text presents an analysis of the relationship between Kino-Eye, the Russian montage technique that was most clearly demonstrated by Dziga Vertov in his 1929 film The Man with a Movie Camera, and Russian Formalist theory, which underwent an intensive period of development during the 1920s. Russian Formalism, established primarily as a theory of literature, was likewise applied in film and the visual arts. A dominant characteristic of Soviet film authors and theorists from the avant-garde period was a preoccupation with linguistic aspects and an understanding of film itself in terms of language. Transposing Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of defamiliarization [остранение, ostranenie] to the visual experience of Vertov’s film contributes to an additional understanding of the usage of unconventional camera angles, diagonal camera positions, as well as to the interpreting of the Kino-Eye montage procedure. The experimental montage procedure of Kino-Eye is posited as an attempt to decode the world through the lens of a film camera, while understanding this procedure is linked to the impact of Shklovsky and Russian Formalism on Russian 1920s cinema. Article received: December 15, 2017; Article accepted: December 30, 2017; Published online: April 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper How to cite this article: Latifić, Amra. "The Kino-Eye Montage Procedure as a Formal Experiment." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 15 (2018): . doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.227

Perec and the Politics of Constraint

This chapter argues that Perec’s engagement with the Oulipo at a crucial moment in the group’s history crystallizes the political potential of the Oulipian project, and determines the continuing significance of the group for today’s writers. Perec develops a mode of formal experiment that is perhaps ‘not so very anti’ when compared to the radically oppositional stance of the avant-garde, but which burrows beneath surfaces, exposing hidden determinisms and unexpected coincidences in the fabric of social life. Oulipian constraint thus operates, to borrow Jacques Rancière’s expression, as a ‘redistribution of the sensible’ that opens up the possibility of new forms of life.