Authored Books by German A. Duarte
Fractals suggest recursivity, infinity and the repetition of a principle of order. They are digit... more Fractals suggest recursivity, infinity and the repetition of a principle of order. They are digital pictures of the universe’s continuous movement ignored by mankind during millennia. This book investigates the relationship existing between geometries and technology, and how this relationship guided cognitive processes and thus the organization of narrative spaces. The author proposes a new approach for the study of media suggesting that from Bacon’s camera obscura to von Neumann’s computers both geometries and technology strongly influenced the organization of narrative spaces, which acquired a fractal character.
Pocos años después del desarrollo y popularización del cine, surgieron dos grandes tendencias q... more Pocos años después del desarrollo y popularización del cine, surgieron dos grandes tendencias que con el tiempo crearon la falsa dicotomía entre el documental y la ficción. Sin poder escapar de la naturaleza de la imagen fotografía, la imagen en movimiento dio lugar, de forma natural, a la creación de formas narrativas ficcionales que se elaboraban a través de representaciones objetivas de la realidad. Si bien de una manera reductiva, se percibían en el cine dos esferas opuestas que se plasmaban bien a través un documento objetivo, bien por una narración fruto de la imaginación. En otras palabras, la contraposición entre Lumière y Méliès.
La trayectoria de Peter Watkins, iniciada en la década de 1950, cuestiona esta falsa dicotomía y pone al desnudo la inmensa máquina de imaginario que se había apoderado de la industria cinematográfica y televisiva. Considerado como el padre del docudrama, Peter Watkins nos concede esta entrevista donde analiza su obra cinematográfica y reflexiona.
Realtà e finzione, narrativa e documentario, Lumière e Méliès: il cinema ci è parso troppo spesso... more Realtà e finzione, narrativa e documentario, Lumière e Méliès: il cinema ci è parso troppo spesso chiuso in questa comoda e riduttiva dicotomia. Non è così semplice: dalle “notizie ricostruite” di Méliès al “cinema sociale”, dal Pathé Journal a Griffith, questo libro ricostruisce l’intreccio tra fiction e documento che caratterizza il cinema sin dalle sue origini, per concentrarsi poi su una delle più complesse e straordinarie figure di cineasta del secondo Novecento, quella di Peter Watkins. Quasi sconosciuto in Italia, ma ancora poco studiato anche nel resto del mondo, Watkins è invece all’origine di alcune delle tendenze più intriganti e complesse dell’arte degli ultimi anni, dal docu-drama al re-enactment. Ma rinchiudere l’opera di questo artista scomodo e ribelle in uno o più “generi”, anche se innovativi, vorrebbe dire immiserirla e, in ultima analisi, fraintenderla. Fin dai suoi inizi alla BBC (da cui venne cacciato nel 1965, dopo soli due anni di lavoro) Watkins ha sempre proposto un metodo di lavoro che liberasse la narrazione cinematografica e incitasse la partecipazione del singolo cittadino all’informazione e allo sviluppo dei mezzi audiovisivi. Autore di un cinema civile appassionatamente impegnato, Watkins è stato fortemente collegato ai movimenti di contestazione politica e sociale, proponendo un superamento della distanza fra opera e spettatore molto in anticipo sui tempi, che solo l’avvento di Internet ha reso pienamente possibile. E non è un caso che quasi tutte le sue opere siano state duramente colpite dalla censura. Questo libro del giovanissimo ricercatore German Duarte rappresenta in assoluto la prima introduzione all’opera di Watkins pubblicata in Italia.
En los años 60 del siglo pasado, las posiciones existencialistas
y fenomenológicas plantearon un... more En los años 60 del siglo pasado, las posiciones existencialistas
y fenomenológicas plantearon un problema importante y
controvertido, que produjo divisiones en el seno del mismísimo
campo del pensamiento marxista. ¿Está el efecto de reificación
sujeto inextricablemente al modo de producción capitalista?
