#semiosphere

[agent-kether]

one of my favorite parts about the SCP wiki is that not only does it use a lot of obscure or outright invented words to describe spooky shit, but because of how the ratings system functions, the most popular instances of these words tend to sound the coolest. "acroamatic abatement", "kinetoglyphs", "telekill alloy"*, "pataphysics", "surrealistics", "Akiva radiation", "Scranton Reality Anchors"... the website is a hotbed of echolalia

*yes i know telekill alloy is cringe and was purged from the site along with a lot of SCPs that relied on it after it made series 1 writers get lazy and specify "1cm thick telekill alloy plating" on containment cells for no God damned reason but consider. the triple L sound is cool

[dino--draws]

scp wikidot's fake sciences are my best fucking friend. i still dont fully understand the narrativistic particles and shit like that but im forever charmed by the fact it exists

[kikunai]

just infodumped about semiosphere/noosphere and its retroactvity on editing🙏

[jhavelikes]

The current design of artificial intelligence and its structural dependence on collective and personal data for its functioning demonstrates, once again, the debt that the technosphere has historically maintained towards the ergosphere, i.e. the sphere of labour cooperation, collective knowledge, and cultural heritage (Renn 2020). This extractivist dimension of AI towards the common of knowledge aligns it, unsurprisingly, with other sectors of the global economy such as financial markets and natural resource industries which have founded their business models on a similar rentier scheme. The magnitude of such extractivist economies, nevertheless, stresses not anew the importance of knowledge, culture, and science as forces of production. Well before the debates on knowledge extractivism and the Anthropocene, feminist epistemologies (Rose 1983, Federici 2004, et al.) already predicted and questioned the exploitative mentality of modern technoscience and, specifically, the way it disciplined the collective body (and especially women’s body) as a source of productivity and value. Given the deep political implications of such technological predicaments, how to read the evolution of modern mechanical thinking into the project of ‘thinking machines’ especially from the point of view of collective production of knowledge? Contemporary debates on the general intellect in political economy (Pasquinelli 2019), extended cognition in philosophy of mind (Wolfe 2010) and noosphere in environmental humanities (Rispoli 2022) are challenged by a situation in which AI systems do not to represent simply a new semiosphere but a further modelling system (Lotman 1990) which imposes a new metric and measure on labour, culture, and nature (D. Senthil Babu, 2023). Eventually, the emancipation of praxis and knowledge confronts the ambivalent destiny of their (incom)mensurability.

Workshop series: AI MODELS

[swordcoasts]

me: trying to work on my presentation for tomorrow the demon in my brain: you should write the most insane smut right now :)

[plakhova-blog]

#semiosphere #letters #lettering #psalm #psalms #thankyoudavid by #complexitygraphics https://www.instagram.com/p/B9Y6jRHHAfK/?igshid=1my3x69d4bix8

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Umwelt: What Matters Most in the World

(Originally posted at my blog at https://rebeccalexa.com/umwelt-what-matters-most-in-the-world/)

I will be the first to admit that a lot of philosophy tends to bend my brain in ways that I’m really not prepared for. I’m a very earthy creature, and I am more comfortable in physical, solid spaces than in abstract conceptualizations. Even the modalities of psychology I gravitated toward in grad school tended to be based in our interactions with physical nature, and measurable effects thereof. But it was a casual discussion on philosophy with regards to the awareness of animals that introduced me to the concept of umwelt.

Originally coined by biologist Jakob Johann Freiherr von Uexküll, umwelt describes the unique way in which a given animal experiences the world around it. Uexküll looked at how various beings take in information through their senses; the way that a blind, deaf worm engages with their environment through taste and touch is very different from how we with our hearing and color vision connect with our world. Even when I am walking with my dog out in the woods, her interpretation of what’s going on around us is going to be much more heavily influenced by hearing, and especially smell, than my sight-heavy approach. (And when we engage with each other, our respective umwelten create a semiosphere!)

