In Hybrid artwork, whereby the digital and the real are mixed, the artist/creator has to additionally manage interaction. Interaction is seen as an added dimension to narration: the art piece turns from being a means towards a narration (or an understanding) to a path towards an experience. It is argued that strong metaphysical concepts give place to new more fragmented ones. This nihilism and fragmentation can be seen as a cause of concern but also as an opportunity.

A number of philosophers of music have proved resistant to the idea that song should be considered as a hybrid art that combines language and music. Separately, Levinson in his influential account of hybrid art forms does not admit folk song, even though he does allow nineteenth-century lieder into the hybrid category. Folk songs are sometimes treated as if they are anterior to and therefore ontologically distinct from the more complex songs of Western art music, or even (...) of modern popular culture. In contrast, this article argues that in a historical perspective English-language folk songs constitute a category of considerable complexity, and that the combination of the two distinct media of language and music is fundamental to any consideration of such songs in an ontological perspective. (shrink)

Over the past decade artists have increasingly turned to science in order to investigate technology’s effect. The move from hardware-based technologies to live organisms as media, raises ethical issues that the broader art community is addressing. This paper tracks the history of instrumental disengagement to determine when and how the gradual codification of life contributed to the eventual use of live organisms in art practice.

Abstract…observations of skylfull pylotts is the onlye waye to bring it in rule; for it passeth the reach of naturall philosophy. – Michael Gabriel, 1576 (Collinson, 1867, p. 30)Abstract The tension between empirical data and formal theory pervades the entire history of geomagnetism, from the Middle Ages up to the present day. This paper explores its early-modern history (1500–1800), using a hybrid approach: it applies a methodological framework used in modern geophysics to interpret early-modern developments, exploring to what extent (...) formal conjectures shaped observation and vice versa. A range of pertinent case studies supports classification of this entire period as proto-scientific, characterised by the initial formation of theories being largely disconnected from observational constraints, and their subsequent evolution being advanced primarily by their empirical falsification, and not necessarily associated with the introduction of an alternative. The few exceptional instances of purely data-driven discovery were essentially due to an improved signal-to-noise ratio. (shrink)

Noël Carroll proposes a generalist theory of art criticism, which essentially involves evaluations of artworks on the basis of their success value, at the cost of rendering evaluations of reception value irrelevant to criticism. In this article, I argue for a hybrid account of art criticism, which incorporates Carroll's objective model but puts Carroll-type evaluations in the service of evaluations of reception value. I argue that this hybrid model is supported by Kant's theory of taste. Hence, I not (...) only present an alternative theory of metacriticism, which has the merit of reinstating the centrality of reception value in art critics’ evaluations, but also show that, contrary to a common conception, Kant's aesthetic theory can house a fruitful account of art criticism. The benefit of this hybrid account is that, despite being essentially particularist, it should be appealing even to generalists, including Carroll. (shrink)

The boundaries of social acceptance and models of convergence of human and non-human actors of digital reality are defined. The constructive creative possibilities of convergent processes in distributed neural networks are analyzed from the point of view of possible scenarios for building “friendly” human-dimensional symbioses of natural and artificial intelligence. A comprehensive analysis of new management challenges related to the development of cyber-physical and cybersocial systems is carried out. A model of social organizations and organizational behavior in the conditions of (...) cyberphysical reality is developed. The possibilities of reconciling human moral principles and “machine ethics” in the processes of modeling and managing digital reality are studied. The significance of various concepts of digital, machine and cyber-anymism for the socio-cultural understanding of the development of modern cyber-physical technologies, the anthropological dimension of a smart city is revealed. The article introduces the concept of hybrid society and shows the development of its models as self-organizing collective systems that consist of co-evolving biohybrid and socio-technical spheres. The importance of modern anthropogenic research for sustainable development is analyzed. The process of marking ontological boundaries between heterogeneous modalities in the digital world is investigated. Examples of acute social contexts that are able to set the vector of practical philosophy in the modern digital era are considered. (shrink)

The category within which an artwork is received affects its critical and aesthetic significance (Levinson 2011; Walton 1970).1 Yet, it is not always clear how.

Envisager la problématique de l’hybride nécessite aujourd’hui de concevoir une dialectique entre deux temporalités, deux champs, qui se croisent et se superposent dans la culture hybride, ancrée dans l’art actuel. L’archéologie de la notion, tout autant que certains phénomènes récents portant cet enjeu, participent d’un récit dont il s’agit de traduire la densité et la complexité, ainsi que la trajectoire.