¿Está por ello destinado a desaparecer con la liberación de la
esfera social del dominio del capital, o bien tenemos que
pensar que el carácter de reificación es más profundo que el
mismo capitalismo y que está arraigado en la dimensión
antropológica fundacional, anterior a la relación social
capitalista? En este ensayo, German A. Duarte nos lleva a la
raíz de la actual crisis mediática, proponiendo la
reelaboración de algunas teorías fundamentales de la
comunicación y enfocando, desde otro punto de vista, algunos
conceptos cardinales del estudio de los mass media.
EDITED BOOKS by German A. Duarte
Towards the Realm of Materiality -Designing Philip K. Dick's non-Existing Technologies, 2024
Philip K. Dick, one of the most prolific and visionary authors of the 20th century, crafted compe... more Philip K. Dick, one of the most prolific and visionary authors of the 20th century, crafted compelling visions of possible futures and dystopian realities teeming with humans, artificial intelligences, and more. Yet, the Dickian universe is more than just its characters—it’s a realm intricately built with technological devices, machines, and objects entirely conceived by this brilliant mind. How did Philip K. Dick envision these technologies, and through them, the future? And now, decades after his time, how should we perceive and interpret these tools? More intriguingly, how can we decode and reconstruct the creative process that led to the creation and “materialization” of these devices? Grounded in a multidisciplinary framework, this volume explores alternative designs and projects for some of the non-existing technologies described in Philip K. Dick’s oeuvre.
«I reietti dell’altro pianeta» Un’Ambigua Utopia e le società del futuro
«I reietti dell’altro pianeta» Un’Ambigua Utopia e le società del futuro, 2024
Negli anni Sessanta venne evidenziata una profonda trasformazione nelle forme di produzione di va... more Negli anni Sessanta venne evidenziata una profonda trasformazione nelle forme di produzione di valore: inizia la cosiddetta «era post-industriale», o «tardo capitalismo», alimentato da una razionalità tecnologica che progressivamente scardinava la dialettica tra forza-lavoro e mezzi di produzione. La tecnologizzazione dei centri industriali aveva avviato un processo di automazione che avrebbe ridotto considerevolmente l’impiego di energie umane nella produzione materiale. I movimenti controculturali, operai e studenteschi trovarono nella fantascienza l’immaginario necessario per decodificare le trasformazioni in atto. La fantascienza è diventata quindi un serbatoio inesauribile di immaginazione del futuro. Tra la fine degli anni Settanta e l’inizio degli Ottanta la rivista «Un’Ambigua Utopia» si inserisce appieno in questo contesto socio-culturale. Nata da un collettivo di scrittura, ha usato la fantascienza come terreno di discussione per ridisegnare la società nel suo complesso.
Nel libro è riprodotta un’ampia selezione dei nove numeri della rivista, introdotta dal curatore e seguita da postfazioni di Giuliano Spagnul, Diego Gabutti e Carlo Pagetti, per comprendere e approfondire la relazione tra fantascienza, movimenti sociali e immagini del futuro.
Soils Matter. Intersezioni tra arte e scienza
Soils Matter. Intersezioni tra arte e scienza, 2024
Il suolo, oltre ad avere significati metaforici, rappresenta un ecosistema complesso che porta co... more Il suolo, oltre ad avere significati metaforici, rappresenta un ecosistema complesso che porta con sé narrazioni letterali e materiali: è una struttura per le città, un nutriente per le piante e può avere un’influenza sulle tecnologie per il sostentamento umano.
La scienza del suolo, nata nell’Ottocento, studia la complessità di questo elemento, coinvolgendo, oltre a geologi e agronomi, figure provenienti da diverse discipline, tra cui l’antropologia, l’economia, e l’arte.