So umwelt is essentially the sum total of all the ways in which an animal takes in that sensory information and attaches meaning to each fragment thereof. It’s how they tell the story of the world around them, and understand their place in it. And they rank the signs according to importance; umwelt is more strongly formed by things that are of particular interest to the animal.

That means that umwelt, rather than being constant throughout life, is always shifting according to new sensory input, or changes in how the senses work; as my dog gets older, her hearing and vision may not be as good as they were, but if her nose stays sharp then smells may become an even more important part of how she navigates her world.

Or look at a Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana), which is born as a blind, deaf little hairless being with two front legs that they use to crawl to the mother’s abdominal pouch. At that time their umwelt centers on seeking and retaining the warmth of their mother’s pouch, and the sensation of the constant flow of warm, nourishing milk. After about ten weeks they leave the pouch as a miniature furry little possum and travel on their mother’s back while learning to walk; their umwelt has expanded quite a bit to include the sight and smell of their mother, the visual and scent cues that tell them how close they are to known food sources, and visual, sound, and audio information warning of various dangers. At around five months, the opossum becomes independent, and their mother fades from their umwelt while being replaced by an even larger network of food, danger, and perhaps even potential mates. Over a lifetime, as the opossum’s senses develop (and, with age, decline) and their priorities shift, so does their umwelt evolve with them.

This then led me into a bit of a rabbit hole with biosemiotics. Semiotics is the study of symbols and the communication of meaning, to include communication with the self. Biosemiotics, then, is how non-human beings assign meaning to various things in their lives, and interpret the world they live in. Zoosemiotics specifically refers to the semiotics of animals, like the examples I’ve given so far, while endosemiotics (aka phytosemiotics or vegetative semiotics) is semiotics at a cellular or even molecular level.

One example of endosemiotics can be found in our immune systems. A B lymphocyte can recognize an invader such as a virus or bacteria, and it sends out a signal (an antigen) to T lymphocytes that then attack the invader. The B lymphocyte’s umwelt consists of information received through surface receptors that can detect certain proteins and other molecules, and the response it’s programmed to have as a result of detecting an invader. The T lymphocyte’s umwelt, on the other hand, centers on the B lymphocyte’s antigen signal, as well as the invader itself.

Biosemiotics is important because it moves meaning-making beyond humans, demonstrating that we are not the only beings who assign more importance to one part of our world than another. It promotes the idea that human language is not necessary for an organism to be able to find meaning in their environment. I’m cautious about anthropomorphization–assigning human traits to non-human beings–but biosemiotics allows each being to be its own unique self, rather than being gauged by human standards.

It’s all too easy for me to get overwhelmed by just how technical some of the discussion over biosemiotics can get (especially when delving into the “semotics” part of it!) But my takeaway is that it’s nice to have a term–umwelt–that encapsulates the unique experience that every animal, plant, fungus, slime mold, and other being has, no matter how large or small its world may be.

I can envision millions upon millions of overlapping umwelten in every ecosystem, becoming semiospheres whenever two or more of those umwelten nudge, slide, or crash into each other. I’m already delighted by knowing that I myself contain several ecosystems, with microbiomes in my organs and on my skin and more. But I can now also consider the umwelten and semiospheres of the lymphocytes in my immune system, along with all the other cells that are carrying on their existences within my various tissues, fluids, and so forth.

Of course, this gets into discussions of whether umwelt requires some level of consciousness, the nature of consciousness, sentience vs. sapience, etc., etc., all of which are the sort of headache-inducing philosophical discussions that I try to avoid at this stage of my life. So I can understand that this whole umwelt-biosemiotics thing is still being hammered out and explored and critiqued, but also use it to augment my own personal model of my world, internal and external (my innenwelt!) And for now, umwelt is a perfectly good shorthand for “the unique way in which an organism experiences its environment.”

Did you enjoy this post? Consider taking one of my online foraging and natural history classes, checking out my other articles, or picking up a paperback or ebook I’ve written! You can even buy me a coffee here!