Hybrid Documentary and Non-Binary Cinema offers an expansive exploration of the contemporary documentary cinema form, aesthetics, and ethics. Beginning with a brief history of early seminal examples of magical realism, and constructed realities in documentary and ethnographic film the book will focus on recent and present-day examples of work that blur the lines between fiction and non-fiction. The book will also take a series of case studies to question the vision and motives of filmmakers working between documentary and fictional (...) film. It will consider the aesthetic and ethical challenges of these works and look toward the future of non-fiction filmmaking after the internet, and in the realm of the metaverse. The book will offer both an entry point to discover new tendencies and a deeper understanding for those readers who are more familiar with the field. Given its interdisciplinary subject nature, the book will appeal to audiences across a spectrum of interests such as film, fine art, anthropology, documentary, sociology and Drama. (shrink)

This essay characterizes the perception of the visual hybrid as nonconceptual, introducing the terminology of nonconceptual content theory to aesthetics. The visual hybrid possesses a radical but nonetheless exemplary aesthetic composition and is well established in culture, art, and even design. The essay supplies a philosophical analysis of the results of cross-cultural experiments, showing that while categorization or conceptual hierarchization kicks in when the visual hybrids are juxtaposed with linguistic descriptions, no conceptual scheme takes effect when participants are (...) presented with mere visual hybrids. In isolation, the hybrids do not lend themselves to classification. I draw four conclusions from these experimental outcomes: 1. The perception of visual hybrids follows the structure of a nonconceptual mental content, because the original categories or concepts of the hybrids’ components are not combined into one, and their properties are not applied to one another, therefore none of the components reconstructs the other such that it is introduced to a new category. 2. Language freezes the hybridity of the visual hybrid into conceptuality. 3. Given that language has a freezing effect in the case of an extreme visual phenomenon such as the hybrid, it is all the more restraining in moderate artistic compositions, such as visual metaphors, in which properties of one component (the source) are applied to the other (the target). In those, nonconceptuality emerges from relatively organized compositions, forms, and relations, and from the dependence of objects and their properties on perceptual context. 4. Thus, the nonconceptualist terminology is suitable for the analysis of aesthetic perception in general and aesthetic perception’s relation to language. Keywords aesthetics, perception, nonconceptual content, hybrids, visual metaphors. (shrink)

Dans le monde contemporain, la majorité des acteurs sociaux fait quotidiennement l’expérience d’une accélération effrénée des rythmes de vie. Cette course contre la montre, qui tend à devenir chronique, semble affecter non seulement la sphère des obligations professionnelles et familiales mais aussi le champ des pratiques de loisirs. Dans un contexte de pénurie temporelle, où le temps est devenu une denrée aussi rare que précieuse, consentir d’y consacrer une partie à des activités non productives suppose de pouvoir obtenir un retour (...) sur investissement. Quels types d’activités sportives peuvent satisfaire cette condition en permettant désormais aux pratiquants d’en avoir non seulement pour leur argent mais surtout pour leur temps? À partir d’une étude de cas, la pratique d’un sport de combat de synthèse, le Mixed Martial Arts, par des étudiants de l’École Normale Supérieure de Lyon et anciens élèves des Classes Préparatoires aguerris à la gestion de l’urgence temporelle, nous montrerons que les activités sportives que nous qualifierons d’« hybrides » apparaissent, pour cette population, comme une réponse particulièrement pertinente au manque de temps en autorisant un engagement jugé rentable et efficient. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that modelling occupies a curious role in the art making process, and that it constitutes a hybrid art form. Modelling is intriguingly under-research in aesthetics, despite it being a cornerstone of art education and deeply involved in various art practices. It functions both within a supportive role to further the goals of art making, while also retaining the creative agency and performance of the professional model upon which the artist, photographer, or wider crew rely. (...) This ability entails not merely helping to steer a posing session, but experimenting with and adapting to any unexpected issues that arise in the course of the session. To understand the salient performative qualities of modelling, I first focus on expert movement, improvisation, and style. Second, I reflect on how modelling corresponds to creativity and skill. Finally, I propose that the model is a performer, and that, ultimately, modelling should be recognised as a hybrid collaborative art form which incorporates qualities of various performing arts. (shrink)

Until now, the mass spread of fake news and its negative consequences have implied mainly textual content towards a loss of citizens' trust in institutions. Recently, a new type of machine learning framework has arisen, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) – a class of deep neural network models capable of creating multimedia content (photos, videos, audio) that simulate accurate content with extreme precision. While there are several areas of worthwhile application of GANs – e.g., in the field of audio-visual production, human-computer (...) interactions, satire, and artistic creativity – their deceptive uses, at least as currently foreseeable, are just as numerous and worrying. The main concern is linked to the so-called “deepfakes”, fake images or videos that simulate real events with extreme precision. When trained on a human face, GANs can make the face assume hyper-realistic movements, expressions and (verbal and non-verbal) communication abilities. This technology poses an urgent threat to the governance of democratic processes concerning the production of public opinions and political discourses, with significant potential for reality-altering and disinformation. After a short introduction of their current technical state-of-the-art, in this paper we want to enquire the GANs` socio-technical system alongside different and intertwined philosophical accounts. Firstly, we will argue about the conditions that make perceived a GANs-generated content as trustworthy, arguing also about the general effects GANs might have on the perceived trustworthiness of individuals. Thereafter, we will discuss about the inadequacy to approach GANs only as perception-altering technology. Against this backdrop, we will propose a theoretical turn that considers the human-machine relationships of trustworthiness as elements of a broader hybrid socio-technical systems. This turn come up with political repercussions that we will discuss in the last part of the paper. (shrink)