Soils Matter nasce nell’ambito di Scientific Visualisations: Impact on Practice [SVIP], un progetto di ricerca interdisciplinare sviluppato presso la Libera Università di Bolzano tra il 2019 e il 2021 e nato dalla collaborazione tra ricercatori e ricercatrici della Facoltà di Design e Arti, e della Facoltà di Scienze Agrarie, Ambientali e Alimentari.
Il volume raccoglie contributi che riflettono sull’intersezione tra diversi ambiti professionali, esplorando il suolo attraverso diverse prospettive disciplinari.
Après Transmédialité, Bande dessinée & Adaptation (2019), Évelyne Deprêtre et German A. Duarte pr... more Après Transmédialité, Bande dessinée & Adaptation (2019), Évelyne Deprêtre et German A. Duarte proposent ce nouvel ouvrage choral à la fois scientifique, médiatique et artistique. Les études qu’ils y réunissent visent à encore enrichir le concept de transmédialité. Ainsi lui allient-ils non seulement les pratiques circonscrites dans le cadre des industries culturelles, mais aussi (et surtout) leur appropriation sociale et culturelle de même que le discours savant qu’elles suscitent. Or, comprendre ce concept comme tel donne lieu à plusieurs questions. Par exemple, de quelle manière ces pratiques viennent-elles à former un véritable phénomène, pas seulement artistique et culturel, mais également social ?
Pour tenter de répondre à leurs interrogations et mieux cerner ce geste d’appropriation à l’œuvre dans les pratiques artistiques et culturelles contemporaines, les deux chercheurs convoquent, avec une certaine audace, le concept narratologique de péritexte. Pourtant, comme la transmédialité qui induit l’idée de passage d’un médium à un autre, le péritexte, constituant de tout objet culturel, revêt lui aussi cette idée de transition. Les placer tant en perspective qu’en coïncidence permettent ainsi de s’interroger, d’une part, sur les limites médiatiques en jeu dans des pratiques transmédiales, et, d’autre part, sur ces seuils que les lecteurs, spectateurs ou utilisateurs traversent pour pénétrer ou sortir de toute production artistique ou culturelle contemporaine.
Ce travail collectif s’avère très fécond en éléments théoriques et analytiques. Il reflète combien la transmédialité observée sous l’angle péritextuel est bien affaire de plusieurs arts, langages, sémiotiques ou médias. Il démontre aussi que les œuvres contemporaines mettent à mal les frontières artistiques, culturelles et médiatiques traditionnelles.
Review of International American Studies, 2022
A key distinction of Review of International American Studies is its commitment to the notion tha... more A key distinction of Review of International American Studies is its commitment to the notion that the Americas are a hemispheric and transoceanic communicating vessel. This angle provides a unique path to de-center the American Studies discipline, which has become tantamount to studies of the United States. This angle also expands the discipline beyond its traditional literary roots, inviting critical investigations into other forms of communicative media, such as cinema, television, and photography. Informed and inspired by this conceptualization of the discipline, this issue of RIAS is composed of several pieces specifically focused on Latin America, each of which employs a unique interpretive approach of visual media to, collectively and comprehensively, articulate how this multilayered cultural landscape manifests in our contemporary social imaginary.
The arbitrary delineation of the globe through the notion of ‘the western world’ has, seemingly, transformed the Latin American continent a no man’s land. In its vast extension, this part of the planet seems condemned to exist between two worlds. Despite being part of the western hemisphere, and despite its deep Catholic tradition, this vast region is surprisingly excluded as a member of ‘the west.’ Yet, it was neither placed in ‘the east,’ nor on the other side of the wall, when the world was politically, culturally, and economically divided by the Iron Curtain. This land’s perpetual homelessness might be due to its consistent political instability, to the weakness of some of its democracies, or even its colonial past, one that bears no relation to the Commonwealth of Britain, a belonging that placed Australia in the topos of the West. These reasons, in addition to others, have fostered an understanding of Latin America as being generally alien to the ‘western world.’