[perkwunos]

The culture/nature distinction grows increasingly irrelevant. A biosemiotically informed critical theory of subjects, society and culture might well help us to move beyond the problems which have driven critical theory in the humanities for the past 35 to 40 years. That formation was largely derived from two sources: a Marxist theory of false consciousness critical of Enlightenment reason and claims to truth, and the ‘postmodern’ theory which says that all meanings are made by humans and that human meanings are just a ceaseless circulation of signifiers unanchored from bodies and Earth. The biosemiotic realisation that meaning-making belongs to all living things, and that human meaning-making, although distinctive of Homo sapiens, has its roots in the common descent of non-human semiotic life, indicates that reality is not ‘constructed in human language’. It is experienced in sign relations that are anchored in bodies and in the shared Earth. All other organisms make meanings too, and human life is lived amongst those meanings. Organisms continually both shape and are shaped by the embodied and enminded semiotic relations which both scaffold matter and energy, and also constitute life and meaning on this planet. Human beings are but a part of that global semiosis in which the biosphere is at the same time the semiosphere. In the light of all this, we might conjecture that an environmental ethic of biosemiosis strongly implies the reality of many different readings – among both human and nonhuman organisms – and an imperative to listen and take heed.

The modern sciences and humanities have both tended toward inadequate models of mind and subjectivity. Computational models produce the problem of mechanistic genetic determinism versus free will. Computers have no real choice about their inputs. On the humanities side, tabula rasa models have produced a socio-linguistically deterministic model of human selves that is both biologically and semiotically shallow. Critical theory in the humanities has tended to reject scientific accounts as reductive, and as especially simplistic in their gene-based attempts to explain cultural experience and meaning-making.

Wendy Wheeler, How Can the Study of the Humanities Inform the Study of Biosemiotic

[kamanori]

Semiotic ecology: different nature in the semiosphere K Kull - Sign systems studies, 1998 

[burpenterprisejournal]

ACTIVITY CENTER + MAT POGO IN AUSLAND

2018/11/03 ACTIVITY CENTER + MAT POGO MICHAEL RENKEL’s  NOMOS ALTO Ausland Berlin - DE

Saturday November 3, 2018 As part of the series biegungen im ausland ausland Lychener Strasse 60, 10437 Berlin, Germany  h. 20:30 Michael Renkel / Activity Center + Mat Pogo Michael Renkel: Nomos Alto Miako Klein – recorder Johnny Chang – violin Emilio Gordoa – vibraphone Rieko Okuda – piano Activity Center + Mat Pogo Burkhard Beins – percussion and strings Michael Renkel – strings and percussion Mat Pogo – voice biegungen im ausland dedicate this evening to the work of guitar player and composer Michael Renkel. He was a core member of the first Berlin Echtzeitmusik generation and long time organizer of the legendary concert series 2:13 Club and Quiet Cue. Michael Renkel is featured as an improviser (with Activity Center) as well as a composer, presenting his moving graphic score Nomos Alto. Activity Center & Mat Pogo Over the course of the last three decades Burkhard Beins’ and Michael Renkel’s duo Activity Center has developed a unique style of musical performance. Their distinctive way to “create spontaneous compositional structures” has been described as improvised sound art or hand-played musique concrète. – “Beins and Renkel’s fractured instrumentation ... rocks out to a scattered beat of madness, joy and sheer bedlam.” (The Wire) Vocalist extraordinaire Mat Pogo is best known for his work with Jealousy Party, one of the most advanced musical units in Italy,

mixing with personal touch soul, improv, avant rock, noise and error music. He has developed a fully integrated sound world of live and sampled voice fragments. In collaboration with Activity Center he is focusing on the pure acoustic potential of his voice.

