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<TITLE>Transformations Issue 28 released</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>Transformations announces the release of issue 28<BR>
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<B>THE RUIN, THE FUTURE<BR>
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<FONT COLOR="#0000FF"><U><a href="http://www.transformationsjournal.org/">http://www.transformationsjournal.org/</a><BR>
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</U></FONT></SPAN></FONT><FONT SIZE="1"><FONT FACE="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:9pt'>O</SPAN></FONT></FONT><FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>ver the past few years a swathe of what has come to be known as “ruin porn” has swept the internet. Perhaps in an uncanny updating of Albert Speer’s dark fantasies of “ruin value”, photographs of Detroit’s abandoned factories and theatres, Chernobyl’s crumbling tenements and “urbex” photos of ruined asylums and hotels are gleefully traded on Facebook and Reddit and have amassed immense cultural currency.<BR>
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This contemporary interest in ruins scales from numerous blogs and sub-Reddits to the vaulted heights of major art institutions, with the Tate gallery’s 2013 “Ruin Lust” exhibition. But of course – as the Tate’s 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.<BR>
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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?<BR>
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This issue of Transformations reflects on the ruin and ruination, its past and its future.<BR>
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Papers:<BR>
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The Excess and Potential of the Movie Theatre Ruin: The Midnight Star<BR>
Vanessa Berry<BR>
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Ruin, Rubble, and the Necropolitics of History<BR>
Stefka Hristova<BR>
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Light and the Aesthetics of Abandonment: HDR Imaging and the Illumination of Ruins<BR>
Alysse Kushinski<BR>
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The Internet as Ruin: Nostalgia for the Early World Wide Web in Contemporary Art<BR>
Paolo Magagnoli<BR>
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Toward a Rust Belt Poetics: Ruins and Everyday Life in Visual Art from the Deindustrialised U.S. Midwest<BR>
Patrick Manning<BR>
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Rephotography and the Ruin of the Event<BR>
László Munteán<BR>
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Apocalyptic Commons: Derek Jarman’s The Last of England<BR>
Avery Slater<BR>
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Assembling Ruin: Rubble Photography of the 1908 Messina Earthquake<BR>
William M. Taylor<BR>
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Ruin, Allegory, Melancholy. On the Critical Aesthetics of W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn<BR>
Robin Vandevoordt<BR>
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<FONT COLOR="#008000">Dr. Warwick Mules<BR>
General Editor Transformations <a href="http://www.transformationsjournal.org/">http://www.transformationsjournal.org/</a><BR>
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Adjunct Associate Professor<BR>
School of Arts and Social Sciences<BR>
Southern Cross University<BR>
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mobile: +61 412 292 541<BR>
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