| 1. |
- Belgrano, Elisabeth, 1970
(author)
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'Lasciatemi morire' & 'Rochers vous etes sourds': interpreting Arianna's tears, sighs and pain by investigating Italian and French ornaments through vocal practice-based research
- 2009
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In: Singing Music from 1500 to 1900: style, Technique, Knowledge, Asssertion, Experiment. 7-10 juli 2009. National Early Music Association International Conference, University of York, UK.
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- ABSTRACT: In my PhD research I depart from a female singer’s perspective of interpreting 17th century opera laments , based on musicologist Mauro Calcagno’s statement signifying the voice of the female singer as a symbol of Nothing in association with the concept of aesthetics in the early 17th century opera genre . The female singer, he points out, justified the relevance of “pure voice” and “over-vocalization” referring to two recurring tropes, pronounced within a larger discourse among 17th century intellectuals in Italy and France, concerned with the concept of aesthetics: the concept of nothingness and the singing of the nightingale. In this presentation I show my perceptions of the voice of Arianna. My aim is to better understand the use of ornamentation in my performance of Italian and French 17th century vocal music. Knowledge of ornamentation can be obtained by investigating at depth the singer’s process from the first encounter with the text and musical score, to the actual performance of stage. There are two important aspects I take into consideration. First, the intellectual discourse, contemporary to the creations and performances of the two laments by Monteverdi and Lambert, carries a great deal of information significant to vocal interpretation. Second, the oriental ornamentation is reflected upon the arts and architecture in Venice during the 16th and 17th centuries, but has not yet been fully addressed in relation to vocal ornamentation in the 17th century opera repertory. I have been observing the life and career of Signora Anna Renzi Romana, one of the first opera prima donnas active in Venice during mid 17th century. Her interpretations of laments and mad scenes made a great impact on her audience as well and on the intellectual academies supporting the early operatic events in Venice. As the sounding voices of the Greek Sirens seducing Odysseus and his sailors , Anna Renzi and her female colleagues seduced their audiences in the Venetian opera theaters. Renzi’s performances are described in a volume published to her honor in 1644, “La Glorie della Signora Anna Renzi Romana”. In my research I explore and reflect upon the vocal sounds of ‘trillo’, ‘esclamazione’ and ‘coup de gosier’ by merging these vocal ornaments and my experience of PURE VOICE to theories of Nothingness, debated by Italian and French17th century intellectuals in Venice and Paris. I also combine their thoughts and theories to philosophical theories of Nothing referring to Jean-Paul Sartre and Marcia Ça Cavalcante Schuback . My personal experience of the lamenting sound is then analyzed along with the glorious description of Renzi’s performances of the laments. Finally in my search for sources of vocal ornaments, I listen to voices and vocal music from the ‘east’, following the 16th and 17th century Venetian trading routes. The Eastern throat–beating ornaments and vibratos appears similar to the ones described by 17th century composers and authors like Giulio Caccini and Benigne de Bacilly, and they inspire my research towards different possible ways of performing the sighs, tears and pains of Arianna. This research and presentation is part of my PhD research project“Passionate Women’s Voices on Stage and an Interpretation of the 17th Century Lamenti and Scene di Pazzie”. See: http://www.konst.gu.se/forskarutbildning/doktorander/Elisabeth_Belgrano/
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| 2. |
- Synnestvedt, Anita, 1956
(author)
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“Archaeology as a meeting point for multicultural regeneration”
- 2009
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In: The Vital Spark 30 September to Wednesday 3 October, 2007. Interpret Scotland and the Association for Heritage Interpretation.
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article presents a project of an archaeological excavation around a Stone Age chamber grave in a suburban area in Gothenburg, Sweden. Questions raised were how this site has been used during the last 80 years and how it is used today.
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| 3. |
- Alfredsson, Johan, 1974
(author)
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Bengt Emil Johnson’s Bland orrar och kor and the Legacy of 1960’s Sound Technology : Bengt Emil Johnson - after Concretism
- 2005
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In: "Avant-Garde and Technology", 2005-11-25, Stockholm.