Nomos Alto is a moving graphic score for flute, violin, vibraphone and piano, here interpreted by Miako Klein, Johnny Chang, Emilio Gordoa and Rieko Okuda. It is based on Michael Renkel’s thoughts on semiotics and the semiosphere:

“I perceive the outside world surrounding me as an unforeseen self-motion of the ‘projection surface: world’; symbols as results of thinking, consciousness or interpretation not as their prerequisite. Signs as reduction and attempt of objectification in a generally flowing movement. As a consequence of this thought experiment, the composition Nomos Alto is created. The score starts to change and thus refuses a traditional interpretation, since the sign system has already developed and changed during the interpretation process and reacts – metaphorically – to an intertextuality. Text (score) and interpretation become virtually indistinguishable. In the triad: system of signs (score) – object (work) – interpretation, the score is initially a seemingly certain tangible materiality. The performance refers only in a limited way to the work, as there are potentially infinite interpretations: Different interpreters relate to previous interpretations and thus to the relationship between work and score. Previous performances become the ‘sign’ of this new ‘object’, the semiotic process becomes an endless web of relations. The understanding of the work of art is moving, becomes more vulnerable, more unfathomable, brings the process into motion, but is always an initiation point on the interpretation. Apart from the practical interpretation, only ink and paper exist. The play of interpretation does not only include the preceding interpretations, but also other influences, including non-musical ones; a whole ‘encyclopedia’ (*1) of influences. This also happens in a compositional process! A web of references – composition and interpretation approach each to each other by becoming an intertext. ‘As one can now assume, in reality there are no sign systems that function completely precisely and functionally unambiguously on their own. (…) They only function because they are integrated into a certain semiotic continuum, which is filled with semiotic structures of different types, which are at different organizational levels. We want to call such a continuum (…) a semiosphere.’ (*2)

Background knowledge, experience, influences, analysis and cultural phenomena are inseparably interwoven. Fading out intertextuality and a (violent) reduction of the musical text to seemingly objective conditions reduces the wealth of possibilities. However, any statement is interpretation. Text and interpretation are indistinguishable. This calls into question the concept of repeatability at least: instead, there is an exciting perspective: the inevitable interaction of text and interpretation can create additional sense and new possibilities.

(*1) Umberto Eco: Semiotica e filosofia del linguaggio, Torino 1984, 55–140

(*2) Jurij M. Lotman: Über die Semiosphäre, in: Zeitschrift für Semiotik 12 (1990), Heft 4, 288“

Michael Renkel, born in north Germany, is based in Berlin since 1996. Renkel studied classical guitar in Hamburg. The main emphasis of his work is an interest in open methods of composition and the impossibility of repeating. His guitar playing straddles tradition and the development of a personal language that includes extended playing techniques and the preparation of the acoustic guitar. In a logical continuation he also extends the instrument via computer technology and he’s the first classical guitarist who connected the instrument in realtime-live processing to the computer. The acoustic guitar is modified in a way that blurs the delineation between acoustic preparation and electronic variance. In his works the instrumental material is altered in realtime using preparations, laptops, MAX/MSP, percussion instruments, a 16 channel sampler-sequencer, synthesizers and a vibraphone, the further development of this setup is his self-constructed amplified stringboard. Renkel also works with field recordings and composes works that experiment with genetic processes via generation, mutation, hybridization and coding also video animated compositions in which the performers interpret a permanently changing score in a live situation. As “Greekeeper in a Shadow Meadow” he also works on video projects as an actor and musician. His compositions are published at Verlag Neue Musik / Berlin. Supported by Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa and Konzert des Deutschen Musikrates Doors: 8.30 pm Concert start: 9.00 pm fb event

[reportwire]

Culture – Edgar Schein

Culture – Edgar Schein

Culture – Edgar Schein This weeks conversation is about Safety Culture,  Dave Whitefield from Semiosphere and Andrew Thornhill from Clarity Enabled and myself discuss Edgar Schein’s model as a way of explaining Safety Culture. Couple of out takes from the discussions “The tricky part of Schein’s definition is that it is complex, the good part […] Source link

[meteoradominic]

World of Influencers

Enter the World of Influencers

The Endless Space has the same type of organization as a factory or a supermarket. It offers a repetitive pattern with multiple hubs, a neutral, equal and continuous structure.

it is a radical analysis of the architecture project and of design, offering a model for an immaterial city without quality, a city dedicated only to the continuous flow of information, technical networks, markets and services; where architecture disappears in a pure “urban semiosphere”, free of all symbolic value.