Being a no man’s land, deprived of a hemisphere, and broadly unintelligible by the general imaginary of the western cultural industry, this continent, populated by almost 700-million people, was traditionally subjected to stereotypes formulated during the twentieth century, and that remained unchangeable in this new millennium. Latin America has become, for the global imaginary, a place of military juntas, a vast lowland displaying desertic features, a tropical yet savage jungle, a poverty-stricken favela, and a land fought over by romantic revolutionarios.
Certainly, the question remains if the obsolete model ‘western world,’ the also obsolete ‘third world,’ or ‘periphery,’ and even the in vogue ‘global south’ would be able to embrace and reproduce a closer image of this heterogenous and vast continent, and by extension if this generalization is able to denote a set of multiple series of social diversities. We doubt it. This doubt encouraged us to gather diverse scholars from diverse academic disciplines to contribute to this issue of Review of International American Studies. And this doubt, which was at a first glance only intuitive, brough us to avoid the topic of identity and representation as the main theme for this journal’s issue. Our initial plan was to structure the series of contributions on some problematics relating to the photographic medium, a medium that is widely regarded as exerting an objective representation of reality, yet also places the pictorial representation on an undetermined semiotic field. The choice of photography was also a choice of intuition that we quickly abandoned since, in our twenty-first century mediascape, photography represents only one element of a fast and global visual stream that shapes and refashions the collective imaginary of the Latin American continent. Thus, we expanded our scope to include other media such as films, paintings, and any visual-oriented human expression that could provide insights on the complex and chaotic mechanism that formulates and constructs the imaginary on the turbulent entity that we call society.
The Object as a Process, 2023
How does artistic practice lead to the production of knowledge? How does, in turn, artistic knowl... more How does artistic practice lead to the production of knowledge? How does, in turn, artistic knowledge relate to its material base? How does contingent materiality guide the artist towards finding form and developing a statement? This volume is dedicated to the object as a process in order to offer new insights into the ways the object – broadly construed, comprising digital and other non-classical objects – becomes an active element in artistic practice.
Expanding Spatial Narratives. Museums, Exhibitions, and Digital Culture
Through a collection of essays by selected scholars and practitioners, this volume explores the w... more Through a collection of essays by selected scholars and practitioners, this volume explores the ways in which digital technology has deeply influenced how one produces interacts with, and consumes narratives by reformulating the notion of space.
Il Corpo Virtuale. Dal corpo robotizzato al corpo disseminato nelle reti. Di Antonio Caronia, 2022
In decine di migliaia di anni il nostro corpo non ha subito modifiche biologiche. L’homo sapiens ... more In decine di migliaia di anni il nostro corpo non ha subito modifiche biologiche. L’homo sapiens ha intessuto una storia fatta di processi simbolici, culture, rappresentazioni, abitando sempre lo stesso corpo che ha segnato il confine tra il dentro e il fuori. Nell’era del postumano, però, il corpo sembra essersi smaterializzato, disseminato. È l’insetto kafkiano, l’androide di Dick, il cyborg di Ballard e Haraway. Eppure continua a essere il braccio a muovere il pennello dell’artista, l’occhio a guardare il foglio bianco, la mano a digitare le lettere sulla tastiera. Il corpo è ancora rivoluzionario.
Con l’ingresso del Metaverso e del fashion nft sulla scena, oggi Il corpo virtuale di Antonio Caronia diventa una lettura profetica. Ma è anche una guida per guardare il presente con le lenti di un futuro passato, uno squarcio nell’immaginario, tra ciò che siamo stati e ciò che potevamo diventare, come società e come corpi.
Very few contemporary television programs provoke spirited responses quite like the dystopian ser... more Very few contemporary television programs provoke spirited responses quite like the dystopian series Black Mirror. This provocative program, infamous for its myriad apocalyptic portrayals of humankind's relationship with an array of electronic and digital technologies, has proven quite adept at offering insightful commentary on a number of issues facing contemporary society. This timely collection draws on innovative and interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks to provide unique perspectives about how confrontations with such issues should be considered and understood through the contemporary post-media condition that drives technology use.
