Journal articles on the topic 'Gran Poder Festival'

Objetivo: El artículo analiza el impacto del marketing experiencial, a través del patrocinio de festivales de música, como vía idónea para el fomento relaciones positivas para organizadores, marcas y asistentes. Diseño/metodología/enfoque: El presente estudio realiza, a través de una revisión bibliográfica, entrevistas en profundidad y estudio de casos, un recorrido sobre el valor de los festivales como impulsor de experiencias positivas entre las partes. Los casos objetos de estudio se aplica sobre dos festivales de música que asumen formatos diversos. Uno que se presta a los criterios estándares de los festivales de música (el Arena Sound) y, otro formato que se aleja de los formatos más comerciales y convencionales (el WOS Festival x Son Estrella). Resultados: El vínculo positivo en un evento elegido por la audiencia donde la participación activa del usuario es evidente, desde la espera para poder adquirir el producto hasta su disfrute, es un filón para la marca en un sentido publicitario. La atribución de esa presencia física o virtual, así como la relación como promotor de la existencia de ese festival quedarán asociadas en la mente de ese consumidor. La simbiosis marca-música-experiencia es altamente productiva para anunciantes, organizadores y espectadores. Al organizador le aporta notoriedad y publicity, a la marca afinidad e impacto en soportes y al público una experimentación de ocio que compartirá con gran probabilidad en sus redes generando contenido prescriptor entre sus pares. De partida todo indica que es una asociación win-win para todos los actores de la acción. Limitaciones/implicaciones: las limitaciones del artículo se circunscriben a la muestra abordada que, si bien no es generalizable al conjunto de festivales de música, permiten aproximarse a una realidad concreta desde una perspectiva cualitativa Originalidad/contribución: Este texto contribuye a un campo de estudio poco abordado en la literatura académica, los festivales de música como generador de marketing experiencial. Se aporta una clasificación propia sobre los efectos del patrocinio en este tipo de eventos sobre las marcas, asistentes y festivales. Clasificación JEL: M31

A festa do "Senhor Jesus do Gran Poder" é o maior evento folclórico da cidade de La Paz (Bolívia). A pesquisa desenvolvida, se ancora teoricamente no campo das práticas sociais e culturais, mais especificamente na teoria da folkcomunicação. Portanto, o objetivo deste trabalho é realizar uma análise folkcomunicacional e folkmidiática desta festa, contemporaneamente considerada como festival, investigando de que maneiras atua para a promoção da comunicação dos marginalizados e do folclore como prática sócio-cultural democratizante. A abordagem adotada é qualitativa, a metodologia parte do levantamento bibliográfico e posterior análise teórica e documental, de uma série de pesquisas ligadas ao campo folkcomunicacional, as principais ferramentas utilizadas são a observação e registro fotográfico das práticas, rituais festivos e, de maneira especial das danças apresentadas em seu decorrer. No entanto, também se lançou mão de entrevistas semi-estruturadas com alguns personagens atuantes na festa. O desafio reflexivo, deste texto, aponta para a inclusão da teoria da folkcomunicação, no campo acadêmico boliviano, pois que, pelo menos, até este momento e pelos levantamentos realizados, esta discussão têm sido ausente. Assim também se assemelha como resultado, a adição de outras categorias teóricas tais como: práticas sociais e culturais e resistência cultural, neste contexto. A pesquisa se justifica, na medida em que, abre um horizonte de visibilidade, a respeito da importância da análise deste evento folclórico, como também das questões relacionadas a comunicação dos marginalizados na Bolívia. Festa; Folclore; Folkcomunicação; Práticas socioculturais.

La fiesta es un acto social que tiene como eje central un acontecimiento importante. El momento de la fiesta representa algo extraordinario y está fuera de lo que día a día se hace en una comunidad o en una nación. Es un evento cargado de alegría, en el que usualmente hay música, bailes y comida que lo caracterizan. En Cartagena hay dos actividades festivas de gran significado para los ciudadanos: el 11 de noviembre, día en que se celebra la independencia, y la fiesta de la Virgen de la Candelaria, celebración con una larga tradición que hunde sus raíces en la colonia.

Este artículo propone explorar la compleja interrelación entre Felipe III y el duque de Lerma, su valido, a través de un prisma poco utilizado por la historiografía: la danza cortesana. En la muy ambiciosa política festiva del valido, la danza ocupa un papel especial que responde al gusto específico del monarca por este arte y que no tendrá equivalentes en la posteridad bajo los Austrias. En este contexto, la danza cortesana es uno de los soportes de la representación alegórica de la monarquía que opera en las fiestas reales. Partiendo de estas premisas, el artículo se pregunta cómo la danza afecta a este sistema de representación cuando está en manos del valido, es decir, no solo un partícipe cualquiera de las danzas, sino aquel que baila al lado del rey y, sobre todo, aquel que termina teniendo suficiente poder como para costear saraos o máscaras capaces de emular la magnificencia real.

Abstract The city reflects a politics of possession, upon which pieces of land ultimately get encircled by walls for exploitation. Walls—the entities that frame up the city—are territory ma(r)kers, yet this architectural gesture, far from being innocent, symbolizes a lurking desire at owning territories in the ma(r)king. This paper brings this idea home by examining the other meanings of the wall in contemporary Morocco, by closely studying the poetics and politics of the wall in the context of the Jidar street art festival of Rabat, situated, as it were, in the intersection of concepts (such as festival, paint, street art, wall, patronage, cooptation, resistance, local and global). We argue that the JSAF presents, among other things, a venue for local artists to perform and translate their thoughts and artistic visions into murals of a grand scale. Yet under the gaze of power, their performances accentuate the existentialist yet ambivalent position of city walls not only as embodiments of visual escape, but also as terrains of artistic/economic opportunities, incompatible social emotions, and contentious politics.

Life in the eighteenth century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was signified by active interference of the Russian Empire in the politics of the state. Imperial army was continuously summoned to reinforce Russian interests and to support internal feuds of the Commonwealth. Lithuanian and Polish society was forced to reconcile with the presence of foreign army in the country, whereas Russian officers sought to utilize their presence in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in enhancing useful personal relationships and for the purposes of propaganda. The article explores the relationship between the society of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Russian officers in daily life, how both sides built this coexistence, and how it was changing depending on circumstances. Analysis of sources on everyday life of Vilnius showed that daily life of its citizens was burdened by the obligation of housing and feeding the army, although in ordinarily they tried not to confront this menacing power. People wanted to earn favour of the Russian army leadership and be relieved of this duty through gifts, salutations and other signs of respect. On the other side, Russian officers depended not only on their power, they also tried to form good relationships with the high society and communities, e. g. officers visited monasteries and pass greetings during church celebrations. A pretext to assemble the nobility was a celebration dedicated to honour the rulers of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russia. Russian officers also demonstrated signs of respect to the loyal high standing officials of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. They also tried to earn favour of the wider public through events of mass entertainment, e. g. the carnivals were made open to the citizens from various strata. The public could be rallied to watch show exercises of the Russian army, which was a spectacle for the curious citizens from lower social strata, and for the higher level citizens it was an opportunity to strengthen ties that could ensure their future privileges. Multiple festivities organized by the Russian officers were implemented with propaganda objectives in mind. Through such spectacular and luxury events they tried to demonstrate power and their decorations usually repeated motifs of the glorification of the Court of Catherine II. Celebrations, their decorations, occasional literature were some of the tools aimed at supporting the patronage of Russia. Existing sources on everyday life do not permit speaking about the moral side of the relationship with the Russian officers. Most likely, the start of the Four-Year Sejm, when the aim to strengthen the statehood was expressed in clearer terms, collaboration with the foreign power was not considered treason and condemned. Keywords: Vilnius, Russian army, everyday life, festivities, spectacles.

Se presentan 4 máscaras precolombinas, tres de las cuales son ecuatorianas y una colombiana. Las primeras son de cerámica y se adscriben a la cultura Jama-Coaque y la tercera de concha Spondylus prínceps no tiene adscripción a ninguna en particular del Ecuador prehispánico, por no existir un estudio sistemático en Ecuador sobre la relación de esas máscaras con sus culturas costeras, la colombiana es de cobre. La primera de cerámica ecuatoriana por su tamaño, peso y elementos agregados – un material blanco que simula los dientes, tres piedras verdes que parecen los ojos y una incrustación sublabial, un bezote – hacen pensar en una máscara mortuoria de un personaje de poder y alto estatus social; la segunda de cerámica por presentar dieciséis nódulos faciales remite al observador a la llamada verruga peruana o bartonelosis, la tercera ecuatoriana fue elaborada posiblemente como un elemento votivo o de ofrenda para exhibir poder o invocar fuerza o protección dado el carácter de gran valor simbólico de esa concha roja. La máscara de cobre del Cauca medio o Quimbaya, en razón a su material, peso y color, con bastante probabilidad fue usada como adorno colocado sobre el pecho del personaje poderoso o de elevado estatus. Se compara la máscara con bartonelosis con otras dos que el autor ya había documentado, la de concha con otra del mismo tipo de material, la máscara de cobre con una pequeña de piedra jadeíta se referencia con una calavera enmascarada que el autor tuvo la oportunidad de estudiar hace varios años. Se concluye sugiriendo los usos tradicionalmente asignados a las máscaras: festivos, mortuorios y como adornos corporales para resaltar el poder de quien las exhibe. Las máscaras con la erupción tipo nódulos debieron jugar un papel similar a las estatuillas en cerámica y piedra que representan patologías con tanto realismo en el arte prehispánico, pudiendo ser una forma de enseñar, dentro de un pensamiento médico empírico analógico, como lo son los moldes en cera, las fotografías, los dibujos y pinturas en la medicina moderna basada en un pensamiento empírico analítico.

Abstract Across the Arab world, increasing digitization, spiking young demographics, expanding media education programs and rising cultural liberalism seem to be inducing greater visualization in the virtual sphere. This perception of the image as a key facet of online communications has been especially noted in the Arabian Gulf, where grand cultural and media projects embracing media cities, virtual museums, knowledge parks, online video platforms and film festivals are seen as critically supporting the region by telling its story to the world. But in order for the Arab world to sustain this visual momentum in the virtual public sphere, it must address certain challenges arising from its postcolonial visual media policies, historically-entrenched oral communication legacies, state authoritarianism and narrow Islamic views of the image as taboo. In a global communications environment, Arabs have much to gain by harnessing the power of the image in virtual space to enhance their international engagement. The Gulf region has already made some breakthroughs in this regard by fostering more open cultural policies, supporting online visual content creation, embracing creative young talent, maintaining world-class telecommunications infrastructures and solidifying visual media education programs. But more has yet to be done to realize the full visual potential of the virtual sphere.

In June 1945, the 220th anniversary of the USSR Academy of Sciences was celebrated on a grand scale. An academic anniversary is a polysyllabic commemorative action that can be described in diverse contexts. The authors focused directly on the holiday scenario in the corporate-ritual dimension, as well as its communicative potentialities. The source of the research was published and unpublished clerical materials of the USSR Academy of Sciences, periodicals and popular science publications, ego-sources of participants in the science festival. The methodological optics of the article consisted of developments in the field of intellectual history, the social history of science, and the history of memory. In the festive scenario, the authors identified the following components: 1) actually scientific, 2) ritual and welcoming, 3) concert and entertainment, and 4) banquet. During the study, it was concluded that the scenario for celebrating the 220th anniversary of the USSR Academy of Sciences is multilayered and at the same time integral and indivisible. It organically combined heterogeneous social entities - power sharpened by rigid forms of social engineering and repressive regulation, scientists trying to remove themselves from excommunication from pre-revolutionary and world science, foreign guests who became their own for a short historical moment. The scenario of the anniversary correlates with the contextual background of the anniversary celebrations, which was distinguished by a special atmosphere of expectation of a new life after the Great Patriotic War. In the communicative plan, jubilee celebrations are considered as practices of intensive communication. The conclusion is made that the idea of a unified world science will be revived for a short moment.

As John Adamson outlined in his voluminous comparative analysis of European court culture, „in the period between 1500 and 1750 a „Versailles model” of a court as a self-sufficient, situated in a free space, architectonically harmonious city-residency remote from the capital city, where the king’s household and administration was located, was an exception.” The Versailles conception and „model” both architectonically and in terms of practical functioning of the court was spread and secured in the 18th century, developing into a model of absolutism which was imitated to different extents. The spectrum of the adoption of the court of Louis XIV by material and intellectual culture reached from the grand ensembles of palaces of Carskoye Selo in Peterhof, Russia, Drottningholm in Sweden and Sanssouci in Germany to several small residences of the German princes’ realms in Weimar, Hanover, and elsewhere in Europe. Analyzing the works of several researchers about the transformation of the French aristocracy into court society, a common conclusion is the assurance of the symbolic autocratic power by Louis XIV to the detriment of the economic and political independence of the aristocracy. In this context, A. de Tocqueville points at the forfeiture of the power of the French aristocracy and its influence and a simultaneous self-isolation of the group, which he defines as a „caste with ideas, habits and barriers that they created in the nation.” Modern research, when revisiting the methods of the resarch on the aristocracy and when expanding the choice of sources, is still occupied with the problem defined in the beginning of the 19th century by A. de Tocqueville: The aristocracy lost its power and influence, and by the end of the 18th century also its economic basis for its dominance in French society. John Levron defines courtiers as functional mediators between the governor and society, calling them a „screen”.1 In turn, Ellery Schalk stated that in the time of Louis XIV the aristocracy was going through an elite identity crisis, when alongside the old aristocracy involved in military professions (noblesse d’épée), the governor allowed a new, so-called administrative aristocracy (noblesse de robe) to hold major positions and titles of honour. Along with the transformation of the traditional aristocratic hierarchy formed in the early Middle Ages, which John Lough described as an anachronism already back in the 17th century, also the status of governor and its symbolic place in the aristocratic hierarchy changed. It shall be noted that it is the question of a governor’s role in the political culture of absolutism by which the ideas of many researches can be distinguished. Norbert Elias thinks that an absolute monarch was a head of a family, which included the whole state and thereby turned into a governor’s „household”. Timothy Blanning, on the other hand, thinks that the court culture of Louis XIV was the expression of the governor’s insecurity and fears. This is a view which the researcher seems to derive from the traumatic experience of the Fronde (the aristocrats’ uprising against the mother of Louis XIV, regent Anna of Austria), which the culturologist K. Hofmane interpreted from a psychoanalytical point of view and defined Louis XIV as a conqueror of chaos and a despotic governor. In the wide spectrum of opinions, it is not the governor’s political principles which are postulated as a unifying element, but scenarios of the representation of power, their aims and various tools that are combined in the concept of court culture. N. Elias names symbolic activities in the court etiquette as the manifestation of power relations, whereas M. Yampolsky identifies a symbolic withdrawal of a governor’s body from the „circulation in society”, when a governor starts to represent himself, thereby alienating himself from society. George Gooch in this way reprimanded Louis XV as he thought this development would deprive the royal representation from the sacred. In turn, Jonathan Dewald in his famous work „European Aristocracy” noted that Louis XIV was not the first to use the phenomenon of the court for securing the personal authority of a governor, and refers to the courts during the late period of the Italian Renaissance as predecessors of French court culture. What role did the monarch’s closest „viewers” – the courtiers – play in this? K. Hofmane by means of comparison with the ancient Greek mythical monster Gorgon comes to conclusion that the court had to provide prey for the Gorgon (the king), who is both scared and fascinated by the terrific sight (of power and glory). The perception of the court as a collective observer implies the presence of the observed and worshiped object, the king. The public life of Louis XIV, which was subjected to the complicated etiquette, provided for the hierarchical access to the king’s public body. Let’s remember the „Memoirs” of Duc de Saint-Simon that gives a detailed description of the symbolic privileges granted to the courtiers, which along the material gifts (pensions, concessions and land plots) were tools for the formation of the identity and the status of a new aristocrat/courtier – along with the right to touch the king’s belongings, his attire, etc. The basis for securing the structure of the court’s hierarchy was provided by the governor’s body along the lines mentioned above, which according to the understanding of representation by M. Yampolsky was withdrawn from society and placed within the borders of the ensemble of the Versailles palace. There, by means of several tools, including dramatic works of art, the governor’s body was separated from its symbolic content and hidden behind the algorithms of ritualized activities. Blanning also speaks about a practice of hiding from the surrounding environment, thereby defining court culture as a hiding-place that a governor created around himself. It was possible to look at a governor and thereby be observed by him not only on particular festivals, when a governor was available mostly for court society, but also in different works of visual art, for example, on triumphal archs, in engravings, or during horse-racings.

Grundtvig and Golden Age CopenhagenBy Flemming Lundgreen-NielsenThe article has originally been given as a public lecture at the University of Copenhagen during the Golden Days in Copenhagen festival in September 1994. By way of introduction the question is posed to which extent Grundtvig belongs to the Golden Age period in Danish cultural and artistic life. Though he lived in the capital for 65 years, he never orientated himself towards the places that interested most other educated Copenhageners. The University rejected his applications for a professorate, and he in return vehemently attacked the dead learning of the institution. He hardly ever went to the Cathedral or other of the city churches, since he was at odds with most of the clergy. The art of acting he considered to be organized hypocrisy and accordingly avoided the Royal Theatre. He had good relations to the Kings (and Queens!), but did not involve himself in the affairs of the Royal Court. Unlike most contemporary writers and artists, he never took the Grand Tour of the Continent, in fact apart from four journeys to England (1829-31 and 1843) and one to Norway (1851), he stayed at home in his study, travelling in time through his comprehensive readings rather than in actual space. As he grew older, he got quite popular among his younger followers and ended up becoming one of the tourist attractions of the city, as witnessed 1872 by the young English poet Edmund Gosse briefly before Grundtvig’s demise.Grundtvig cared little for the kind of elite culture that dominated Copenhagen for most of his life. Though singing of national ballads was inaugurated during his 1838 lectures and since then has been a part of Danish tradition for public meetings, he had no ear for music at all and never communicated with the fine composers who set music to his texts. Sculpture and painting he rejected as base materialistic arts, only acknowledging the Danish sculptor of European fame, Bertel Thorvaldsen, because of his unassuming and genial personality, not on account of his reliefs and statues. Even his fellow poets he in general criticized harshly, excepting a few works by B.S. Ingemann. On the whole he did not think that, the first third of the 19th century constituted any Golden Age: it was a period filled with drowsiness and shallow entertainment, devoid of anything but sensualistic or even materialistic pleasures.Inspired by writers from Classical Greece and Rome, older humanists such as professor K.L. Rahbek nourished a hopeless longing for a lost Golden Age. Modem romanticists, however, such as the philosopher Henrich Steffens, the poet Adam Oehlenschl.ger and the above mentioned Thorvaldsen strove to regain or recreate a true Golden Age in the near future. Spurred on by Norse mythology as well as by his Christian belief, Grundtvig from around 1824 increasingly came to share this attitude. He distinguished between Guld-Alder (Golden Age) as a thing of the past, and Gylden-Aar (literally: Golden Year) as a state of earthly and heavenly happiness soon to be achieved or even existing in the present moment-the word refers to the Biblical Year of Jubilee as rendered in a medieval Danish translation of the Old Testament. Unfortunately no all-encompassing examination of Grundtvig’s use of these terms has been executed, but from his secular poetry a series of instances are given in the following, starting with a somewhat overlooked poem called »Gylden-Aaret« from January 1834, celebrating three moments in the life of King Frederik VI: his recovery from a serious illness in Schleswig and his triumphant return to Copenhagen in August 1833, hisbirthday in January 1834 and his 50 years’ jubilee as a ruler in the following April. The modem Gylden-Aar is defined as happiness for all of the people through enlightenment about life, procured by the king and all the fine poets surrounding him. Thus Grundtvig gives a unique priority to the art of poetry. No matter what occurred to Denmark in the rest of Grundtvig’s life-time, he managed to interpret the events as pains of child-birth heralding the approaching Gylden-Aar rather than as death throes. Instead of confining himself to the refined small-scale topics of most contemporary poets, he time and again energetically prophecied about the expected Gylden-Aar as a solid historical fact. In a period where elitist art according to the doctrines of romantic poetics was literally idolized, he maintained that the highest form of art consists in organizing society and the lives of common people so that all innate talents and latent possibilities are being developed in the due course of time. He believes this to be happening under the benevolent reign of the present Danish kings, among others things because the Danes have been reared to pay attention to each other and are generally uninterested in pursuing power and glory, honour and greatness. Grundtvig deduces this attitude partly from the role played by the peasants in the formation of the modem Danish national character, partly from the influence of the exeptionally loving, loveable and lovely Danish womanhood. Even the geographical position of Copenhagen between the Sound (the scene of the heroic battle against Lord Nelson in 1801) and the impressive beeches of Charlottenlund Forest (a beautiful and peaceful idyll of nature) becomes symbolic of Denmark’s state of mind, demonstrating a harmony between nature and history, reality and dream, simplicity and majesty, people and royalty. Though Grundtvig remained much of an outsider in Golden Age Copenhagen, his interest in the common citizen, in family and home and everyday life, relates him to the then current concept of ’cozy’ (hyggelig) Biedermeier art after all. Because of his view of universal history, he was able to give depth and significance even to the smallest and most trivial elements in his environment. Grundtvig simply could not help converting the exclusive Golden Age of the poets and artists into a fruitful Gylden-Aar for the whole nation.