An infrastructural playground for influencers. The water point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo. [24]

Each Floor of Elizabeth’s Palace, a slightly altered copy. By repeating the act of replication, each copy is transformed with a new shade. The designer can provisionally override, add, modify, copy, shift, rotate and mirror elements, in rapid succession, without interfering with the precious accumulation of complex information already achieved. [25] Creating together a stack of floors connected through Escalators. The always proceeding Infrastructure operating as one-way thresholds. 

The Endless Grid depicts the loneliness in the hyperreal space.  The ceiling a screen to set up the environment for the artificial scene. The floor a stage for cat walking though the exaggerated scenery. The Walls a filter toward the city. Only the monuments overlooking the city remain visible.

Platforms offer a kind of generic universality, open to human and non-human users. They generate user identities whether the users want them or not. They link actors, information, events across times and spaces, across scales and temporalities [26]

During their development, the Influencers pass three characteristic stages in Elizabeth’s Palace:

Garden

A fertilising ground. Dedicated for breeding, growth, training and cultivation. Laid out for the enhancement of specific traits and virtues. Carefully selected by Elizabeth. A place for the recurring cycles of the offspring. Only the finest and glamorous may be preserved.

Camping

A temporary dwelling ground. A Space to dwell for the influencers and their alternating artefacts. Providing a stage to present themselves. Moment of joy and fun. The Residence for divergent Creatures in a Hyperreal space.

Feast

Hosted by Elizabeth for the decadent expression of her newest creations. The place for the consumption of merchandise, their ambrosia and nectar A place for Elizabeth to disintegrate, to be the multiple. The space to dissolve in a cloud of commerce and become one with it. An amusing and shapeshifting experience, farming the fully grown crop.

[introspectiveresearchdiary]

Computational Arts Research Week 7

How do we create an artefact that exists both as an artwork and a computational object? 

How do we negotiate the boundaries of such work and the way it manifests? 

For our group project Echoes from the Semiospheres [further addressed as ‘Echoes’], we decided to take a multi-media approach to exploring plant intelligence while contemplating on possible implications such speculative work can have on our understanding of worlds | ecologies and relationships that constitute them. 

Echoes is then an amalgam of scientific, conceptual and practice-based research into the communication systems of plants manifested as a website incorporating visual references, written research materials, conceptualized procedural composition and its sonification, and documentation of the process. In this way, the final object becomes an environment, a world inhabited by entities that irrespective of their origin are active agents forming | formed by relationships within this world. 

While outlining our objectives and possible directions we often encountered the topic of ethics. In our case, the ethics of engaging with plants. We feel it is imperative that we approach our agents with solidarity, as subjects rather than objects, teeming with aliveness. Agency that is not necessarily equivalent to ours, as we are existing across certain differences. Agency that acknowledges solidarity despite those differences and one that comprehends the true meaning of kin. Agency which, one step at a time, retreats from the cancer of anthopocentrism [capital letter omitted for obvious reasons].

[awarenessofspace]

text exploration

“A body exists in space…moves in space…is contained by space” (Blom and Chaplin, 1989, p.31).

Leveratto, Jacopo. 2014. “The Body Is the Medium (Between Space and Technology).” International Journal of Interior Architecture + Spatial Design 2: 86-91.