Editorial. Fractus, fracta, fractum. La indeterminación
de la imagen y su relación con el acto na... more Editorial. Fractus, fracta, fractum. La indeterminación
de la imagen y su relación con el acto narrativo en la
era digital- German A. Duarte
Narrativa y estética dela database -Laura Fattori
Paranoia en movimiento. La posibilidad del método
paranoico-crítico en la cinematografía gracias a la era
digital - Cristina Crane
Los subterfugios digitales de Jafar Panahi - Bertold Salas Murillo
Cronomosaicos: metáforas espaciales del tiempo en la
novela hipermedia TOC, de Steve Tomasula - Juan Alberto Conde
La configuración de espacios fractales en la música
minimalista - Diego Franco
Man in the Square: Una parodia del individuo modern - Gul Yaşarturk, Rana İğneci Suzen
Reseña. De “The Exhibitionary Complex” (1988)
a “Thinking (with) Museums: From Exhibitionary
Complex to Governmental Assemblage” (2015) de Tony
Bennett. Una mirada a la práctica museística - Giulia Cordin
Les processus transmédiaux et adaptatifs dans la condition médiatique actuelle constituent le noy... more Les processus transmédiaux et adaptatifs dans la condition médiatique actuelle constituent le noyau de cet ouvrage. D'un côté, il s'agit de situer les processus adaptatifs dans un contexte technologique, qui, par sa nature, opère quotidiennement des formes d’adaptation, et cela même de façon involontaire. D’un autre côté, il s’agit de mettre en lumière non seulement le phénomène de la transmédialité mais également la collectivisation de l’acte narratif qu’il induit de plus en plus souvent. Or, il semble que ce phénomène soit demeuré en arrière-plan dans le contexte médiatique de cette dernière décennie. Entre ces deux intérêts, comme pivot de cette collaboration, se trouve l’analyse des relations entre le médium bédéique et le vaste univers médiatique. En effet, la bande dessinée représente, de l’avis de l’équipe directrice, un moyen de construire des espaces narratifs très particuliers, et son étude, contextualisée dans l’ère numérique, ouvre des voies indispensables pour mieux comprendre et cerner la manière dont les espaces narratifs numériques seront construits dans un futur proche.
Ainsi ce riche travail collectif est-il, à ce titre, l’un des tout premiers à être consacré intégralement à ce sujet. Construit en deux parties, l’une traitant des adaptations littéraires en bandes dessinées, l’autre des adaptations cinématographiques de bandes dessinées, il mêle approches théoriques et analyses d’œuvres spécifiques et ouvre la porte à la fois d’une pratique culturelle en perpétuelle transformation et d’un champ de recherche encore plein d’avenir.
We Need to Talk About Heidegger - Essays Situating Martin Heidegger in Contemporary Media Studies
This collection assembles a number of chapters engaging different strands of Martin Heidegger’s p... more This collection assembles a number of chapters engaging different strands of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy in order to explore issues relevant to contemporary media studies. Following the release of Heidegger’s controversial Black Notebooks and the subsequent calls to abandon the philosopher, this book seeks to demonstrate why Heidegger, rather than be pushed aside and shunned by media practitioners, ought to be embraced by and further incorporated into the discipline, as he offers unique and often innovative pathways to address, and ultimately understand, our daily engagements with media-related phenomena.
Essay by German A. Duarte
This interdisciplinary project explored how fictional technological devices imagined by the scien... more This interdisciplinary project explored how fictional technological devices imagined by the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick could be reinterpreted and re-materialized through speculative design and transmedia storytelling.