The article analyzes Yuka Hui's concept of the transformation of modern technology. He is a well-known Hong Kong philosopher of technology, well acquainted with both Western and Eastern (Chinese) philosophy. He is an obvious follower of Martin Heidegger, who proposes to consider language and art, but not modern, but authentic, given in historical reconstructions, as a means of transforming technology. Specifically, Hui considers Chinese reconstructed art and worldview to be the tools of such a transformation. To convince readers of this, (...) both Western and Eastern, Hui, on the one hand, turns to the analysis of Chinese Shan Shui painting, which he considers an example of "cosmo-art", on the other ‒ to Western concepts of second-order cybernetics, the concept of autopoiesis, studies of individuation by the French philosopher J. Simondon. The author shows that Hui's thinking and discourse are hybrid, including, on the one hand, cultural logic, on the other ‒ cybernetic and autopoetic, on the third hand, modernized ancient Chinese logic. Hui connects them quite organically, although for a Western reader, such logic still looks contradictory. Especially when it comes to understanding the third logic, when Hui, for example, comments and clarifies ideas about the Tao, pointing to such signs as invisibility, obscurity, a combination of natural and anthropological properties (Heaven and the virtuous path). At the end of the article, the author discusses whether Hui managed to outline an effective solution to the problems posed by him and Heidegger. He examines the arguments for and against and tends to conclude that the proposed solutions look dubious, in the sense that they are almost impossible to implement. In addition, the author draws attention to the fact that the interpretation of modern technology as a "delivery" is clearly insufficient to solve these problems. In reality, modern technology is a more complex phenomenon; in the philosophy of technology, in addition to delivery, other aspects are considered in it (engineering, technology, technical environment, technosocial large projects, the Internet, robotics, AI). These and other considerations, especially regarding the conditions for the implementation of projects such as those proposed by Hui, incline the author to a pessimistic point of view about the transformation of modern technology. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that one can articulate a historically attuned and analytically rich model for understanding jazz in its various inflections. That is, on the one hand, such a model permits us to affirm jazz as a historically conditioned, dynamic hybridity. On the other hand, to acknowledge jazz’s open and multiple character in no way negates our ability to identify discernible features of various styles and aesthetic traditions. Additionally, my model affirms the sociopolitical, legal (Jim Crow and copyright (...) laws), and economic structures that shaped jazz. Consequently, my articulation of bebop as an inflection of Afromodernism highlights the sociopolitical, and highly racialized context in which this music was created. Without a recognition of the sociopolitical import of bebop, one’s understanding of the music is impoverished, as one fails to grasp the strategic uses to which the music and discourses about the music were put. (shrink)

This paper describes and discusses overlapping interests and concerns of art and bioethics and suggests that bioethics would benefit from opening to contributions from the arts. There is a description of recent events in bioethics that have included art, and trends in art that relate to bioethics. The paper outlines art exhibits and performances within two major international bioethics congress programs alongside a discussion of the work of leading hybrid and bio artists who experiment with material (including their own (...) bodies) at the ambiguous intersections between art, bio art and bioethics. Their work seeks to engage audiences in challenging ethical precepts and assumptions about life and existence. We consider the response of art and social theorists and compare these with the responses of bioethicists to comparable cases in bioethics. We note divergent views within the arts and within bioethics in relation to some pivotal questions including questions about what limits, if any, can apply in particular cases and on what basis. This approach allows for a transfer of information and perspectives, challenges assumptions in both art and bioethics and opens up a space for future exchange and dialogue along the shifting borders between these genres. (shrink)

What can the art of living after Foucault contribute to ethics in relation to the mediation of human existence by technology? To develop the relation between technical mediation and ethics, firstly the theme of technical mediation is elaborated in line with Foucault’s notion of ethical problematization. Every view of what technology does to us at the same time expresses an ethical concern about technology. The contemporary conception of technical mediation tends towards the acknowledgement of ongoing hybridization, not ultimately good or (...) bad but ambivalent, which means for us the challenge of taking care of ourselves as hybrid beings. Secondly, the work of Foucault provides elements for imagining this care for our hybrid selves, notably his notions of freedom as a practice and of the care of the self. A conclusions about technical mediation and ethics is that whereas the approaches of the delegation of morality to technology by Latour and mediated morality by Verbeek see technical mediation of behavior and moral outlook as an answer in ethics, this should rather be considered the problem that ethics is about. (shrink)

