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The archaeological project on the hill of Poggio Imperiale began in 1992. From the beginning this project was characterized by intense experimentation with a range of IT applications. During 2014, the University of Siena began a new project focused on the valorisation of archaeological data with the creation of an Open-Air Museum of the Carolingian village, one of the archaeological phases of the settlement. Over the last several years, the use of three-dimensional (3D) data in archaeology has increased exponentially due to the application of photogrammetry to record every stratigraphic unit. This ever-increasing amount of data fostered the development of the C.A.P.I. project (Collina Accessibile di Poggio Imperiale – Accessibility of the Hill of Poggio Imperiale), which involved the construction of a 3D model of the archaeological area of Poggio Imperiale. The project modeled the three main life stages of the hill using 3D computer graphics. Virtual tours can be experienced through PCs, tablets, smartphones, and even virtual reality headsets, offering users a fully immersive experience. However, virtual reality will not be a replacement for the materiality of the archaeological site. On the contrary, it will provide an additional tool to make the site accessible and inclusive to any potential visitor, regardless of physical distance, physical ability, or time zone.

This article proposes a direction—inspired by a reading of Heidegger’s reflections on sculpture— in which thinking enriched by artistic experience can unfold an alternative mode of being-in-the-world. Heidegger points out that, in contrast to a scientific understanding of space as an empty container, the special character of space in sculpture is characterized by a clearing-away (Räumen), which presupposes and points to an open, receptive attitude toward experience that is necessary for dwelling to take place. From Heidegger this article proceeds to reflect on artworks by Eduardo Chillida and Janet Echelman. These offer concrete examples of how a thinking of sculpture can apply to different notions of place. While Chillida’s sculptures present a sense of place as rooted and embedded in the landscape, Echelman’s artworks explore an expanded notion of place through a multisensory sense of immersion. Applying Heidegger’s meditations on Räumen, it turns out that the differences between these artworks are of greatest significance in illustrating the breadth of the experiential space that they share: an openness to dwelling and a receptivity toward being-in-the-world. In this way, Heidegger’s reflections on sculpture are unfolded in a contemporary context and the potential of sculpture for a thinking of experience is established.

The “material” turn has steadily gained currency in cultural studies and the humanities, with scholars increasingly attentive to theorising things and examining their presence, power, and meaning in any number of fields and disciplines. This essay stems from the keynote lecture given at the conference MatteReality: Historical Trajectories and Conceptual Futures for Material Culture Studies, held on March 23, 2017, at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Freiburg. Focused in particular on the meaning of materiality in American art history and American Studies today, it opens with an examination of the factors of monetisation and mobility and segues to a consideration of more efficacious ways to assess, theorise, and critique the material turn. Two areas that are particularly relevant in terms of rethinking, and mediating, materiality in American art and American Studies are those of technological process and affect: how things are made and how things make us feel.

Not all public art is bad art, but when public art is bad, it tends to be bad in an identifiable way. In this paper, I develop a Waltonian theory of the category of public art, according to which public art standardly is both accessible to the public and minimally site-specific. When a work lacks the standard features of the category to which it belongs, appreciators tend to perceive the work as aesthetically flawed. I then compare and contrast cases of successful and unsuccessful public art to show that accessibility and site-specificity are features which tend to preclude the other. It is difficult, although hardly impossible, for a site-specific work to remain accessible, and difficult for an accessible work to engage adequately with the site on which it is situated. As a result, while not all public art is bad, the features peculiar to public work encourage a latent tendency toward badness.

This essay looks at water in Victorian fiction and argues that it is important not just as motif or symbol—which is how literary criticism has traditionally approached it—but as a metamorphic substance. I propose a material ecocritical framework in order to conceptualise water as literary matter, and I analyse selected passages from four canonical Victorian novels through a focus on aquatic materialisation and transformation. I argue that through the emphasis on these processes in a variety of water scenes fromJane Eyre,Wuthering Heights,Lady Audley’s Secret, andDracula, water emerges as not inert but agential. Through a material ecocritical approach which rejects intentionality as a precondition of agency, representations of nature as animate can be reconceived as not necessarily anthropomorphic or as instances of the pathetic fallacy, but as bearing witness to how agency is shared by humans and their environment.

In critiquing the humanism of the Anthropocene, scholars have proposed multiple “-cenes” of their own (i.e. the Capitalocene, Plantationocene, and Necrocene). However, authors often consider these formations in isolation rather than considering the intersection between them. To address this oversight, I propose the use of musical artefacts as a site of examination as the forces behind these “-cenes” embed traces of themselves into these recordings and performances. Power electronics, a subgenre of noise music, provides an exceptionally fruitful area of research because of its tendency towards disruption as both a musical and ideological gesture. This inclination creates space for artists to evoke non-dominant narratives, allowing for new forms of interaction between “-cenes” to emerge. By way of example, I analyse the album The History of AIDS by power electronics artist Prurient. Utilizing Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome as a framework for interaction, the album evokes the sexual and racial politics within the Capitalocene, Necrocene, and Plantationocene, allowing space for audiences to consider all three formations simultaneously. This manoeuvring between various “-cenes” highlights the ways in which music acts as a “-ceneic” meeting ground and implies new directions for research.

The main objective of this essay is to consider Polish perception of the 21st-century European movement of migration and analyse the literary and artistic representations of this experience through the examples of Jarosław Mikołajewski’s A Great Surge, Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Guests, Anna Konik’s In the Same City, Under the Same Sky and Margot Sputo’s Who Where?. I relate these works to the latest international art, including projects by Ai Weiwei, E. B. Itso, Giacomo Sferlazzo, and look for common denominators. I claim that the common feature of many artistic projects is the creation of a substitute for contact between the viewer and refugees, appealing to other senses than sight, especially to the sense of touch. These works do not attempt to represent the experience of migrants as individuals, but point to the experience of migration in its elemental aspect-matter and physical contact, exposure to destruction, dependence, intimacy, confrontation with others. What’s more, art based on migrant movement-referring to the imagined experience of direct contact with migrants or their belongings-bypasses the process of identification and empathy. Instead, it relies on affective transmission. I propose a category of affective diffusion as a process that can occur not only between sentient individuals but also as a result of the material aspect of art and the contact with the viewer. The inspiration to create the concept of affective diffusion is the relationship between migrants and inhabitants described by Jarosław Mikołajewski in his essay Wielki Przypływ [A Great Surge] which shows aspects of migration through Lampedusa Island. Many inhabitants who are asked about migrants show intensive emotions like anger, fear and xenophobia. But the testimonies of people who see the living and the dead day after day suggest that these emotions get weaker under the influence of physical contact. It seems that the moment of two bodies getting in touch undermines the frozen system of ideas and emotions, stimulates feelings, opens up a new, ambiguous potential for understanding. This is because expressive emotions lose their importance with the activation of affective transmission. This physical contact gives rise to changes in the economy of feeling, thinking and judging.

International audience

This essay considers some stylistic features of Theodor Fontane's late work, using the example of “Die Poggenpuhls”. “Die Poggenpuhls” is a good example of the Fontane tone, because the novel presents a series of tones that are particularly characteristic of Fontane: intimacy, modesty, discretion, and humour. In this respect, questions of genre do not get us very far. In this article, some stylistic features of the novel are analysed: a programmatic beginning which ‘sets the tone’ is followed by a set of revealing oppositions. We can also observe musical effects, assonances; much gentle humour; attention to detail; sensitivity to the texture of the family’s everyday routine; skilful treatment of popular sayings and quotations; critical handling of social roleplay; and, last but not least, an appeal to humanity in general, thus affirming Fontane’s humanism.