The international journal Design | Arts | Culture is a digital open access and peer-reviewed multidisciplinary academic journal, published by the "Design, Interior Architecture and Audiovisual Documentation" research lab, Faculty of Applied Arts and Culture, University of West Attica, Athens, Greece, in cooperation with a continuously evolving network of peer institutions and guest editors. The journal is hosted in the open access e Publishing platform of the National Documentation Centre of Greece (EKT). This journal is biannual (with regular and from time to time special issues) and publishes research articles, projects and portfolios, as well as book reviews and student works. It aims to provide an academic forum for sharing and connecting ideas, projects, practices and findings about design, applied arts and culture. This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. This journal does not charge submission or publication fees.
Announcements
Call for Submissions: Design / Arts / Culture Vol. 5, “Polarities, limits and thresholds”
2024-03-11
This is an open call for papers for the fifth volume of Arts | Culture | Design (ISSN: 2732-6926), which is focused on the topic “Polarities, limits and thresholds” (for more details, please refer to the full text of the announcement). Vol. 5 is edited by the ESAD College of Arts and Design, Matosinhos, Portugal.
The guest editors invite contributions related to the topic, from a multiplicity of disciplinary and theoretical viewpoints. Articles should range between 4,000 and 8,000 words. We will also include review essays of academic books and/or curated exhibitions (1500-2000 words); and visual essays (1000-3000 words, plus 10-15 images).
Deadline for submissions May 31st, 2024
About the Journal
The International Journal Design | Arts | Culture is a digital open access and peer-reviewed multi disciplinary journal, published by Design, Interior Architecture and Audiovisual Documentation lab of the Faculty of Applied Arts and Culture of the University of West Attica Greece in cooperation with the: National University of Arts Bucharest Romania, ESAD Matosinhos Portugal, University of Nicosia Cyprus. The journal is hosted in the open access e Publishing platform of the National Documentation Centre of Greece (EKT).
All articles, portfolios and reviews will be double blind peer reviewed. The official language is English. All the published works are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This permits anyone to copy, redistribute, remix, transmit and adapt the work provided the original work and source is appropriately cited. This journal does not charge submission or publication fees.
For more information, please contact the guests editors
Marta Varzim martavarzim@esad.pt
João Lemos joaolemos@esad.pt
Current Issue
Vol. 4 No. 2 (2024): NARRATIVES OF CRISIS: REPRESENTING CAPITALIST REALISM PART II: THE GREEK CRISIS
Published: 31.03.2024
Bringing together researchers, theorists and visual artists, the fourth volume of DAC journal, "Narratives of Crisis: Representing Capitalist Realism", aims to provide a platform for discussions and research, which consider various aspects of the visual and its implication to both ideological formations and cultural forms related albeit not limited to the notion of crisis. The special issues (4:1, 4:2) are, in a way, a continuation of previous, relatively recent projects which the guest editor, Dr Penelope Petsini, has curated or organised, and all invited contributors have been involved in: The group exhibitions "Capitalist Realism: Future Perfect" and "Capitalist Realism: Past Continuous" (2018-19, held at MOMus-Thessaloniki Museum of Photography and MOMus-Center of Experimental Arts, respectively), the eponymous book (University of Macedonia Press, 2018), as well as the conference "Representing Capitalist Realism: Crisis, Politics and the Visual" (23-24/11/2018, MOMus-Thessaloniki Museum of Photography & Rosa Luxemburg Foundation). Starting from this point, the issues aim to offer a comparative charting of the crisis discourse by adopting an inclusive definition of the term derived from new scholarship and the concept of "Capitalist Realism" as introduced by British theorist Mark Fisher: an ideological framework for perceiving capitalism's impact on politics, economics, and collective consciousness – encompassing both the spheres of economy and culture. Crucially, Capitalist Realism encapsulates the prevalent notion that not only is capitalism the sole feasible political and economic structure, but it has also become nearly inconceivable to imagine a coherent alternative.