Can we speak about a specific real-virtual spatiality in the contexts offered by the post-desktop technological philosophy and practice? Does Augmented Reality have the potential to produce a different type of space in which private and public converge up to the point of their cross identification? More exactly, to create, what media theoretician Jenny Edbauer Rice names a “zone of public intimacy”? The goal of this essay is to explore the possible answers to these questions. At the core of my (...) analysis is the idea that the hybrid character of Augmented Reality is effected by two conditions. On the one hand, by the process of converging real and virtual spaces into a single – although discontinuous – “multimedia” space-image and, on the other, by the tensions existent between private perception and public engagement. My conclusion is that by creating a hybrid convergent space of inclusions and exchanges, AR raises not only the prospect of a new sensorium, but, what is more, it confirms the possibility of a distinct aesthetic paradigm as well as of a different way to articulate social relations. (shrink)

With the findings of microbiome studies, many artists have begun to focus on environments where microbe-human interactions take place. Beyond the sharp boundaries that separate human and microbe as distinct entities, they give an artistic expression to the complex symbiotic modes between them. Güneş-Helen Isitan’s work _Hybridities_: _Almost Other_ creates images of human-microbe symbiosis by mobilizing certain scientific tools and discourses and the possibilities of photographic medium. A “microbe-image” emerges as a result of multi-species interaction and is produced by traversing (...) multi-sites. Its apparatus contains its own production process as a problematic knot to be posed. This requires approaching the work with a certain ethnographic sensibility. As a result, manufacturing life through microbe-images becomes inseparable from technical, scientific, social, methodological, and philosophical issues that are weaved in _Hybridities_: _Almost Other_’s “biophotographic” apparatus. (shrink)

Initially conceived as an interview with the hybrid media artist Brian Goeltzenleuchter, this text gradually took the form of a conversation on various issues regarding olfactory art and the aesthetic significance of smell. Framing the artistic uses of odours in the context of contemporary art, the paper discloses some of its foundational traits, variations, and underlying impulses. By commenting on Goeltzenleuchter’s olfactory artworks through a philosophical perspective, this contribution covers a number of subjects including the notion of atmosphere, the (...) socio-cultural values and narratives conveyed by scents, the suggestive relationship between spaces and aromas, and the phenomenology of smells as compared to the experience of sounds. Consistent with how smell perception unfolds, the dialogue flows in a form that is not rigidly structured but airy, ephemeral, and fluid, developing a sequence of insights whose aim is, rather than scrutinising a specific topic, to evoke the essence of olfactory poetics as a whole. (shrink)

Looking at contemporary Japanese images of the self and how Japanese scholars have conceptualised the notion of the subjectivity three remarkable concepts of “the self” can be identified and distinguished from another: the Inner Self, the Political Self, the Social Self. In my paper I will discuss these concepts by high lightening their hybridity, plurality and their emphasis on the identity as an effect of self-realization. I shall argue that the investigation in the Japaneseunderstanding of the self is particularly fruitful (...) for a global understanding of subjectivity, because Japanese selfhood does not represent the “otherness” of the western thought but is actually crisscrossed by western and eastern ideas. What can be marked as the Inner Self combines ideas of the Buddhist “Non-Self” (anatman) and the European Idealistic Ego (Ich). Embedded in practises of meditation the Inner Self in the Japanese understanding is realized through the activity of finding and loosing oneself. The Political Self can be perceived as an amalgamation of the Asian art of the regime of the group and the western thought of Liberalism and personal identity. Somewhat discovered in Japan as a possibility of the self in the 19th century the Political Self comes into existence througheducational practise. Furthermore the Social Self brings together Chinese Confucian ethics and ancient Japanese Shintoism. Understood as a particle in the flow of social relations the Social Self is realized in Japan within the rituals of everyday live and physical hence tactical education in the childhood of a person. The Japanese concepts of the self exemplify on the level of their formal configuration the qualities of what can be called a plural anthropology. (shrink)

For efficient energy distribution, microgrids provide significant assistance to main grids and act as a bridge between the power generation and consumption. Renewable energy generation resources, particularly photovoltaics, are considered as a clean source of energy but are highly complex, volatile, and intermittent in nature making their forecasting challenging. Thus, a reliable, optimized, and a robust forecasting method deployed at MG objectifies these challenges by providing accurate renewable energy production forecasting and establishing a precise power generation and consumption matching at (...) MG. Furthermore, it ensures effective planning, operation, and acquisition from the main grid in the case of superior or inferior amounts of energy, respectively. Therefore, in this work, we develop an end-to-end hybrid network for automatic PV power forecasting, comprising three basic steps. Firstly, data preprocessing is performed to normalize, remove the outliers, and deal with the missing values prominently. Next, the temporal features are extracted using deep sequential modelling schemes, followed by the extraction of spatial features via convolutional neural networks. These features are then fed to fully connected layers for optimal PV power forecasting. In the third step, the proposed model is evaluated on publicly available PV power generation datasets, where its performance reveals lower error rates when compared to state-of-the-art methods. (shrink)