Como era el caso en todo el país, la promoción de una identificación con el nuevo orden social luego de la Revolución exigía mucho más que algunas cuantas declaraciones oficiales. En Veracruz, los dirigentes cívicos tuvieron que enfrentar un desafío especialmente difícil, ya que la ciudad acababa de sufrir una invasión extranjera, una guerra civil y una amarga serie de huelgas laborales. Así, los promotores de la fiesta trabajaron a puerta cerrada para llevar a cabo una producción social con la aspiración de que esta podría reintegrar a la comunidad veracruzana, mientras que miles de personas anticiparon la coronación de la Reina del carnaval, así como una gran cantidad de desfiles y bailes previstos para aquel fin de semana escandaloso. En el proceso combinaron elementos tradicionales de la fiesta con ciertos aspectos fundamentales de la nueva ideología nacional, para crear una síntesis ritual que minimizara el conflicto social a la vez que contribuyera a la legitimaci6n del poder posrevolucionario. Además, el carnaval abrió nuevas oportunidades para el comercio local y para el desarrollo del turismo en el puerto de Veracruz.Carnival in Veracruz: Festivities, Identity, and the Beginings of TourismAs was true across the nation, encouraging identification with the new social order after the Revolution required much more than official pronouncements. In Veracruz, civic leaders faced an especially difficult challenge in that the city had recently suffered foreign invasion, civil war and a wave of bitter labor strikes. Thus as thousands anticipated the crowning of Carnival Queen as well as the many parades and dances scheduled for the raucous weekend, festival promoters worked behind the scenes to realize a social production they hoped would help reintegrate the Veracruz community. In the process, they blended traditional elements of the festival with fundamental aspects of new national ideology to create a ritual synthesis that downplayed social conflict and contributed to the legitimation of postrevolutionary power. Furthermore, Carnival opened new opportunities for local business and the development of tourism in the Port of Veracruz.

Los grandes espectáculos cortesanos, así como la etiqueta, el ceremonial palaciego y los distintos rituales monárquicos pueden ser considerados expresiones de la particular cultura política que se desarrolló en Europa a lo largo de la Alta Edad Moderna. El presente trabajo intenta explicar, en primer lugar, cuál era el papel asignado a fiestas y a espectáculos en la declaración de la relación existente entre un rey y su reino: en segundo lugar, cuál fue el proceso del que terminó por surgir un efímero verdaderamente moderno, cuando la generalización de nuevos medios mecánicos, como el grabado. permitieron la difusión a gran escala de la imagen real: y, por último, la efectiva rentabilidad propagandística que cabía obtener de las imágenes puestas al servicio del poder monárquico.The great court spectacles, like etiquette, palace ceremony, and different royal rituals, can be considered expressions of a particular political culture which developed in Europe during tfie early modern period. This chapter seeks to explain, first, whiat was the role given to festivals and spectacles as statement about the relationstiip between a king and his realm: secondly, what was the procese which finally generated a truly modern efimero, when the spread of new mechanical tecnology, such as print, permitted the diffusion on a grand scale of the royal image: and, lastly, the efective propagandistic value which these images pleased at the servIce of royal power.

Every January, thousands of people from far and near dance, play music, and pray for three days in the streets of Kalibo, a town in the province of Aklan in the central Philippines. They are celebrating the Ati-atihan, an annual festival in honor of the Santo Ni–o, the Holy Child Jesus, and in remembrance of the indigenous Atis—commonly known as the Negritos—who are the putative ancestors of the Filipinos. The day before the third Sunday when the Ati-atihan reaches its climax with a grand procession, the local government of Kalibo holds a street dancing competition that tourists and residents await with much anticipation. In January 2009 I collaborated with photographer Nana Buxani, videographer Fruto Corre, and editor Florencito Fernandez to document the Ati-atihan and produce the present multimedia project. As a way of calling additional attention to the idea of social constructivism deeply embedded in the Ati-atihan performance—an artificial construction reiterated by the editing and selection of photos and ambient sounds, I asked my brother Peter Alcedo, Jr., who has played music for the Ati-atihan, to compose an original score for the project. In Ati-atihan: Mother of Philippine Festivals, I focus on five participants to illustrate the Ati-atihan’s ever-changing synthesis of sacred and secular, traditional and modern, local and global, serious and playful. This is part of a collaborative project. As a combination of photos, sounds, narration, and music, this multimedia project offers one model for articulating Ati-atihan’s cultural and historical complexity brought about by colonialism and the porosity of Philippine borders. Like any embodied performance, one could immediately conclude that to experience Ati-atihan one has to go to Kalibo during the festival season. But this multimedia project does not push solely for that kind of travel and experience. Rather, its images and the way they have been arranged to move across the screen challenge the limits of the viewer’s location. To experience a festival such as the Ati-atihan, it has become necessary in the contemporary world to also encounter a cultural phenomenon outside of its physical locale and in the virtual realm, an encounter that adds to and re-affirms the hybrid discourse implicit in the performances of this particular festival. Displaying race, gender, class in the Ati-atihan In the Philippines, the Ati-atihan is known as a powerful instance of the dynamic blending of Filipino traditions from pre-colonial, colonial, and modern times. Much of the writing on the Ati-atihan emphasizes the festival’s ability to take on influences from inside and outside the culture of Aklan. Yet little attention has been paid to Ati-atihan as a public event that complicates the interaction between performance and politics. During the Ati-atihan, a Tagalog word which means “to look like the Atis,” most participants apply soot on their bodies to imitate the dark skin of the Atis and to acknowledge the Ati heritage in Aklan. This is a symbolic move. The act of sooting connects Filipinos to a “pure” and “authentic” pre-colonial identity, playing with the representation of the Atis as the racial Other. When I conducted fieldwork in 2000 and recently in 2009, Ati-atihan participants had said that when they cover their bodies with soot they temporarily become one with the Atis, who are not members of their everyday lives. Through the darkening of their bodies, participants move away from the whiteness of their colonial history with Spain and the United States. The Atis are central in this festival, but the local government of Kalibo and town residents have not invited the indigenous population to participate officially in the festival. Any participation by the Atis has invariably been happenstance and at the spur of the moment. However, at the January 2009 festival celebration, a group of Atis in a nearby town decided to join the street dancing competition for the first time. The participation of the Atis in 2009 questioned the fixing of their minority identity in its construction as primitive and unchanging. The performance of these participants is one instance on which I focus to underline the active role performance plays in the project of self-representation. While static and uncontested images of the Atis sit at the core of the Ati-atihan festival, the Santo Niño, the Holy Child Jesus, and the people’s devotion to Him occupy that same position as well. For Lowland Filipinos, the Santo Niño stands, on the one hand, as a colonial tool the Spanish government introduced in the early part of the sixteenth century to convert the population to Roman Catholicism. On the other hand, the Santo Niño’s local transformations symbolize for Filipinos the folklorization and localization of a foreign religion, a process consistent with their other forms of postcolonial expressions. The predominant belief of Aklanons that the Santo Niño is gender ambiguous and playful in character gives permission to participants and devotees alike to subvert the order of everyday life during the Ati-atihan. In addition, the ongoing impact of globalization and lasting legacies of colonialism explain the dancing of the participants and the repertoire played by the brass bands, including the popular Lou Begas’ “Mambo Number 5” and the American song from the Great Depression “Happy Days Are Here Again,” which was brought to the Philippines during the American Colonial Period in the early twentieth century. At the 2000 Ati-atihan festival, one participant who was a former ballet teacher, a devout Roman Catholic, and a self-identified member of the “third sex,” cross dressed in order to perform as a Folies Bergère chorus girl. More recently, at the 2009 celebration, a successful businessman dancing as Michael Jackson applied white powder to his face to imitate the light-skinned Michael Jackson of the 1990s. The expense incurred in his process of mimicry reflected achievement of a new economic status, and his whiteface the uneven migration of global media. Another participant, a Filipina returnee from the United States, tapped into her transnational network through a request she made to her diplomat cousin to buy traditional Hmong attire in Bangkok for her to wear at the festival’s grand procession. All three claim that their enacting of such carnivalesque inversions fulfills a promise made to the Santo Niño. But their festival participation further highlights the ways in which performance was used as a critical social practice. In these dancers’ particular scenarios, performance was turned into a platform where they negotiated issues of gender politics and class difference, and navigated the flows of globalization, transnationalism, and modernity that have seeped into their lives. Aligning with the acts of resistance and negotiation deployed by the participants that people it, this multimedia project reminds us that public participation remains key in contesting colonialism and responding to its attendant social and cultural domination.

SINGAPORE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2001 The 14th SIFF, with over 350 films, was centred this year at Golden Village's plush six-screen multiplex GV Grand and the Alliance Française. The Goethe Institut was host once again to the Festival Fringe which started a few days earlier (7 to 22 April 2001), screening the documentaries which were this year's focus. Although more films were sold out this year than the last (47 full houses), there were in fact only 45,000 admissions compared to 60,000 in 2000. One probable reason for the number of full houses is that the GV Grand's audience capacity was considerably smaller than those of the festival venues in 2000. However, the decline in ticket sales could partly be attributed to the plunge in the high tech stocks and shares market which seemed to have affected the spending power of the young urban professionals who make up the...

Introduction Utopia has always been countercultural, and ever since technological progress has allowed, utopia has been using alternative media to promote and strengthen its underpinning ideals. In this article, I am seeking to clarify the connections between counterculture and alternative media in utopian contexts to demonstrate their reciprocity, then draw together these threads through reference to a well-known figure of the Rainbow Region–Rusty Miller. His trajectory from iconic surfer and Aquarian reporter to mediator for utopian politics and ideals in the Rainbow Region encompasses in a single identity the three elements underpinning this study. In concluding, I will turn to Rusty’s Byron Guide, questioning its classification as alternative or mainstream media, and whether Byron Bay is represented as countercultural and utopian in this long-running and ongoing publication. Counterculture and Alternative Media in Utopian Contexts Counterculture is an umbrella that enfolds utopia, among many other genres and practices. It has been most often situated in the 1960s and 1970s as a new form of social movement embodying youth resistance to the technocratic mainstream and its norms of gender, sexuality, politics, music, and language (Roszak). Many scholars of counterculture underscore its utopian impulses both in the projection of better societies where the social goals are achieved, and in the withdrawal from mainstream society into intentional communities (Yinger 194-6; McKay 5; Berger). Before exploring further the connections between counterculture and alternative media, I want to define the scope of countercultural utopian contexts in general, and the Rainbow Region in particular. Utopia is a neologism created by Sir Thomas More almost 500 years ago to designate the island community that demonstrates order, harmony, justice, hope and desire in the right balance so that it seems like an ideal land. This imaginary place described in Utopia (1516) as a counterpoint to the social, political and religious shortcomings of contemporary 16th century British society, has attracted accusations of heresy (Molner), and been used as a pejorative term, an insult to denigrate political projects that seem farfetched or subversive, especially during the 19th century. Almost every study of utopian theory, literature and practice points to a dissatisfaction with the status quo, which inspires writers, politicians, architects, artists, individuals and communities to rail against it (see for example Davis, Moylan, Suvin, Levitas, Jameson). Kingsley Widmer’s book Counterings: Utopian Dialectics in Contemporary Contexts reiterates what many scholars have stated when he writes that utopias should be understood in terms of what they are countering. Lyman Tower Sargent defines utopia as “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space” and utopianism as “social dreaming” (9), to which I would add that both indicate an improvement on the alternatives, and may indeed be striving to represent the best place imaginable. Utopian contexts, by extension, are those situations where the “social dreaming” is enhanced through human agency, good governance, just laws, education, and work, rather than being a divinely ordained state of nature (Schaer et al). In this way, utopian contexts are explicitly countercultural through their very conception, as human agency is required and their emphasis is on social change. These modes of resistance against dominant paradigms are most evident in attempts to realise textual projections of a better society in countercultural communal experiments. Almost immediately after its publication, More’s Utopia became the model for Bishop Vasco de Quiroga’s communitarian hospital-town Santa Fe de la Laguna in Michoacan, Mexico, established in the 1530s as a counterculture to the oppressive enslavement and massacres of the Purhépecha people by Nuno Guzmán (Green). The countercultural thrust of the 1960s and 1970s provided many utopian contexts, perhaps most readily identifiable as the intentional communities that spawned and flourished, especially in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand (Metcalf, Shared Lives). They were often inspired by texts such as Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America (1970) and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975), and this convergence of textual practices and alternative lifestyles can be seen in the development of Australia’s own Rainbow Region. Located in northern New South Wales, the geographical area of the Northern Rivers that has come to be known as the Rainbow Region encompasses Byron Bay, Nimbin, Mullumbimby, Bangalow, Clunes, Dunoon, Federal, with Lismore as the region’s largest town. But more evocative than these place names are the “rivers and creeks, vivid green hills, fruit and nut farms […] bounded by subtropical beaches and rainforest mountains” (Wilson 1). Utopian by nature, and recognised as such by the indigenous Bundjalung people who inhabited it before the white settlers, whalers and dairy farmers moved in, the Rainbow Region became utopian through culture–or indeed counterculture–during the 1973 Aquarius Festival in Nimbin when the hippies of Mullumbimby and the surfers of Byron Bay were joined by up to 10,000 people seeking alternative ways of being in the world. When the party was over, many Aquarians stayed on to form intentional communities in the beautiful region, like Tuntable Falls, Nimbin’s first and largest such cooperative (Metcalf, From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality 74-83). In utopian contexts, from the Renaissance to the 1970s and beyond, counterculture has underpinned and alternative media has circulated the aims and ideals of the communities of resistance. The early utopian context of the Anabaptist movement has been dubbed as countercultural by Sigrun Haude: “During the reign of the Münster (1534-5) Anabaptists erected not only a religious but also a social and political counterculture to the existing order” (240). And it was this Protestant Reformation that John Downing calls the first real media war, with conflicting movements using pamphlets produced on the new technology of the Gutenberg press to disseminate their ideas (144). What is striking here is the confluence of ideas and practices at this time–countercultural ideals are articulated, published, and disseminated, printing presses make this possible, and utopian activists realise how mass media can be used and abused, exploited and censored. Twentieth century countercultural movements drew on the lessons learnt from historical uprising and revolutions, understanding the importance of getting the word out through their own forms of media which, given the subversive nature of the messages, were essentially alternative, according to the criteria proposed by Chris Atton: alternative media may be understood as a radical challenge to the professionalized and institutionalized practices of the mainstream media. Alternative media privileges a journalism that is closely wedded to notions of social responsibility, replacing an ideology of “objectivity” with overt advocacy and oppositional practices. Its practices emphasize first person, eyewitness accounts by participants; a reworking of the populist approaches of tabloid newspapers to recover a “radical popular” style of reporting; collective and antihierarchical forms of organization which eschew demarcation and specialization–and which importantly suggest an inclusive, radical form of civic journalism. (267) Nick Couldry goes further to point out the utopian processes required to identify agencies of change, including alternative media, which he defines as “practices of symbolic production which contest (in some way) media power itself–that is, the concentration of symbolic power in media institutions” (25). Alternative media’s orientation towards oppositional and contestatory practices demonstrates clear parallels between its ambitions and those of counterculture in utopian contexts. From the 1960s onwards, the upsurge in alternative newspaper numbers is commensurate with the blossoming of the counterculture and increased utopian contexts; Susan Forde describes it thus: “a huge resurgence in the popularity of publications throughout the ‘counter-culture’ days of the 1960s and 1970s” (“Monitoring the Establishment”, 114). The nexus of counterculture and alternative media in such utopian contexts is documented in texts like Roger Streitmatter’s Voices of Revolution and Bob Osterlag’s People’s Movements, People’s Press. Like the utopian newspapers that came out of 18th and 19th century intentional communities, many of the new alternative press served to educate, socialise, promote and represent the special interests of the founders and followers of the countercultural movements, often focusing on the philosophy and ideals underpinning these communities rather than the everyday events (see also Frobert). The radical press in Australia was also gaining ground, with OZ in Australia from 1963-1969, and then from 1967-1973 in London. Magazines launched by Philip Frazer like The Digger, Go-Set, Revolution and High Times, and university student newspapers were the main avenues for youth and alternative expression on the Vietnam war and conscription, gay and lesbian rights, racism, feminism and ecological activism (Forde, Challenging the News; Cock & Perry). Nimbin 1973: Rusty Miller and The Byron Express The 1973 Aquarius Festival of counterculture in Nimbin (12-23 May) was a utopian context that had an alternative media life of its own before it arrived in the Rainbow Region–in student publications like Tharnuka and newsletters distributed via the Aquarius Foundation. There were other voices that announced the coming of the Aquarius Festival to Nimbin and reported on its impact, like The Digger from Melbourne and the local paper, The Northern Star. During the Festival, the Nimbin Good Times first appeared as the daily bulletin and continues today with the original masthead drawn by the Festival’s co-organiser, Graeme Dunstan. Some interesting work has been done on this area, ranging from general studies of the Rainbow Region (Wilson; Munro-Clark) to articles analysing its alternative press (Ward & van Vuuren; Martin & Ellis), but to date, there has been no focus on the Rainbow Region’s first alternative newspaper, The Byron Express. Co-edited by Rusty Miller and David Guthrie, this paper presented and mediated the aims and desires of the Aquarian movement. Though short-lived, as only 7 issues were published from 15 February 1973 to September 1973, The Byron Express left a permanent printed vestige of the Aquarian counterculture movement’s activism and ideals from an independent regional perspective. Miller’s credentials for starting up the newspaper are clear–he has always been a trailblazer, mixing “smarts” with surfing and environmental politics. After graduating from a Bachelor of Arts in history from San Diego State College, he first set foot in Byron Bay during his two semesters with the inaugural Chapman College affiliated University of the Seven Seas in 1965-6. Returning to his hometown of Encinitas, he co-founded the Surf Research accessory company with legendary Californian surfer Mike Doyle, and launched Waxmate, the first specially formulated surf wax in 1967 (Davis, Witzig & James; Warshaw 217), selling his interest in the business soon after to spend a couple of years “living the counterculture life on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai” (Davis, Witzig & James), before heading back to Byron Bay via Bells Beach in 1970 (Miller & Shantz) and Sydney, where he worked as an advertising salesman and writer with Tracks surfing magazine (Martin & Ellis). In 1971, he was one of the first to ride the now famous waves of Uluwatu in Bali, and is captured with Steven Cooney in the iconic publicity image for Albe Falzon’s 1971 film, Morning Of The Earth. The champion surfer from the US knew a thing or two about counterculture, alternative media, advertising and business when he found his new utopian context in Byron Bay. Miller and Guthrie’s front-page editorial of the inaugural issue of The Byron Express, published on 15 February 1973, with the byline “for a higher shire”, expressed the countercultural (cl)aims of the publication. Land use, property development and the lack of concern that some people in Byron had for their impact on the environment and people of the region were a prime target: With this first issue of the Byron Express, we hope to explain that the area is badly in need of a focal point. The transitions of present are vast and moving fast. The land is being sold and resold. Lots of money is coming into the area in the way of developments […] caravan parts, hotels, businesses and real estate. Many of the trips incoming are not exactly “concerned” as to what long term effect such developments might have on the environment and its people. We hope to serve as a focus of concern and service, a centre for expression and reflection. We would ask your contributions in vocal and written form. We are ready for some sock it to ya criticism… and hope you would grab us upon the street to tell us how you feel…The mission of this alternative newspaper is thereby defined by the need for a “focal point” that inscribes the voices of the community in a freely accessible narrative, recorded in print for posterity. Although this first issue contains no mention of the Aquarius Festival, there were already rumours circulating about it, as organisers Graeme Dunstan and Johnny Allen had been up to Main Arm, Mullumbimby and Nimbin on reconnaissance missions beginning in September 1972. Instead, there was an article on “Mullumbimby Man–Close to the Land” by Nicholas Shand, who would go on to found the community-based weekly newspaper The Echo in 1986, then called The Brunswick Valley Echo and still going strong. Another by Bob McTavish asked whether there could be a better form of government; there was a surf story, and a soul food section with a recipe for honey meade entitled “Do you want to get out of it on 10 cents a bottle?” The second issue continues in much the same vein. It is not until the third issue comes out on 17 March 1973 that the Aquarius Festival is mentioned in a skinny half column on page four. And it’s not particularly promising: Arrived at Nimbin, sleepy hamlet… Office in disused R.S.L. rooms, met a couple of guys recently arrived, said nothing was being done. “Only women here, you know–no drive”. Met Joanne and Vi, both unable to say anything to be reported… Graham Dunstan (codenamed Superfest) and John Allen nowhere in sight. Allen off on trip overseas. Dunstan due back in a couple of weeks. 10 weeks to go till “they” all come… and to what… nobody is quite sure. This progress report provides a fascinating contemporary insight into the tensions–between the local surfies and hippies on one hand, and the incoming students on the other–around the organisation of the Aquarius Festival. There is an unbridled barb at the sexist comments made by the guys, implicit criticism of the absent organisers, obvious skepticism about whether anyone will actually come to the festival, and wonderment at what it will be like. Reading between the lines, we might find a feeling of resentment about not being privy to new developments in their own backyard. The final lines of the article are non-committal “Anyway, let’s see what eventuates when the Chiefs return.” It seems that all has been resolved by the fifth issue of 11 May, which is almost entirely dedicated to the Aquarius Festival with the front page headline “Welcome to the New Age”. But there is still an undertone of slight suspicion at what the newcomers to the area might mean in terms of property development: The goal is improving your fellow man’s mind and nourishment in concert with your own; competition to improve your day and the quality of the day for society. Meanwhile, what is the first thing one thinks about when he enters Byron and the area? The physical environment is so magnificent and all encompassing that it can actually hold a man’s breath back a few seconds. Then a man says, “Wow, this land is so beautiful that one could make a quid here.” And from that moment the natural aura and spells are broken and the mind lapses into speculative equations, sales projections and future interest payments. There is plenty of “love” though, in this article: “The gathering at Nimbin is the most spectacular demonstration of the faith people have in a belief that is possible (and possible just because they want it to be) to live in love, through love together.” The following article signed by Rusty Miller “A Town Together” is equally focused on love: “See what you could offer the spirit at Nimbin. It might introduce you to a style that could lead to LOVE.” The centre spread features photos: the obligatory nudes, tents, and back to nature activities, like planting and woodworking. With a text box of “random comments” including one from a Lismore executive: ‘I took my wife and kids out there last weekend and we had such a good time. Seems pretty organized and the town was loaded with love. Heard there is some hepatitis about and rumours of VD. Everyone happy.” And another from a land speculator (surely the prime target of Miller’s wrath): “Saw guys kissing girls on the street, so sweet, bought 200 acres right outside of town, it’s going to be valuable out there some day.” The interview with Johnny Allen as the centrepiece includes some pertinent commentary on the media and reveals a well-founded suspicion of the mediatisation of the Aquarius Festival: We have tried to avoid the media actually. But we haven’t succeeded in doing so. Part of the basic idea is that we don’t need to be sold. All the down town press can do is try and interpret you. And by doing that it automatically places it in the wrong sort of context. So we’ve tried to keep it to people writing about the festival to people who will be involved in it. It’s an involvement festival. Coopting The Byron Express as an “involved” party effects a fundamental shift from an external reporting newspaper to a kind of proponent or even propaganda for the Aquarius festival and its ideas, like so many utopian newspapers had done before. It is therefore perhaps inevitable that The Byron Express should disappear very soon after the Aquarius festival. Fiona Martin and Rhonda Ellis explain that Rusty Miller stopped producing the paper because he “found the production schedule exhausting and his readership too small to attract consistent advertising” (5). At any rate, there were only two more issues, one in June–with some follow up reporting of the festival–and another in September 1973, which was almost entirely devoted to environmentally focused features, including an interview with Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal). Byron Bay 2013: Thirty Years of Rusty’s Byron Guide What Rusty did next is fairly well known locally–surfing and teaching people how to surf and a bit of writing. When major local employer Walkers slaughterhouse closed in 1983, he and his wife, social geographer Tricia Shantz, were asked by the local council to help promote Byron Bay as a tourist destination, writing the first Byron guide in 1983-4. Incorporating essays by local personalities and dedicated visitors, the Byron guide perpetuates the ideal of environmental awareness, spiritual experimentation, and respect for the land and sea. Recent contributors have included philosopher Peter Singer, political journalist Kerry O’Brien, and writer John Ralston Saul, and Miller and Shantz always have an essay in there themselves. “People, Politics and Culture” is the new byline for the 2013 edition. And Miller’s opening essay mediates the same utopian desires and environmental community messages that he espoused from the beginning of The Byron Express: The name Byron Bay represents something that we constantly try to articulate. If one was to dream up a menu of situations and conditions to compose a utopia, Australia would be the model of the nation-state and Byron would have many elements of the actual place one might wish to live for the rest of their lives. But of course there is always the danger of excesses in tropical paradises especially when they become famous destinations. Australia is being held to ransom for the ideology that we should be slaves to money and growth at the cost of a degraded and polluted physical and social environment. Byron at least was/is a refuge against this profusion of the so-called real-world perception that holds profit over environment as the way we must choose for our future. Even when writing for a much more commercial medium, Miller retains the countercultural utopian spirit that was crystallised in the Aquarius festival of 1973, and which remains relevant to many of those living in and visiting the Rainbow Region. Miller’s ethos moves beyond the alternative movements and communities to infiltrate travel writing and tourism initiatives in the area today, as evidenced in the Rusty’s Byron Guide essays. By presenting more radical discourses for a mainstream public, Miller together with Shantz have built on the participatory role that he played in launching the region’s first alternative newspaper in 1973 that became albeit briefly the equivalent of a countercultural utopian gazette. Now, he and Shantz effectively play the same role, producing a kind of countercultural form of utopian media for Byron Bay that corresponds to exactly the same criteria mentioned above. Through their free publication, they aim to educate, socialise, promote and represent the special interests of the founders and followers of the Rainbow Region, focusing on the philosophy and ideals underpinning these communities rather than the everyday events. The Byron Bay that Miller and Shantz promote is resolutely utopian, and certainly countercultural if compared to other free publications like The Book, a new shopping guide, or mainstream media elsewhere. Despite this new competition, they are planning the next edition for 2015 with essays to make people think, talk, and understand the region’s issues, so perhaps the counterculture is still holding its own against the mainstream. References Atton, Chris. “What Is ‘Alternative’ Journalism?” Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism 4.3 (2003): 267-72. Berger, Bennett M. The Survival of a Counterculture: Ideological Work and Everyday Life among Rural Communards. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2004. Cock, Peter H., & Paul F. Perry. “Australia's Alternative Media.” Media Information Australia 6 (1977): 4-13. Couldry, Nick. “Mediation and Alternative Media, or Relocating the Centre of Media and Communication Studies.” Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 103, (2002): 24-31. Davis, Dale, John Witzig & Don James. “Rusty Miller.” Encyclopedia of Surfing. 10 Nov. 2014 ‹http://encyclopediaofsurfing.com/entries/miller-rusty›. Downing, John. Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Davis, J.C. Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Forde, Susan. Challenging the News: The Journalism of Alternative and Independent Media. Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2011. ---. “Monitoring the Establishment: The Development of the Alternative Press in Australia” Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 87 (May 1998): 114-133. Frobert, Lucien. “French Utopian Socialists as the First Pioneers in Development.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 35 (2011): 729-49. Green, Toby. Thomas More’s Magician: A Novel Account of Utopia in Mexico. London: Phoenix, 2004. Goffman, Ken, & Dan Joy. Counterculture through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House. New York: Villard Books. 2004. Haude, Sigrun. “Anabaptism.” The Reformation World. Ed. Andrew Pettegree. London: Routledge, 2000. 237-256. Jameson, Fredric. Archeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005. Levitas, Ruth. Utopia as Method. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Martin, Fiona, & Rhonda Ellis. “Dropping In, Not Out: The Evolution of the Alternative Press in Byron Shire 1970-2001.” Transformations 2 (2002). 10 Nov. 2014 ‹http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_02/pdf/MartinEllis.pdf›. McKay, George. Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties. London: Verso, 1996. Metcalf, Bill. From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality: Cooperative Lifestyles in Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1995. ---. Shared Visions, Shared Lives: Communal Living around the Globe. Forres, UK: Findhorn Press, 1996. Miller, Rusty & Tricia Shantz. Turning Point: Surf Portraits and Stories from Bells to Byron 1970-1971. Surf Research. 2012. Molnar, Thomas. Utopia: The Perennial Heresy. London: Tom Stacey, 1972. Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1986. Munro-Clark, Margaret. Communes in Rural Australia: The Movement since 1970. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1986. Osterlag, Bob. People’s Movements, People’s Press: The Journalism of Social Justice Movements. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. New York: Anchor, 1969. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994): 1-37. Schaer, Roland, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent, eds. Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World. New York: New York Public Library/Oxford UP, 2000. Streitmatter, Roger. Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America. Columbia: Columbia UP, 2001. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Ward, Susan, & Kitty van Vuuren. “Belonging to the Rainbow Region: Place, Local Media, and the Construction of Civil and Moral Identities Strategic to Climate Change Adaptability.” Environmental Communication 7.1 (2013): 63-79. Warshaw, Matt. The History of Surfing. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2011. Wilson, Helen. (Ed.). Belonging in the Rainbow Region: Cultural Perspectives on the NSW North Coast. Lismore, NSW: Southern Cross University Press, 2003. Widmer, Kingsley. Counterings: Utopian Dialectics in Contemporary Contexts. Ann Arbor, London: UMI Research Press, 1988. Yinger, J. Milton. Countercultures: The Promise and Peril of a World Turned Upside Down. New York: The Free Press, 1982.