Dick’s literary universe—marked by dystopian futures, artificial intelligence, and paranoid realities—was filled with imaginary machines and devices that functioned as both narrative tools and philosophical metaphors. Decades after their creation, can these speculative objects be revisited and brought into new creative contexts?
Bringing together researchers and practitioners from film studies, speculative design, digital humanities, and media theory, the project aimed to reconstruct and reimagine some of these fictional technologies. Through a series of collaborative workshops and critical design sessions, we investigated how abstract concepts—philosophical, existential, or political—could be transformed into concrete, meaningful artifacts.
More than a homage to Dick’s legacy, the project proposed new methodologies for creating narrative objects that question our evolving relationship with technology and fiction. It served as a laboratory for designing alternate futures, where imagination, theory, and material practice intersect.
Imago. A Journal of Social Imaginary, 2025
Chiquinquirá 15 de mayo (2023) reconstructs a traumatic Colombian event using only archival telev... more Chiquinquirá 15 de mayo (2023) reconstructs a traumatic Colombian event using only archival television footage. Though the event occurred, the widely shared memory of its live broadcast is false-no such transmission exists. The film becomes a case study in how collective memory forms around emotionally-credible but fabricated images. Drawing on film theory, memory studies, and archival critique, this essay examines the mythopoetic function of audiovisual media. It argues that moving images do not record reality but generate the sensation of truth. In post-conflict contexts, wherein video is used as legal evidence, such affective mechanisms reveal deep epistemological instability.
“Le text est mort, vive le livre !”
PÉRITEXTE ET TRANSMÉDIALITÉ, 2023
Les dernières années du millénaire ont été marquées par une discussion récurrente qui n’a pas seu... more Les dernières années du millénaire ont été marquées par une discussion récurrente qui n’a pas seulement touché la sphère scientifique. En dépassant les frontières des diverses disciplines, la question de l’hypothétique « mort du livre » a été ouvertement discutée par une grande partie de la société. L’hypothèse du remplacement du livre par un dispositif technologique était déjà présente dans l’imaginaire social. En effet, plusieurs récits de science-fiction le mettaient déjà en œuvre. Mais cette hypothèse, qui ne s’est pas réalisée au cours du premier quart du XXIe siècle, semble avoir éclipsé une perte encore plus grave : « la mort du texte ». Il est possible qu’en discutant de l’hypothétique disparation du livre, nous ayons ignoré la disparition de l’organisation textuelle de la pensée. Cet essai traite de la manière dont la construction hypertextuelle de la pensée présente essentiellement une nature spatiale qui peut être mieux comprise en reconnaissant l’espace « seuil » théorisé par Gérard Genette.
Review of International American Studies, 2022
A conversational exchange between German A. Duarte and Eva Leitolf, deals with the com-plex and ... more A conversational exchange between German A. Duarte and Eva Leitolf, deals with the com-plex and problematic relationship between text and image. Through the Greek concept of topos (τόπος)—from which it seems to emerge the rivalry between text and image in the contempo-rary knowledge production—the text reformulates an interesting phenomenon raised with the development of digital technology: the spatialization of narratives. Once this theoretical framework is settled, the text proposes an analysis on the construction of social imaginaries, propaganda, and the mechanisms of meaning creation in our technological context. This first text develops arguments around a corpus composed by a series of photographic images that influenced Latin American public opinion and, at the same time, reinforced a series of stereotypes on that meridional part of the continent.
Uploads
Authored Books by German A. Duarte
La trayectoria de Peter Watkins, iniciada en la década de 1950, cuestiona esta falsa dicotomía y pone al desnudo la inmensa máquina de imaginario que se había apoderado de la industria cinematográfica y televisiva. Considerado como el padre del docudrama, Peter Watkins nos concede esta entrevista donde analiza su obra cinematográfica y reflexiona.
y fenomenológicas plantearon un problema importante y
controvertido, que produjo divisiones en el seno del mismísimo
campo del pensamiento marxista. ¿Está el efecto de reificación
sujeto inextricablemente al modo de producción capitalista?