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Bengt Emil Johnson was one of the most prominent poets of the short-lived yet highly vivid Swedish concretist movement of the early 1960’s. As for most poets involved in this movement, his carreer soon turned to other manners of writing, in his case more successfully than for many of his fellow concretists. During the second half of the 1960’s he was involved in creating the interartial genre of text-sound-composition, and ever since then he has been an internationally acclaimed composer of electro-acoustic music. Since the 1970’s he has also been recognised as an important innovator in the field of nature-poetry, displaying an attitude as keen and attentive towards the abundance of language as it is towards that of nature. Through this sensitivity he has been able to examine and unfold intriguing correspondences between language and nature. Apart from being a poet during the first half of the 1960’s, Johnson was also a writer of manifestos and essays concerning aesthetic matters. He quite frequently appeared in the press as well as in several of the important Swedish periodicals of the time. Quite a few of the aesthetical texts he wrote during this period were concerned with the artistic potential that was to be found in new technology, especially sound-technology. Particularly interesting are a number of texts which he wrote in collaboration with Lars-Gunnar Bodin. Johnson and Bodin were not, however, the only Swedish artists writing manifestos and essays from these perspectives during those years. Someone else who did was Öyvind Fahlström, the patriarch of the Swedish concretist movement. In my paper I trace a rhetoric in a number of aesthetic essays and manifestos by all these writers published between the years 1954-1965, a rhetoric which in several ways has its aim fixed on connecting technological and scientific breakthrough to artistic breakthrough. In this way I try to point out the fact that a number of the ideals behind the radical avant-garde writing strategies used by Johnson and his compatriots during his concretist years had a technological origin. I also go on to show to what extent these strategies linger in Johnson’s later writing, what part they play, and in what ways they appear. The examples I use from his later writing consist of three, among themselves quite different, poems from his 1989 poetry collection Bland orrar och kor (Amongst Black Grouse and Cows). I aim to show that Johnson, in these poems, still uses techniques appropriated from, and inspired by, mid-century sound-technological landmarks such as the contact-microphone, multiple layer recording, cut-up- and pitching techniques. And all of these technologies and techniques were discussed in the aesthetic writings of Johnson, Bodin, and Fahlström, respectively, during the 1950’s and 1960’s. And all of them were mentioned as holding great artistic potential.
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| 4. |
- johansson, michael, 1962-, et al.
(author)
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Fieldasy
- 2004
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In: Fieldasy. - Sheffield, UK.
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Fieldasy is a process for engaging multiple perspectives in the creation of a world, and the mapping of its virtual space. While the final outcome lies ahead, the process has already produced a series of artistic expressions that drives the overall project forward. Fieldasy refers to the methods of field working and invoking imagination by using physical objects. The objects constitute a shared ground for collaborative creativity, serves as nodes in a complex narrative and as a basis for the creation of the world. In the paper, we describe the process, methods and the artifacts developed in this project. We also show how this approach can host and facilitate artistic development in a complex production environment such as the one of digital media, supported by invited artists, researchers (computer science) and students (interaction design), enabling diverse parties to transfer their knowledge into the project in an ongoing manner. Three aspects of the project are discussed: The Framework; the city of Abadyl, The Method; fieldasy and The Output; a series of artifacts eventually displayed in a series of exhibitions.
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| 5. |
- Snæbjørnsdóttir, Bryndis, 1955
(author)
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Glazing the Gaze: A human animal encounter
- 2009
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In: Minding Animals, Newcastle, Australia.
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Glazing the Gaze; a human animal encounter. Abstract. This paper explores prevailing ideas about ‘the wild’ through an examination of human relationships with animals in relation to an art project entitled ‘seal’ produced by Snaebjornsdottir/Wilson. ‘seal’ is a recent visual art project (currently a work in progress) that explores human relationships to the seal, an animal widely appropriated in Western culture for a variety of human representations, and emotional and political ends. For the purpose of the project the artists (Snæbjörnsdóttir/ Wilson) have focused on the animal in a specific geographical context, one that offers access to a multiplicity of human attitudes towards the animal. The project aims to draw attention to those attitudes in an attempt to separate the ‘represented’ animal from the ‘living’ animal. Through its site–specificity, the project also explores cultural territories and the shaping of ‘belonging’ and nationhood. The research for this project has included a series of interviews with people who have had some contact with the seal through observation, caring, and hunting and we have filmed various activities involved in the preparation and aftermath of a hunt. The final stage of this research (planned for the autumn 2008) is a film involving the process of taxidermy – the making of a stuffed seal. The project is part of a practice-based PhD submission (scheduled for Spring 2009) in the Faculty of Fine Art at Gothenburg University, Sweden. We propose that what we refer to today as ‘animal’ is a complex and evolving construction, which humans use to project and carry ideas and desires concerning nature and wilderness. Obsession with controlling and dominating ‘nature’ and its representation, through various forms of confinement, from zoos to natural history collections to wild-life photography and film, has arguably culminated in the ‘killing’ of the term ‘animal’ and ultimately resulted in an ‘eclipse’ of the ‘real/living’ animal (Lippit 2000). In pursuance of the argument, the paper explores the visual art methodology employed in the project and its relationship to relevant contemporary and historical writings. Please note that we have been offered an exhibition at the Podspace Gallery for 3 weeks during the conference where the art work relating to this research and paper will be shown.