Figure 1: Peng Liu, Body Techniques. Photograph. (2014).As an academic researcher as well as practicing artist, I am interested in my bodily movement/techniques in the actions of painting which inevitably reflects the institutions enacted upon my body as representation of Chinese culture/society, and also highlight my individual practice as an artist in response to the world. According to Shilling (10-12), Turner (197), Douglas (68-78) and Mauss (75), the body is historically inherited and culturally embodied. My bodily experience of wandering in the space of the Forbidden City is mediated by its historical and cultural formations, as Turner notes that human beings “are simultaneously part of nature and part of culture […] and culture shapes and mediates nature…nature constitutes a limit in human agency” (197). Specifically, my body is affected by the concept of grand unification which is reflected in its actions and reactions. It is interested in the Confucian conditions of the limits to what is possible in the techniques of painting and how the techniques of painting rely upon and resist the grand unification promised by Confucian thought. Every action, as Douglas notes, “always sustaining a particular set of cultural meanings, a particular social order” (68).The concept of grand unification is apparent in the space of the Forbidden City in that the design of every courtyard is in hierarchical relation to each other, not only physically connected and distinguished through hidden doorways, corridors, and verandas, but also the styles and plants suggesting their coherency within/to the city as the head of the hierarchical society. My body responds to the architectural space in certain ways whereby visual perception and tactile experience of touching surfaces of wooden columns, cornerstones, and fallen roof tiles consolidate the interactions of my body with the space under the concept, as my body is forming its techniques to approach corners and details.The Forbidden City represents a dynamic fusion or hybrid setting. It is an eastern historical and cultural precinct as much as a symbol of western economic and technological exchange. Because of its particularity as the continued power centre of the nation, the Forbidden City becomes a material form of memory, like a portal to access the past. As much as immaterial form, the Forbidden City generates viewers’ affective and intuitive responses allowing the viewers to imagine ancient time and space even though they are physically in present time and space.My everyday bodily actions, embodied with historical thought and culture means as being a “cultural men” (Merleau-Ponty 7), or a cultural meme, may obtain rich sensations and experience through multiple senses in the space of the Forbidden City; however the everyday body and its actions may inadequate in expressing the bodily experience in studio. While Merleau-Ponty describes the relationship between lived object and post-impressionist painter: “The lived object (in nature) is not rediscovered or constructed on the basis of the contributions of the (human) senses; rather, it presents itself to us from the start” (5), his words imply the actions of expression in painting may require different techniques from everyday life. And Frenhofer notes the role of hand as bodily technique in studio: “A hand is not simply part of the body (in everyday perspective), but the expression and continuation of a thought which must be captured and conveyed” (Frenhofer cited in Merleau-Ponty 7), and result in brushstrokes.Apart from being social and cultural, therefore, my everyday habitual actions are re-thought and expanded to form a new series of bodily techniques in studio in order to express my bodily experience in the space. Body techniques in studio are not only cultural embodied as representation of social contexts, but also artistic – being individual in response to the world.And paint (painting) is the documentation of my body movement/techniques in studio space, as James Elkins notes: “Paint is a cast made of the painter’s movements, a portrait of the painter’s body and thoughts […] (it) records the most delicate gesture and the most tense (tensest) […] (and) tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front of the canvas” (5). Each brushstroke reflects particular bodily techniques formed in studio which is the combination of both cultural embodiment and artistic expression that would barely appeared in everyday life.As a practicing artist who was trained under the influence of the concept of the grand unification, I was taught to paint relationships on canvas as one of many ways to handle the medium. Every colours and brushstrokes, painted in terms of tones, perspectives, and size of brushstrokes build the relationships in between in order to construct a coherent system which balances positive and negative shapes. There is no such “right or wrong” colour/brushstrokes. There are only appropriate or inappropriate colour/brushstrokes. The dynamics of the painting is reshuffled with every colour/brushstrokes painted on canvas at a time. Painting is a process of constant balancing. As Bernard said, “each stroke must ‘contain the air, the light, the object, the composition, the character, the outline, and the style.’ Expressing what exists is an endless task” (Bernard cited in Maurice Merleau-Ponty 5). And the task of expressing on canvas is not the showcase of our visual ability in capture shapes and colours from nature or memories, but is to see how my next brushstroke interacts with the existing marks on canvas. The photos taken in the space, may help to recall memories at first place, would have little to do with the actions to painting in studio as soon as the first brushstroke is laid.The Concept of Grand Unification in Everyday Embodied Body Movement and My Body Techniques in Studio SpaceThe concept of grand unification is understood as Dao, which originated from Laozi founder of Daoism and has variable interpretations one of which appeared as communality in some English translations. The grand unification was advocated by major ancient philosophies such as: Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism, and in processes like Legalism, in China to reflect the philosophers’ understanding about the world. For example, Confucius points out: “天下有道，则礼乐征伐自天子出” (“if the nation is unified under one centre, the nation is in good shape”). This implication of the concept of grand unification in politics encouraged centralization, which is fulfilling god’s will according to Daoism.Liu Che, the Wu emperor in Han dynasty, adopted Dong Zhongshu’s suggestion in Interactions between Heaven and Mankind, to “罢黜百家，独尊儒术” (“venerate Confucianism, meanwhile, ban the rest of philosophies and ideologies inherited from the Warring state period”). This political move established Confucianism as the only official ideology in China, which applied the grand unification in cultural/ideological perspective.The idea of the grand unification is interpreted and embedded in daily life, forming a set of body techniques in relation to the hierarchical society, for example, the mid-autumn festival which is one of the two most important festivals in China. By using the astronomical phenomena of the full moon as both a symbol and a metaphor, moon in full, represent the nation in unification as well as a family reunion.In terms of Confucian values, every common person should reunite with their family to celebrate the festival by having a family feast. The feast not only gathers the family, but also suggests the nation which is seen as a big family that shall be unified too, for example many poems from the Tang and Song Dynasty are themed on the full moon to express their nostalgia as well as the wish of a unified nation. Such as poet Li Bai wrote in Tang dynasty: “举头望明月，低头思故乡” (“I raised my head and looked out on the mountain moon; I bowed my head and thought of my far-off home”). Moon cake is one of the festival foods made in the shape of full moon as a symbol of perfection in family reunion.Even for those people who do trading far away from home all year round, they must make their way back home in time for the family feast to celebrate and express their filial piety, which is one of essentials in Confucianism. The very first evidence of body technique occurs when the family members literally step across the doorsill back from business trip when they greet parents straight way in the principal room. A well educated person under the value of Confucianism would salute his parents with formal/full ketou in expressing filial piety. This form of address was considered “rituals of abject servitude” (181) by James L. Hevia. There were nine types of ketou which, as body techniques, were applied in everyday life and highlighted the hierarchical society orientated by the centralization.The actions of ketou involve everyone’s physical participation and cultural engagement with the idea of centralization so that the philosophical content of the idea behind the phenomenon is inscribed into common bodies. The everyday accumulated bodily memories and experience of participating in the idea drives the bodies to behave accordingly and technically and impacts upon the bodies to reinforce the ideology over and over again. The concept of grand unification is widely accepted and implemented in the nation as cultural reference, which discipline every body into a fixed role in the hierarchical society, as Michel Foucault describes culture “a hierarchical organization of values, accessible to everybody, (and) at the same time the occasion of a mechanism of selection and exclusion” (173). The senses of grand unification in the hierarchical society became a part of the national identity in centuries, not only as abstract concept but also as concrete culture embodiment in every action of everybody on daily base.With such cultural means inherited, my bodily movement in action to painting dedicatedly place and adjust every brushstroke in relation to the existing marks in order to construct a collective and systematic world. My brushstrokes, as James Elkins notes, are “the evidence of the artist’s manual devotion to his image” (3) which provide the balance between the sense of stability created by the composition and the sense of infinite possibilities created by the subtlety of the colour. (Figure 2) There is neither strong contrast in using colours, nor sharp edges painted, as the air I painted not only has softened every object, but also has integrated every object into the holistic atmosphere. The world is “a mass without gaps” (Merleau-Ponty 5) and the ultimate purpose of grand unification underneath its hierarchical structure is in ever pursuit of a virtuous circle – a mystical interpretation and expectation about the world in order in terms of Chinese ancient philosophy. The scene of painting “is not just one of my visual perceptions recalled from memory but a bodily experience as participant in the scene” (Liu 25) and my cultural embodiment which are expressed and translated through body techniques into the language of painting in studio. The constantly moving body perceives the colour of the space as infinite, and it seems as though the space itself vibrates. Figure 2: Peng Liu, The Forbidden City Study Series Two. Oil on canvas, 100cm x 170cm. Photo: Peng Liu (2010).While I physically explores and forms my very own techniques (as the language of painting), the intention on applying certain body techniques to ensure the painters’ understanding and to create an appropriate artwork is historical inherited. For example, in early tenth century, Jing Hao firstly theorized types of brushstrokes, called 笔法记 (The Theory of Brushstrokes in Chinese Landscape Painting), for depicting different objects accordingly. The theorized brushstrokes specify particular bodily movements for depicting certain objects, such as the fingers in variable ways of holding Chinese brushes and the pressure of hand’s strength put into each brushstroke. The theorized bodily movements/techniques would create sufficient communication and establish a hierarchical relation in between depicted objects, which translate the painter’s cultural understanding of the grand unification into the expression of Chinese landscape painting.Certainly, the sense of grand unification in Chinese landscape painting can be achieved in many methods and different techniques according to each individual artist. For instance, Guo Xi’s painting techniques, called “the angle of totality” or “floating perspective” which displaces the static eye of viewers by producing multiple perspectives in two-dimensional scroll painting, as his artistic interpretation of the sense of grand unification. (Figure 3) Guo, cited in R. M. Barnhart (372), describes the objects relation realized in his techniques: “山以水为血脉，以草木为毛发，以烟云为神采，故山得水而活 […] 水得山而媚” (“Mountain and water come alive through the mutual endorsement on each other. Water makes mountain vibrant; and mountain makes water vigorous”).Figure 3: Guo Xi. Early Spring. Hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk. 158.3 x 108.1. National Palace Museum, Taipei. (1072). And Guo's paper “Mountains and Waters”, cited in Grousset, notes: “The clouds and the vapours of real landscapes are not the same at the four seasons. In spring they are light and diffused, in summer rich and dense, in autumn scattered and thin, and in winter dark and solitary. When such effects can be seen in pictures, the clouds and vapours have an air of life” (195). Every lived object become full of vigour by the interaction with other lived object depicted together to create a sense of coherence as whole. The vibrant communications between depicted objects reinforce the aliveness of individuals within the atmosphere of the painting. The virtuous circle appears. Moreover, his painting express double meanings that not only eulogize the dynamic scene created by the relationship between every depicted object, but also imply the concept of grand unification that every object is supposed to play their own part, to be appropriate in the centralized atmosphere.Under the influence of the concept and with the awareness of body techniques in terms of Chinese painting, my body has brought its cultural habits into the studio while interrogate its own process of translation of the bodily experience into the language of painting through bodily movement. In particular, by depicting in paint the colour of the light, temperature, and atmosphere of spaces that are shaped by buildings, and how bodies interact with these affects, it is like unfolding communications on the canvas about what happens between my body and the space of the Forbidden City. My body, when making paintings, then, becomes a vehicle for expressing my remembered bodily responses to the resonances of the space. And through the compositional construction of the image, I am, or my body is able to find the best combination between colours, lines and forms to interpret those experiences/stories all under the unified voice. In the process of translating, from idea to object, the movement/techniques of my body help me to revive those bodily experiences from the space of the Forbidden City. During the constant movement of my arm and my hand, holding the brushes, I look for the best moment to leave a brushstroke on the canvas in the most appropriate angle. Every move of my body along with every colour left on the canvas is the representation of the ideology that my cultural embodied body from history creates the painting.The movement of my physical body in studio enacts my cultural body in the sense of provoking memories of the inscribed experience and embodied knowledge from the space of the Forbidden City to colonize the studio. The dynamics of the studio assimilate into the space of the Forbidden City, not through some display objects such as printed photos taken in the space, but through my body’s physical and cultural presence in actions to painting. Apart from interacting with brushstrokes, the bodily movement also involve the rest of the studio into actions, such as wall, lights, tables, palette, little things placed behind easels, and the air around my bodies which are inevitably caught in my sight as background while travelling between canvas and palette. The bodily actions in studio, as Merleau-Ponty notes, “is a process of expression […] to grasp the nature of what appears to us in a confused way and to place it (on canvas) before us as a recognizable object” (6). Such bodily movement and techniques housed within, which may be differentiated from everyday actions, are culturally embodied and individual artistic. Therefore, as result of it, the painting, as a technique, becomes a post-colonial, which indicates the embodied knowledge and experience colonized in, as a material form of memory at the same time as an immaterial form to generate viewers’ affective and intuitive responses by allowing the viewers to imagine.To continually consider the painting as the techniques of my bodily movement in studio, the rhythm of my painting (constructed by composition, colour, and brush marks) is connected with my variable perceptions sensed in the space, reflecting my bodily experience, and affecting my viewers through its pictorial depiction. My use of colour is subtle, vivid and individualized, as the original colours of the buildings merely serves as a reference point. (Figure 4) Specifically, the colours shown in my paintings display a collection of colours that my body perceives while moving in the space at a particular time; rather than the actual colour of the paint on the building itself perceived through a fixed geometric or photographic perspective. This is called “the lived perspective” (Cezanne cited in Merleau-Ponty 4), emphasising on expressing the colours perceived by my body constantly changing in subtle ways with every step my body taken in the space over a period of time. And “this visual rhythm is the translation of my bodily experience in the space, not only representing a still scene at a specific moment, but also visualizing a set of body movements/techniques accumulated in the space over a period of time” (Liu 25-26); as well as in studio.Figure 4: Peng Liu. The Forbidden City Study Series Three. Oil on canvas. 170cm x 300cm. Photo: Peng Liu (2013).ConclusionAcknowledging my body is historically inherited and culturally embodied as the result of participating in different societies and my bodily experience is perceived “through the mediation of cultural categories” (Douglas 68); “it is certain that a person’s life does not explain his (art) work” (Merleau-Ponty 8). My body techniques in dealing with everyday society are re-thought and expanded in studio space, which highlight my bodily movement not only representing my body as cultural embodied being, but also exposing my individual as an artist in response to the world.ReferencesBarnhart, R.M., et al. Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.Confucius. The Analects of Confucius. Trans. P, Liu. No. 16. Written 770-476BC.Dong, Zhongshu. 天人策 [Interactions between Heaven and Mankind]. Written 179-104BC.Douglas, Mary. “The Two Bodies.” The Body: A Reader. Edited by Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco, New York: Routledge, 2005. 68-78.Elkins, James. What Painting Is. New York: Routledge, 1998. 3-5.Foucault, Michel. L'hermeneutique du sujet: Cours au Collège de France, 1981-1982. Paris: Gallimard Seuil, 2001.Grousset, Rene. The Rise and Splendour of the Chinese Empire. Barnes & Noble Inc, 1995.Guo, Xi. 林泉高致集 – 山水训 [Chinese Landscape]. 1020-1090AD.Hevia, James L. “Sovereignty and Subject: Constituting Relations of Power in Qing Guest Ritual.” Body, Subject & Power in China. Eds. Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.Jing, Hao. 笔法记 [The Theory of Brushstrokes in Chinese Landscape Painting]. Written 923-936AD.Li, Bai. 静夜思 [On a Quiet Night]. Trans. S. Obata.Liu, Peng. “The Impact of Space upon the Body in the Forbidden City: From the Perspective of Art.” Body Tensions: Beyond Corporeality in Time and Space. UK: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2014. 22-34.Mauss, Marcel. “Techniques of the Body.” The Body: A Reader. Edited by Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco, New York: Routledge, 2005.Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Cezanne’s Doubt.” Sense and Non-Sense. Trans. Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. 9-25.Shilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: SAGE Publication, 1993. 10-12.Turner, Bryan S. The Body & Society Second Edition. London: SAGE Publication, 1996.