Most art is made by people with a well-developed concept of art and who are familiar with its forms and genres as well as with the informal institutions of its presentation and reception. This is reflected in philosophers’ proposed definitions. The earliest artworks were made by people who lacked the concept and in a context that does not resemble the art traditions of established societies, however. An adequate definition must accommodate their efforts. The result is a complex, hybrid definition: (...) something is art (a) if it shows excellence of skill and achievement in realizing significant aesthetic goals, and either doing so is its primary, identifying function or doing so makes a vital contribution to the realization of its primary, identifying function, or (b) if it falls under an art genre or art form established and publicly recognized within an art tradition, or (c) if it is intended by its maker/presenter to be art and its maker/presenter does what is necessary and appropriate to realizing that intention. Meanwhile, artworlds—historically developed traditions of works, genres, theories, criticism, conventions for presentation, and so on—play a crucial but implicit role in (b) and (c). They are to be characterized in terms of their origins. (shrink)

HSimulator is a multithread simulator for mass-action biochemical reaction systems placed in a well-mixed environment. HSimulator provides optimized implementation of a set of widespread state-of-the-art stochastic, deterministic, and hybrid simulation strategies including the first publicly available implementation of the Hybrid Rejection-based Stochastic Simulation Algorithm. HRSSA, the fastest hybrid algorithm to date, allows for an efficient simulation of the models while ensuring the exact simulation of a subset of the reaction network modeling slow reactions. Benchmarks show that HSimulator (...) is often considerably faster than the other considered simulators. The software, running on Java v6.0 or higher, offers a simulation GUI for modeling and visually exploring biological processes and a Javadoc-documented Java library to support the development of custom applications. HSimulator is released under the COSBI Shared Source license agreement. (shrink)

Collaboration in the arts is no longer a conscious choice to make a deliberate artistic statement, but instead a necessity of artistic survival. In today’s hybrid world of virtual mobility, collaboration decentralizes creative strategies, enabling artists to carve new territories and maintain practice-based autonomy in an increasingly commercial and saturated art world. Collaboration now transforms not only artistic practices but also the development of cultural institutions, communities and personal lifestyles. This book explores why collaboration has become so integrated into (...) a greater understanding of creative artistic practice. It draws on an emerging generation of contributors—from the arts, art history, sociology, political science, and philosophy—to engage directly with the diverse and interdisciplinary nature of collaborative practice of the future. (shrink)

Today the movement of ideas, capital and people is faster and wilder than at any point in history. Globalization has made the world more interconnected. The flows of traffic in this new network have not only accelerated to new levels, but the directions of movement have multiplied and abandoned the well-worn paths. The cultural dynamics of globalization have presented new challenges to the existing models for explaining the forms of belonging and the patterns of exchange that are occurring in the (...) world. Culture is no longer understood as the discrete and unique expression of activities and ideas that occur in particular places. No culture can exist in isolation. The process of hybridization in the deterritorialization of cultures and peoples demands new theories of flow and resistance and is compelling artists and intellectuals to rethink their methods. Cultural critics and curators are also in need of new conceptual frameworks. There is an urgent need for a new vocabulary in art discourse that is able to make sense of the complex forms of representation that are incorporating images from different locations and that simultaneously activate signs that contain within them a multiplicity of other signs, each embodying a series of contrary or competing codes. To do justice to both the complexity of the artwork and the intellectual potential of these new conceptual headings we need to develop frameworks that can address both these signs of difference and the process by which signs are made out of the plays with difference. The concept of translation can serve as a tool that can both make sense of the broader dynamic of cultural exchange and explain specific forms of cultural representation. I am particularly concerned with the ways in which contemporary artists and art writing deal with issues of mobility and attachment. What sort of place does art connote if it is constantly evoking the shuttling between places? In what language can the artist articulate the recognition that translations fail as often as they succeed? How does a bi-lingual or a bi-cultural person speak their mother-tongue and see the world, which operates in a different or hybrid language? These questions push the available conceptual frameworks for cross-cultural exchanges to the limits. In this article I re-examine the conceptual viability of the term hybridity in light of the new debates on creolization and globalization. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of interstate confrontation known as “hybrid war.” It attempts to consider this phenomenon in relation to pankration, the ancient Greek martial art with minimum limitations. The paper defines the philosophical and historical preconditions for hybrid war, its epistemological and ideological aspects. The author assesses the statement declaring Russia guilty of waging this type of war. Analysis of relevant sources allows us to answer the question of the theoretical prerequisites for the formation (...) of the concept of hybrid wars and to name the authors who first expressed ideas of the transformation of war into a new type of military confrontation. An attempt is made to perform a comparative analysis of various interpretations of the concept of “hybrid war.” The place of this concept among others that are related to the so-called “new wars” is considered. The author questions a negative connotation to the concept of hybrid war and the legitimacy of attempts by Western countries to attribute the conduct of this type of military action exclusively to Russia. A number of countries attempt to use Russia as a “scapegoat,” and this complex has been described by the French philosopher R. Girard. A broader interpretation of this mechanism leads to sacralization of collective aggression, but not in relation to an individual but in relation to a participant in international relations. Comprehension of the essential features of hybrid war, of its tendencies towards eliminating restrictions and regulating forms and methods of achieving military and political goals makes it possible to identify the possibilities of resisting aggressive aspirations of some countries trying to impose their scenarios for resolving international contradictions on other states. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I begin by considering the nature of philosophy understood as a genre of writing. I claim that genres are impure, porous, changing sites of inclusion and exclusion that are anything but natural kinds. Furthermore, I suggest that works of poetry, drama, painting, dance, and other arts may profitably be understood as works of philosophy and that philosophy itself may profitably be understood as an art, as performance work. I support this claim by an analysis of philosophy's canon as historicist, (...) expressivist, and self-consciously hybrid. I explicate the notion of hybridity in terms of crossings understood as encounters, resistance and opposition, and passing borders. I conclude by drawing parallels between philosophical notions of hybridity and political issues of identity, community, and outsiders. Throughout this article, I am concerned to do philosophy in a way or style consistent with the expressivist view of philosophy I present. (shrink)

