Victorian ear trumpets in XX and XXI century

Throughout the 19th century ear trumpets became the most popular and in fact the only technical solution for deaf people. They merged with the behavior regarded as typical for the deaf such as misinterpretations and communicational loss, therefore ear trumpets turned into a social stigma. They became objects that were bashfully hidden by users. In the 20th century however ear trumpets’image as well as functions changed as they were substituted with modern, electric and later electronic hearing prostheses. Once ear trumpets became antiquated their place in the technological landscape have changed. They did not vanish but relocated within the social and cultural domain. Article is based on: object oriented analysis of ear trumpets, interview with the ear trumpet collector, discourse analysis of the ear trumpet advertisements documents from British National Archives and The Thackray Museum in Leeds.

* Artykułpowstałw ramach projektu sfinansowanego ze środków Państwowego Funduszu Rehabilitacji Osób Niepełnosprawnych – nr umowy BEA/000052/BF/D, Trąbki słuchowe dla głuchych w XX i XXI wieku. Losy akustycznych wzmacniaczy w czasach elektryczności i elektroniki.

Narcissism –authenticity –atopy. Digital faces of the “New Man”

Narcissism, as mentioned by many authors, is one of the defining characteristics of modern culture. Substantial technological changes, especially in communication and media changed our own experience of aloof narrative of ourselves into a narrative “from ourselves”, by means of democratization and fetishization of the self-narrative. It would not be possible to such extent if not for the unprecedented expansion of multimedia and the complete time consumption which they offer. It can be said that the digital culture and its typical logorrhea of word-pictures are the very core of XXI century narcissism in all its appearances and allow us to think that a completely new man is created who finally can exercise his/her own individuality without boundaries and can be “authentic”. One of the most insightful observers of that oecumenical illusion is Byung-Chul Han – a German culture expert and philosopher whose reflections we fill with empirical matter.

The word “Murzyn”as a perlocutionary speech act

Whilst an array of words is used by white Poles to describe and denote Black people both outside Poland and within the country itself, in recent years, a heated public debate has taken place in Poland concerning the on-going use of the term Murzyn in everyday speech acts and in public discourse. The word actively reproduces anti-black stereotypes and racist meanings, and also conceals the prejudice, not least by virtue of the fact that a number of White Polish public persons claim that Murzyn is a neutral word used inoffensively to refer to Black people. Recently, as the demonstrations after George Floyd’s death spread across Europe, the continuing use of the term has been widely protested by Poles of African descent, and a growing number of Polish linguists argue against the word’s assumed neutrality. In this article, I draw upon the internalism and externalism in communication theory as I demonstrate perlocutionary effects of the word Murzyn from semi-interviews conducted with black Poles in 2014 and 2020, and utterance of Poles of African descent from media discourse between 2011 and 2020. With regard to the histories, experiences, and perspectives of Black communities in Poland, I argue that the derogatory meaning of the word depends  largely on its effects on thoughts and feelings of the recipient, namely the pragmatic perlocution and the externalist communication theory, and less on the intention of the speaker and the internalist communication theory.

Narcissus’s dream. On the pluralisation of styles of thinking in the “anthropology of translation”

The article concerns a never written book by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro entitled Anti-Narcissus and presents the decolonization potential of culture studies. The subject of reflection is the possibility of tearing the figure of the Native (which is currently experiencing a renaissance) out of the power of occidental discourses of knowledge. By exploring anthropological ways of opposing onto-epistemological narcissism, the author shows the difficulties faced by anthropologists who have set themselves the goal of pluralizing Western styles of thinking and acting.

Our knowledge about the facial expression of emotion may well be entering an age of scientific revolution. Conceptual models for facial behavior and emotion phenomena appear to be undergoing a paradigm shift brought on at least in part by advances made in facial recognition technology and automated facial expression analysis. And the use of technological labor by corporate, government, and institutional agents for extracting data capital from both the static morphology of the face and dynamic movement of the emotions is accelerating. Through a brief survey, the author seeks to introduce what he terms biometric art, a form of new media art on the cutting-edge between this advanced science and technology about the human face. In the last ten years, an increasing number of media artists in countries across the globe have been creating such biometric artworks. And today, awards, exhibitions, and festivals are starting to be dedicated to this new art form. The author explores the making of this biometric art as a critical practice in which artists investigate the roles played by science and technology in society, experimenting, for example, with Basic Emotions Theory, emotion artificial intelligence, and the Facial Action Coding System. Taking a comprehensive view of art, science, and technology, the author surveys the history of design for biometric art that uses facial recognition and emotion recognition, the individuals who create such art and the institutions that support it, as well as how this biometric art is made and what it is about. By so doing, the author contributes to the history, practice, and theory for the facial expression of emotion, sketching an interdisciplinary area of inquiry for further and future research, with relevance to academicians and creatives alike who question how we think about what we feel.