Introduction This article presents the trans-disciplinary encounters with and perspectives on embodiment of three creative-arts practitioners within the Deakin University research project Flows & Catchments. The project explores how creative arts participate in community and the possibility of well-being. We discuss our preparations for creative work exhibited at the 2012 Lake Bolac Eel Festival in regional Western Victoria, Australia. This festival provided a fertile time-place-space context through which to meet with one regional community and engage with scales of geological and historical time (volcanoes, water flows, first contact), human and animal roots and routes (settlement, eel migrations, hunting and gathering), and cultural heritage (the eel stone traps used by indigenous people, settler stonewalling, indigenous language recovery). It also allowed us to learn from how a festival brings to the surface these scales of time, place and space. All these scales also require an embodied response—a physical relation to the land and to the people of a community—which involves how specific interests and ways of engaging coordinate experience and accentuate particular connections of material to cultural patterns of activity. The focus of our interest in “embody” and embodiment relates to the way in which the term constantly slides from metaphor (figural connection) to description (literal process). Our research question, therefore, addresses the specific interaction of these two tendencies. Rather than eliminate one in preference to the other, it is the interaction and movement from one to the other that an approach through creative-arts practices makes visible. The visibility of these tendencies and the mechanisms to which they are linked (media, organising principle or relational aesthetic) are highlighted by the particular time-place-space modalities that each of the creative arts deploys. When looking across different creative practices, the attachments and elisions become more fine-grained and clearer. A key aim of practice-led research is to observe, study and learn, but also to transform the production of meaning and its relationship to the community of users (Barrett and Bolt). The opportunity to work collaboratively with a community like the one at Lake Bolac provided an occasion to gauge our discerning and initiating skills within creative-arts research and to test the argument that the combination of our different approaches adds to community and individual well-being. Our approach is informed by Gilles Deleuze’s ethical proposition that the health of a community is directly influenced by the richness of the composition of its parts. With this in mind, each creative-arts practitioner will emphasize their encounter with an element of community. Zones of Practice–Drawing Together (Jondi Keane) Galleries are strange in-between places, both destinations and non-sites momentarily outside of history and place. The Lake Bolac Memorial Hall, however, retains its character of place, participating in the history of memorial halls through events such as the Eel Festival. The drawing project “Stone Soup” emphasizes the idea of encounter (O’Sullivan), particularly the interactions of sensibilities shaped by a land, a history and an orientation that comprise an affective field. The artist’s brief in this situation—the encounter as the rupture of habitual modes of being (O’Sullivan 1)—provides a platform of relations to be filled with embodied experience that connects the interests, actions and observations produced outside the gallery to the amplified and dilated experience presented within the gallery. My work suggests that person-to person in-situ encounters intensify the movement across embodied ways of knowing. “Stone Soup”. Photograph by Daniel Armstrong.Arts practice and practice-led research makes available the spectrum of embodied engagements that are mixed to varying degrees with the conceptual positioning of material, both social and cultural. The exhibition and workshop I engaged with at the Eel Festival focused on three level of attention: memory (highly personal), affection (intra-personal) and exchange (communal, non-individual). Attention, the cognitive activity of directing and guiding perception, observation and interpretation, is the thread that binds body to environment, body to history, and body to the constructs of person, family and community. Jean-Jacques Lecercle observes that, for Deleuze, “not only is the philosopher in possession of a specific techne, essential to the well-being of the community, a techne the practice of which demands the use of specialized tools, but he makes his own tools: a system of concepts is a box of tools” (Lecercle 100). This notion is further enhanced when informed by enactive theories of cognition in which, “bodily practices including gesture are part of the activity in which concepts are formed” (Hutchins 429) Creative practices highlight the role of the body in the delicate interaction between a conceptually shaped gallery “space” and the communally constructed meeting “place.” My part of the exhibition consisted of a series of drawings/diagrams characterized under the umbrella of “making stone soup.” The notion of making stone soup is taken from folk tales about travelers in search of food who invent the idea of a magical stone soup to induce cooperation by asking local residents to garnish the “magical” stone soup with local produce. Other forms of the folk tale from around the world include nail soup, button soup and axe soup. Participants were able to choose from three different types of soup (communal drawing) that they would like to help produce. When a drawing was completed another one could be started. The mix of ideas and images constituted the soup. Three types of soup were on offer and required assistance to make: Stone soup–communal drawing of what people like to eat, particularly earth-grown produce; what they would bring to a community event and how they associate these foods with the local identity. Axe soup–communal drawing of places and spaces important to the participants because of connection to the land, to events and/or people. These might include floor plans, scenes of rooms or views, or memories of places that mix with the felt importance of spaces.Heirloom soup–communal drawing of important objects associated with particular persons. The drawings were given to the festival organizer to exhibit at the following year’s festival. "Story Telling”. Photograph by Daniel Armstrong.Drawing in: Like taking a breath, the act of drawing and putting one’s thought and affections into words or pictures is focused through the sensation of the drawing materials, the size of the paper, and the way one orients oneself to the paper and the activity. These pre-drawing dispositions set up the way a conversation might occur and what the tenor of that exchange may bring. By asking participants to focus on three types of attachments or attentions and contributing to a collective drawing, the onus on art skills or poignancy is diminished, and the feeling of turning inward to access feeling and memory turns outward towards inscription and cooperation. Drawing out: Like exhaling around vowels and consonants, the movement of the hand with brush and ink or pen and ink across a piece of paper follows our patterns of engagement, the embodied experience consistent with all our other daily activities. We each have a way of orchestrating the sequence of movements that constitute an image-story. The maker of stone soup must provide a new encounter, a platform for cooperation. I found that drawing alongside the participants, talking to them, inscribing and witnessing their stories in this way, heightened the collective activity and produced a new affective field of common experience. In this instance the stone soup became the medium for an emergent composition of relations. Zones of Practice–Embodying Photographic Space (Rozalind Drummond) Photography inevitably entails a certain characterization of reality. From being “out there” the world comes to be “inside” photographs—a visual sliver, a grab, and an upload, a perpetual tumble cycle of extruded images existing everywhere yet nowhere. While the outside, the “out there” is brought within the frame of the photograph, I am interested rather in looking, through the viewfinder, to spaces that work the other way, which suggest the potential to locate a “non-space”—where the inside suggests an outside or empty space. Thus, the photograph becomes disembodied to reveal space. I consider embodiment as the trace of other embodiments that frame the subject. Mark Auge’s conception of “non-places” seems apt here. He writes about non-places as those that are lived or passed through on the way to some place else, an accumulation of spaces that can be understood and named (94). These are spaces that can be defined in everyday terms as places with which we are familiar, places in which the real erupts: a borderline separating the outside from the inside, temporary spaces that can exist for the camera. The viewer may well peer in and look for everything that appears to have been left out. Thus, the photograph becomes a recollection of what Roland Barthes calls “a disruption in the topography”—we imagine a “beyond” that evokes a sense of melancholy or of irrevocably sliding toward it (238). How then could the individual embody such a space? The groups of photographs of Lake Bolac are spread out on a table. I play some music awhile, Glenn Gould, whose performing embodies what, to me, represents such humanity. Hear him breathing? It is Prelude and Fugue No. 16 in G Minor by Bach, on vinyl; music becomes a tangible and physical presence. When we close our eyes, our ears determine a sound’s location in a room; we map out a space, by listening, and can create a measureable dimension to sound. Walking about the territory of a living room, in suburban Melbourne, I consider too a small but vital clue: that while scrutinizing these details of a photographic image on paper, simultaneously I am returning to a small town in the Western District of Victoria. In the fluid act of looking at images in a house in Melbourne, I am now also walking down a road to Lake Bolac and can hear the incidental sounds of the environment—birdcalls and human voices—elements that inhabit and embody space: a borderline, alongside the photographs. What is imprinted in actual time, what is fundamental, is that the space of a photograph is actually devoid of sound and that I am still standing in a living room in Melbourne. In Against Architecture, Denis Hollier states of Bataille, “he wrote of the psychological power of space as a fluid, boundary effacing, always displaced and displacing medium. The non-spaces of cities and towns are locations where it is possible to be lost in a collective space, a progression of thoroughfares that are transitional, delivering the individual from one point and place to another—stairwells, laneways and roadsides—a constellation of streets….” (Hollier 79). Though photographs are sound-less, sound gives access to the outside of the image. “Untitled”. Photograph by Rozalind Drummond from “Stay with me here.” 2012 Type C Digital Print. Is there an outline of an image here? The enlargement of a snapshot of a photograph does not simply render what in any case was visible, though unclear. What is the viewer to look for in this photograph? Upon closer inspection a young woman stands to the right within the frame—she wears a school uniform; the pattern of the garment can be seen and read distinctly. In the detail it is finely striped, with a dark hue of blue, on a paler background, and the wearer’s body is imprinted upon the clothing, which receives the body’s details and impressions. The dress has a fold or pleat at the back; the distinct lines and patterns are reminiscent of a map, or an incidental grid. Here, the leitmotif of worn clothing is a poetic one. The young woman wears her hair piled, vertiginous, in a loosely constructed yet considered fashion; she stands assured, looking away and looking forward, within the compositional frame. The camera offers a momentary pause. This is our view. Our eye is directed to look further away past the figure, and the map of her clothing, to a long hallway in the school, before drifting to the left and right of the frame, where the outside world of Lake Bolac is clear and visible through the interior space of the hallway—the natural environment of daylight, luminescent and vivid. The time frame is late summer, the light reflecting and reverberating through glass doors, and gleaming painted surfaces, in a continuous rectangular pattern of grid lines. In the near distance, the viewer can see an open door, a pictorial breathing space, beyond the spatial line and coolness of the photograph, beyond the frame of the photograph and our knowing. The photograph becomes a signpost. What is outside, beyond the school corridors, recalled through the medium of photography, are other scenes, yet to be constructed from the spaces, streets and roads of Lake Bolac. Zones of Practice–Time as the “Skin” of Writing, Embodiment and Place (Patrick West) There is no writing without a body to write. Yet sometimes it feels that my creative writing, resisting its necessary embodiment, has by some trick of metaphor retreated into what Jondi Keane refers to as a purely conceptual mode of thought. This slippage between figural connection and literal process alerted me, in the process of my attempt to foster place-based well-being at Lake Bolac, to the importance of time to writerly embodiment. My contribution to the Lake Bolac Eel Festival art exhibition was a written text, “Stay with me here”, conceived as my response to the themes of Rozalind Drummond’s photographs. To prepare this joint production, we mixed with staff and students at the Lake Bolac Secondary College. But this mode of embodiment made me feel curiously dis-embodied as a place-based writer. My embodiment was apparently superficial, only skin deep. Still this experience started me thinking about how the skin is actually thickly embodied as both body and where the body encounters, not only other bodies, but place itself—conceivably across many times. Skin is also the embodiment of writing to the degree that writing suggests an uncertain and queered form of embodiment. Skin, where the body reaches its limit, expires, touches other bodies or not, is inevitably implicated with writing as a fragile and always provisional, indexical embodiment. Nothing can be more easily either here or somewhere else than writing. Writing is an exhibition or gallery of anywhere, like skin in that both are un-placed in place. The one-pager “Stay with me here” explores how the instantaneous time and present-ness of Drummond’s photographs relate to the profusion of times and relations to other places immanent in Lake Bolac’s landscape and community (as evidenced, for example, in the image of a prep student yawning at the end of a long day in the midst of an ancient volcanic landscape, dreaming, perhaps, of somewhere else). To get to such issues of time and relationality of place, however, involves detouring via the notion of skin as suggested to me by my initial sense of dis-embodiment in Lake Bolac. “Stay with me here” works with an idea of skin as answer to the implied question, Where is here? It creates the (symbolic) embodiment of place precisely as a matter of skin, making skin-like writing an issue of transitory topography. The only permanent “here” is the skin. Emphasizing something valid for all writing, “here” (grammatically a context-dependent deictic) is the skin, where embodiment is defined by the constant possibility of re-embodiment, somewhere else, some time else. Reminding us that it is eminently possible to be elsewhere (from this place, from here), skin also suggests that you cannot be in two places at the one time (at least, not with the same embodiment). My skin is a sign that, because my embodiment in any particular place (any “here”) is only ever temporary, it is time that necessarily sustains my embodiment in any place whatsoever into the future. According to Henri Bergson, time must be creative, as the future hasn’t happened yet! “Time is invention or it is nothing at all” (341). The future of place, as much as of writing and of embodiment itself, is thus creatively sheathed in time as if within a skin. On Bergson’s view, time might be said to be least and greatest embodiment, for it is (dis-embodied) time that enables all future and currently un-created modes of embodiment. All of these time-inspired modes will involve a relationship to place (time can only “happen” in some version of place). And all of them will involve writing too, because time is the ultimate (dis-)embodiment of writing. As writing is like a skin, a minimal embodiment shared actually or potentially with more than one body, so time is the very possibility of writing (embodiment) into the future. “Stay with me here” explores how place is always already embodied in a relationship to other places, through the skin, and to the future of (a) place through the creativity of time as the skin of embodiment. By enriching descriptive and metaphoric practices of time, instability of place and awarenesses of the (dis-)embodied nature of writing—as a practice of skin—my text is useful to well-being as an analogue to the lived experience, in time and place, of the people of Lake Bolac. Theoretically, it weaves Bergson’s philosophy of time (time richly composed) into the fabric of Deleuze’s proposition that the health of a community is linked to the richness of the composition of its parts. Creatively, it celebrates the identity that the notion of “here” might enable, especially when read alongside and in dialogue with Drummond’s photographs in exhibition. Here is an abridged text of “Stay with me here:” “Stay with me here” There is salt in these lakes, anciently—rectilinear lakes never to be without ripple or stir. Pooling waters the islands of otherwise oceans, which people make out from hereabouts, make for, dream of. Stay with me here. Trusting to lessons delivered at the shore of a lake moves one closer to a deepness of instruction, where the water also learns. From our not being where we are, there. Stay with me here. What is perfection to water if not water? A time when photographs were born out of its swill and slosh. The image swimming knowingly to the surface—its first breaths of the perceiving air, its glimpsing itself once. The portraits of ourselves we do not dare. Such magical chemical reactions, as in, I react badly to you. Such salts! Stay with me here, elsewhere. As if one had simply washed up by chance, onto this desert island or any other place of sand and water trickling. Daring to imagine we’ll be there together. This is what I mean by… stay with me here. Notice these things—how music sounds different as one walks away; the emotional gymnastics with which you plan to impress; the skin of the eye that watches over you. Stay with me here—in your spectacular, careless brilliance. The edge of whatever it is one wants to say. The moment never to be photographed. Conclusion It is not for the artists to presume that they can empower a community. As Tasmin Lorraine notes, community is not a single person’s empowerment but “the empowerment of many assemblages of which one is part” (128). All communities, regional communities on the scale of Lake Bolac or communities of interest, are held in place by enthusiasm and common histories. We have focused on the embodiment of these common histories, which vary in an infinite number of degrees from the most literal to the most figurative, pulling from the filigree of experiences a web of interpersonal connections. Oscillating between metaphor and description, embodiment as variously presented in this article helps promote community and, by extension, individual well-being. The drawing out of sensations into forms that produce new experiences—like the drawing of breath, the drawing of a hot bath, or the drawing out of a story—enhances the permeability of boundaries opened to what touches upon them. It is not just that we can embody our values, but that we are able to craft, manifest, enact, sense and evoke the connections that take shape as our richly composed world, in which, as Deleuze notes, “it is no longer a matter of utilizations or captures, but of sociabilities and communities” (126). ReferencesAuge, Mark. Non-Places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso, 1995. Barrett, Estelle, and Barbara Bolt. Eds. Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007. Barthes, Roland. The Responsibility of Forms. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1998. Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988. Hollier, Denis. Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Hutchins, Edwin. “Enaction, Imagination and Insight.” Enaction: Towards a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science. Eds. J. Stewart, O. Gapenne, and E.A. Di Paolo. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. 425–450.Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Deleuze and Language. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.Lorraine, Tamsin. Deleuze and Guattari’s Immanent Ethics: Theory, Subjectivity and Duration. Albany: State University of New York at Albany, 2011.O’Sullivan, Simon. Art Encounters: Deleuze and Guattari—Thought beyond Representation. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Introduction Artist: June 2 at 11.26pm:‘To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.’ - Raymond Williams. (Singaporean Artists’ public Facebook Post) Can the critical arts exist without ‘place’?There is an ongoing debate on ‘place’ and where it begins and ends; on the ways that cities exist in both material and immaterial forms, and thereby, how to locate and understand place as an anchoring point amidst global flows (Massey; Merrifield). This debate extends to the global art- scape, as traditional conceptions of art and art-making attached to place require re-thinking in a paradigm where digital and immaterial networks, symbols and forums both complement and complicate the role that place has traditionally played (Luger, “Singaporean ‘Spaces of Hope?”). The digital art-scape has allowed for art-led provocations, transformations and disturbances to traditional institutions and gatekeepers (see Hartley’s “ Communication, Media, and Cultural Studies” concept of ‘gatekeeper’) of the art world, which often served as elite checkpoints and way-stations to artistic prominence. Still, contradictory and paradoxical questions emerge, since art cannot be divorced of place entirely, and ‘place’ often features as a topic, subject, or site of critical expression for art regardless of material or immaterial form. Critical art is at once place-bound and place-less; anchored to sites even as it transcends them completely.This paper will explore the dualistic tension – and somewhat contradictory relationship – between physical and digital artistic space through the case study of authoritarian Singapore, by focusing on a few examples of art-activists and the way that they have used and manipulated both physical and digital spaces for art-making. These examples draw upon research which took place in Singapore from 2012-2014 and which involved interviews with, and observation of, a selected sample (30) of art-activists (or “artivists”, to use Krischer’s definition). Findings point to a highly co-dependent relationship between physical and digital art places where both offer unique spaces of possibility and limitations. Therefore, place remains essential in art-making, even as digital avenues expand and amplify what critical art-practice can accomplish.Singapore’s Place-Bound and Place-Less Critical Art-Scape The arts in Singapore have a complicated, and often tense relationship with places such as the theatre, the gallery, and the public square. Though there has been a recent push (in the form of funding to arts groups and physical arts infrastructure) to make Singapore more of an arts and cultural destination (see Luger “The Cultural Grassroots and the Authoritarian City”), the Singaporean arts-scape remains bound by restrictions and limitations, and varying degrees of de facto (and de jure) censorship and self-policing. This has opened up spaces for critical art, albeit in sometimes creative and surprising forms. As explained to me by a Singaporean playwright,So they’re [the state] making venues, as well as festival organizers, as well as theatre companies, to …self-police, or self-censor. But for us on the ground, we use that as a way to focus on what we still want to say, and be creative about it, so that we circumvent the [state], with the intention of doing what we want to do. (Research interview, Singaporean playwright)Use of cyber-spaces is one way that artists circumvent repressive state structures. Restrictions on the use of place enliven cyberspace with an emancipatory and potentially transformative potential for the critical arts. Cyber-Singapore has a vocal art-activist network and has allowed some artists (such as the “Sticker Lady”) to gain wide national and even international followings. However, digital space cannot exist without physical place; indeed, the two exist, simultaneously, forming and re-forming each other. The arts cannot ‘happen’ online without a corresponding physical space for incubation, for practice, for human networking.It is important to note that in Singapore, art-led activism (or ‘artivism’) and traditional activism are closely related, and research indicated that activist networks often overlap with the art world. While this may be the case in many places, Singapore’s small geography and the relatively wide-berth given to the arts (as opposed to political activism) make these relationships especially strong. Therefore, many arts-spaces (theatres, galleries, studios) function as activist spaces; and non-art spaces such as public squares and university campuses often host art events and displays. Likewise, many of the artists that I interviewed are either directly, or indirectly, involved in more traditional activism as well.Singapore is an island-nation-city-state with a carefully planned urban fabric, the vast majority of which is state-owned (at least 80 % - resulting from large-scale land transfers from the British in the years surrounding Singapore’s independence in 1965). Though it has a Westminster-style parliamentary system (another colonial vestige), a single ruling party has commanded power for 50 years (the People’s Action Party, or PAP). Despite free elections and a liberal approach toward business, foreign investment and multiculturalism, Singapore retains a labyrinthine geography of government control over free expression, dictated through agencies such as the Censorship Review Committee (CRC); the Media Development Authority (MDA), and the National Arts Council (NAC) which work together in a confusing grid of checks and balances. This has presented a paradoxical and often contradictory approach to the arts and culture in which gradual liberalisations of everything from gay nightlife to university discourse have come hand-in-hand with continued restrictions on political activism and ‘taboo’ artistic / cultural themes. These ‘out of bounds’ themes (see Yue) include perceived threats to Singapore’s racial, religious, or political harmony – a grey area that is often at the discretion of particular government bureaucrats and administrators.Still, the Singaporean arts place (take the theatre, for example) has assumed a special role as a focal point for not only various types of visual and performance art, but also unrelated (or tangentially-related) activist causes as well. I asked a theatre director of a prominent alternative theatre where, in Singapore’s authoritarian urban fabric, there were opportunities for provocation? He stressed the theatres’ essential role in providing a physical platform for visual tensions and disturbance:You know, and on any given evening, you’ll see some punks or skinheads hanging outside there, and they kind of – create this disturbance in this neighbourhood, where, you know a passer-by is walking to his posh building, and then suddenly you know, there’s this bunch of boys with mohawks, you know, just standing there – and they are friendly! There’s nothing antagonistic or threatening, whatever. So, you know, that’s the kind of tension that we actually love to kind of generate!… That kind of surprise, that kind of, ‘oh, oh yes!’ we see this nice, expensive restaurant, this nice white building, and then these rough edges. And – that is where uh, those points where – where factions, where the rough edges meet –are where dialogue occurs. (Theatre Director, Singapore)That is not to say that the theatre comes without limits and caveats. It is financially precarious, as the Anglo-American model of corporate funding for the arts is not yet well-established in Singapore; interviews revealed that even much of the philanthropic donating to arts organizations comes from Singapore’s prominent political families and therefore the task of disentangling state interests from non-ideological arts patronage becomes difficult. With state - funding come problems with “taboo” subjects, as exemplified by the occasional banned-play or the constant threat of budget cuts or closure altogether: a carrot and stick approach by the state that allows arts organizations room to operate as long as the art produced does not disturb or provoke (too) much.Liew and Pang suggest that in Singapore, cyberspace has allowed a scale, a type of debate and a particularly cross-cutting conversation to take place: in a context where there are peculiar restrictions on the use and occupation of the built environment. They [ibid] found an emerging vocal, digital artistic grassroots that increasingly challenges the City-State’s dominant narratives: my empirical research therefore expands upon, and explores further, the possibility that Singapore’s cyber-spaces are both complementary to, and in some ways, more important than its material places in terms of providing spaces for political encounters.I conducted ‘netnography’ (see Kozinets) across Singapore’s web-scape and found that the online realm may be the ‘… primary site for discursive public activity in general and politics in particular’ (Mitchell, 122); a place where ‘everybody is coming together’ (Merrifield, 18). Without fear of state censorship, artists, activists and art-activists are not bound by the (same) set of restrictions that they might be if operating in a theatre, or certainly in a public place such as a park or square. Planetary cyber-Singapore exists inside and outside the City-State; it can be accessed remotely, and can connect with a far wider audience than a play performed in a small black box theatre.A number of blogs and satirical sites – including TheOnlineCitizen.sg, TheYawningBread.sg, and Demon-Cratic Singapore, openly criticize government policy in ways rarely heard in-situ or in even casual conversation on the street. Additionally, most activist causes and coalitions have digital versions where information is spread and support is gathered, spanning a range of issues. As is the case in material sites of activism in Singapore, artists frequently emerge as the loudest, most vocal, and most inter-disciplinary digital activists, helping to spearhead and cobble together cultural-activist coalitions and alliances. One example of this is the contrast between the place bound “Pink Dot” LGBTQ event (limited to the amount of people that can fit in Hong Lim Park, a central square) and its Facebook equivalent, We are Pink Dot public ‘group’. Pink Dot occurs each June in Singapore and involves around 10,000 people. The Internet’s representations of Pink Dot, however, have reached millions: Pink Dot has been featured in digital (and print) editions of major global newspapers including The Guardian and The New York Times. While not explicitly an art event, Pink Dot is artistic in nature as it uses pink ‘dots’ to side-step the official designation of being an LGBTQ pride event – which would not be sanctioned by the authorities (Gay Pride has not been allowed to take place in Singapore).The street artist Samantha Lo – also known as “Sticker Lady” – was jailed for her satirical stickers that she placed in various locations around Singapore. Unable to freely practice her art on city streets, she has become a sort of local artist - Internet celebrity, with her own Facebook Group called Free Sticker Lady (with over 1,000 members as of April, 2016). Through her Facebook group, Lo has been able to voice opinions that would be difficult – or even prohibited – with a loudspeaker on the street, or expressed through street art. As an open lesbian, she has also been active (and vocal) in the “Pink Dot” events. Her speech at “Pink Dot” was heard by the few-thousand in attendance at the time; her Facebook post (public without privacy settings) is available to the entire world:I'll be speaking during a small segment at Pink Dot tomorrow. Though only two minutes long, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about my speech and finding myself at a position where there's just so much to say. All my life, I've had to work twice as hard to prove myself, to be taken seriously. At 18, I made a conscious decision to cave in to societal pressures to conform after countless warnings of how I wouldn't be able to get a job, get married, etc. I grew my hair out, dressed differently, but was never truly comfortable with the person I became. That change was a choice, but I wasn't happy.Since then, I learnt that happiness wasn't a given, I had to work for it, for the ability to be comfortable in my own skin, to do what I love and to make something out of myself. (Artists’ Facebook Post)Yet, without the city street, Lo would not have gained her notoriety; without use of the park, Pink Dot would not have a Facebook presence or the ability to gather international press. The fact that Singaporean theatre exists at all as an important instigator of visual and performative tension demonstrates the significance of its physical address. Physical art places provide a crucial period of incubation – practice and becoming – that cannot really be replicated online. This includes schools and performance space but also in Singapore’s context, the ‘arts-housing’ that is provided by the government to small-scale, up-and-coming artists through a competitive grant process. Artists can receive gallery, performance or rehearsal space for a set amount of time on a rotating basis. Even with authoritarian restrictions, these spaces have been crucial for arts development:There’s a short-term [subsidised] residency studio …for up to 12 months. And so that –allows for a rotating group of artists to come with an idea in mind, use it for whatever- we’ve had artists who were preparing for a major show, and say ‘my studio space, my existing studio space is a bit too tiny, because I’m prepping for this show, I need a larger studio for 3 months. (Arts Administrator, Singapore)Critical and provocative art, limited and restricted by place, is thus still intrinsically bound to it. Indeed, the restrictions on artistic place allow cyber-art to flourish; cyber-art can only flourish with a strong place- based anchor. Far from supplanting place-based art, the digital art-scape forms a complement; digital and place-based art forms combine to form new hybridities in which local context and global forces write and re-write each other in a series of place and ‘placeless’ negotiations. Conclusion The examples that have been presented in this paper paint a picture of a complex landscape where specific urban sites are crucial anchoring nodes in a critical art ecosystem, but much artistic disturbance actually occurs online and in immaterial forms. This may hint at the possibility that globally, urban sites themselves are no longer sufficient for critical art to flourish and reach its full potential, especially as such sites have increasingly fallen prey to austerity policies, increasingly corporate and / or philanthropic programming and curation, and the comparatively wider reach and ease of access that digital spaces offer.Electronic or digital space – ranging from e-mail to social media (Twitter, blogs, Facebook and many others) has opened a new frontier in which, “… material public spaces in the city are superseded by the fora of television, radio talk shows and computer bulletin boards” (Mitchell. 122). The possibility now emerges whether digital space may be even more crucial than material public spaces in terms of emancipatory or critical potential– especially in authoritarian contexts where public space / place comes with particular limits and restrictions on assembling, performance, and critical expression. These contexts range from Taksim Square, Istanbul to Tiananmen Square, Beijing – but indeed, traditional public place has been increasingly privatized and securitized across the Western-liberal world as well. Where art occurs in place it is often stripped of its critical potential or political messages, sanctioned or sponsored by corporate groups or sanitized by public sector authorities (Schuilenburg, 277).The Singapore case may be especially stark due to Singapore’s small size (and corresponding lack of visible public ‘places’); authoritarian restrictions and correspondingly (relatively) un-policed and un-censored cyberspace. But it is fair to say that at a time when Youtube creates instant celebrities and Facebook likes or Instagram followers indicate fame and (potential) fortune – it is time to re-think and re-conceptualise the relationship between place, art, and the place-based institutions (such as grant-funding bodies or philanthropic organizations, galleries, critics or dealers) that have often served as “gatekeepers” to the art-scape. This invites challenges to the way these agents operate and the decision making process of policy-makers in the arts and cultural realm.Mitchell (124) reminded that there has “never been a revolution conducted exclusively in electronic space; at least not yet.” But that was 20 years ago. Singapore may offer a glimpse, however, of what such a revolution might look like. This revolution is neither completely place bound nor completely digital; it is one in which the material and immaterial interplay and overlap in post-modern complexity. Each platform plays a role, and understanding the way that art operates both in place and in “placeless” forms is crucial in understanding where key transformations take place in both the production of critical art and the production of urban space.What Hartley (“The Politics of Pictures”) called the “space of citizenry” is not necessarily confined to a building, the city street or a public square (or even private spaces such as the home, the car, the office). Sharon Zukin likewise suggested that ultimately, a negotiation of a city’s digital sphere is crucial for current-day urban research, arguing that:Though I do not think that online communities have replaced face to face interaction, I do think it is important to understand the way web-based media contribute to our urban imaginary. The interactive nature of the dialogue, how each post feeds on the preceding ones and elicits more, these are expressions of both difference and consensus, and they represent partial steps toward an open public sphere. (27)Traditional gatekeepers such as the theatre director, the museum curator and the state or philanthropic arts funding body have not disappeared, though they must adapt to the new cyber-reality as artists have new avenues around these traditional checkpoints. Accordingly – “old” problems such as de-jure and de-facto censorship reappear in the cyber art-scape as well: take the example of the Singaporean satirical bloggers that have been sued by the government in 2013-2016 (such as the socio-political bloggers and satirists Roy Ngerng and Alex Au). No web-space is truly open.A further complication may be the corporate nature of sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, or Twitter: far from truly democratic platforms or “agoras” in the traditional sense, these are for-profit (massive) corporations – which a small theatre is not. Singapore’s place based authoritarianism may be multiplied in the corporate authoritarianism or “CEO activism” of tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg, who allow for diverse use of digital platforms and encourage open expression and unfettered communication – as long as it is on their terms, within company policies that are not always transparent.Perhaps the questions then really are not where ‘art’ begins and ends, or where a place starts or stops – but rather where authoritarianism, state and corporate power begin and end in the hyper-connected global cyber-scape? And, if these power structures are now stretched across space and time as Marxist theorists such as Massey or Merrifield claimed, then what is the future for critical art and its relationship to ‘place’?Despite these unanswered questions and invitations for further exploration, the Singapore case may hint at what this emerging geography of place and ‘placeless’ art resembles and how such a new world may evolve moving forward. ReferencesHartley, John. The Politics of Pictures: the Creation of the Public in the Age of Popular Media. Perth: Psychology Press, 1992.———. Communication, Media, and Cultural Studies: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Routledge, 2012. Kozinets, Robert. Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online. New York: Sage, 2010. Krischer, Oliver. “Lateral Thinking: Artivist Networks in East Asia.” ArtAsia Pacific 77 (2012): 96-110. Liew, Kai Khiun. and Natalie Pang. “Neoliberal Visions, Post Capitalist Memories: Heritage Politics and the Counter-Mapping of Singapore’s City-Scape.” Ethnography 16.3 (2015): 331-351.Luger, Jason. “The Cultural Grassroots and the Authoritarian City: Spaces of Contestation in Singapore.” In T. Oakes and J. Wang, eds., Making Cultural Cities in Asia: Mobility, Assemblage, and the Politics of Aspirational Urbanism. London: Routledge, 2015: 204-218. ———. “Singaporean ‘Spaces of Hope?' Activist Geographies in the City-State.” City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 20.2 (2016): 186-203. Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Merrifield, Andy. The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013. Mitchell, Don. “The End of Public Space? People’s Park, Definitions of the Public, and Democracy.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85.1 (1996): 108-133. Schuilenburg, Marc. The Securitization of Society: Crime, Risk and Social Order. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: Penguin, 2008. Yue, Audrey. “Hawking in the Creative City: Rice Rhapsody, Sexuality and the Cultural Politics of New Asia in Singapore. Feminist Media Studies 7.4 (2007): 365-380. Zukin, Sharon. The Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