According to Didier Eribon, melancholy is where it all starts and where it also ends: the lifelong process of mourning that each homosexual experiences, and through which they construct their own identity. In this beguiling book, an introverted, anxious, ambitious, artistically gifted queer Filipino-Canadian boy finds solace, inspiration, and a "syllabus for living" in art--works of literature and music, from the children's literary classic Anne of Green Gables to the music of Maria Callas. But their contribution to his intellectual, emotional, (...) and spiritual edification belies the fact that they were largely heteronormative and white, which had the effect of invisibilizing him as a queer person of colour. Part memoir, part cultural commentary, and a hybrid of besotted aesthetic appreciation and unsparing critique, Double Melancholy is by turns a passionate love letter to art and an embattled examination of its oppressive complicity with the society that produces it, and the depths to which art both enriches and colonizes us. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage procède à un examen critique de la sphère de l'art en général, des activités de création artistique et de jouissance esthétique en particulier, à une période où se pose avec une extrême acuité la question cruciale des rapports de l'art aux autres pans de l'existence humaine. L'approche, qui s'appuie sur l'histoire de l'esthétique, mais fait aussi appel à l'histoire de l'art et à la culture philosophique en général, permet de cerner les nombreux contours de cette réalité hybride et (...) pas toujours facile à saisir, qu'est aujourd'hui devenu l'art. Après l'examen des vertiges modernes et de l'engrenage postmoderne ayant marqué l'évolution de cette sphère, l'accent est mis sur l'art contemporain en général, tiraillé entre la logique marchande et l'instrumentalisation, puis sur l'art africain contemporain en particulier, qui se débat entre leurres et lueurs, entre ombre et lumière, entre espoir et désespoir. (shrink)

The Hybrid Constitution/Melez Anayasa defines the principles upon which a Hybrid Constitution between nature and technology is based. This is an artistic task, because nature and technology cannot inscribe their Magisteria as beings and rights inside a ‘Constitution’, but a beginning for a new utopic non-human-centred vision. The Hybrid Constitution is based on the assumption that best constitution is a mixed system, including human, nature, and low- and high-tech elements. This constitution distinguishes between human citizens, who had (...) the right to participate in the state, and non-citizens and Others, who had the right to be represented. The otherness. The Hybrid Constitution/Melez Anayasa is an artwork presented at the Amber Festival in Istanbul in 2011 and the argument of an essay published in the AUT AUT issue 361/2014 and titled La condizione postumana. (shrink)

Hybrid renewable energy system arises regularly in real life. By optimizing the capacity and running status of the microgrid, HRES can decrease the running cost and improve the efficiency. Such an optimization problem is generally a constrained mixed-integer programming problem, which is usually solved by linear programming method. However, as more and more devices are added into MG, the mathematical model of HRES refers to nonlinear, in which the traditional method is incapable to solve. To address this issue, we (...) first proposed the mathematical model of an HRES. Then, a coevolutionary multiobjective optimization algorithm, termed CMOEA-c, is proposed to handle the nonlinear part and the constraints. By considering the constraints and the objective values simultaneously, CMOEA-c can easily jump out of the local optimal solution and obtain satisfactory results. Experimental results show that, compared to other state-of-the-art methods, the proposed algorithm is competitive in solving HRES problems. (shrink)

