Innovation with Words and Visuals:A Baroque Sensibility (2024)

Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual Studies in Italian Urban Culture, 2013

This paper considers the role of ritual forms in presaging, even constructing, early modern Rome’s urban development. Its overarching argument is that processional routes, arches, floats, decorations, and performances often formed the living tissue from which new art, architecture, and urbanism drew in its reinvention of Rome. These evanescent and ephemeral forms, through the familiarity of a calendar repetition, forged an identity with the urban spaces in which they took place, in the eyes of their viewers. Inexorably, ritual marked the city’s material fabric with ‘memorative’ spaces, imbued with the collective memories of their iterative enactment. Much of the change in ritual activity in early modern Rome was driven by its popes, as was the city’s urban development. This intertwining of ritual and urban forms in the hands of the papacy worked to remake Rome’s civic fabric in the image of the popes. Spaces reclaimed by reinvented ritual forms became then permanently reconfigured by an attendant architecture, art, and urbanism. Key ritual spaces were widened, regularised, paved, in concert with their ceremonial roles; their surrounding buildings drawn into a choreographed urban scenography by means of new façades and fountains; while the memory of ritual decoration was latent within the forms of their sculptural ornament. Early modern Rome’s urban developments thus embodied in perpetuity the ritual histories out of which they grew. Finally, the paper argues for the potency of visual cultures, both ritual and artistic, in reinventing the identities of urban space.

Music and Arts in Action, 2008

The relevance of contemporary architectural design is intrinsically dependent upon it’s being in-step with the aesthetic and spatial sensibilities of its time. Within Southern California, one of the most dramatic contemporary influences on aesthetic and spatial sensibilities is that of Latinization, in particular, Mexican/Chicano cultural practices. This dissertation speculates on the emergence of an architectural hybridity autochthonous to Los Angeles informed by a theoretical framework termed the Spanglish Turn. The development of this framework begins with an analysis of visual arts, and material culture in Los Angeles. This strategy aims to ‘stretch’ the relationship between architecture and specific forms of popular and material culture by speculating on the behavior informing them. Then guided by a formulation of this emergent spatial logic, it looks for tangential inroads and alternative patterns to begin to articulate a new ‘grammar of translation’ for LA’s popular and visual culture into the realm of architecture.

The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory, 2019

The ‘new’ sociology of culture has provided us with valuable insights regarding the performative, corporeal, and unpredictable dimensions of art tasting, which the ‘old’, critical sociology of art failed to recognize. But how can we profit from these insights without committing the sin of the denial of the social (and social structures in particular)? This article suggests that these insights may be incorporated into the critical sociology of art once we are ready to substitute reified tasting techniques for reified tastes as our main objects of study. Relying on works in anthropology, philosophy, history and neuroscience, I urge us to put tasting techniques at the heart of our research agenda in cultural sociology. This will enable us to simultaneously give full account of the subjective, unique art-tasting experiences which are informed by specific tasting techniques, as well as of the role the same techniques play in social reproduction and social closure.