One of Woody Allen's first jobs was as a gag/joke writer indirectly for New York gossip columnists. To coordinate with the appearance of famous people at grand openings, Allen would write appropriately witty lines that a star's press agent would work hard to get placed in a newspaper column like Walter Winchell's. The lines would be treated as authentic quotes as the star entered the premiere, club or ceremony (Lax 71). His reputation grew from this ability to see what would be humorous to say in a very public setting, or just generally what would make a particular star look more engaged, more intelligent or more alluring. The presence, at least according to the gossip columnist, was real; what the famous person said was a fiction. If we turn the crystal around somewhat you can see quite a different engagement with the fictional real life. Jackie Chan, possibly the best-known film star, plays a variety of roles from police detective (the Police Story series to his Hollywood Rush Hour) to some saviour of a particular school of kung fu (think of the Dragon Lord series). One of the features of action/kung fu are the fight scenes, elaborately staged stunts of flying bodies and various forms of body blows that have become the base aesthetic of videogames such as Tekken. They have been reformed as a slightly changed aesthetic and with a great deal more pyrotechnics by director John Woo and his series of gun operas, from A Better Tomorrow to the Hollywood-financed Face/Off. The stunts in these various films are appealing in their fetishistic stop in the narrative. For a moment everything is arrested for the movement of bodies. The outcome, although not assured in each battle, is more or less guaranteed in the ultimate survival/triumph of Jackie Chan as hero. Like watching Western professional wrestling the question is always asked: 'was that real?' The melodramatic quality of the films combined with Chan's use of physical humour makes the audience debate the reality of the action sequences. Jackie Chan turns the question around as he resolutely performs all of his "stunts" in his own movies and he reinforces his real through the final trailer in his films as the credits roll, which shows the failed attempts at doing the various stunts where the blood flows and the ambulance occasionally arrives to take Chan away (Chan). Chan is more real in his fictional constructions because there is no blue screen or stunt double hanging from the bus or falling through glass ceilings. One of Chan's laments as he ages is that to ensure his career's longevity he must eventually adopt the "fake" "blue-screen" action style of the Stallones, Willises and Schwarzeneggers of the world. A third angle to view the crystalline refractions of public life is to observe President Clinton in his various representations during his impeachment trial. There are three moving images presented. First, there is the presidential image -- he continues to make speeches (think of the bizarre State of the Union address at the end of January; he presents policy initiatives and meets with international leaders, and we see these moments on the evening news or in stills for the newspaper front pages). Second, there are the medium close-ups edited with close-ups of the president's face, Hilary Clinton's face and their hands: this is the familial Clinton. Third is the washed-out videotaped evidence that Clinton gave to the Grand Jury investigation about his affair with Monica Lewinsky that the trial managers from the House of Representatives are using in the Senate impeachment trial: here is the juridical Clinton which melds the public and the private (think of Monica Lewinsky's testimony: "I saw him more as a man than a President"). Making sense of public life is then not so much about getting to the real or the non-fiction, although that seems to be the will-to-narrative that drives our desire to watch and listen to gossip about the famous. The fictions produced are deployed realities, produced and proliferated for certain functions (Foucault). Woody Allen's unseen efforts are producing the more complete self, where the public arena becomes an elaborate Lacanian mirror stage for an audience. Max Factor's make-up techniques in Hollywood are a similar technology that transforms the self into an image. Jackie Chan's apparently real stunt work has been redeployed into the exigencies of publicity for a Hollywood film; as Redford's Sundance Festival's construction of independent film becomes part of Hollywood's industrial appropriation machine, Jackie Chan willingly becomes part of the revitalisation of Hollywood through the Hong Kong aesthetic. His "real" invigorates the decaying action genre with its extratextual narrative of personal risk. Woody Allen's and Jackie Chan's fictions have been well integrated into the system of representation; after all, as members of the entertainment industry their world is a fictional space that intersects with reality to connect to an audience. Clinton represents something quite transitional and significant in his versions of the self. There are clear deployments of the self put in place by Kenneth Starr and the Congressional Republicans (sounds like a good name for a pop band) that not only place the fictional purity of the President against the backdrop of deceit and adulterated philandering. But there is also the remarkable play of the fictional deployed selves to the audience. This is not the end of the politician's career as we witnessed with Gary Hart's decline or a myriad of other American congressmen who have fallen into the fictions and moralities of a sex scandal. What we are witnessing is the sophisticated reading of the fictional public life by the cognoscenti who just happen to be the entire American populace. Grossberg once wrote in a lament that the right had monopolised what he called the affective economy in the United States. What he meant was that the right was able to mobilise sentiment and, in that way, shape the political and cultural agenda (Grossberg). The Clinton impeachment trial with its three clear versions of the self demonstrates that the overriding fiction of all the representations and the confusion between the real and the fictional production of the self -- something that has been a given in contemporary (we could call it modern) politics -- no longer works. What an audience now looks for is slippage in the fictional plates that reveal something else. The risk is perpetual that the manufactured fiction will not hold and another fiction will supplant it. Refracted, reflected and rerefracted, the fiction of public life has been revealed by its own mechanisms of concealment. Its crystalline structure is solid zirconium which is really quite fine. References Chan, Jackie, with Jeff Yang. I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action. St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1998. Foucault, Michel, in Rabinow and Dreyfus. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983. Grossberg, Lawrence. It's a Sin: Politics, Postmodernism and the Popular. Sydney: Power, 1988. Lax, Eric. Woody Allen: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1991. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA style: P. David Marshall. "The Fiction of Public Life." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.1 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/life.php>. Chicago style: P. David Marshall, "The Fiction of Public Life," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 1 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/life.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: P. David Marshall. (1999) The fiction of public life. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/life.php> ([your date of access]).