Despite Hegel’s effusive praise for art as one of the ways humans express truth, art by his description is both essentially limited and at perpetual risk of ending. This hybrid assessment is apparent first in Hegel’s account of art’s development, which shows art culminating in classical sculpture’s perfect unity but then, unable to depict Christianity’s interiority, evolving into religion, surrendering to division, or dissipating into prose. It is also evident in his ranking of artistic genres from architecture to poetry (...) according to their ability to help humans produce themselves both individually and collectively: the more adequately art depicts human self-understanding, the more it risks ceasing to be art. Nevertheless, art’s myriad endings do not exhaust its potential. Art that makes us alive to the unity and interdependence at the heart of reality continues to express the Idea and so achieves Hegel’s ambitions for its role in human life. (shrink)

In a global economic landscape of hyper-commodification and financialisation, efforts to assimilate digital art into the high-stakes commercial art market have so far been rather unsuccessful, presumably because digital artworks cannot easily assume the status of precious object worthy of collection. This essay explores the use of blockchain technologies in attempts to create proprietary digital art markets in which uncommodifiable digital artworks are financialised as artificially scarce commodities. Using the decentralisation techniques and distributed database protocols underlying current cryptocurrency technologies, such (...) efforts, exemplified here by the platform Monegraph, tend to be presented as concerns with the interest of digital artists and with shifting ontologies of the contemporary work of art. I challenge this characterisation, and argue, in a discussion that combines aesthetic theory, legal and philosophical theories of intellectual property, rhetorical analysis and research in the political economy of new media, that the formation of proprietary digital art markets by emerging commercial platforms such as Monegraph constitutes a worrisome amplification of long-established, on-going efforts to fence in creative expression as private property. As I argue, the combination of blockchain-based protocols with established ambitions of intellectual property policy yields hybrid conceptual-computational financial technologies (such as self-enforcing smart contracts attached to digital artefacts) that are unlikely to empower artists but which serve to financialise digital creative practices as a whole, curtailing the critical potential of the digital as an inherently dynamic and potentially uncommodifiable mode of production and artistic expression. (shrink)

A computer-based language system exploring hybrid invention generation has been developed by Bill Seaman working in conjunction with the programmer Gideon May.1 The project was primarily funded by Intel. This work explores 3D visualization with related generative texts and recombinant audio/music, as well as a series of textual descriptions. Computer-based environmental meaning is explored through the inter-authorship and operative experiential examination of a diverse set of media-elements and media-processes, in this case focusing on the virtual construction of hybrid (...) inventions. Differing sets of media elements in the Hybrid Invention Generator convey their own fields of meaning through the juxtaposition of 3D models, texts and digital audio. Varying combinations of these fields of meaning are experienced through direct interaction with the system. The work explores notions surrounding machinic genetics. Nonsense relations can present seemingly off-kilter juxtapositions, providing the participant with an experience akin to surrealism. Lautréamont’s definition of surrealist beauty - ‘beautiful as the unexpected meeting, on a dissection table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella’ (Waldberg 1965) - describes an experience engendered through a unique juxtaposition of elements not unlike relations encountered within this particular techno-poetic environment. Yet the system can also be used to brainstorm actual devices, as well as their potential conceptual/functional construction. (shrink)

The interpretability of AI is just as important as its performance. In the LegalAI field, there have been efforts to enhance the interpretability of models, but a trade-off between interpretability and prediction accuracy remains inevitable. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework called LK-IB for compulsory measure prediction (CMP), one of the critical tasks in LegalAI. LK-IB leverages Legal Knowledge and combines an Interpretable model and a Black-box model to balance interpretability and prediction performance. Specifically, LK-IB involves three steps: (...) (1) inputting cases into the first module, where first-order logic (FOL) rules are used to make predictions and output them directly if possible; (2) sending cases to the second module if FOL rules are not applicable, where a case distributor categorizes them as either “simple” or “complex“; and (3) sending simple cases to an interpretable model with strong interpretability and complex cases to a black-box model with outstanding performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the LK-IB framework provides more interpretable and accurate predictions than other state-of-the-art models. Given that the majority of cases in LegalAI are simple, the idea of model combination has significant potential for practical applications. (shrink)

In this interdisciplinary book, Keala Jewell reunites Giorgio de Chirico with his brother, Alberto Savinio, a prolific writer and painter who has been kept at the margins of the discussion of Surrealism and, more generally, the culture politics of twentieth-century Italy. Yet as Jewell demonstrates, the brothers worked together during their formative years in Munich and Paris and always shared, on the one hand, a drive to salvage Mediterranean myth and history and, on the other, a deep involvement with art’s (...) power to shape cultural identity and authority. Rather than looking for a key to unlock the secrets of the brothers’ recurrent use of dislocated spaces and bizarre hybrid figures, Jewell focuses on assessing the issues of identity and mastery put at stake in the haunting enigmas that characterize their paintings and writings. Deeply impressed by Nietzsche, she argues, they believed the "human" is inherently unstable and must be constantly "rewoven" with analogies and metaphors seized from empowering states of being. Jewell’s approach to the de Chirico brothers breaks new ground, not only because it brings them together as artists and writers but also because it sets the brothers within the context of myth, history, and Italian culture politics, instead of French surrealism and its aesthetic and psychoanalytic theories. Further, Jewell’s strong readings of little-known paintings and notoriously difficult texts like Giorgio de Chirico’s _Ebdòmero_ will expand and diversify the sources used in modernist studies. (shrink)