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| 6. |
- Belgrano, Elisabeth, 1970
(author)
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Understanding the singing self in performance of laments and madscenes in Italian and French 17th century opera.
- 2009
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In: EUFRAD (European Forum for Research Degrees in Arts and Design, 4-6 september 2009, Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, UK.
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This is an interdisciplinary study departing from vocal practice-based research in Baroque opera performance. The aim is to better understand minds and emotions of women performers during the 17th century with reference to 21 century performance practice, while exploring new possibilities of performing vocal music from the Baroque era.
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| 7. |
- Zetterman, Eva
(author)
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Formation of identity processes on the walls of California
- 2006
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In: Paper presented at the conference III congreso Nol@an & VI Taller de la Red Haina (sobre Globalización y genero en América Latina), June 8-11, 2006, Gothenburg University.. - Göteborg. ; , s. 1-9
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)
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| 8. |
- Almér, Alexander, 1967
(author)
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Interpreter relativism vs assertion insensitive semantics
- 2009
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In: Workshop: Pragmatics, semantics and systematicity, May 8, 2009, University of Stockholm.
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Recently, contextualism has been challenged for not being able to account for certain linguistic data having to do, e.g., with disagreement about taste and retraction of epistemic modals. The evidence alluded to typically shows that speakers assess utterances made by others or themselves as true, false, wrong, agreeable etc., in a fashion contradicting the predictions of standard contextualism. Contextualism predicts that taste/epistemic modal sentences express different propositional contents in different contexts of utterance by taking the taste standard / information salient in the context of utterance as a semantic value. There is evidence that we frequently assess such assertions for truth or correctness independently of which information is salient in the utterance situation, building instead on which information is relevant at the context of assessment. Moreover, linguistic intuition tells us that nothing is wrong with such utterance insensitive assessments. The contextualist seems to face the challenge of either assuming that competent speakers don’t fully grasp the truth conditions of epistemic modals and taste judgments or abandon contextualism. Recently, this evidence has been adduced in favor of a new brand of semantic relativism, which does not trace the variation in truth to contextual variation in content, but to contextual variation in truth assignment to the same content. The most influential version of this new relativism defines truth for assertion so that the same assertion varies in truth with context of assessment rather than context of utterance. An alternative non-standard contextualist analysis of utterance insensitive assessments assumes that such assessments do not express concern with the proposition expressed (and asserted) by the utterance but rather a relevantly related proposition made salient in the context of assessment. A further alternative position construes the semantics of utterances relative to a context of interpretation: an utterance expresses/asserts a set of propositions relative to an interpreter, which might or might not be in a different context than the original asserter when making the interpretation/assessment. In my talk, which is based on joint work with Gunnar Björnsson, I compare the content-relativistic notion that an utterance expresses different propositions relative to different contexts of interpretation with our notion that insensitive assessments target propositions made salient in the context of assessment, rather than the original proposition asserted. For some domains of discourse, these non-standard contextualist theories are close competitors about providing the best account of insensitive assessments. I argue that our notion requires less modification of the common sense notion that what one asserts one is supposed to believe.
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| 9. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969
(author)
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Contextualism for Conditionals
- 2008
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In: Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models II, Book of abstracts.