Dégueulasse is French slang for “disgusting,” derived in 1867 from the French verb dégueuler, to vomit. Despite its vulgar status, it is frequently used by almost every French speaker, including foreigners and students. It is also a term that has often been employed to describe the 1973 cult film, La Grande bouffe [Blow Out], by Marco Ferreri, which recounts in grotesque detail the gastronomic suicide of four male protagonists. This R-rated French-Italian production was booed, and the director spat on, at the 26th Cannes Film Festival—the Jury President, Ingrid Bergman, said it was the most “sordid” film she’d ever seen, and is even reported to have vomited after watching it (Télérama). Ferreri nevertheless walked away with the Prix FIPRESCI, awarded by the Federation of International Critics, and it is apparently the largest grossing release in the history of Paris with more than 700,000 entries in Paris and almost 3 million in France overall. Scandal sells, and this was especially seemingly so 1970s, when this film was avidly consumed as part of an unholy trinity alongside Bernardo Bertolucci’s Le Dernier Tango à Paris [Last Tango in Paris] (1972) and Jean Eustache’s La Maman et la putain [The Mother and the Whore] (1973). Fast forward forty years, though, and at the very moment when La Grande bouffe was being commemorated with a special screening on the 2013 Cannes Film Festival programme, a handful of University of Melbourne French students in a subject called “Matters of Taste” were boycotting the film as an unacceptable assault to their sensibilities. Over the decade that I have been showing the film to undergraduate students, this has never happened before. In this article, I want to examine critically the questions of taste that underpin this particular predicament. Analysing firstly the intradiegetic portrayal of taste in the film, through both gustatory and aesthetic signifiers, then the choice of the film as a key element in a University subject corpus, I will finally question the (dis)taste displayed by certain students, contextualising it as part of an ongoing socio-cultural commentary on food, sex, life, and death. Framed by a brief foray into Bourdieusian theories of taste, I will attempt to draw some conclusions on the continual renegotiation of gustatory and aesthetic tastes in relation to La Grande bouffe, and thereby deepen understanding of why it has become the incarnation of dégueulasse today. Theories of Taste In the 1970s, the parameters of “good” and “bad” taste imploded in the West, following political challenges to the power of the bourgeoisie that also undermined their status as the contemporary arbiters of taste. This revolution of manners was particularly shattering in France, fuelled by the initial success of the May 68 student, worker, and women’s rights movements (Ross). The democratization of taste served to legitimize desires different from those previously dictated by bourgeois norms, enabling greater diversity in representing taste across a broad spectrum. It was reflected in the cultural products of the 1970s, including cinema, which had already broken with tradition during the New Wave in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and became a vector for political ideologies as well as radical aesthetic choices (Smith). Commonly regarded as “the decade that taste forgot,” the 1970s were also a time for re-assessing the sociology of taste, with the magisterial publication of Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979, English trans. 1984). As Bourdieu refuted Kant’s differentiation between the legitimate aesthetic, so defined by its “disinterestedness,” and the common aesthetic, derived from sensory pleasures and ordinary meanings, he also attempted to abolish the opposition between the “taste of reflection” (pure pleasure) and the “taste of sense” (facile pleasure) (Bourdieu 7). In so doing, he laid the foundations of a new paradigm for understanding the apparently incommensurable choices that are not the innate expression of our unique personalities, but rather the product of our class, education, family experiences—our habitus. Where Bourdieu’s theories align most closely with the relationship between taste and revulsion is in the realm of aesthetic disposition and its desire to differentiate: “good” taste is almost always predicated on the distaste of the tastes of others. Tastes (i.e. manifested preferences) are the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference. It is no accident that, when they have to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the refusal of other tastes. In matters of taste, more than anywhere else, all determination is negation; and tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance (“sick-making”) of the tastes of others. “De gustibus non est disputandum”: not because “tous les goûts sont dans la nature,” but because each taste feels itself to be natural—and so it almost is, being a habitus—which amounts to rejecting others as unnatural and therefore vicious. Aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent. Aversion to different life-styles is perhaps one of the strongest barriers between the classes (Bourdieu). Although today’s “Gen Y” Melbourne University students are a long way from 1970s French working class/bourgeois culture clashes, these observations on taste as the corollary of distaste are still salient tools of interpretation of their attitudes towards La Grande bouffe. And, just as Bourdieu effectively deconstructed Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and the 18th “century of taste” notions of universality and morality in aesthetics (Dickie, Gadamer, Allison) in his groundbreaking study of distinction, his own theories have in turn been subject to revision in an age of omnivorous consumption and eclectic globalisation, with various cultural practices further destabilising the hierarchies that formerly monopolized legitimate taste (Sciences Humaines, etc). Bourdieu’s theories are still, however, useful for analysing La Grande bouffe given the contemporaneous production of these texts, as they provide a frame for understanding (dis)taste both within the filmic narrative and in the wider context of its reception. Taste and Distaste in La Grande bouffe To go to the cinema is like to eat or shit, it’s a physiological act, it’s urban guerrilla […] Enough with feelings, I want to make a physiological film (Celluloid Liberation Front). Marco Ferreri’s statements about his motivations for La Grande bouffe coincide here with Bourdieu’s explanation of taste: clearly the director wished to depart from psychological cinema favoured by contemporary critics and audiences and demonstrated his distaste for their preference. There were, however, psychological impulses underpinning his subject matter, as according to film academic Maurizio Viano, Ferrari had a self-destructive, compulsive relation to food, having been forced to spend a few weeks in a Swiss clinic specialising in eating disorders in 1972–1973 (Viano). Food issues abound in his biography. In an interview with Tullio Masoni, the director declared: “I was fat as a child”; his composer Phillipe Sarde recalls the grand Italian-style dinners that he would organise in Paris during the film; and, two of the film’s stars, Marcello Mastroianni and Ugo Tognazzi, actually credit the conception of La Grande bouffe to a Rabelaisian feast prepared by Tognazzi, during which Ferreri exclaimed “hey guys, we are killing ourselves!” (Viano 197–8). Evidently, there were psychological factors behind this film, but it was nevertheless the physiological aspects that Ferreri chose to foreground in his creation. The resulting film does indeed privilege the physiological, as the protagonists fornicate, fart, vomit, defecate, and—of course—eat, to wild excess. The opening scenes do not betray such sordid sequences; the four bourgeois men are introduced one by one so as to establish their class credentials as well as display their different tastes. We first encounter Ugo (Tognazzi), an Italian chef of humble peasant origins, as he leaves his elegant restaurant “Le Biscuit à soupe” and his bourgeois French wife, to take his knives and recipes away with him for the weekend. Then Michel (Piccoli), a TV host who has pre-taped his shows, gives his apartment keys to his 1970s-styled baba-cool daughter as he bids her farewell, and packs up his cleaning products and rubber gloves to take with him. Marcello (Mastroianni) emerges from a cockpit in his aviator sunglasses and smart pilot’s uniform, ordering his sexy airhostesses to carry his cheese and wine for him as he takes a last longing look around his plane. Finally, the judge and owner of the property where the action will unfold, Philippe (Noiret), is awoken by an elderly woman, Nicole, who feeds him tea and brioche, pestering him for details of his whereabouts for the weekend, until he demonstrates his free will and authority, joking about his serious life, and lying to her about attending a legal conference in London. Having given over power of attorney to Nicole, he hints at the finality of his departure, but is trying to wrest back his independence as his nanny exhorts him not to go off with whores. She would rather continue to “sacrifice herself for him” and “keep it in the family,” as she discreetly pleasures him in this scene. Scholars have identified each protagonist as an ideological signifier. For some, they represent power—Philippe is justice—and three products of that ideology: Michel is spectacle, Ugo is food, and Marcello is adventure (Celluloid Liberation Front). For others, these characters are the perfect incarnations of the first four Freudian stages of sexual development: Philippe is Oedipal, Michel is indifferent, Ugo is oral, and Marcello is impotent (Tury & Peter); or even the four temperaments of Hippocratic humouralism: Philippe the phlegmatic, Michel the melancholic, Ugo the sanguine, and Marcello the choleric (Calvesi, Viano). I would like to offer another dimension to these categories, positing that it is each protagonist’s taste that prescribes his participation in this gastronomic suicide as well as the means by which he eventually dies. Before I develop this hypothesis, I will first describe the main thrust of the narrative. The four men arrive at the villa at 68 rue Boileau where they intend to end their days (although this is not yet revealed). All is prepared for the most sophisticated and decadent feasting imaginable, with a delivery of the best meats and poultry unfurling like a surrealist painting. Surrounded by elegant artworks and demonstrating their cultural capital by reciting Shakespeare, Brillat-Savarin, and other classics, the men embark on a race to their death, beginning with a competition to eat the most oysters while watching a vintage pornographic slideshow. There is a strong thread of masculine athletic engagement in this film, as has been studied in detail by James R. Keller in “Four Little Caligulas: La Grande bouffe, Consumption and Male Masochism,” and this is exacerbated by the arrival of a young but matronly schoolmistress Andréa (Ferréol) with her students who want to see the garden. She accepts the men’s invitation to stay on in the house to become another object of competitive desire, and fully embraces all the sexual and gustatory indulgence around her. Marcello goes further by inviting three prostitutes to join them and Ugo prepares a banquet fit for a funeral. The excessive eating makes Michel flatulent and Marcello impotent; when Marcello kicks the toilet in frustration, it explodes in the famous fecal fountain scene that apparently so disgusted his then partner Catherine Deneuve, that she did not speak to him for a week (Ebert). The prostitutes flee the revolting madness, but Andréa stays like an Angel of Death, helping the men meet their end and, in surviving, perhaps symbolically marking an end to the masculinist bourgeoisie they represent.To return to the role of taste in defining the rise and demise of the protagonists, let me begin with Marcello, as he is the first to die. Despite his bourgeois attitudes, he is a modern man, associated with machines and mobility, such as the planes and the beautiful Bugatti, which he strokes with greater sensuality than the women he hoists onto it. His taste is for the functioning mechanical body, fast and competitive, much like himself when he is gorging on oysters. But his own body betrays him when his “masculine mechanics” stop functioning, and it is the fact that the Bugatti has broken down that actually causes his death—he is found frozen in driver’s seat after trying to escape in the Bugatti during the night. Marcello’s taste for the mechanical leads therefore to his eventual demise. Michel is the next victim of his own taste, which privileges aesthetic beauty, elegance, the arts, and fashion, and euphemises the less attractive or impolite, the scatological, boorish side of life. His feminized attire—pink polo-neck and flowing caftan—cannot distract from what is happening in his body. The bourgeois manners that bind him to beauty mean that breaking wind traumatises him. His elegant gestures at the dance barre encourage rather than disguise his flatulence; his loud piano playing cannot cover the sound of his loud farts, much to the mirth of Philippe and Andréa. In a final effort to conceal his painful bowel obstruction, he slips outside to die in obscene and noisy agony, balanced in an improbably balletic pose on the balcony balustrade. His desire for elegance and euphemism heralds his death. Neither Marcello nor Michel go willingly to their ends. Their tastes are thwarted, and their deaths are disgusting to them. Their cadavers are placed in the freezer room as silent witnesses to the orgy that accelerates towards its fatal goal. Ugo’s taste is more earthy and inherently linked to the aims of the adventure. He is the one who states explicitly: “If you don’t eat, you won’t die.” He wants to cook for others and be appreciated for his talents, as well as eat and have sex, preferably at the same time. It is a combination of these desires that kills him as he force-feeds himself the monumental creation of pâté in the shape of the Cathedral of Saint-Peter that has been rejected as too dry by Philippe, and too rich by Andréa. The pride that makes him attempt to finish eating his masterpiece while Andréa masturbates him on the dining table leads to a heart-stopping finale for Ugo. As for Philippe, his taste is transgressive. In spite of his upstanding career as a judge, he lies and flouts convention in his unorthodox relationship with nanny Nicole. Andréa represents another maternal figure to whom he is attracted and, while he wishes to marry her, thereby conforming to bourgeois norms, he also has sex with her, and her promiscuous nature is clearly signalled. Given his status as a judge, he reasons that he can not bring Marcello’s frozen body inside because concealing a cadaver is a crime, yet he promotes collective suicide on his premises. Philippe’s final transgression of the rules combines diabetic disobedience with Oedipal complex—Andréa serves him a sugary pink jelly dessert in the form of a woman’s breasts, complete with cherries, which he consumes knowingly and mournfully, causing his death. Unlike Marcello and Michel, Ugo and Philippe choose their demise by indulging their tastes for ingestion and transgression. Following Ferreri’s motivations and this analysis of the four male protagonists, taste is clearly a cornerstone of La Grande bouffe’s conception and narrative structure. It is equally evident that these tastes are contrary to bourgeois norms, provoking distaste and even revulsion in spectators. The film’s reception at the time of its release and ever since have confirmed this tendency in both critical reviews and popular feedback as André Habib’s article on Salo and La Grande bouffe (2001) meticulously demonstrates. With such a violent reaction, one might wonder why La Grande bouffe is found on so many cinema studies curricula and is considered to be a must-see film (The Guardian). Corpus and Corporeality in Food Film Studies I chose La Grande bouffe as the first film in the “Matters of Taste” subject, alongside Luis Bunuel’s Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast, and Laurent Bénégui’s Au Petit Marguery, as all are considered classic films depicting French eating cultures. Certainly any French cinema student would know La Grande bouffe and most cinephiles around the world have seen it. It is essential background knowledge for students studying French eating cultures and features as a key reference in much scholarly research and popular culture on the subject. After explaining the canonical status of La Grande bouffe and thus validating its inclusion in the course, I warned students about the explicit nature of the film. We studied it for one week out of the 12 weeks of semester, focusing on questions of taste in the film and the socio-cultural representations of food. Although the almost ubiquitous response was: “C’est dégueulasse!,” there was no serious resistance until the final exam when a few students declared that they would boycott any questions on La Grande bouffe. I had not actually included any such questions in the exam. The student evaluations at the end of semester indicated that several students questioned the inclusion of this “disgusting pornography” in the corpus. There is undoubtedly less nudity, violence, gore, or sex in this film than in the Game of Thrones TV series. What, then, repulses these Gen Y students? Is it as Pasolini suggests, the neorealistic dialogue and décor that disturbs, given the ontologically challenging subject of suicide? (Viano). Or is it the fact that there is no reason given for the desire to end their lives, which privileges the physiological over the psychological? Is the scatological more confronting than the pornographic? Interestingly, “food porn” is now a widely accepted term to describe a glamourized and sometimes sexualized presentation of food, with Nigella Lawson as its star, and hundreds of blog sites reinforcing its popularity. Yet as Andrew Chan points out in his article “La Grande bouffe: Cooking Shows as Pornography,” this film is where it all began: “the genealogy reaches further back, as brilliantly visualized in Marco Ferreri’s 1973 film La Grande bouffe, in which four men eat, screw and fart themselves to death” (47). Is it the overt corporeality depicted in the film that shocks cerebral students into revulsion and rebellion? Conclusion In the guise of a conclusion, I suggest that my Gen Y students’ taste may reveal a Bourdieusian distaste for the taste of others, in a third degree reaction to the 1970s distaste for bourgeois taste. First degree: Ferreri and his entourage reject the psychological for the physiological in order to condemn bourgeois values, provoking scandal in the 1970s, but providing compelling cinema on a socio-political scale. Second degree: in spite of the outcry, high audience numbers demonstrate their taste for scandal, and La Grande bouffe becomes a must-see canonical film, encouraging my choice to include it in the “Matters of Taste” corpus. Third degree: my Gen Y students’ taste expresses a distaste for the academic norms that I have embraced in showing them the film, a distaste that may be more aesthetic than political. Oui, c’est dégueulasse, mais … Bibliography Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2001. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1984. Calvesi, M. “Dipingere all moviola” (Painting at the Moviola). Corriere della Sera, 10 Oct. 1976. Reprint. “Arti figurative e il cinema” (Cinema and the Visual Arts). Avanguardia di massa. Ed. M. Calvesi. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978. 243–46. Celluloid Liberation Front. “Consumerist Ultimate Indigestion: La Grande Bouffe's Deadly Physiological Pleasures.” Bright Lights Film Journal 60 (2008). 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://brightlightsfilm.com/60/60lagrandebouffe.php#.Utd6gs1-es5›. Chan, Andrew. “La Grande bouffe: Cooking Shows as Pornography.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 3.4 (2003): 47–53. Dickie, George. The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Ebert, Roger, “La Grande bouffe.” 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/la-grande-bouffe-1973›. Ferreri, Marco. La Grande bouffe. Italy-France, 1973. Freedman, Paul H. Food: The History of Taste. U of California P, 2007. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Winsheimer and Donald C. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1999. Habib, André. “Remarques sur une ‘réception impossible’: Salo and La Grande bouffe.” Hors champ (cinéma), 4 Jan. 2001. 11 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/cinema/030101/salo-bouffe.html›. Keller, James R. “Four Little Caligulas: La Grande bouffe, Consumption and Male Masochism.” Food, Film and Culture: A Genre Study. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co, 2006: 49–59. Masoni, Tullio. Marco Ferreri. Gremese, 1998. Pasolini, P.P. “Le ambigue forme della ritualita narrativa.” Cinema Nuovo 231 (1974): 342–46. Ross, Kristin. May 68 and its Afterlives. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Smith, Alison. French Cinema in the 1970s: The Echoes of May. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005. Télérama: “La Grande bouffe: l’un des derniers grands scandales du Festival de Cannes. 19 May 2013. 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.telerama.fr/festival-de-cannes/2013/la-grande-bouffe-l-un-des-derniers-grands-scandales-du-festival-de-cannes,97615.php›. The Guardian: 1000 films to see before you die. 2007. 17 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/film/series/1000-films-to-see-before-you-die› Tury, F., and O. Peter. “Food, Life, and Death: The Film La Grande bouffe of Marco Ferreri in an Art Psychological Point of View.” European Psychiatry 22.1 (2007): S214. Viano, Maurizio. “La Grande Abbuffata/La Grande bouffe.” The Cinema of Italy. Ed. Giorgio Bertellini. London: Wallflower Press, 2004: 193–202.