“I sense, therefore I am” - Descartes

conceptual ideas to explore through text

experiencing materiality more viscerally using the entire body...

the body

taking up space

the body in space

body --> identity

movement

‘grounding’

tangibly experiencing and exploring materiality, texture

experiencing space with the entire body

~~~~~~~~

In fact, if the relationship between the man and the world – or between the body and the space – which characterized during the centuries the Western human conscience, was based on the contraposition between what was interior and belonged to the body and what was exterior and belonged to an outer reality, today this dualism seems to be drastically challenged by the digital media abilities in connecting, interrelating or deeply mediating things, entities or spaces that earlier were distinct, like the space of the subject and the space of the world. (Palumbo 2012, 30)

Several aspects of bodily self-consciousness can be altered through multisensory manipulations inducing changes of self-identification and self-location. With our experiments, we investigated the mutual relationship between architectonic space and body space through changes in bodily self-consciousness. - The Architectonic Experience of Body and Space in Augmented Interiors, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5932369/

The architecture is finally beginning to move towards a level of ‘abstraction’, that is overcoming its old ‘figurative’ limit, to finally turn itself (like art, music and literature) in a system, a semiosphere not to be watched but to be experienced, because it is made of perceptions, emotions, constantly changing information... The architecture is becoming an ‘interior’ experience, that is not only made of ‘interior’ spaces, but also of mental logics and psychological spaces. (Branzi 2010, 178-179)

The pre-eminence of visual perception is typical of a visual society, primarily based on the value assigned to the dimensional, proportional and quantitative relationships (Prestinenza Puglisi 1999, 37), on the possibilities of understanding and interpreting reality. The term haptic, on the other hand, is concerned with the ability of experimenting with an object through fundamentally tactile, active exploration, which refers to bodily and instinctive knowledge coming from the early stages of life. Our visual images develop later and their meaning depends, in large part, on these previous haptic experiences (Bloomer and Moore 1977, 44). All our senses, including sight are, in a certain way, types of extensions of the sense of touch, because the skin is the most sensitive of our organs, our first medium of communication and our most efficient protection (Montagu 1971, 3). -  Leveratto, Jacopo. 2014. “The Body Is the Medium (Between Space and Technology).” International Journal of Interior Architecture + Spatial Design 2: 86-91.

[deraztrebz]

Musings #8: Leveling up & relationships

26 to 31. Swiftly. I think I've leveled up fast in the augmented reality mobile game " Pokémon Go” since April. Chalk it up to the extra time I give the game during lunchtime — well, aside from the minutes I spend catching and evolving Pokemons while jogging around the campus in the afternoon or early evening. (I have to say that sometimes, I also have to kick around somewhere playing the game to keep my sanity.)

Truly, when you allot time for something and become focused on it during the allotted time, it "grows" in various ways. You may perhaps discover new things about it, get to explore its many other dimensions, and/or become capable of doing more with it (e.g., more adventures, more fun, more tricks, more opportunities, more realizations). Does this apply to a human being's relationship with other humans? Maybe. When you give your family, relatives, friends, classmates, neighbors, and/or other humans more quality time, your relationship with ‘em likely levels up as well.

Unlike in Pokemon Go, though, human relationship doesn't level out. It improves or deteriorates, but never stays the same. Thus, the face-to-face social semiosphere is still different from the virtual semiosphere of human-simulacra interaction. (Or are they really different?) Acknowledgment: The Pokemon tricks I learned from Zeus (a lot) and Mishael (a few) may have contributed to my renewed interest in the game.  PS: Thanks to Edmund’s ref magnet collection which I used as background in the Dratini photograph.

[visualcultureconference2019-blog]

Day 3: March 21

Landfill as Landscape (Adam Westman)

In my presentation I will investigate how the visual montages in Jennifer Scapettone book The Republic of Exit 46 allows us to think the on going ecological disaster in relation to the landfill. And how they make visible humans relationship to environment and consumption. Scapettones montages incorporates both photographic imagery and textual fragments.  I will understand the book in the context of site-specific art and argue that it allows for different understanding of the environment. Specifically I will focus on the representation of the relationship between humans to landscape and environment.  By way of a semiotic method I will show how Scapettone book by incorporating both text and visual elements in her montages allows for a new and different relation to the environment. I will connect my methodological findings to a Marxist theory of value to further shed light on the relation of the visual montages and their connection to questions concerning human relationship to the environment.  The republic of exit 46 is a site specific book which through the means of poetry, theatre, visual montage and found source texts investigates and approaches the landfill as a site for archaeology.