Part Two ("The Greek Crisis") is a collection of essays and visual explorations which present the multifaceted dimensions of the Greek Crisis, weaving together threads of cinema, art, literature, architecture, politics, and urban life. It includes articles, visual essays, portfolios and a review by: Ioanna Barkouta; Io Chaviara; Depression Era collective; Grossraum (Yannis Karpouzis - Yorgos Karailias - Yorgos Prinos - Pavlos Fysakis); Dimitris Kechris; Paraskevi Kertemelidou; Myrto Marini; Maria Moira; Maria Paschalidou; Anna Poupou; Nikolas Ventourakis.
Total pages 156
Full Issue
Editorial
Articles
MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS AND THE DYNAMICS OF ARTISTS' DIALOGUE IN THE ERA OF SOCIAL CRISIS
Paraskevi Kertemelidou
Artwork/Portfolio
GROSSRAUM C21
Experiencing intangible fields of sovereignty, expansionism and imposition of state-of-emergency regimes
Yannis Karpouzis, Yorgos Karailias, Yorgos Prinos, Pavlos Fysakis
Book Reviews
EDITORIAL NOTE
Starting from some fundamental questions posed many decades ago: “What do we mean by «image»? Is it in our mind or on the screen or both? If both, what are some of the similarities and differences between the projected image and the mental image? More importantly, how fundamental and instrumental is the picture in your mind to your cognitive processes perception, memory, thought, creativity? What are the effects of imagery on memory?
Can relatively abstract concepts and thoughts involve imagery?” (Fleming, 1977, p. 43); this is the question anwered by the third volume of DAC Journal (Design | Arts | Culture) dedicated to “Image and Memory”.
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its “theatre”. The cultural, symbolic world, the world of going beyond the material, the ultimate, the transcendent, constitutes an understanding of the concept of “place of memory” in Pierre Nora. Collective memory exists due to “places of memory”, as they are manifested in material, functional and symbolic forms: monuments, memorials, and images.
In this context, we should remember Theodor Adorno’s critical view of Walter Benjamin’s philosophical imagination (philosophische Phantasie) that makes of the singular ‘image’ (Bild) the very crystal ‘eye’ – of history. Commenting Adorno, Georges Didi-Huberman claimed “the paradoxical power and fragility of images.
On the one hand, they are unsuited to the generality of the concept, since they are always singular: local, incomplete, in short, insubstantial […]. On the other hand, they are universally open: never entirely sealed off, never completed […]”.
According to the French philosopher of art, “There is no critical theory without a critique of images. But nor is there any such theory without a critique – of discourse and image – by images themselves. […] Images are themselves capable of becoming critical tools. They are, as Jean-Paul Sartre long ago said, acts not things, active confrontations on the battlefield of ‘culture’. They do not merely illustrate ideas: they produce ideas or produce effects critical of ideas.” (Didi-Huberman, 2017, p. 260).
If images are embodied in pictures, we should also acknowledge that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. This commonplace quotation suggests that images contain more information than texts and that the pieces of information provided by images are more easily processed and understood by any observer. Otherwise, a picture can trigger a buried memory and recall a precise moment in time much more rapidly than words.
Quoting Walter Benjamin, “the true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”
Image and memory are indelibly linked by the contemporary urges as the coagulation of the concept of “public image” due to Paul Virilio. Images are “fabricated” on different levels in different techniques mobilising the individual and the collective memory.
The connection between image and memory can be seen from the beginning of history, the images of individual or collective experience being present in material culture (Jones, 2007).
These images representing a type of external memory (Donald, 1998), fixed on a material medium, allowed the remembrance process (Gibbons, 2019) to encompass an enormous area of topics, from images of the deceased to images of memorable events.
Visual artists, art historians and theoreticians, historians, and archaeologists contributed with essays (both textual and visual) thematising various aspects regarding the mnemonic, individual and collective memories.
Reference List
Didi-Huberman, G. and Miller, C. (2017) “Critical Image/Imaging Critique”, Oxford Art Journal, Volume 40, Issue 2, pp. 249–261.
Donald, M. (1998) Hominid enculturation and cognitive evolution. In C. Renfrew & C. Scarre (eds.) Cognition and material culture: The archaeology of symbolic storage (pp. 7–17). Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Fleming, M.L, (1977) “The Picture in Your Mind.” AV Communication Review, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 43–62.
Gibbons, J. (2019) Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Jones, A. (2007) Memory and material culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