In this thesis, I sought to contribute to organizational creativity research by empirically studying the collective production of Contemporary Dance Theater (CDT). I began with suggesting that the literature domain of organizational creativity, while a burgeoning academic field, is perpetuating paradigmatic and ideological assumptions that often separate creativity from practice. It is the prevailing ontological and methodological individualism of most organizational creativity research that brings about conceptual and methodological quandaries when seeking to account for (a) organizational creativity as a relational, processual and thoroughly embodied and affective affair, and (b) the basic question of how novelty and creativity are possible.The overall aim of this thesis was therefore to reclaim creativity as a prolific category of social and organizational thought by exploring it within the holistic process of actual work. For this, I studied creativity as a form of practice and enactive sensemaking within the richness of the moment-to-moment, affective engagement of experienced bodies with culturally meaningful materials. From a perspective of creative practice, this meant turning creativity into a problematic modality of attachment and thus a matter of taste. Framing creativity in terms of a pragmatic conception of taste-making then allowed me to account for the performativity of relational becomings that conserve as well as refine and transform sensibilities and materials. This meant granting the materials of practice their own agencies, as well as endowing the practitioner with "passion," a specific skill set of active sensibilities that allows one to follow and intervene in the flow of materials.Seeking to enact these conceptual formations through an empirical study of CDT production, I based this study on a multi-sited and focused organizational video-ethnography within a comparative, embedded case design. I thereby developed a methodology that attempted to "follow forward" the creative process and sought to produce rich and suggestive descriptions of the creative practice and its processes within CDT while developing theoretical propositions alongside the empirical material.First, the empirical study detailed creative practice in terms of its ecology. I distinguished between (a) the actual material of creative practice, which consists of incorporated motion repertoires as well as biographical and cultural proficiency; (b) the various practice carriers (plug-ins) - from social techniques, over performative theories, devices, and the conduit of "taste talk" to the enactment of material in productive articulations - that enable creative practice through forging skilled bodies; and (c) the affective and "normaesthetic" milieu of creative practice that is constituted by the community of practitioners. Together, these elements were described as forming an experimental apparatus, or a collective set-up of a performance and event ecology that harbors poetic practices and their occasions. Second, this study specified the process of CDT production as an incremental qualification of a performance. Marked by a peculiar "fever curve" of attachments and detachments, CDT production was described as being affected within the formats of researching, assembling and scaffolding. A detailed analysis of the various practices of these formats revealed a nexus of experimental and codifying modes of taste-making. The findings were integrated within propositional models that specified the modes of taste-making as revolving around three central reciprocal relationships: (a) between immanent and explicit, (b) between prospective and retrospective and (c) between inventive and restorative forms of taste-making.Overall, this study expands our understanding of organizational creativity by showing that creativity is 1) temporalized and processualized, 2) spatialized and collectivized, 3) grounded in affect and 4) politicized. It demonstrates the prolificacy of a practice-based framework of organizational creativity that is rooted in a pragmatic conception of taste-making and suggests that such a framing could open up creativity-as-practice as a stimulating research agenda. On a more general level, this study develops a framework of creative practice that concerns the status of its elements. It provides an "infra-language" or theory that seeks not to represent, systematically and from the outside, but to provide the sensibilities to explore organizational creativity from up-close - which can, as this study suggests, bear remarkable surprises.

Contemporary Music Review , 2019

The harpsichord fad of the 1960s and early 70s provides a roadmap for assessing the strengths and limitations of actor-network theory. The 60s harpsichord was a constellation of heterogeneous material and discursive effects; its impact on changing genres, like pop, soul, jazz, and new music, was broad but not deep. As such the harpsichord fad shows that notions like actor, agency, and affordance can be too strong: too reliant on clarity of function, too confident in their capacity to assess success and failure, and ill-equipped to handle the microdynamics of aesthetic experience. Lingering instead over questions of economy, temporality, and ontology— what is the harpsichord doing where, when, with what, and with whom?—can stop us from drawing premature conclusions about what is acting on what. This paper thus considers the 60s harpsichord as a matter of interrelated political economy, musical economy (the disposition and role of elements in musical textures), and what might be called ‘ethical economy’: the distribution of ethical regard in a social system. Focusing on ethical economy—who cared about the harpsichord and its stakeholders, how, how much—gives a truer picture of the ways that musical fads and genres hang together: partly through aesthetic experience, music’s multitemporality, and respect for the interiority of others.Keywords: Fads; Genres; Musical Economy; Ethical Economy; Temporality; Actor- Network Theory; Critical Organology

Perspective (France)

Regeneration Songs: Sounds of Investment and Loss from East London Edited by Alberto Duman, Dan Hancox, Anna Minton, Malcolm James, 2018

This chapter addresses some specific aesthetic, spatial and affective dimensions of contemporary place-making strategies. The 'affective atmosphere' of the Arc of Opportunity, understood through London Borough of Newham’s livery colour (magenta) is explored here through the 'tabula rasa' model of exploitative capitalism, affectively understood through the idea of an all-pervasive 'haze' at work in areas of intense place-making activities.

Perspective, 2015

Ars Aeterna. Vol. 2/ 1, 2010

The international handbook of …, 2000

This is a short 'discussion' of baroque's possibilities with several scholars.

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2021

The international handbook of sociology, 2000

On these two photographs appear an old lady and an little girl. Both listen to music in a Gothic cathedral. The cathedral is located in the city of Mende, in Southern France, in the Department of Lozère. The object they hold in their hands is called a harmonic lantern. The harmonic lantern is a very simple device. Its only external features are an audio output, which can be connected to a headset, and a volume knob. They hold it vertically, like a candle. If they stand still, they hear nothing. When they walk the aisles of the cathedral, or when they move the lantern, they hear a music whose spectrum is very rich in harmonics that vary constantly according to their position. Each of their trajectories determines a different musical sequence. The harmonic lantern has a peculiar feature: at every moment, it stands at the centre of the world. In other words, each person carries a harmonic lantern carries the centre of the world with him.

