Non-affiliated

Understanding learner’s emotions within
virtual worlds enables more effective learning solutions to be
developed. Spatial presence as a ‘feeling of being there’ has a
significant impact upon this effectiveness within immersive
learning environments. This paper argues that spatial
presence is a perceptual emotion and that such a view can be
related to theories of affective emotion as a perception. It
argues that existing models of spatial presence as cognitive
feeling can be modified and related to perceptual theories of
emotion such as Prinz’s embodied appraisal theory and
Deonna’s perspectival view of emotion as perception. This
supports the approach that spacial presence is better
understood as an affective emotion. Applying embodied
appraisal theory to the activation of motor areas and aspects of
embodied cognition underlying Schubert’s model highlights
the perceptual nature of this emotion. Applying situated
affordances and action potentials, as expressed in Deonna’s
model of emotion, as perception to frames of reference within a
virtual world supports arguments for spatial presence as a
perceptual emotion similar to Schubert’s use of Wirth et al’s
model of spatial presence. This model may be useful when
considering the learner scaffolding of games such as the Alice
Civil Emergency game.

Origini, funzioni e significati culturali del corno potorio nel corso del medioevo. Analisi e inquadramento della forma in area nord-europea e mediterranea con un focus sulla produzione in vetro di età longobarda in Italia. Revisione dei contesti funerari e catalogo dei ritrovamenti

Catalogazione e studio dei materiali ceramici provenienti dalla necropoli di età bassomedievale di Leopoli-Cencelle.  Determinazione delle sequenze crono-tipologiche, definizione dei rapporti tra produzioni locali e produzioni importate, ricostruzione delle dinamiche economiche tra il sito e gli altri centri alto-laziali (campagne di scavo 2007-2010)

Analisi dei nuovi contesti ceramici di età medievale e moderna provenienti dal sito di S. Omobono a Roma nell'ambito del Sant'Omobono project. (Direzione scientifica coordinata dalla Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali in collaborazione con l'Università del Michigan e l'Università della Calabria - campagne di scavo 2010-2014). Gli obbiettivi della ricerca, condotta come Ph.D student della Sapienza-Università di Roma, hanno riguardato lo studio dei depositi stratigrafici e del campione ceramico finalizzati alla ricostruzione dell'assetto spaziale, del panorama sociale e produttivo dell'area in esame.

This article examines a number of representations of abandoned cities in film, and contemplates these as images and depictions of dead and decaying urban spaces. Using Richard Sennett’s assertions regarding circulation within the city streets as a starting point, the article builds upon the concept of the anthropomorphised, urban organism as one which decays in the absence of human movement (Sennett, 2002: 255-281). The lack of social circulation through the city’s veins necessitates discourse regarding Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, and indeed the role of consumerism in a forsaken landscape (Benjamin, 1973). Themes such as the natural and the unnatural, which seemingly permeate the cinema of empty space with unremitting consistency, are thoroughly explored, and textually scrutinised. The dead organism is left to feed the natural environment which surrounds and encroaches upon it, while remaining, in essence, a synthetic form. The natural state of the city is an unnatural state for nature, and so the converse is equally true. The use of indoor and outdoor space within the decaying metropolis is also considered, and the potential for an inversion between public and private spaces is observed. This article is concerned with the aesthetic communication of these thematic considerations.

This article examines the ways in which villainous characters are portrayed in post-classical American films, and examines how these characters are viewed by the cinematic audience in order to ascertain the degree to which the socially and morally understood roles or heroism and villainy might be inverted through cinematic representation. The potential for the inversion of perceived good and evil in the characters that inhabit the films discussed is considered in relation to the aligning and allying capacity of cinema. Through considering the formal presentation of characters and scenarios, this work suggests that villainous deeds can be perceived as unthreatening, and even 'moral' to an extent. The purpose of this article is to form an understanding of how audiences engage with iniquitous characters, and to consider the potential spectatorial implications of such a bond.

Cities are bustling centres of human activity. They seethe with the intersecting lives of their inhabitants. Richard Sennett, in his book Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, writes about the medical discovery of the human circulatory system and eighteenthcentury developments in city planning (2002: 255-281). He claims that these city designs, such as those of Washington, DC and Paris, were intended to allow for a form of circulatory system within the city, an improved urban health. He remarks:

In Cinema 1 Deleuze creates the taxonomy of the movement-image by extending Henri Bergson's account of the sensory-motor process in Matter and Memory through the semiotic system of Charles Sanders Peirce. Through this nexus of Bergson and Peirce, Deleuze can account for each image and sign, their impetus and their relationship to one another. In contrast, the taxonomy of the time-image, the focus of Cinema 2, is given no such genesis. Rather, the images and signs appear in situ, as if ready-made. This article proposes that the impetus for the taxonomy of the time-image lies in the account given of the three passive syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition, and that the nine aspects of the passive syntheses can be seen to correspond to the nine proper signs of the time-image.

This chapter explores the two theses Deleuze puts forward for the transformation between movement-images and time-image in his Cinema books: the taxonomic and the historical.

Giving in-depth overviews and accounts of each – the claim is made that both are valid if approached from different perspectives, from the perspective of the movement-image and the perspective of the time-image.

Accordingly, not only does such an explanation destroy the hierarchy between these two domains of cinema (which many Deleuzians either explicitly or implicitly seem to endorse) but it also creates an impasse to the way in whcih cinema captures up history as an event.

Focusing upon the conceptual couplet of ‘chronos’ and ‘cronos’ in Cinema 2 (the latter concept more commonly explored by Deleuze as ‘aion’ in his other works, such as Logic of Sense), the essay explores history, the event, time and thought through the Stoics, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Artuad.

This essay explores director Honda Ishiro’s 1954 monster flick Godzilla as a cultural artefact at the epicentre of Japanese cinema in the wake of the atom bomb. In respect to Deleuze’s taxonomy of film in the Cinema books, Godzilla becomes an example of what Deleuze calls an action-image imprint, the monster an object capturing up the emotions of Japanese post-war society.

Godzilla is constructed through what Deleuze calls the five laws of the action-image, laws which not only constitute the narration but also situate the story within a socio-historic environment aligned with Friedrich Nietzsche’s analysis of universal history.

Such an exploration of the film not only gathers up previous readings, but extends and turns them in new directions. Godzilla, it is often claimed, simply substitutes the rampaging monster for destructive atom bomb. ‘An imprint of Godzilla’ comes to a very different conclusion.

Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark / Russkiy kovcheg (Russia / Germany, 2002) is far from being a traditional time-travel film. Tellingly, few critical engagements have yet to discuss it in such a context, preferring instead to explore its technical virtuosity (famously, one long take) as capturing a present haunted by various pasts.

Yet it seems to me that considering Russian Ark through the time-travel genre allows a productive reading where we can reflect upon a fundamental aspect of the conventions of such narrations. ‘Time is out of joint’ not due to the intervention in time of the travellers, an intervention that will need to be set right by further intercession, but due to the very nature of time itself.

Time is already riven with paradoxes, disjunctions and problems – and such problems, disjunctions and paradoxes can only be propagated and never returned to an illusory ‘as-it-is.’

Such questions will be discussed through Gilles Deleuze’s cineotic (cinematic semiotic) of the time-image, specifically the organisations of narration articulated through the concepts of ‘sheets of the past,’ ‘peaks of the present’ and ‘powers of the false.’ Sheets of the past refer to a decoupling of before and after; whereas peaks of the present describe how incompatible presents subsist within any moment. In this way, sheets and peaks pronounce an undoing of linear temporality. Finally, powers of the false are the creation of the past in the present for a future, thus problematising historical truth.