This article discusses depiction of autism in science fiction based on three recent American novels written by autistic authors: Ada Hoffman’s The Outside (2019), Kaia Sønderby’s Failure to Communicate (2017), and Selene dePackh’s Troubleshooting (2018). The novels are discussed in the context of debates about diversity in science fiction, depiction of disability in the genre, and disability and autism studies, particularly in reference to concepts such as authorship, self-expression, and rationality. This is followed by an in-depth analysis of the use of utopian and dystopian impulses in science fiction and tropes such as first contact as well as the specificity of autistic perspectives, particularly in Hoffman’s The Outside. The texts propose visions of futures that include disability, specifically autism, and use the narratives of alien encounters to reflect on potential benefits of neurodivergent forms of communication and perception of the world. The article argues that the novels employ science fiction tropes to engage ideas about neurodiversity and cross-cultural communication, contributing both to inclusion of marginalized communities in science fiction and to an expansion of the genre’s repertoire of cultural representations of disability.

* This article is a result of a research project entitled Representation of Autism in Science Fiction [Wizerunek autyzmu w science fiction] carried out at UMCS and funded by State Fund for Rehabilitation of Disabled People (PFRON). Project no. BEA/000042/BF/D.

Prosthetic Memory and Unreality of Time in Watchmen

Starting from a reflection on the traumatic experience of racism, the author of the article considers the possibility of transmitting the knowledge about the past and retrieving memory, and then points out how the relationships between the past, the present and the future are problematized, if we change the way we think about time, namely when it ceases to be perceived as something real or objective. The point of reference for further considerations is the HBO Watchmen series, made in 2019, which exemplifies the mechanism of prosthetic memory. According to the definition proposed by Alison Landsberg, prosthetic memory includes continuity and rupture. It is connected not only with the individual but the collective dimension as well, as it is related to the sphere of politics. In other words, it is a vehicle thanks to which we can travel to other places and times, and thanks to which the viewer may refer to important social and psychological issues.

A Reversed Perspective. The Empathetic Practice of the Rotor Collective

In this study I reflect upon the project Da quassùètutta un’altra cosa (From Above It Is Something Different Altogether), executed by Rotor in 2018 in Palermo, for the Manifesta 12 European Nomadic Biennial. The Belgian collective of architects and designers attempted to recycle a site and a space in order to give it back to the inhabitants. Pizzo Sella, a picturesque slope in the vicinity of Palermo, is the location in question, where developers began erecting a housing estate in the 1980s. But the construction was never completed, and the artists turned the hollow concrete structures, which are marks of trauma today, into platform-like viewpoints, so producing a unique experience. A reversed perspective, besides offering magnificent outlooks, may contribute to reinstating the human and nature symbiosis. The success of the chosen method is a result of an empathetic research attitude to the materials found in the area. Repurposing destroyed buildings is, to me, an example of the ancient practice of appropriation referred to as spolia. Those I wish to define broadly: as secondary, or reclaimed substances that make cognition possible for a body situated in a relation with the world.

A thing about natural history, animal skins and art –a review of Giovanni Aloi’s Speculative Taxidermy

The purpose of this review is to familiarize the Polish reader with the extensive and interesting monography: Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene, published by Columbia University Press. The Author Giovanni Aloi –art historian and museumologist, takes up the challenge of opening new fields, and asking new questions in research on taxidermy in art and science. The speculative methodological approach proposed by the author, draws on the new materialism, archology of knowledge and “speculative turn,”and enables him not only to thoroughly analyze the art involving taxidermic objects, but also to conduct erudite analyzes of discourses, practices and “nexuses”defining complex human-animal relationships. Taxidermy is a pretext to reflect on the sources of animal representation in contemporary culture and discourse of natural history, as well as to show the abovementioned relationships in the context of ecological, economic and environmental crises, and the uncertainties characterizing the “dark ecology”of the Anthropocene. This work is an extremely valuable contribution to Ecocritical studies and the still developing field of animal studies.

About the nature of museums, the review of the book W kręgu muzealnych przedmiotów by Justyna Żak

The review concerns the book W kręgu muzealnych przedmiotów by Justyna Żak, published in 2020 by the Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego. The book deals with the nature of museum objects and objects that fill museum rooms and do not have the status of museum objects, being elements of arrangement, reproductions or reconstructions. In a broader sense it is a reflection on the nature of museums, in which the notion of authenticity is of key importance. The book’s asset is a broad perspective of an object in a museum –its status, value, meaning – from theoretical reflection in the field of philosophy, sociology and aesthetics, to case studies and museum practice, supported by quotations from belles-lettres, however, the author fell into the trap of a superficiality that was difficult to avoid.