The coined term gesture-ing in the article's title, “Gesture-ing in Drawing via Theory of Whitehead and Barad,” refers to a drawing that is being developed as the article is being written, and provides the motif through which its topic is mapped. In addition, the term relates to the combined role of theory of Whitehead and Barad that is itself gestured; combined in the sense that the drawings are stylistically diagrammatic and include annotation, and are made in cooperation with the article, as it is being written and accommodating the latter's argument. The main drawing, of two featured drawings, Gesture drawing and Index Cards drawing, involves gesture and gesturing of line, while bringing in relevant theory in the form of handwritten index cards and paratext pertaining first to Whitehead and then to Barad. The two drawings are gradually developed, as the article is being written, towards a single combined drawing. Whitehead is relevant to the gesturing of movement from his termed event here to event there within an occasion and the next-new occasion, as and through a passage of nature. Barad's referencing is in terms of intra-activity as and within the middle-ness of such movement. Aspects of Barad's agential realism enable consideration of human-agential and material-agential intra-activity, to suggest how the medium of and as the drawing is sympoietic (Donna Haraway), which is how the author, as the visual work's human agency, prefers to consider the near-autonomy of how simple drawing materials work. The combined ratio of practice–theory–agency–materiality is explored through the narrative, the article itself, which is at-once textual and, albeit through reproduction only, visual–material. The role of digital reproduction is introduced as, itself, an agency as relevant to the process as liquid coffee poured on newsprint, as a key material component of the drawings.

Both philosophers and art historians commonly take Brancusi to have been a Platonic sculptor. This is due to the fact that he was sculpting “essences” or “Forms” of things rather than their appearances. My paper argues against the Platonic interpretation of Brancusi. First, I show that this is not a historically accurate way of understanding his sculptural project. Brancusi is not likely to have studied Plato or sculpted in dialogue with his texts. From the historical perspective, rather than connecting Brancusi’s sculpture to Plato, it is more accurate to link it conceptually to Blavatsky’s Theosophy and especially to Isis Unveiled. Second, I argue that Plato’s “Forms”, properly understood, are not the types of things that could be sculpted in the first place. In Plato’s metaphysics, Forms constitute a small subset of “universals”. As non-spatiotemporal, transcendent entities graspable by reason rather than senses, they cannot be rendered in sculpture. Sculpture can endeavor to capture essences (rather than Forms) of things, but there is nothing especially Platonic about such sculptural aims. Thus, Brancusi’s sculptural essences of birds, fish, seals, and turtles are not Platonic in any technical sense of the term. Jointly, these two arguments give us a good reason not to interpret Brancusi’s work in light of Plato’s theory of Forms, but, at best, in light of what he has learned about “essences” from his study of Theosophy.

ABSTRACT This article examines generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) as a disruptive technology in photographic art. It does so by using diffractive analysis to discuss how photorealistic GenAI imaging may disrupt dominant understandings of photography as an artistic medium and anthropocentric understandings of human versus nonhuman agency in artistic practices. Serving as a prism for discussion is The Electrician (2022), a photorealistic portrait created by Boris Eldagsen using DALL·E 2. Like much visual art that builds on the idea of the photographic and highlights nonhuman agency, The Electrician further challenges the boundaries of photography. It does so by imitating a photographic aesthetic without being a photograph, thereby re-actualising questions of what constitutes photography as an artistic medium. The article argues that when photography’s boundaries are already porous, and the field of photographic art is characterised by fluidity and experimentation, further challenging these boundaries does not necessarily constitute disruption. Still, photorealistic GenAI imaging may be considered a force of aesthetic disruption, as its current existence in a photo-philosophical limbo makes thinking of and theorising the boundaries of photography and photographic art acutely relevant, no matter their existing porosity. The unprecedented visual resemblance between (some) photographs and (some) photorealistic GenAI images readily calls for problematisation of existing concepts related to photography. The Electrician’s forceful highlighting of nonhuman agency, both through its visual expression, its modes of production and the discourse surrounding it, may—in its sociohistorical context—be disruptive. The artwork forces attention towards the entanglement of human and nonhuman agency, making the latter difficult to deny.

ABSTRACT Extinction Studies was a years-long, politically motivated artistic event that blurs the boundaries not only between traditional “conservable” visual artwork and ephemeral performance but also between scientific rigour and emotional truth-telling. In the long chronology of art history, Lucienne Rickard’s Extinction Studies project is by no means the first artistic engagement with modes of destruction in any of art’s key domains. Yet, Rickard’s interplay between destruction of art, as art, and in art represents a unique opportunity for the Tasmanian visual artist to assert effective political agency. In the following, I investigate the characteristics of Extinction Studies that justify the twin appellations of political art and ideological vandalism as the testimony of a moral witness to what is commonly referred to as the sixth mass extinction.