¿Está por ello destinado a desaparecer con la liberación de la
esfera social del dominio del capital, o bien tenemos que
pensar que el carácter de reificación es más profundo que el
mismo capitalismo y que está arraigado en la dimensión
antropológica fundacional, anterior a la relación social
capitalista? En este ensayo, German A. Duarte nos lleva a la
raíz de la actual crisis mediática, proponiendo la
reelaboración de algunas teorías fundamentales de la
comunicación y enfocando, desde otro punto de vista, algunos
conceptos cardinales del estudio de los mass media.
EDITED BOOKS by German A. Duarte
Nel libro è riprodotta un’ampia selezione dei nove numeri della rivista, introdotta dal curatore e seguita da postfazioni di Giuliano Spagnul, Diego Gabutti e Carlo Pagetti, per comprendere e approfondire la relazione tra fantascienza, movimenti sociali e immagini del futuro.
La scienza del suolo, nata nell’Ottocento, studia la complessità di questo elemento, coinvolgendo, oltre a geologi e agronomi, figure provenienti da diverse discipline, tra cui l’antropologia, l’economia, e l’arte.
Soils Matter nasce nell’ambito di Scientific Visualisations: Impact on Practice [SVIP], un progetto di ricerca interdisciplinare sviluppato presso la Libera Università di Bolzano tra il 2019 e il 2021 e nato dalla collaborazione tra ricercatori e ricercatrici della Facoltà di Design e Arti, e della Facoltà di Scienze Agrarie, Ambientali e Alimentari.
Il volume raccoglie contributi che riflettono sull’intersezione tra diversi ambiti professionali, esplorando il suolo attraverso diverse prospettive disciplinari.
Pour tenter de répondre à leurs interrogations et mieux cerner ce geste d’appropriation à l’œuvre dans les pratiques artistiques et culturelles contemporaines, les deux chercheurs convoquent, avec une certaine audace, le concept narratologique de péritexte. Pourtant, comme la transmédialité qui induit l’idée de passage d’un médium à un autre, le péritexte, constituant de tout objet culturel, revêt lui aussi cette idée de transition. Les placer tant en perspective qu’en coïncidence permettent ainsi de s’interroger, d’une part, sur les limites médiatiques en jeu dans des pratiques transmédiales, et, d’autre part, sur ces seuils que les lecteurs, spectateurs ou utilisateurs traversent pour pénétrer ou sortir de toute production artistique ou culturelle contemporaine.
Ce travail collectif s’avère très fécond en éléments théoriques et analytiques. Il reflète combien la transmédialité observée sous l’angle péritextuel est bien affaire de plusieurs arts, langages, sémiotiques ou médias. Il démontre aussi que les œuvres contemporaines mettent à mal les frontières artistiques, culturelles et médiatiques traditionnelles.
The arbitrary delineation of the globe through the notion of ‘the western world’ has, seemingly, transformed the Latin American continent a no man’s land. In its vast extension, this part of the planet seems condemned to exist between two worlds. Despite being part of the western hemisphere, and despite its deep Catholic tradition, this vast region is surprisingly excluded as a member of ‘the west.’ Yet, it was neither placed in ‘the east,’ nor on the other side of the wall, when the world was politically, culturally, and economically divided by the Iron Curtain. This land’s perpetual homelessness might be due to its consistent political instability, to the weakness of some of its democracies, or even its colonial past, one that bears no relation to the Commonwealth of Britain, a belonging that placed Australia in the topos of the West. These reasons, in addition to others, have fostered an understanding of Latin America as being generally alien to the ‘western world.’
Being a no man’s land, deprived of a hemisphere, and broadly unintelligible by the general imaginary of the western cultural industry, this continent, populated by almost 700-million people, was traditionally subjected to stereotypes formulated during the twentieth century, and that remained unchangeable in this new millennium. Latin America has become, for the global imaginary, a place of military juntas, a vast lowland displaying desertic features, a tropical yet savage jungle, a poverty-stricken favela, and a land fought over by romantic revolutionarios.