Pushing the boundaries of nature and art: A semiotic analysis of Olafur Eliasson’s installations based on Yuri Lotman’s theories (Cecilia Muszta)

The concept of nature was featured throughout the history of art both in Europe and outside of it. After the renaissance however nature started to become represented not as a symbolic space, but something worthy of depiction without any added symbolic value. This created an image of nature which is seemingly independent of human culture, an image which is problematic. In this conference I am going to talk about the installations of Olafur Eliasson which problematize the image introduced above, such as Riverbed or Lava Floor. In these works, the artist pushes the boundaries between art, institution and nature trough featuring natural materials and constructed landscapes in environments where these appear anachronistic. Eliasson does invoke aesthetic qualities attached to the image of nature such as the serene or sublime, yet the institutional environment keeps disorienting the visitor, making them aware of the constructed nature of these environments. In a sense, the question what nature is being asked by mixing radically different environments. Furthermore, I am going to provide a semiotic analysis of the problems highlighted above. Using the theories of Yuri Lotman I aim to connect the concepts of nature and art world to Lotman’s “semiosphere” idea and liken Eliasson’s artistic work to the philosopher’s notion of boundary concept.

The New Landscape: Music stage constructions on water surfaces (Laine Medniece)

Music festivals and events are entering the immense rivalry phase when differentiation is necessary in order to attract more visitors. Unlike festivals in cities and public spaces, events taking place in deserts, forest, by the beach or abandoned castle ruins, besides artist line-up, include a remarkable aesthetical experience due to the unusual landscape. These particular and unique locations also include events, where the stage is constructed on a lake, particularly to directly experience the specifically chosen landscape.

This conference paper explores the correlation between the stage, landscape and music, and how these aspects are being used in order to signify the landscape and aesthetics. It will be argued how the specific location of the stage on water, the placing of an audience and the visuals of the stage itself can affect the perception of a landscape, as well as how the stage is being perceived as an artificial object within a landscape. Additionally, music emphasizes the experience of a landscape and vice versa, thus creating a constant correlation between the three figures – the stage, landscape and music, - where the slightest change in one aspect can affect the importance of another.

I will refer to music events in the Baltic States and Austria, within techno, ambient and classical music genres, which will be explored based on the ideas within environmental aesthetics.

 Architecture in Cinema: The history of constructing an environment (Christopher Fletcher Sanderjoo)

The role of studio and set designs have always played an important role in cinema. From enhancing the story through architectural choices, to advancing the technologies used within filmmaking. Early works of set and studio designs have mainly been lost to history, within film studies, as to who created them and the thought processes behind these works. The focus points of this paper will handle how studios and sets are built and portrayed to replicate, create and control the environment but also the narrative structures behind architectural choices in cinema. I will look at these focus points mainly through a historical perspective where most of this paper will be about the early history. The films that I will mainly talk about will be The cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and In Bruges (2008). I will go about this through qualitative research and will delve into trends and thought processes to give us a greater insight in the works of sets and studio designs.

 The fetishisation of the Arctic ice caps in the age of the Anthropocene (Linnéa Lindgren Havsfjord)

The Arctic territory was of interest already in the Middle Ages: its harsh climate made it unwelcoming territory until European explorers in the early nineteenth century saw its ice caps as a symbol of the Arctic’s awesome natural power, to be tamed and colonised. Historically, visual representations of the Arctic and its glaciers have been renegotiated from Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic depiction ‘Sea of Ice’ (1823-1824) to Olafur Eliasson’s distressing ‘Ice Watch’ (2014-). This renegotiation reveals an interesting shift in the perception of glaciers, from a powerful unconquered natural space to victim of manmade forces. However, taking their perspective from ‘the anthropocene’, contemporary visual depictions of the Arctic ice caps are in danger of fetishising our current ecological crisis, and without stepping outside of the hegemonic Western perspective. My presentation will problematise the theoretical approach of the anthropocene by looking at this tendency to fetishise the arctic glaciers and ice caps. I will ask whether visual representations of the ice caps via the anthropocentric lens amount to a form of fetishising our own destruction?

