[csaa-forum] Transformations Issue 28 released

[Warwick Mules]

Transformations announces the release of issue 28

THE RUIN, THE FUTURE

http://www.transformationsjournal.org/

Over the past few years a swathe of what has come to be known as ³ruin porn²
has swept the internet. Perhaps in an uncanny updating of Albert Speer¹s
dark fantasies of ³ruin value², photographs of Detroit¹s abandoned factories
and theatres, Chernobyl¹s crumbling tenements and ³urbex² photos of ruined
asylums and hotels are gleefully traded on Facebook and Reddit and have
amassed immense cultural currency.

This contemporary interest in ruins scales from numerous blogs and
sub-Reddits to the vaulted heights of major art institutions, with the Tate
gallery¹s 2013 ³Ruin Lust² exhibition. But of course ­ as the Tate¹s
exhibition charted ­ this fascination has its roots in much older
traditions. The ruin was employed for theological purposes in the paintings
of the Renaissance, and for didactic and allegorical purposes in the
Romantic paintings of the 18th century. For hundreds of years ruins have
been both quotidian elements of the daily lives of many, especially in
Europe, while they have also operated as rich sources of historical meaning
within various modes of artistic expression.

What can be done with the ruin today? Can we put the observations of key
theorists of the ruin, such as Walter Benjamin, to new purposes? And from
our ancient, colonial and industrial ruins can we pull some hope, some
imagination or possibility for the future that sees the ruin differently
than as an emblem of a glorious or inglorious past?

This issue of Transformations reflects on the ruin and ruination, its past
and its future.

Papers:

The Excess and Potential of the Movie Theatre Ruin: The Midnight Star
Vanessa Berry
 
Ruin, Rubble, and the Necropolitics of History
Stefka Hristova
 
Light and the Aesthetics of Abandonment: HDR Imaging and the Illumination of
Ruins
Alysse Kushinski
 
The Internet as Ruin: Nostalgia for the Early World Wide Web in Contemporary
Art
Paolo Magagnoli
 
Toward a Rust Belt Poetics: Ruins and Everyday Life in Visual Art from the
Deindustrialised U.S. Midwest
Patrick Manning
 
Rephotography and the Ruin of the Event
László Munteán
 
Apocalyptic Commons: Derek Jarman¹s The Last of England
Avery Slater
 
Assembling Ruin: Rubble Photography of the 1908 Messina Earthquake
William M. Taylor
 
Ruin, Allegory, Melancholy. On the Critical Aesthetics of W.G. Sebald¹s The
Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn
Robin Vandevoordt


Dr. Warwick Mules
General Editor  Transformations    http://www.transformationsjournal.org/

Adjunct Associate Professor
School of Arts and Social Sciences
Southern Cross University


mobile: +61 412 292 541





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