Werber Schneyder on Cabaret, art and history.

German-German history as reflected in political cabaret': ridiculed separately and laughed together. Cover poster: Klaus Staeck. The poster texts are accompanied by text panels. A version in Polish is available.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWVrz5oCt2w<br /> The meaning of Hand Gestures in Art History<br /> Amuze Art Lectures

Middle and ring fingers together to represent modesty. (He doesn't say it, but it also could stand for "M" as in Medici??)

Finger pointing at viewer may indicate a self portrait.

Woman's hand on abdomen may represent pregnancy, a fertile marriage, or the desire to bear children.

• for: BEing journey - history of art from 10th century to present

Aby Warburg: Metamorphosis and Memory. Documentary, Biography, 2016. https://www.kanopy.com/en/lapl/video/5913764.

Written, Directed and Produced by Judith Wechsler<br /> Wechsler2016

The entire range of emotional stirrings, aggression, defense, sacrifice, mourning, melancholia, ecstasy, triumph, et cetera, is expressed through the revival of movements, gestures, and postures, that is pathosformel: the expressive formulas of emotion either taken from ancient modes or reappearing as mnemonic traces in successive works.

Original source for this? (Likely in German as original.)

Warburg is talking about the expression of current art through the lens of the classical arts and there is a throughline of "mnemonic traces" through out time.

I just watched the documentary Aby Warburg: Metamorphosis and Memory (Wechsler, 2016) via Kanopy (for free using my local library's gateway) and thought that others here interested in the ideas of memory in culture, history, and art history may appreciate it. While a broad biography of a seminal figure in the development of art history in the early 20th century, there are some interesting bits relating to art and memory as well as a mention of Frances A. Yates whose research on memory was influenced by Warburg's library.

Also of "note" is the fact that Aby Warburg had a significant zettelkasten-based note taking practice and portions of his collection (both written as well as images) are featured within the hour long documentary.

Researchers interested in images, art, dance, and gesture as they relate to memory may appreciate this short film as an entrance into some of Aby Warburg's more specialized research which includes some cultural anthropology research into American Hopi indigenous peoples. cc: @LynneKelly

syndication link

Döring, Tanja, and Steffi Beckhaus. “The Card Box at Hand: Exploring the Potentials of a Paper-Based Tangible Interface for Education and Research in Art History.” In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction, 87–90. TEI ’07. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1145/1226969.1226986.

This looks fascinating with respect to note taking and subsequent arranging, outlining, and use of notes in human computer interaction space for creating usable user interfaces.

https://hcommons.social/@ryanrandall/109677171177320098

Mnemonics for the places or pictures used by his predecessors. The historians of Mnemonics, especially Aretin, Reventlow, and the learned and famous bibliographer, Edward Marie Oettinger, in Leipzic, to whom I owe the above-mentioned and some of the following details on the history of Mnemonics, give a dozen other names of authors on Mnemonics belonging to this epoch.*

Edward Pick mentions Conrad Celtes in passing for having "made the great discovery that the alphabet could be substituted in Mnemonics for the places and pictures used by his predecessors. He doesn't provide a textual source for the information.

Pick indicates that his primary sources were Edward Marie Oettinger, (Johann Christoph Freiherr von) Aretin, and (Carl Otto) Reventlow who may have more detail on Celte's potential influence on the major system as well as potential alternate names from that era.

see also: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduard_Maria_Oettinger<br /> - History of Mnemonics by J. Ch, Baron von Aretin

Ancient statuary wasn't white as we often see now in museums, but was brightly colored. Statuary that was outside would have been sun bleached over time as well as subject to other weathering to mute or entirely remove color.

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/12/1109995973/we-know-greek-statues-werent-white-now-you-can-see-them-in-color

F*ck! I've been scooped!

Apparently I'm not the only one who has noticed this, though I notice that he doesn't cite Frances A. Yates, which would have certainly been the place for having come up with this historical background (at least that's where I found it.)

The Llullian arts can be more easily practiced with ideas placed on moveable index cards than they might be with ideas stored in one's own memory. Thus the index card as a tool significantly decreases the overhead and provides an easier user interface for permuting one's ideas and combining them. This decrease in mental work appearing at a time of information overload also puts specific pressure on the older use of the art of memory to put it out of fashion.

https://warburg.library.cornell.edu/about/mnemosyne-themes

Looking at the broad themes here makes me wonder if they line up potentially with the larger groups of cards in Warburg's zettelkasten?

While the non-discursive, frequently digressive character of the Atlas frustrates any smooth critical narrative of its themes and contents, nine thematic sequences may still be discerned:

The ideas of non-discursive, digressive, and frustrated narrative could easily be applied to a stranger approaching another person's collection of notes.

What evidence was given for this identification of Homer and Aristotle?

Design for the Real World

by Victor Papanek

Papanek on the Bauhaus

Many of the “sane design” or “design reform” movements of the time, such as those engendered by the writings and teachings of William Morris in England and Elbert Hubbard in the United States, were rooted in a sort of Luddite antimachine philosophy. By contrast Frank Llloyd Wright said as early as 1894 that “the machine is here to stay” and that the designer should “use this normal tool of civilization to best advantage instead of prostituting it as he has hitherto done in reproducing with murderous ubiquity forms born of other times and other conditions which it can only serve to destroy.” Yet designers of the last century were either perpetrators of voluptuous Victorian-Baroque or members of an artsy-craftsy clique who were dismayed by machine technology. The work of the Kunstgewerbeschule in Austria and the German Werkbund anticipated things to come, but it was not until Walter Gropius founded the German Bauhaus in 1919 that an uneasy marriage between art and machine was achieved.

No design school in history had greater influence in shaping taste and design than the Bauhaus. It was the first school to consider design a vital part of the production process rather than “applied art” or “industrial arts.” It became the first international forum on design because it drew its faculty and students from all over the world, and its influence traveled as these people later founded design offices and schools in many countries. Almost every major design school in the United States today still uses the basic foundation course developed by the Bauhaus. It made good sense in 1919 to let a German 19-year-old experiment with drill press and circular saw, welding torch and lathe, so that he might “experience the interaction between tool and material.” Today the same method is an anachronism, for an American teenager has spent much of his life in a machine-dominated society (and cumulatively probably a great deal of time lying under various automobiles, souping them up). For a student whose American design school slavishly imitates teaching patterns developed by the Bauhaus, computer sciences and electronics and plastics technology and cybernetics and bionics simply do not exist. The courses the Bauhaus developed were excellent for their time and place (telesis), but American schools following this pattern in the eighties are perpetuating design infantilism.

The Bauhaus was in a sense a nonadaptive mutation in design, for the genes contributing to its convergence characteristics were badly chosen. In boldface type, it announced its manifesto: “Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all turn to the crafts.… Let us create a new guild of craftsmen!” The heavy emphasis on interaction between crafts, art, and design turned out to be a blind alley. The inherent nihilism of the pictorial arts of the post-World War I period had little to contribute that would be useful to the average, or even to the discriminating, consumer. The paintings of Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger, et al., on the other hand, had no connection whatsoever with the anemic elegance some designers imposed on products.

(Pages 30-31)

---Paul Lockhart

SATX river map - Witte

A "static" image / mural that reflects a continuum and a continuum. Paradoxically beautiful.

Site on pre-Renaissance Muslim contributions to knowledge. https://twitter.com/HeritageMuslim