Search

The present paper discusses art as an environment for communicating meanings, as shared by the members of a community or culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries; for this purpose, the paper focuses on the changes taking place in cultural production as well as the consumption practices of the digital age: more specifically, on the shift from a goods-centred economy to a service-centred economy, on the experience as a commodity, on interactive art and relational aesthetics, as well as on the emergence of a new way of production and consumption. The paper also discusses a possible modernity and the cultural differences that appear in the works of Eastern European artists (and Romanian artists in particular), works which reflect the transition from communism to post-communism and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present research focuses mainly on highlighting and analyzing the spacetime dimension in Mircea Eliade's works of fiction. The paper also presents the considerations made by the author on this topic in his scientific papers. The detailing of the concepts related to the myth highlights the presence in contemporary prose of cosmogony, eschatology, and calendar myths. We show that the two temporal subsystems, cosmogony and eschatology, blend harmoniously with two spatial subsystems, the vertical and the horizontal, to demonstrate that temporal symbolism exists only in terms of spatial symbolism. The demonstration of the mythical character of the space-time structure is based on the revelation of the sacredness of the mythical space and time and on the sacred-profane opposition, inside this dimension of contemporary prose. The paper highlights aspects that demonstrate that the use of mythical structures and their understanding are different in contemporary prose culminating in changing their meaning, with the transition to postmodernism. This passage is marked by the change of the symbolic code with the naturalistic one, the postmodern writers using the same mythical motives and structures as the modern ones but giving them a different meaning. The research reveals a certain parallelism between the scientific works and Mircea Eliade's prose, by illustrating the concepts related to time and space, and by depicting in his short stories and novels the sacred camouflaged in history and the heroes' attempt to find a privileged space in order to succeed in coming out of profane time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The media plays a fundamental role in shaping and maintaining a European public sphere that evolves through the interaction between institutional actors and their audiences and through the discursive practices and styles that these actors use in the media. In this article, we study the discursive practices that envelop sustainable practices in the absorption of European Regional Funds, with a double-fold focus on member countries and on Transylvania, Romania. We analyze three types of discourse: case studies of best practices on the website of the European Commission, news in the local media in Transylvania, and the Europe in My Region Photo Contest, spanning two years, 2014 and 2015. Our aim is to interpret the visual and textual discourses through the lenses of Critical Discourse Analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article my intention was to configure challenging profile of Digital Art as a mean of expression. We tried to identify the main changes in modern art works, that can be recognized in a digital art work, the instruments of digital and multimedia technology; also we discussed the digital art approach as a medium and as a tool, we tried to find out how it does trigger and influence media consumption and what is the role of the artist and audience in interpretation and creating new meanings for a digital art work. Finally, we presented a few statements of young Romanian artists on the digital artist's condition, the way they share their work, the difficulties to gain money from their work and the necessity to have a formal education in the field. The questionnaire applied to the journalism students revealed the importance of interactivity when interpreting, creating meanings and producing digital artworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to present different theories referring to the representation of images in order to understand the way they represent reality. Also, our purpose was to highlight a few steps in the evolution of modern art and how we can use visual images to create new forms of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper emphasized the importance of the two aspects the mediated text has - production and reception. This difference reveals the role of the receiver in the production of significance and, implicitly, the role of audience in the production of sense of a media text, but also the way in which this sense contributes to the social construction of reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The passage of modernism has brought about a new element in the construction of individual identity. The character of identity as social construct is underlined by the influence that fashion has in experimenting, changing and producing individual identity. The look and style of a person are part of the period's fashion and refer to the possibility for individuals to use the products of the fashion industry just like any other consumption good that can be changed according to the dominant codes of society, either by copying them or by surpassing them. Our research follows the successive steps of identity construction in time, according to the social role, style and clothing of the individuals, with an emphasis on the new ways of influencing identity construction facilitated by the emergence of the fashion industry on the media market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study presents different aspects of visual representations depending on cultural contexts that provide their production. The process of intercultural visual communication involves coding content, decoding, and, sometimes, recoding it. The coding begins with the creation of the visual message by the designer, using the cultural filter of the medium which he is part of. Decoding begins with passing the set of symbols used in the message (symbolical elements, colors, artistic styles, composition, graphs) through the cultural filter and aesthetic frame of the receiver. This process can be followed by another coding by constructing a visual message in response. Thus, we analyzed television images as a result of production, as codes through which reality is represented and can be decoded if the context in which they are represented is taken into consideration. The analysis of these images allows the observation of all those involved in representation, both the represented and the omitted, and the identification of the causes that have led to this situation. The explanation is the fact that the interaction of viewers with the text takes place in the context of a social experience, in a certain culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper offers a perspective on space and on a time vector that allows the visualization of space in a determined period of time. Our paper reviews the theories of space formulated by some critics, introducing notions of space, place, non-place, followed by some examples of the destruction and reconstruction of industrial buildings as cultural spaces. Thus, after discussing the way in which a number of contemporary thinkers (Augé, Baudrillard, Manovich, de Certeau) approach the mechanism whereby space is invested with meaning in the postmodern context, we turn our attention to a few examples of reconversion or redefinition of spaces in the Romanian context, from water towers to old fortified churches and various other landmarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that postmodern identity is built by assuming different roles and an image construction. Hermeneutical and criticizing reading of the images proposed by visual culture offer the understanding of the identity's fragmentarism, reconstruction and fragility in postmodern era. Contemporary society is strongly mediated by the images obtained through mass-communication means. They offer models and patterns that help the personal identity shaping. The individuals' identification using or imitating these patterns place them in positions specific, contradictory, fragile and put them through quick changes and reconstructions. Personal identity is formed according to everyone's option. Identity's change and transformation according to contemporary trends comes as something natural. Analyzing Romanian movies and soap operas proves that through the presented themes and images they encode the fashion and identity discourse specific to the period and to the society they belong to. They have an influence upon individuals' fashion, look, life style and behavior from that era. These images lead to a new style and permanent changes. Adopting a new look and changing one's identity has become modern and desirable attitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The place of digital games in the global media culture cannot be ignored any longer. This paper focuses on the relationship between social representations in games and society and reality and the way they are interconnected. The theoretical approach is an interdisciplinary one, which combines elements of communication sciences, social psychology, narratology and media studies. The first part of the paper is a short exposition of some theoretical concepts while the second is a case study on the Command & Conquer: Red Alert strategy game series. The article concentrates on showing the ability of games to create meanings and significations in building a specific world image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communicating contemporary reality is one of the main topics in 21st century discourse. Contemporary fiction is one of the means which reflect the most complex aspects of reality. It has developed in the direction of strengthening the postmodernism's poetics and often built a world model as an apocalyptic space. It keeps the structure of the normal world, but its mythological significance is deformed. Nevertheless, this model permits the existence of versions of eternity even in the middle of that world. Therefore, our argument will follow the degree of keeping of these mythological significances and the way they have changed or have been replaced by others, suitable for the appearance of the created world and for the human attitude towards it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]