Property as both an idea and a practice has been interpreted through the prism of a liberal, law and economics paradigm since at least the 18th century. This dominant (and domineering) perspective stresses the primacy of individualism, the power of exclusion, and the values of private commodity. By contrast, concepts of property that evolved out of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s challenged this hegemony. Countercultural, or Aquarian, ideas of property stressed pre-liberal, long forgotten property norms such as sociability, community, inclusion and personhood, and contested a private uniformity that seemed “totalizing and universalizing” (Blomley, Unsettling 102). This paper situates what it terms “Aquarian property” in the context of emergent property theory in the 1960s and 1970s, and the propertied practices these new theories engendered. Importantly, this paper also grounds Aquarian ideas of property to location. As legal geographers observe, the law inexorably occurs in place as well as time. “Nearly every aspect of law is located, takes place, is in motion, or has some spatial frame of reference” (Braverman et al. 1). Property’s radical yet simultaneously ancient alter-narrative found fertile soil where the countercultural experiment flourished. In Australia, one such place was the green, sub-tropical landscape of the New South Wales Northern Rivers, home of the 1973 Australian Union of Student’s Aquarius Festival at Nimbin. The Counterculture and Property Theory Well before the “Age of Aquarius” entered western youth consciousness (Munro-Clark 56), and 19 years before the Nimbin Aquarius Festival, US legal scholar Felix Cohen defined property in seminally private and exclusionary terms. To the world: Keep off X unless you have my permission, which I may grant or withhold.Signed: Private citizenEndorsed: The state. (374) Cohen’s formula was private property at its 1950s apogee, an unambiguous expression of its centrality to post-war materialism. William Blackstone’s famous trope of property as “that sole and despotic dominion” had become self-fulfilling (Rose, Canons). Why had this occurred? What had made property so narrow and instrumentalist to a private end? Several property theorists identify the enclosure period in the 17th and 18th centuries as seminal to this change (Blomley, Law; Graham). The enclosures, and their discourse of improvement and modernity, saw ancient common rights swept away in favour of the liberal private right. Property diversity was supplanted by monotony, group rights by the individual, and inclusion by exclusion. Common property rights were rights of shared use, traditionally agrarian incidents enjoyed through community membership. However, for the proponents of enclosure, common rights stood in the way of progress. Thus, what was once a vested right (such as the common right to glean) became a “mere practice”, condemned by its “universal promiscuity” and perceptions of vagrancy (Buck 17-8). What was once sited to context, to village and parish, evolved into abstraction. And what had meaning for person and place, “a sense of self; […] a part of a tribe’ (Neeson 180), became a tradable commodity, detached and indifferent to the consequences of its adverse use (Leopold). These were the transformed ideas of property exported to so-called “settler” societies, where colonialists demanded the secure property rights denied to them at home. In the common law tradition, a very modern yet selective amnesia took hold, a collective forgetting of property’s shared and sociable past (McLaren). Yet, property as commodity proved to be a narrow, one-sided account of property, an unsatisfactory “half right” explanation (Alexander 2) that omits inconvenient links between ownership on the one hand, and self and place on the other. Pioneering US conservationist Aldo Leopold detected as much a few years before Felix Cohen’s defining statement of private dominance. In Leopold’s iconic A Sand County Almanac, he wrote presciently of the curious phenomenon of hardheaded farmers replanting selected paddocks with native wildflowers. As if foreseeing what the next few decades may bring, Leopold describes a growing resistance to the dominant property paradigm: I call it Revolt – revolt against the tedium of the merely economic attitude towards land. We assume that because we had to subjugate the land to live on it, the best farm is therefore the one most completely tamed. These […] farmers have learned from experience that the wholly tamed farm offers not only a slender livelihood but a constricted life. (188)By the early 1960s, frustrations over the constrictions of post-war life were given voice in dissenting property literature. Affirming that property is a social institution, emerging ideas of property conformed to the contours of changing values (Singer), and the countercultural zeitgeist sweeping America’s universities (Miller). Thus, in 1964, Charles Reich saw property as the vanguard for a new civic compact, an ambitious “New Property” that would transform “government largess” into a property right to address social inequity. For Joseph Sax, property scholar and author of a groundbreaking citizen’s manifesto, the assertion of public property rights were critical to the protection of the environment (174). And in 1972, to Christopher Stone, it seemed a natural property incident that trees should enjoy equivalent standing to legal persons. In an age when “progress” was measured by the installation of plastic trees in Los Angeles median strips (Tribe), jurists aspired to new ideas of property with social justice and environmental resonance. Theirs was a scholarly “Revolt” against the tedium of property as commodity, an act of resistance to the centuries-old conformity of the enclosures (Blomley, Law). Aquarian Theory in Propertied Practice Imagining new property ideas in theory yielded in practice a diverse Aquarian tenure. In the emerging communes and intentional communities of the late 1960s and early 1970s, common property norms were unwittingly absorbed into their ethos and legal structure (Zablocki; Page). As a “way out of a dead-end future” (Smith and Crossley), a generation of young, mostly university-educated people sought new ways to relate to land. Yet, as Benjamin Zablocki observed at the time, “there is surprisingly little awareness among present-day communitarians of their historical forebears” (43). The alchemy that was property and the counterculture was given form and substance by place, time, geography, climate, culture, and social history. Unlike the dominant private paradigm that was placeless and universal, the tenurial experiments of the counter-culture were contextual and diverse. Hence, to generalise is to invite the problematic. Nonetheless, three broad themes of Aquarian property are discernible. First, property ceased being a vehicle for the acquisition of private wealth; rather it invested self-meaning within a communitarian context, “a sense of self [as] a part of a tribe.” Second, the “back to the land” movement signified a return to the country, an interregnum in the otherwise unidirectional post-enclosure drift to the city. Third, Aquarian property was premised on obligation, recognising that ownership was more than a bundle of autonomous rights, but rights imbricated with a corresponding duty to land health. Like common property and its practices of sustained yield, Aquarian owners were environmental stewards, with inter-connected responsibilities to others and the earth (Page). The counterculture was a journey in self-fulfillment, a search for personal identity amidst the empowerment of community. Property’s role in the counterculture was to affirm the under-regarded notion of property as propriety; where ownership fostered well lived and capacious lives in flourishing communities (Alexander). As Margaret Munro-Clark observed of the early 1970s, “the enrichment of individual identity or selfhood [is] the distinguishing mark of the current wave of communitarianism” (33). Or, as another 1970s settler remarked twenty years later, “our ownership means that we can’t liquefy our assets and move on with any appreciable amount of capital. This arrangement has many advantages; we don’t waste time wondering if we would be better off living somewhere else, so we have commitment to place and community” (Metcalf 52). In personhood terms, property became “who we are, how we live” (Lismore Regional Gallery), not a measure of commoditised worth. Personhood also took legal form, manifested in early title-holding structures, where consensus-based co-operatives (in which capital gain was precluded) were favoured ideologically over the capitalist, majority-rules corporation (Munro-Clark). As noted, Aquarian property was also predominantly rural. For many communitarians, the way out of a soulless urban life was to abandon its difficulties for the yearnings of a simpler rural idyll (Smith and Crossley). The 1970s saw an extraordinary return to the physicality of land, measured by a willingness to get “earth under the nails” (Farran). In Australia, communities proliferated on the NSW Northern Rivers, in Western Australia’s southwest, and in the rural hinterlands behind Queensland’s Sunshine Coast and Cairns. In New Zealand, intentional communities appeared on the rural Coromandel Peninsula, east of Auckland, and in the Golden Bay region on the remote northwestern tip of the South Island. In all these localities, land was plentiful, the climate seemed sunny, and the landscape soulful. Aquarians “bought cheap land in beautiful places in which to opt out and live a simpler life [...] in remote backwaters, up mountains, in steep valleys, or on the shorelines of wild coastal districts” (Sargisson and Sargent 117). Their “hard won freedom” was to escape from city life, suffused by a belief that “the city is hardly needed, life should spring out of the country” (Jones and Baker 5). Aquarian property likewise instilled environmental ethics into the notion of land ownership. Michael Metzger, writing in 1975 in the barely minted Ecology Law Quarterly, observed that humankind had forgotten three basic ecological laws, that “everything is connected to everything else”, that “everything must go somewhere”, and that “nature knows best” (797). With an ever-increasing focus on abstraction, the language of private property: enabled us to create separate realities, and to remove ourselves from the natural world in which we live to a cerebral world of our own creation. When we act in accord with our artificial world, the disastrous impact of our fantasies upon the natural world in which we live is ignored. (796)By contrast, Aquarian property was intrinsically contextual. It revolved around the owner as environmental steward, whose duty it was “to repair the ravages of previous land use battles, and to live in accord with the natural environment” (Aquarian Archives). Reflecting ancient common rights, Aquarian property rights internalised norms of prudence, proportionality and moderation of resource use (Rose, Futures). Simply, an ecological view of land ownership was necessary for survival. As Dr. Moss Cass, the Federal environment minister wrote in the preface to The Way Out: Radical Alternatives in Australia, ‘”there is a common conviction that something is rotten at the core of conventional human existence.” Across the Tasman, the sense of latent environmental crisis was equally palpable, “we are surrounded by glistening surfaces and rotten centres” (Jones and Baker 5). Property and Countercultural Place and Time In the emerging discipline of legal geography, the law and its institutions (such as property) are explained through the prism of spatiotemporal context. What even more recent law and geography scholarship argues is that space is privileged as “theoretically interesting” while “temporality is reduced to empirical history” (Braverman et al. 53). This part seeks to consider the intersection of property, the counterculture, and time and place without privileging either the spatial or temporal dimensions. It considers simply the place of Nimbin, New South Wales, in early May 1973, and how property conformed to the exigencies of both. Legal geographers also see property through the theory of performance. Through this view, property is a “relational effect, not a prior ground, that is brought into being by the very act of performance” (Blomley, Performing 13). In other words, doing does not merely describe or represent property, but it enacts, such that property becomes a reality through its performance. In short, property is because it does. Performance theory is liberating (Page et al) because it concentrates not on property’s arcane rules and doctrines, nor on the legal geographer’s alleged privileging of place over time, but on its simple doing. Thus, Nicholas Blomley sees private property as a series of constant and reiterative performances: paying rates, building fences, registering titles, and so on. Adopting this approach, Aquarian property is described as a series of performances, seen through the prism of the legal practitioner, and its countercultural participants. The intersection of counterculture and property law implicated my family in its performative narrative. My father had been a solicitor in Nimbin since 1948; his modest legal practice was conducted from the side annexe of the School of Arts. Equipped with a battered leather briefcase and a trusty portable typewriter, like clockwork, he drove the 20 miles from Lismore to Nimbin every Saturday morning. I often accompanied him on his weekly visits. Forty-one years ago, in early May 1973, we drove into town to an extraordinary sight. Seen through ten-year old eyes, surreal scenes of energy, colour, and longhaired, bare-footed young people remain vivid. At almost the exact halfway point in my father’s legal career, new ways of thinking about property rushed headlong and irrevocably into his working life. After May 1973, dinnertime conversations became very different. Gone was the mundane monopoly of mortgages, subdivisions, and cottage conveyancing. The topics now ranged to hippies, communes, co-operatives and shared ownerships. Property was no longer a dull transactional monochrome, a lifeless file bound in pink legal tape. It became an idea replete with diversity and innovation, a concept populated with interesting characters and entertaining, often quirky stories. If property is a narrative (Rose, Persuasion), then the micro-story of property on the NSW Northern Rivers became infinitely more compelling and interesting in the years after Aquarius. For the practitioner, Aquarian property involved new practices and skills: the registration of co-operatives, the drafting of shareholder deeds that regulated the use of common lands, the settling of idealistic trusts, and the ever-increasing frequency of visits to the Nimbin School of Arts every working Saturday. For the 1970s settler in Nimbin, performing Aquarian property took more direct and lived forms. It may have started by reading the open letter that festival co-organiser Graeme Dunstan wrote to the Federal Minister for Urban Affairs, Tom Uren, inviting him to Nimbin as a “holiday rather than a political duty”, and seeking his support for “a community group of 100-200 people to hold a lease dedicated to building a self-sufficient community [...] whose central design principles are creative living and ecological survival” (1). It lay in the performances at the Festival’s Learning Exchange, where ideas of philosophy, organic farming, alternative technology, and law reform were debated in free and unstructured form, the key topics of the latter being abortion and land. And as the Festival came to its conclusion, it was the gathering at the showground, titled “After Nimbin What?—How will the social and environmental experiment at Nimbin effect the setting up of alternative communities, not only in the North Coast, but generally in Australia” (Richmond River Historical Society). In the days and months after Aquarius, it was the founding of new communities such as Co-ordination Co-operative at Tuntable Creek, described by co-founder Terry McGee in 1973 as “a radical experiment in a new way of life. The people who join us […] have to be prepared to jump off the cliff with the certainty that when they get to the bottom, they will be all right” (Munro-Clark 126; Cock 121). The image of jumping off a cliff is a metaphorical performance that supposes a leap into the unknown. While orthodox concepts of property in land were left behind, discarded at the top, the Aquarian leap was not so much into the unknown, but the long forgotten. The success of those communities that survived lay in the innovative and adaptive ways in which common forms of property fitted into registered land title, a system otherwise premised on individual ownership. Achieved through the use of outside private shells—title-holding co-operatives or companies (Page)—inside the shell, the norms and practices of common property were inclusively facilitated and performed (McLaren; Rose, Futures). In 2014, the performance of Aquarian property endures, in the dozens of intentional communities in the Nimbin environs that remain a witness to the zeal and spirit of the times and its countercultural ideals. Conclusion The Aquarian idea of property had profound meaning for self, community, and the environment. It was simultaneously new and old, radical as well as ancient. It re-invented a pre-liberal, pre-enclosure idea of property. For property theory, its legacy is its imaginings of diversity, the idea that property can take pluralistic forms and assert multiple values, a defiant challenge to the dominant paradigm. Aquarian property offers rich pickings compared to the pauperised private monotone. Over 41 years ago, in the legal geography that was Nimbin, New South Wales, the imaginings of property escaped the conformity of enclosure. The Aquarian age represented a moment in “thickened time” (Braverman et al 53), when dissenting theory became practice, and the idea of property indelibly changed for a handful of serendipitous actors, the unscripted performers of a countercultural narrative faithful to its time and place. References Alexander, Gregory. Commodity & Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought 1776-1970. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Aquarian Archives. "Report into Facilitation of a Rural Intentional Community." Lismore, NSW: Southern Cross University. Blomley, Nicholas. Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power. New York: Guildford Press, 1994. Blomley, Nicholas. Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property. New York: Routledge, 2004. Blomley, Nicholas. “Performing Property, Making the World.” Social Studies Research Network 2053656. 5 Aug. 2013 ‹http://ssrn.com/abstract=2053656›. Braverman, Irus, Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney, and Sandy Kedar. The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2014. Buck, Andrew. The Making of Australian Property Law. Sydney: Federation Press, 2006. Cock, Peter. Alternative Australia: Communities of the Future. London: Quartet Books, 1979. Cohen, Felix. “Dialogue on Private Property.” Rutgers Law Review 9 (1954): 357-387. Dunstan, Graeme. “A Beginning Rather than an End.” The Nimbin Good Times 27 Mar. 1973: 1. Farran, Sue. “Earth under the Nails: The Extraordinary Return to the Land.” Modern Studies in Property Law. Ed. Nicholas Hopkins. 7th edition. Oxford: Hart, 2013. 173-191. Graham, Nicole. Lawscape: Property, Environment, Law. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. Jones, Tim, and Ian Baker. A Hard Won Freedom: Alternative Communities in New Zealand. Auckland: Hodder & Staughton, 1975. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac with Other Essays on Conservation from Round River. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966. Lismore Regional Gallery. “Not Quite Square: The Story of Northern Rivers Architecture.” Exhibition, 13 Apr. to 2 June 2013. McLaren, John. “The Canadian Doukhobors and the Land Question: Religious Communalists in a Fee Simple World.” Land and Freedom: Law Property Rights and the British Diaspora. Eds. Andrew Buck, John McLaren and Nancy Wright. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2001. 135-168. Metcalf, Bill. Co-operative Lifestyles in Australia: From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality. Sydney: UNSW Press, 1995. Miller, Timothy. The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1999. Munro-Clark, Margaret. Communes in Rural Australia: The Movement since 1970. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1986. Neeson, Jeanette M. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Page, John. “Common Property and the Age of Aquarius.” Griffith Law Review 19 (2010): 172-196. Page, John, Ann Brower, and Johannes Welsh. “The Curious Untidiness of Property and Ecosystem Services: A Hybrid Method of Measuring Place.” Pace Environmental Law Rev. 32 (2015): forthcoming. Reich, Charles. “The New Property.” Yale Law Journal 73 (1964): 733-787. Richmond River Historical Society Archives. “After Nimbin What?” Nimbin Aquarius file, flyer. Lismore, NSW. Rose, Carol M. Property and Persuasion Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership. Boulder: Westview, 1994. Rose, Carol M. “The Several Futures of Property: Of Cyberspace and Folk Tales, Emission Trades and Ecosystems.” Minnesota Law Rev. 83 (1998-1999): 129-182. Rose, Carol M. “Canons of Property Talk, or Blackstone’s Anxiety.” Yale Law Journal 108 (1998): 601-632. Sargisson, Lucy, and Lyman Tower Sargent. Living in Utopia: New Zealand’s Intentional Communities. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004. Sax, Joseph L. Defending the Environment: A Strategy for Citizen Action. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971. Singer, Joseph. “No Right to Exclude: Public Accommodations and Private Property.” Nw. U.L.Rev. 90 (1995): 1283-1481. Smith, Margaret, and David Crossley, eds. The Way Out: Radical Alternatives in Australia. Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1975. Stone, Christopher. “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects.” Southern Cal. L. Rev. 45 (1972): 450-501. Tribe, Laurence H. “Ways Not to Think about Plastic Trees: New Foundations for Environmental Law.” Yale Law Journal 83 (1973-1974): 1315-1348. Zablocki, Benjamin. Alienation and Charisma: A Study of Contemporary American Communes. New York: Free Press, 1980.

Cities are shared spaces. As the massive worldwide Iraq war protests that began in 2002 indicate, the structure of the city allows for the presentation of social statements, where large groups can gather, share ideas or argue beliefs, and where media outlets can broadcast these activities. While cities enable these forms of interaction, digital technologies also allow for worldwide connections, both through communication and entertainment. What is the relationship between the shared, often contested spaces of the city and how they are represented in interactive media such as videogames? What statements are formed in the streets of Grand Theft Auto? In this paper I will discuss three popular games that reproduce urban spaces: the Grand Theft Auto series (1998-2006), Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland (2004), and Getting Up: Contents under Pressure (2006). These games are of interest due to their popularity, as well as the forms of interaction reinforced by the urban game environment. Cities have always been spaces for interaction and competition, becoming the site for festivals, protests and games. Ancient forms of graffiti in Rome and Pompeii have been re-envisioned in a worldwide graffiti movement, transforming blighted areas into image-laden environments. Games of stickball, hockey and football transform streets into fields, as do modern marathons and bicycle races. The city street becomes a zone of interpretation, for adaptation and personalization. More recently, skateboarders have transformed cities into skateparks, forcing designers to develop such curiosities as handrail and planter augmentation meant to deter skating. Even more peculiar, a possible response to the anti-skating backlash is the sport known as ‘free-running’ or le parkeur, where participants use the existing infrastructure to express themselves, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, climbing concrete peaks and adding stylistic flourish with each step. These forms of urban gameplay may also be accompanied by dangerous activities as well. Jenkins suggests that discussions on the negative effects of increased gameplay might be addressed by looking at socioeconomic factors, such as the increasing numbers of young people living in urban or semi-urban areas who have fewer opportunities for activity that takes place out of doors, creating the prospect for increased interaction with videogames (“Complete Freedom”). The adaptability combined with the dangerous allure of the city street makes for problematic, intriguing representations in contemporary videogames that deal with urban spaces. I will first discuss a brief history of games that deal with urban spaces, before discussing three popular games and the manner in which they attempt to represent, and recreate the experiences in the city. Games and the City One of the earliest examples of the city represented in a videogame can be seen in Rampage, released by Bally/Midway in 1986. The game includes the city only as backdrop for demolition by hyperagressive mutant animals. SimCity, created by Will Wright and released in 1989, is considered a landmark in the history of videogames, as it is based in forms of cooperation rather than competition. It has spawned at least 21 varieties, including the highly anticipated Spore, a game that allows the player to control life on a microbiological level. Game developers also have explored the recreation of cities from the past. Games such as Civilization and Children of the Nile: Immortal Cities (2004) allow players to control events on a broad social scale, in the style of SimCity, with the addition of historical information that comes into play. As videogames have developed, an increase in processing power has allowed programmers to create spaces rendered in real-time, in three dimensions, allowing for immersive ‘first-person’ perspectives not possible in earlier game systems. This perspective has changed the way in which the city is engaged, from the simplistic destruction of Rampage to more nuanced ways of moving through game space. When discussing the perspective of the player in the urban game space, we should also discuss the perspective of the city inhabitant. As de Certeau describes it, the act of walking in the city represents a form of ownership, reading and creating ‘texts’ through movement. This perspective can shift, through travel in automobile or train, or by ascending in skyscrapers, changing the understanding of the text in the process. This process is inevitably collaborative, as the urban terrain that is monitored both by individuals and by groups: businesses, governments, police. As Flynn suggests, this notion of walking closely resembles the procedural nature of generating meaning in many videogames. Recent games such as the Grand Theft Auto series (1998-2006), Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland (2004), and Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure (2006) raise issues regarding the representation of the city, and the possibilities afforded the player. Of interest are the following questions: How is the urban environment represented? What options are provided to players for interaction within this environment? Are their implications for everyday practices that borrow from these game-based environments? Grand Theft Auto Grand Theft Auto (GTA) was first released in 1998, and has since expanded into a series of increasingly controversial games. Originally designed for top-down gameplay, a third person point of view was introduced in GTA II (2001). Along with this new point of view came the ability for players to interact with a highly detailed cityspace, deviating from the urban gangster storyline, and interacting with city inhabitants in any number of illicit ways. This interactivity was taken to an extreme in GTA: San Andreas (2004). GTA: San Andreas is set in a state that is a fictional blend of California and Nevada. It continued the gangster storyline of the previous games, becoming notorious for including an encoded, hidden level that allowed players to take part in explicit sex scenes. It featured a style of nonlinear gameplay that allowed players to entertain themselves, exploring the urban landscape free from rigid game requirements. It also limited interactions with city dwellers, limiting narrative elements to ‘cut scenes’ that allow for uninhibited gameplay. As Frasca suggests, the later Grand Theft Auto games are really about moving through space, typically seen as a mundane activity, in an interesting way. However, that which makes the movement interesting typically involves killing and maiming and destroying that which stands in the way of the main character. Without getting into a discussion of morals and videogames, the GTA series certainly has pushed the boundaries of video game acceptability, as well as engaging gameplay, allowing players to drift through the urban environment. The Situationist International (SI) sought to engage with the city, opening up possibilities for new forms of engagement and interaction through drifts, or derivé. Through various forms of derivé they engaged with the psychogeographic space of the city, walking through varied areas, and reorganizing these experiences as though in a dream state, or, perhaps, game (Sadler). Surely any video game can be experienced in a similar manner. I suggest that the GTA series, through interactive openness, allows players to reread the text of this virtual city, while at the same time contributing to the ‘society of the spectacle’ that situationist Guy Debord so maligned (Debord). As a successful yet problematic blend of simulation and quest, the rules in GTA: San Andreas are not made explicit; we are familiar with the urban spaces depicted in GTA, at least through the stereotypes portrayed in the media. Players therefore know the rules implicit to these spaces, and what happens when we break them; thus, the allure of the simulated urban environment. The text created is one that combines lived experience, mediated images, and interaction with the fictional urban space. What happens when this environment is made specific, when the game depicts a real city? Tony Hawk Pro Skater The Tony Hawk Pro Skater (THPS) series became very popular after its release in 1999, capitalizing on the marketing of ‘extreme sports’ as seen in events such as ESPN X Games, which debuted in 1995. While not the first skateboarding game on the market, THPS captured the imagination of the game buying audience, allowing players to skate as Tony Hawk, or any number of pro skaters. The latest installment of the series is Tony Hawk American Wasteland (THAW), which promotes the seamless connections between levels that are detailed reproductions of Los Angeles. While the GTA series allows for, and in many cases encourages, activities that would be deemed illegal, THAW extends the possibility that the player could actually perform these acts in the place depicted in the game. Does this allow for greater immersion, which then inspires players to ‘take it to the street?’ Or, does the gameplay reinforce the argument against such activities in the actual urban space, affirming their ‘destructive’ nature? Although skaters can be a nuisance, particularly in crowded downtown areas, the appropriation of utilitarian infrastructure can also be seen as improvisational art, adapting existing urban features in the process of skating. The SI notion of detournement can be seen in the actions of many skaters, as the process of skating brings new meanings to the urban landscape. Whether the Pro Skater series adds to the possibilities for detournement, or further limits the actual skating that happens in the city, is only relevant to those who skate and those who attempt to prevent this sport from taking place. As you skate through the city, writing the text of your experience through railslides and grinds, you are also given the ability to ‘tag’ the walls of Los Angeles, literally inscribing your place in the environment. The control of urban spaces, and the possibilities for rewriting these spaces—for detournement—brings me to my third example. Getting Up Marc Ecko, clothing designer and hip-hop aficionado, released Getting Up: Contents under Pressure in 2006. Players assume the identity of ‘Trane,’ a young graffiti artists desparate to learn the ropes in the city of ‘New Radius.’ New Radius is currently under the draconian control of ‘Mayor Sung,’ who has promised to rid the city of the scourge of graffiti. As Trane, you make your way through New Radius, battling foes and meeting graffiti legends, who teach you new skills along the way. Getting Up is unique from the games previously mentioned, as you have the ability to interact with the urban environment in a manner that is not incessantly violent or overtly destructive. In fact, the game is marketed as a way to get the thrill of ‘tagging’ without actually taking part in illegal activity. It is also a unique experience, as Trane walks through the entire environment. This slows down the gameplay, and allows the character to take in the highly detailed environments. It a very literal way, the player in Getting Up is writing the city, as de Certeau describes it, though this writing is typically underappreciated as creative activity, much less art. Conclusion The games that I have described present the city in very different ways, and offer players diverse options for interacting and thinking about the city. While, the impact of these games remains to be seen, and may never register beyond the world of the gamer, these games present urban environments as active spaces for engagement, even if it is the thuggishness reinforced in Grand Theft Auto. I would hope that the creativity shown in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater would lead to the creation of not only more skateparks in suburban spaces, but the acknowledgement of the need for detournement in public urban spaces such as Philadelphia’s Love Park, a favorite East Coast US skate spot that has been the center of much controversy as a result of its popularity. If Pro Skater brings the issue of street skating to a national audience, it is doing good, both as entertainment and social force. Similarly, Marc Ecko’s Getting Up has the potential to not only memorialize the birth of graffiti and hip hop in 1970’s New York; it can also instruct on the flourishing worldwide graffiti scene, allowing those who deserve (and desire) attention to have it. Recent projects such as pacmanhattan have inverted the relationships between gaming and the urban environment that I have described. Taking the game to the city, players engage in interpretations of the video game classic Pac Man in the streets of Manhattan, utilizing a variety of locative media devices. While these games do not change the physicality of the city, they surely change our psycheographical interpretation of that space, in a way that folds together the freedom of gameplay with the control of the street. Jenkins suggests that designers should pay more attention to the work of architects and urban planners as they create interactive worlds (“Game Design”). I would also suggest that the opposite take place. Urban designers might learn from the urban spaces created in games such as American Wasteland and Getting Up, as they present options for the detournement of fixed spaces evident in the graffiti and skate cultures. Increased control will result in diverse responses that subvert this control. Cities should remain spaces for walking, for drifting, for protesting: for games. References Bureau of Public Secrets. Situationist International Anthology. Ed. K. Knabb. Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1991. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1984. Flynn, B. Languages of Navigation within Computer Games. Paper presentation, Digital Art and Culture, Melbourne, Australia, 2003. April 2006 http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Flynn.pdf>. Jenkins, Henry. “Complete Freedom of Movement: Videogames as Gendered Play Spaces.” In The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology. Eds. K. Salen and E. Zimmerman. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” In The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology. Eds. K. Salen and E. Zimmerman. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Frasca, G. Sim Sin City: Some Thoughts on Grand Theft Auto. Game Studies 2003. April 2006 http://www.gamestudies.org/0302/frasca/>. Sadler, S. The Situationist City. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Sweeny, Robert. "Code of the Streets: Videogames and the City." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/07-sweeny.php>. APA Style Sweeny, R. (Jul. 2006) "Code of the Streets: Videogames and the City," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/07-sweeny.php>.