  How do Environmental Institutions in South Florida Create Different Representations of Our  Oceans? An Interpretation of Conservation Science and Social Community Engagement  (Marisol Diaz Turkowsky)

The description of our marine world is not only cultural, but also based on social and political influence from the scientific experts and environmental institutions supervising and framing appropriate marine conservation conduct.

This master thesis investigates the common and unique roles that each institution portrays in the making of today’s oceans and science regulations for the general public. South Floridians are known to be active participants in coastal and marine activities, commonly organized by environmental organizations, private research laboratories and federal agencies. In addition, local zoos and aquariums have also attracted tourists and locals to portray conservation issues and goals regarding Florida’s waters.

In this study, nine different environmental institutions in Florida were interviewed regarding their roles as educational portals of conservation and outreach communicators. The results show that the institutions’ political agenda and social relationships with their target public were reflected differently on their conservation motives and values. Varying animal species were also used and displayed based on what messages these institutions wanted to communicate. This study argues that to understand where the vision of ocean conservation is going, we need to understand how environmental institutions connect humans to the making of their ocean ecologies.

 Before Terraforming? The aesthetics and ethics of terraforming landscape on the Ascension Island  (Chenglan Jin)

Ascension Island is located in the South Atlantic Ocean, about halfway between South America and Africa. Scientists from the 19th century had built the planet's first artificial ecosystem here by planting the non-native tree to this volcanic/Mars-like island also known as the Green Mountain.

While much has been written about this island's scientific value on changing the island's soil, rainfall and increasing its plant diversity, less has been said about how this human- made landscape critiques our perspective of terraforming through aesthetics and ethics.

In this paper, I plan to draw upon some Phenomenology theory and Postcolonial theory, combining them with the field of aesthetics and ethics in order to explore the questions of How does the experience like when are we appreciating the terraforming landscape aesthetically? How does it re-shape our view of the relationship between landscape (on the surface level) and human activity?

It will be argued that different approaches such as semiotic and phenomenology will vary our interpretation of the artificial and natural that comes from the terraforming landscape. Also, it will be further analysed that terraforming landscape is a representation of the Anthropocentrism in which human took away the islands' ability to define its original landscape.

Through this biocentrism point of view, Ascension Island invites us to reinterpret our perception with the past (terraforming earth) and the future (terraforming Mars).

Ecologies of Masculinity and Melancholia in the Natural Landscapes of Video Games (Emma Shachat)

During the Romanticism movement of the 19th century, natural landscapes were conceptualised as the domain of the modern man. By claiming nature as a realm of masculine identity, one could reclaim a masculinity that was supposedly lost to Industrialisation. Today, a similar process of constructing masculinity through nature takes root in the virtual realm, specifically in video games that emphasise the exploration of their digitally-rendered, “natural” environments. These multiplayer virtual spaces are sought out for a sense of community and self-actualisation, spaces where new lands can be discovered and new identities created. The expansive, mystical landscapes of community-oriented fantasy games such as World of Warcraft serve as spaces where many players hope to assert--and mourn--a “lost” masculine identity. While these online community spaces often become dominated by toxic masculinity and misogyny, such virtual microclimates can also cultivate communities in which masculine-melancholia can be collectively expressed.

In this paper, I will be looking at images of the landscapes of these virtual worlds as well as analysing how users relate to these landscapes and to each other. By applying Judith Butler’s notion of “melancholy gender” as a theoretical framework and by looking at primary sources from the gaming world, I will attempt to discuss and problematise the relationship between contemporary masculinities, melancholia, and virtual natural landscapes.