Contemporary Music Review, 2018

twentieth-century music, 2005

New Literary History, 2016

This article is premised on two presumptions. The first is, I think, uncontroversial, the second less so. The first presumption is that today, serious discussions about taste usually start out by rehearsing Pierre Bourdieu’s contribution to our understanding of how taste preferences operate in society. Today Bourdieu is often the starting point for discussing taste, rather than invoked as a critical response to other starting points that might go by the name of Immanuel Kant, or David Hume, or Archibald Alison. The second, more contentious presumptions, is that Bourdieu was not actually interested in taste and rarely addressed its particular qualities in his work. Or to put it differently, Bourdieu was only interested in taste as a function of something else, and that something else was the generation and maintenance of social distinctions. These presumptions beg their own questions: how should we attend to taste if we want to apprehend the various modalities it can engender (indifference as much as vehemence)? How could we find an approach to taste that is flexible enough to apprehend what might be seen as micro-sensitivities as well as those macro-orchestrations that could include such phenomena as the ubiquitous taste for individualised technologies (from cars to smart phones) and the seemingly ubiquitous taste for “convenience”? Tastes, in other words, that might not best accessed by assessing their value as good or bad taste? And could such an approach (if it could be concocted) also apprehend what Freud called “the narcissism of minor differences,” differences that were foundational for Bourdieu’s questionnaires?

Qualities of food, 2018

Reads postmodern self reflexivity as a new baroque, back through Bernini's St Teresa.

Tecnoscienza : Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies, 2018

This section offers a series of joint reflections on (open) data platform from a variety of cases, from cycling, traffic and mapping to activism, environment and data brokering. Data platforms play a key role in contemporary urban governance. Linked to open data initiatives, such platforms are often proposed as both mechanisms for enhancing the accountability of administrations and performing as sites for 'bottom-up' digital invention. Such promises of smooth flows of data, however, rarely materialise unproblematically. The development of data platforms is always situated in legal and administrative cultures, databases are often built according to the standards of existing digital ecologies, access always involves processes of social negotiation, and interfaces (such as sensors) may become objects of public contestation. The following contributions explore the contested and mutable character of open data platforms as part of heterogeneous publics and trace the pathways of da...

More-Than-Human Aesthetics. Venturing beyond the Bifurcation of Nature, 2024

This chapter contends that in times of socio-ecological crises all manner of aesthetics are at play in more-than-human processes of becoming. In a world out of joint, the conceptual apparatus inherited from western modernity no longer holds as a way to grasp our current socio-ecological predicaments. This warrants a complete overhaul of ‘modern’ aesthetics. Rather than a supplementary dimension of human values, the beautiful or the sublime, the aesthetic now manifests as a paramount dimension in fashioning, cultivating and sustaining more-than-human worlds. Hence, the philosophy of A.N. Whitehead is introduced as it transcends the modes of valorisation that define our present, providing a reading of our own present and the habits of thought that structure it. More importantly, Whitehead provides a functional more-than-human metaphysics with conceptual tools to reconceptualise the contours of aesthetics beyond the frameworks of modernity. In this ‘generalised aesthetics’, feeling and experience are centre-staged as fundamental to all modes of becoming. This approach is situated in relation to emerging perspectives in sociocultural research, notably STS and feminist technoscience, which eschew social and human-centered aesthetics, to wager that new modes of more-than-human sensitisations are required to exceed western abstractions and attune knowledge practices to experimental possibilities in worlding.

twentieth-century music, 2005

This article develops a theoretical analysis of music and mediation, building on the work of Theodor Adorno, Tia DeNora and Antoine Hennion. It begins by suggesting that Lydia Goehr's account of the work concept requires such a perspective. Drawing on Alfred Gell's ...

This section offers a series of joint reflections on (open) data platform from a variety of cases, from cycling, traffic and mapping to activism, environment and data brokering. Data platforms play a key role in contemporary urban governance. Linked to open data initiatives, such platforms are often proposed as both mechanisms for enhancing the accountability of administrations and performing as sites for 'bottom-up' digital invention. Such promises of smooth flows of data, however, rarely materialise unproblematically. The development of data platforms is always situated in legal and administrative cultures, databases are often built according to the standards of existing digital ecologies, access always involves processes of social negotiation, and interfaces (such as sensors) may become objects of public contestation. The following contributions explore the contested and mutable character of open data platforms as part of heterogeneous publics and trace the pathways of da...