Certainly, the question remains if the obsolete model ‘western world,’ the also obsolete ‘third world,’ or ‘periphery,’ and even the in vogue ‘global south’ would be able to embrace and reproduce a closer image of this heterogenous and vast continent, and by extension if this generalization is able to denote a set of multiple series of social diversities. We doubt it. This doubt encouraged us to gather diverse scholars from diverse academic disciplines to contribute to this issue of Review of International American Studies. And this doubt, which was at a first glance only intuitive, brough us to avoid the topic of identity and representation as the main theme for this journal’s issue. Our initial plan was to structure the series of contributions on some problematics relating to the photographic medium, a medium that is widely regarded as exerting an objective representation of reality, yet also places the pictorial representation on an undetermined semiotic field. The choice of photography was also a choice of intuition that we quickly abandoned since, in our twenty-first century mediascape, photography represents only one element of a fast and global visual stream that shapes and refashions the collective imaginary of the Latin American continent. Thus, we expanded our scope to include other media such as films, paintings, and any visual-oriented human expression that could provide insights on the complex and chaotic mechanism that formulates and constructs the imaginary on the turbulent entity that we call society.
Con l’ingresso del Metaverso e del fashion nft sulla scena, oggi Il corpo virtuale di Antonio Caronia diventa una lettura profetica. Ma è anche una guida per guardare il presente con le lenti di un futuro passato, uno squarcio nell’immaginario, tra ciò che siamo stati e ciò che potevamo diventare, come società e come corpi.
de la imagen y su relación con el acto narrativo en la
era digital- German A. Duarte
Narrativa y estética dela database -Laura Fattori
Paranoia en movimiento. La posibilidad del método
paranoico-crítico en la cinematografía gracias a la era
digital - Cristina Crane
Los subterfugios digitales de Jafar Panahi - Bertold Salas Murillo
Cronomosaicos: metáforas espaciales del tiempo en la
novela hipermedia TOC, de Steve Tomasula - Juan Alberto Conde
La configuración de espacios fractales en la música
minimalista - Diego Franco
Man in the Square: Una parodia del individuo modern - Gul Yaşarturk, Rana İğneci Suzen
Reseña. De “The Exhibitionary Complex” (1988)
a “Thinking (with) Museums: From Exhibitionary
Complex to Governmental Assemblage” (2015) de Tony
Bennett. Una mirada a la práctica museística - Giulia Cordin
Ainsi ce riche travail collectif est-il, à ce titre, l’un des tout premiers à être consacré intégralement à ce sujet. Construit en deux parties, l’une traitant des adaptations littéraires en bandes dessinées, l’autre des adaptations cinématographiques de bandes dessinées, il mêle approches théoriques et analyses d’œuvres spécifiques et ouvre la porte à la fois d’une pratique culturelle en perpétuelle transformation et d’un champ de recherche encore plein d’avenir.
Essay by German A. Duarte
Dick’s literary universe—marked by dystopian futures, artificial intelligence, and paranoid realities—was filled with imaginary machines and devices that functioned as both narrative tools and philosophical metaphors. Decades after their creation, can these speculative objects be revisited and brought into new creative contexts?
Bringing together researchers and practitioners from film studies, speculative design, digital humanities, and media theory, the project aimed to reconstruct and reimagine some of these fictional technologies. Through a series of collaborative workshops and critical design sessions, we investigated how abstract concepts—philosophical, existential, or political—could be transformed into concrete, meaningful artifacts.
More than a homage to Dick’s legacy, the project proposed new methodologies for creating narrative objects that question our evolving relationship with technology and fiction. It served as a laboratory for designing alternate futures, where imagination, theory, and material practice intersect.