Media art can be conceived as laboratory, at the edges of art. These technological experiments give priority to innovation and exploration by means of new media. In metaphorical terms, we could say that the emphasis is on creating new languages that allow us, in a later phase, to write prose or poetry with it.In my paper, I discuss why the common view on media art falls short. Media art is not just about mixing media but rather about mixing art. Several (...) different challenges are at stake that beget a hybrid post-medium condition. (1) The artistic practice of media art often concerns exercises in remediation (i.e. resonating visual narratives of old media in new media). Here, we encounter a repetition of historical themes and re-makes or re-enactments of classical art pieces. These experiments thus mix the history of art. (2) Media art is often also about immersion (i.e. interactively enclosing the spectactor in a audiovisual or virtual realm). In experiments with CAVE-installations or 3D-cinema using digital goggles, for instance, we notice a combination of an artistic interest with a phenomenologicaland a scientific one (cf. so-called postfenomenology, robotics, experimental psychology). Hence, these experiments mix art with science. (3) Media art is not just a friction between art an technoscience. It takes place at a junction between art, creative industry, design, sociology and politics. Concerning the latter, I willdiscuss the culture-critical potential of i.e. hacktivism, marx 2.0 and bio-performances like Stelarc and Orlan. (4) Media art is not simply a genre that aims for recognition as a part of or a completion of fine art. While democratizing new media technology, it actually blurs the idea of genre, altering and opening up the very canon of fine art, music art, live art, performance art, video art and cinema. (shrink)

This book establishes a fresh and expansive view of the grotesque in Western art and culture, from 1500 to the present day. Following the non-linear evolution of the grotesque, Frances S. Connelly analyzes key works, situating them within their immediate social and cultural contexts, as well as their place in the historical tradition. By taking a long historical view, the book reveals the grotesque to be a complex and continuous tradition comprised of several distinct strands: the ornamental, the carnivalesque and (...) caricatural, the traumatic, and the profound. The book articulates a model for understanding the grotesque as a rupture of cultural boundaries that compromises and contradicts accepted realities. Connelly demonstrates that the grotesque is more than a style, genre, or subject; it is a cultural phenomenon engaging the central concerns of the humanistic debate today. Hybrid, ambivalent, and changeful, the grotesque is a shaping force in the modern era. (shrink)

Contemporary art based on new media is situated at the intersection of art-as-we-know-it, smart technologies, digital and algorithmic culture, networked economy, politics, as well as bio and techno sciences. Contemporary art enters into intense relations with these fields, including interactions, adoption of methodological devices and approaches, changes of the areas of activity, hybridization and amalgamation. This text explores those features of contemporary life and culture which are affected by digital art and the recombination, appropriation, remediation, reusing, repurposing, and transfer of (...) artistic procedures/tools from one context or field to another. (shrink)

As machines take over more tasks previously done by humans, artistic creation is also considered as a candidate to be automated. But, can machines create art? This paper offers a conceptual framework for a philosophical discussion of this question regarding the status of machine art and machine creativity. It breaks the main question down in three sub-questions, and then analyses each question in order to arrive at more precise problems with regard to machine art and machine creativity: What is art (...) creation? What do we mean by art? And, what do we mean by machines create art? This then provides criteria we can use to discuss the main question in relation to particular cases. In the course of the analysis, the paper engages with theory in aesthetics, refers to literature on computational creativity, and contributes to the philosophy of technology and philosophical anthropology by reflecting on the role of technology in art creation. It is shown that the distinctions between process versus outcome criteria and subjective versus objective criteria of creativity are unstable. It is also argued that we should consider non-human forms of creativity, and not only cases where either humans or machines create art but also collaborations between humans and machines, which makes us reflect on human-technology relations. Finally, the paper questions the very approach that seeks criteria and suggests that the artistic status of machines may be shown and revealed in the human/non-human encounter before any theorizing or agreement takes place; an experience which then is presupposed when we theorize. This hints at a more general model of what happens in artistic perception and engagement as a hybrid human-technological and emergent or even poetic process, a model which leaves more room for letting ourselves be surprised by creativity—human and perhaps non-human. (shrink)

Theories are processes modelled by thought. When they evolve in time, they are transformed and become new theories. They may cross from one academic discipline to another, then open up to new areas of human knowledge, mixing together the humanities, art, science and even spirituality. The way they are modelled reveals their plasticity and their elasticity is tested in their potential for transfer from one field to another, while the different contacts they make and mergers they undergo generate a certain (...) hybridity. Plasticity, elasticity and hybridity are the triad which makes the transfer of theories possible. (shrink)