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Contextualism for Conditionals Consider the following sentences: (1) If Sarah has the measles, she will have a fever. (2) If Sarah has a fever, then she has the measles. (3) If Julia asks nicely, Bill still won’t help us. Intuitively, (1) would be used to communicate that the present case is of the kind in which having fever follows causally from having measles, (2) would be used to communicate that the case is one in which having the measles follows evidentially from having a fever, and (3) would probably be used to communicate that the case in question isn’t the kind in which asking nicely elicits helpful action. My question is through what processed these intuitive messages concerning causal and evidential relations are encoded and decoded given the conventional contribution of the “if P, Q” form. Standard philosophical theories of indicative conditionals – the material implication theory, the conditional probability theory, and versions of the possible world theory – take these intuitive messages to be pragmatically inferred from the utterance of a sentence the conventional meaning of which gives it more abstract truth- or acceptability conditions. Elsewhere, I have defended an alternative model: relational contextualism. It agrees that the intuitive messages are determined pragmatically, but denies that we identify the intuitive messages by first identifying more abstract truth- or acceptability conditions. Instead, the conventional contribution of if-clauses to the meaning of conditionals is that if-clauses introduce a proposition without asserting it so that the main clause can be understood in relation to it. When we decode the conditional form, our primary task is to identify the relevant relation between the content of the if-clause and the main clause. In the case of conditionals like (1), (2) and (3), that relation will typically be one of causal or evidential consequence or independence. There are several reasons to think that something like relational contextualism is correct. It gives a unified account of a wide variety of conditionals: apart from consequence conditionals like (1) and (2) and independence conditionals like (3), it covers relevance conditionals (“If anyone cares to ask, I do have views on celebrity couples”) as well as conditionals expressing conditional commands, questions and bets (“If it is snowing hard, stay with your car”). It explains both why conditionals embed systematically and why some embedding constructions nevertheless seem unintelligible. And it promises a unified account of indicative and subjunctive conditionals, as well as a straightforward explanation of the well-known context-relativity of the latter. My concern in this talk is to clarify how relational contextualism explains a phenomenon that appears to undermine standard theories of conditionals. Standard theories all take it that when the consequent is highly probable independently of the antecedent, we have good reasons to accept what the conditional says. But not all such conditionals seem acceptable. I am reasonably confident that both clauses of the following conditional are true, but I find the conditionals nonsensical rather than acceptable: (4) If Berne is the capital of Switzerland, John Lennon was killed in 1980. I am also reasonable confident that it will rain tomorrow, independently of what I do, but my first intuitive verdict about the following is false: (5) If I go to the movies tonight, it will rain tomorrow. Verdicts like these are very common, especially among people without background in logic and the theory of conditionals, and relational contextualism explains them easily: (4) comes off as unintelligible because no relation between antecedent and consequent has been identified; (5) comes off as false because it has been taking to convey a relation of causal consequence between antecedent and consequent. Defenders of standard theories try to explain this with reference to conversational implicature, but I have argued elsewhere that such explanations are problematic. The literal contents ascribed to conditionals by these theories would have to be much further removed from the conscious processing of sentences such as (4) and (5) than are literal contents in typical cases of conversational implicature, such as the literal content of conjunctive sentences that seem to imply causal or temporal relations between conjuncts, thus making it implausible that the mechanisms at work are the same. And there are reasons to think that relational contextualism better fits our ways of associating expressions with contents, ways that explain the rapid conventionalisation of conversational implicatures. But while it is clear that relational contextualism leaves room for typical reactions to (4) and (5), it will only provide an explanation of these reactions if supplied with an account of what factors we can expect to affect the conversational salience of various kinds of relations between antecedent and consequents, in particular relations of consequence and independence. What I will do in this talk is to sketch such an account, and begin offering an explanation. To do this, I sketch a general account of what it is to be aware of such relations, and discuss various factors that affect the salience of epistemic, causal, and logical consequence and independence relations of different degrees of abstractness. This account takes our awareness of consequence and independence relations to be central to our capacity to adapt to lawful regularities of various kind: epistemic, causal, logical, etc. Such awareness consists in the activation of what I call our concepts or regularities: mechanisms involving a capacity to recognize that a case falls within the domain of the regularity (smoke is only accompanied by fire under certain circumstances) as well as certain inferential tendencies (to infer the presence of fire from the presence of smoke, say) that differ depending on whether the regularities in question are consequence or independence regularities. Taken together with relational contextualism, this account lets us explain why concepts of consequence regularities will tend to be more easily activated than independence regularities, which in turn explains why conditionals typically need special linguistic markers to communicate independence relations. It also underpins an explanation of why concepts of regularities that track both consequence and independence regularities will be much less easily activated, thus explaining why many take (4) to be nonsensical rather than true or false. And it lets us explain why concepts of causal relations are particularly easy to activate, thus explaining why (5) can come out as false, even though relations that we take not to hold will tend to be much less salient than relations that we take to hold.
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| 10. |
- Davidsson, Hans, 1958
(author)
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The Organ as an Upholder of Culture
- 2002
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In: "Upholders of Culture Past and Present: Lectures from an international seminar arranged by the Committee on Man, Technology and Society at the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA)", Forsmark, 13-14 april 2000. - 9170826730
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)
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