ABSTRACT Traditionally, Oríkì, a praise poetic oral genre among the Yorùbá people, serves both socio-cultural (for the praised) and economic (for the performer) functions. Scholars have indicted modernity through colonization and westernization as great threats to the sustainability of its socio-cultural aspect. However, little is theorized about the contributions of such modernity to the sustainability of its economic function. Therefore, this study examined the features of Yorùbá Oríkì that are hybridized with modern musical entertainment in order to praise audience through what has been socially referred to as hype performance. The study adopted the qualitative research approach of the interpretive phenomenological perspective. The life performances of Segun Johnson, a popular hype performer in Nigeria, were purposively selected for this analysis. Ten (10) videos of his life performances were curated from his social media handles on Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube and TikTok. The texts arisen from the transcription of the performances constituted the data. These data were analyzed thematically and interpreted using Bhabha’s theory of hybridity. The findings revealed the theatrical, orality and language features of Yorùbá Oríkì that were hybridized with modern entertainment mode (pop performance) by Segun Johnson in hyping and getting money from his audience. The article concludes that hyping has become a modern performance art similar to the traditional Oríkì performance among the Yorùbá. Therefore, it is recommended that upcoming pop artistes in Nigeria should adopt this strategy of blending traditional oral genres with their performances in order to contribute to the Nigerian creative economy and the modernization of their cultural heritage.

ABSTRACT The following essay explores the work of art as a site of encounter with human perceptual labor that plays a role in technical operations. It tackles the way such labor is deemed obsolete, soon to be replaced, and therefore surrogate even if it actually animates and reproduces automated vision systems. It explores how art goes about representing the ways in which such labor is undervalued and unrecognized. The text argues for reading in between the lines and images of Harun Farocki’s films, installations, and writings where the obsolescence of human labor emerges more as an ideological screen than a fact. It focuses on moments in his oeuvre which indicate that human labor, including cognition as automation’s last frontier, is not automated away but persists, changes site, undergoes restructuring, and becomes more hidden. More recent works by the eeefff collective and Elisa Giardina Papa explore the intertwined roles of human affection and vision labor in the necessarily failed attempts to teach machines to see and feel, to “clean” the algorithmic vision and affection from opacity and the queerness of real life. Both artists leave behind Farocki’s self-reflexive, detached spectator to involve the audience in more situated and embodied experiences of perception labor and the particular ways in which such labor has become outsourced and dispersed in semi-peripheries such as Sicily or Belarus. They try to express the price that people pay with their emotions and bodies for such work. Yet, in principle, they follow Farocki’s take on labor’s in/visibility in that they challenge the ruling ideologies that blind human vision to the realities of labor. The essay also pays attention to the ways in which both artistic and technical vision today are pre-determined by the logic of the gig economy.

ABSTRACT The sudden flourishing of reflections on light, nature and poetry that occurred from the mid-80s onwards in the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, could not fail to surprise. Between their reputation as Brechtian, materialist filmmakers and these seemingly apolitical reflections, developed in conjunction with their appeal to Hölderlin’s “idealist” poetry, there seems to be an insurmountable rift. By situating their aesthetics in the broader framework known as “aesthetic modernity”, i.e. art and philosophy of art since the end of the 18th century (cf. J.M. Schaeffer, J. Rancière), I demonstrate how films such as Der Tod des Empedokles (1986) and Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro (1991), not so much exhibit a shift to conservatism with this “sudden” interest in nature and poetry, but, rather, the manifestation of a Romantic contradiction characteristic of modern aesthetics. In a period of disillusionment, these “Brechtian” filmmakers increasingly turned to a German literary and philosophical tradition that praised the “revelationist” potential of poetry, while they, simultaneously and still with revolutionary fervour, reflected on Germany’s troubled political past and present. I will argue that we can understand this alignment of revolution and revelationism from the perspective of their indebtedness to an antimodern worldview that perceives of the modern age as being in decline, to which these filmmakers oppose a utopian striving towards a “new world”, captured in a Romantic discourse of light and vision.

ABSTRACTThis article seeks to investigate the different dimensions of transcultural memory; it particularly scrutinises it with reference to travelling, dialogic and postmemory. The aim of such an approach is to discuss transcultural memory in relation to migrants, expatriates and exiles, highlighting the ways in which their memories tend to cut across national, cultural, ethnic and geographical borders. Having addressed the transcultural turn in the field of memory studies, I closely examine transcultural memory in Vikram Seth’s memoir Two Lives in order to address broader issues of diasporic identities and the coming together of Indian and European histories within a memory narrative. Set mostly in Germany and England, Two Lives recounts individual histories—at first parallel, and separated, but later intertwined—of Seth’s great-uncle Shanti Seth and his German-Jewish wife Hennerle Caro. These two lives, I argue, serve as a historical document, revealing how family histories turn out to be a unique manifestation of “global memories” such as the Holocaust, the Second World War, or the partition of India. The article, hence, demonstrates that as the narrator chronicles overlapping family histories, he makes the reader imagine transcultural memory as a constant process of change and discovery rather than a permanent condition. Finally, I maintain that Seth’s work, with its tale of human dialogue across cultural barriers, provides a new perspective on memory, culture, history and territory as shared, overlapping and intertwined.

ABSTRACTThe article analyses commemorative practices and public debates revolving around the local remembrance of military commander Marshal Stepa Stepanović in the Serbian town of Čačak. The geographical concept of place is used as the coming together of processes and agencies operating on different scales (local, national, transnational) and manifesting themselves through material settings around which social interactions take place. It is argued that Stepanović’s legacy served as a medium for directing how different groups within the local community processed contentious historical experiences, concurrently revealing polyphonous collective and individual interests and agencies. Ultimately, this example of local remembrance can be viewed as a microcosm of wider mnemonic dynamics in Serbian society, as well as of the influences of broader processes on locally based social relations.