Perfume is a Japanese “techno-pop” idol trio formed in 2000 consisting of three women–Ayano Omoto, Yuka Kashino, and Ayaka Nishiwaki. Since 2007, when one of their songs was selected for a recycling awareness campaign by Japan's national public broadcaster, Perfume has been a consistent fixture in the Japanese pop music charts. They have been involved in the full gamut of typical idol activities, from television and radio shows to commercials for clothing brands, candy, and drinks. Their success reflects Japanese pop culture's long-standing obsession with pop idols, who once breaking into the mainstream, become ubiquitous cross-media presences. Perfume’s fame in Japan is due in large part to their masterful performance of traditional female idol roles, through which they assume the kaleidoscopic positions of daughter, sister, platonic friend, and heterosexual romantic partner depending on the standpoint of the beholder. In the lyrical content of their songs, they play the various parts of the cute but shy girl who loves from a distance, the strong compatriot that pushes the listener to keep striving for their dreams, and the kindred spirit with whom the listener can face life's ordinary challenges. Like other successful idols, their extensive lines of Perfume-branded merchandise and product endorsements make the exercise of consumer spending power by their fans a vehicle for them to approach the ideals and experiences that Perfume embodies. Yet, Perfume's videos, music, and stage performances are also replete with subversive images of machines, virtual cities and landscapes, and computer generated apparitions. In their works, the traditional idol as an object of consumer desire co-exists with images of the fragmentation of identity, distrust in the world and the senses, and the desire to escape from illusion, all presented in terms of encounters with technology. In what their fans call the "Near Future Trilogy", a set of three singles released soon after their major label debut (2005-06), lyrics refer to the artificiality and transience of virtual worlds ("Nothing I see or touch has any reality" from "Electro-World," or "I want to escape. I want to destroy this city created by immaculate computation" from "Computer City"). In their later work, explicit lyrical references to virtual worlds and machines largely disappear, but they are replaced with images and bodily performances of Perfume with robotic machinery and electronic information. Perfume is an idol group augmented by technology. In this paper, I explore the significance of these images of technological augmentation of the human body in the work of Perfume. I suggest that the ways these bodily encounters of the human body and technology are articulated in their work reflect broader social and economic anxieties and hopes in Japan. I focus in the first section of this paper on describing some of the recurring technological motifs in their works. Next, I show how their recent work is an experiment with the emergent possibilities of human-technology relationships for imagining Japan's future development. Not only in their visual and performance style, but in their modes of engagement with their fans through new media, I suggest that Perfume itself is attempting to seek out new forms of value creation, which hold the promise of pushing Japan out of the extended economic and social stagnation of its 1990s post-bubble "Lost Decade,” particularly by articulating how they connect with the world. The idol's technologically augmented body becomes both icon and experiment for rethinking Japan and staking out a new global position for it. Though I have referred above to Perfume as its three members, I also use the term to signify the broader group of managers and collaborating artists that surrounds them. Perfume is a creation of corporate media companies and the output of development institutions designed to train multi-talented entertainers from a young age. In addition to the three women who form the public face of Perfume, main figures include music producer Yasutaka Nakata, producer and choreographer MIKIKO, and more recently, the new media artist Daito Manabe and his company, Rhizomatiks. Though Perfume very rarely appear on stage or in their videos with any other identifiable human performers, every production is an effort involving dozens of professional staff. In this respect, Perfume is a very conventional pop idol unit. The attraction of these idols for their fans is not primarily their originality, creativity, or musicality, but their professionalism and image as striving servants (Yano 336). Idols are beloved because they "are well-polished, are trained to sing and act, maintain the mask of stardom, and are extremely skillful at entertaining the audience" (Iwabuchi 561). Moreover, their charisma is based on a relationship of omoiyari or mutual empathy and service. As Christine Yano has argued for Japanese Enka music, the singer must maintain the image of service to his or her fans and reach out to them as if engaged in a personal relationship with each (337). Fans reciprocate by caring for the singer, and making his or her needs their own, not the least of which are financial. The omoiyari relationship of mutual empathy and care is essential to the singer’s charismatic appeal (Yano 347). Thus it does not matter to their fans that Perfume do not play their own instruments or write their own songs. These are jobs for other professionals. However, mirroring the role of the employee in the Japanese company-as-family (see Kondo), their devotion to their jobs as entertainers, and their care and respect for their fans must be evident at all times. The tarnishing of this image, for instance through revelations of underage smoking or drinking, can be fatal, and has resulted in banishment from the media spotlight for some former stars. A large part of Japanese stars' conventional appeal is based on their appearance as devoted workers, consummate professionals, and partners in mutual empathy. As charismatic figures that exchange cultural ideals for fans’ disposable income, it is not surprising that many authors have tied the emergence of the pop idol to the height of Japan's economic prosperity in the 1970s and 1980s, when the social contract between labor and corporations that provided both lifelong employment and social identity had yet to be seriously threatened. Aoyagi suggests (82) that the idol system is tied to post-war consumerism and the increased importance of young adults, particularly women, as consumers. As this correlation between the health of idols and the economy might imply, there is a strong popular connection between concerns of social fission and discontent and economic stagnation. Koichi Iwabuchi writes that Japanese media accounts in the 1990s connected the health of the idol system to the "vigor of society" (555). As Iwabuchi describes, some Japanese fans have looked for their idols abroad in places such as Hong Kong, with a sense of nostalgia for a kind of stardom that has waned in Japan and because of "a deep sense of disillusionment and discontent with Japanese society" (Iwabuchi 561) following the collapse of Japan's bubble economy in the early 1990s. In reaction to the same conditions, some Japanese idols have attempted to exploit this nostalgia. During a brief period of fin-de-siècle optimism that coincided with neoliberal structural reforms under the government of Junichiro Koizumi, Morning Musume, the most popular female idol group at the time, had a hit single entitled "Love Machine" that ended the 1990s in Japan. The song's lyrics tie together dreams of life-long employment, romantic love, stable traditional families, and national resurgence, linking Japan's prosperity in the world at large to its internal social, emotional, and economic health. The song’s chorus declares, "The world will be envious of Japan's future!", although that future still has yet to materialize. In its place has appeared the "near-future" imaginary of Perfume. As mentioned above, the lyrics of some of their early songs referenced illusory virtual worlds that need to be destroyed or transcended. In their later works, these themes are continued in images of the bodies of the three performers augmented by technology in various ways, depicting the performers themselves as robots. Images of the three performers as robots are first introduced in the music video for their single "Secret Secret" (2007). At the outset of the video, three mannequins resembling Perfume are frozen on a futuristic TV soundstage being dressed by masked attendants who march off screen in lock step. The camera fades in and out, and the mannequins are replaced with the human members frozen in the same poses. Other attendants raise pieces of chocolate-covered ice cream (the music video also served as an advertisement for the ice cream) to the performers' mouths, which when consumed, activate them, launching them into a dance consisting of stilted, mechanical steps, and orthogonal arm positions. Later, one of the performers falls on stairs and appears to malfunction, becoming frozen in place until she receives another piece of ice cream. They are later more explicitly made into robots in the video for "Spring of Life" (2012), in which each of the three members are shown with sections of skin lifted back to reveal shiny, metallic parts inside. Throughout this video, their backs are connected to coiled cables hanging from the ceiling, which serve as a further visual sign of their robotic characters. In the same video, they are also shown in states of distress, each sitting on the floor with parts exposed, limbs rigid and performing repetitive motions, as though their control systems have failed. In their live shows, themes of augmentation are much more apparent. At a 2010 performance at the Tokyo Dome, which was awarded the jury selection prize in the 15th Japan Media Arts Festival by the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs, the centerpiece was a special performance entitled "Perfume no Okite" or "The Laws of Perfume." Like "Secret Secret," the performance begins with the emergence of three mannequins posed at the center of the stadium. During the introductory sequence, the members rise out of a different stage to the side. They begin to dance, synchronized to massively magnified, computer generated projections of themselves. The projections fluctuate between photorealistic representations of each member and ghostly CG figures consisting of oscillating lines and shimmering particles that perform the same movements. At the midpoint, the members each face their own images, and state their names and dates of birth before uttering a series of commands: "The right hand and right leg are together. The height of the hands must be precise. Check the motion of the fingers. The movement of the legs must be smooth. The palms of the hands must be here." With each command, the members move their own bodies mechanically, mirrored by the CG figures. After more dancing with their avatars, the performance ends with Perfume slowly lowered down on the platform at the center of the stage, frozen in the same poses and positions as the mannequins, which have now disappeared. These performances cleverly use images of robotic machinery in order to subvert Perfume's idol personas. The robotic augmentations are portrayed as vectors for control by some unseen external party, and each of the members must have their life injected into them through cables, ice cream, or external command, before they can begin to dance and sing as pop idols. Pop idols have always been manufactured products, but through such technological imagery Perfume make their own artificiality explicit, revealing to the audience that it is not the performers they love, but the emergent and contingently human forms of a social, technological, and commercial system that they desire. In this way, these images subvert the performers' charisma and idol fans' own feelings of adoration, revealing the premise of the idol system to have been manufactured to manipulate consumer affect and desire. If, as Iwabuchi suggests, some fans of idols are attracted to their stars by a sense of nostalgia for an age of economic prosperity, then Perfume's robotic augmentations offer a reflexive critique of this industrial form. In "The Laws of Perfume", the commands that comport their bodies may be stated in their own voices, yet they issue not from the members themselves, but their magnified and processed avatars. It is Perfume the commercial entity speaking. The malfunctioning bodies of Perfume depicted in "Secret Secret" and "Spring of Life" do not detract from their charisma as idols as an incident of public drunkenness might, because the represented breakdowns in their performances are linked not to the moral purity or professionalism of the humans, but to failures of the technological and economic systems that have supported them. If idols of a past age were defined by their seamless and idealized personas as entertainers and employees, then it is fitting that in an age of much greater economic and social uncertainty that they should acknowledge the cracks in the social and commercial mechanisms from which their carefully designed personas emerge. In these videos and performances, the visual trope of technological body augmentation serves as a means for representing both the dependence of the idol persona on consumer capitalism, and the fracturing of that system. However, they do not provide an answer to the question of what might lie beyond the fracturing. The only suggestions provided are the disappearance of that world, as in the end of "Computer City," or in the reproduction of the same structure, as when the members of Perfume become mannequins in "The Laws of Perfume" and "Secret Secret." Interestingly, it was with Perfume's management's decision to switch record labels and market Perfume to an international audience that Perfume became newly augmented, and a suggestion of an answer became visible. Perfume began their international push in 2012 with the release of a compilation album, "Love the World," and live shows and new media works in Asia and Europe. The album made their music available for purchase outside of Japan for the first time. Its cover depicts three posed figures computer rendered as clouds of colored dots produced from 3D scans of the members. The same scans were used to create 3D-printed plastic figures, whose fabrication process is shown in the Japanese television ad for the album. The robotic images of bodily augmentation have been replaced by a more powerful form of augmentation–digital information. The website which accompanied their international debut received the Grand Prix of the 17th Japan Media Arts Prize. Developed by Daito Manabe and Rhizomatiks, visitors to the Perfume Global website were greeted by a video of three figures composed of pulsating clouds of triangles, dancing to a heavy, glitch-laden electronic track produced by Nakata. Behind them, dozens of tweets about Perfume collected in real-time scroll across the background. Controls to the side let visitors change not only the volume of the music, but also the angle of their perspective, and the number and responsiveness of the pulsating polygons. The citation for the site's prize refers to the innovative participatory features of the website. Motion capture data from Perfume, music, and programming examples used to render the digital performance were made available for free to visitors, who were encouraged to create their own versions. This resulted in hundreds of fan-produced videos showing various figures, from animals and cartoon characters to swooshing multi-colored lines, dancing the same routine. Several of these were selected to be featured on the website, and were later integrated into the stage performance of the piece during Perfume's Asia tour. A later project extended this idea in a different direction, letting website visitors paint animations on computer representations of the members, and use a simple programming language to control the images. Many of these user creations were integrated into Perfume's 2013 performance at the Cannes Lions International Festival as advertising. Their Cannes performance begins with rapidly shifting computer graphics projected onto their costumes as they speak in unison, as though they are visitors from another realm: "We are Perfume. We have come. Japan is far to the east. To encounter the world, the three of us and everyone stand before you: to connect you with Japan, and to communicate with you, the world." The user-contributed designs were projected on to the members' costumes as they danced. This new mode of augmentation–through information rather than machinery–shows Perfume to be more than a representation of Japan's socio-economic transitions, but a live experiment in effecting these transitions. In their international performances, their bodies are synthesized in real-time from the performers' motions and the informatic layer generated from tweets and user-generated creations. This creates the conditions for fans to inscribe their own marks on to Perfume, transforming the emotional engagement between fan and idol into a technological linkage through which the idols’ bodies can be modified. Perfume’s augmented bodies are not just seen and desired, but made by their fans. The value added by this new mode of connection is imagined as the critical difference needed to transform Perfume from a local Japanese idol group into an entity capable of moving around the world, embodying the promise of a new global position for Japan enabled through information. In Perfume, augmentation suggests a possible answer to Japan’s economic stagnation and social fragmentation. It points past a longing for the past towards new values produced in encounters with the world beyond Japan. Augmentations newly connect Perfume and Japan with the world economically and culturally. At the same time, a vision of Japan emerges, more mobile, flexible, and connected perhaps, yet one that attempts to keep Japan a distinct entity in the world. Bodily augmentations, in media representations and as technological practices, do more than figuratively and materially link silicon and metal with flesh. They mark the interface of the body and technology as a site of transnational connection, where borders between the nation and what lies outside are made References Aoyagi, Hiroshi. Islands of Eight Million Smiles: Idol Performance and Symbolic Production in Contemporary Japan. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. Iwabuchi, Koichi. "Nostalgia for a (Different) Asian Modernity: Media Consumption of "Asia" in Japan." positions: east asia cultures critique 10.3 (2002): 547-573. Kondo, Dorinne K. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Morning Musume. “Morning Musume ‘Love Machine’ (MV).” 15 Oct. 2010. 4 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A7j6eryPV4›. Perfume. “[HD] Perfume Performance Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.” 20 June 2013. 11 Nov. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI0x5vA7fLo›. ———. “[SPOT] Perfume Global Compilation “LOVE THE WORLD.”” 11 Sep. 2012. 11 Nov. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28SUmWDztxI›. ———. “Computer City.” 18 June 2013. 10 Oct. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOXGKTrsRNg›. ———. “Electro World.” 18 June 2013. 10 Oct. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zh0ouiYIZc›. ———. “Perfume no Okite.” 8 May 2011. 10 Oct. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EjOistJABM›. ———. “Perfume Official Global Website.” 2012. 11 Nov. 2013 ‹http://perfume-global.com/project.html›. ———. “Secret Secret.” 18 Jan. 2012. 10 Oct. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=birLzegOHyU›. ———. “Spring of Life.” 18 June 2013. 10 Oct. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PtvnaEo9-0›. Yano, Christine. "Charisma's Realm: Fandom in Japan." Ethnology 36.4 (1997): 335-49.

The term “coffee palace” was primarily used in Australia to describe the temperance hotels that were built in the last decades of the 19th century, although there are references to the term also being used to a lesser extent in the United Kingdom (Denby 174). Built in response to the worldwide temperance movement, which reached its pinnacle in the 1880s in Australia, coffee palaces were hotels that did not serve alcohol. This was a unique time in Australia’s architectural development as the economic boom fuelled by the gold rush in the 1850s, and the demand for ostentatious display that gathered momentum during the following years, afforded the use of richly ornamental High Victorian architecture and resulted in very majestic structures; hence the term “palace” (Freeland 121). The often multi-storied coffee palaces were found in every capital city as well as regional areas such as Geelong and Broken Hill, and locales as remote as Maria Island on the east coast of Tasmania. Presented as upholding family values and discouraging drunkenness, the coffee palaces were most popular in seaside resorts such as Barwon Heads in Victoria, where they catered to families. Coffee palaces were also constructed on a grand scale to provide accommodation for international and interstate visitors attending the international exhibitions held in Sydney (1879) and Melbourne (1880 and 1888). While the temperance movement lasted well over 100 years, the life of coffee palaces was relatively short-lived. Nevertheless, coffee palaces were very much part of Australia’s cultural landscape. In this article, I examine the rise and demise of coffee palaces associated with the temperance movement and argue that coffee palaces established in the name of abstinence were modelled on the coffee houses that spread throughout Europe and North America in the 17th and 18th centuries during the Enlightenment—a time when the human mind could be said to have been liberated from inebriation and the dogmatic state of ignorance. The Temperance Movement At a time when newspapers are full of lurid stories about binge-drinking and the alleged ill-effects of the liberalisation of licensing laws, as well as concerns over the growing trend of marketing easy-to-drink products (such as the so-called “alcopops”) to teenagers, it is difficult to think of a period when the total suppression of the alcohol trade was seriously debated in Australia. The cause of temperance has almost completely vanished from view, yet for well over a century—from 1830 to the outbreak of the Second World War—the control or even total abolition of the liquor trade was a major political issue—one that split the country, brought thousands onto the streets in demonstrations, and influenced the outcome of elections. Between 1911 and 1925 referenda to either limit or prohibit the sale of alcohol were held in most States. While moves to bring about abolition failed, Fitzgerald notes that almost one in three Australian voters expressed their support for prohibition of alcohol in their State (145). Today, the temperance movement’s platform has largely been forgotten, killed off by the practical example of the United States, where prohibition of the legal sale of alcohol served only to hand control of the liquor traffic to organised crime. Coffee Houses and the Enlightenment Although tea has long been considered the beverage of sobriety, it was coffee that came to be regarded as the very antithesis of alcohol. When the first coffee house opened in London in the early 1650s, customers were bewildered by this strange new drink from the Middle East—hot, bitter, and black as soot. But those who tried coffee were, reports Ellis, soon won over, and coffee houses were opened across London, Oxford, and Cambridge and, in the following decades, Europe and North America. Tea, equally exotic, entered the English market slightly later than coffee (in 1664), but was more expensive and remained a rarity long after coffee had become ubiquitous in London (Ellis 123-24). The impact of the introduction of coffee into Europe during the seventeenth century was particularly noticeable since the most common beverages of the time, even at breakfast, were weak “small beer” and wine. Both were safer to drink than water, which was liable to be contaminated. Coffee, like beer, was made using boiled water and, therefore, provided a new and safe alternative to alcoholic drinks. There was also the added benefit that those who drank coffee instead of alcohol began the day alert rather than mildly inebriated (Standage 135). It was also thought that coffee had a stimulating effect upon the “nervous system,” so much so that the French called coffee une boisson intellectuelle (an intellectual beverage), because of its stimulating effect on the brain (Muskett 71). In Oxford, the British called their coffee houses “penny universities,” a penny then being the price of a cup of coffee (Standage 158). Coffee houses were, moreover, more than places that sold coffee. Unlike other institutions of the period, rank and birth had no place (Ellis 59). The coffee house became the centre of urban life, creating a distinctive social culture by treating all customers as equals. Egalitarianism, however, did not extend to women—at least not in London. Around its egalitarian (but male) tables, merchants discussed and conducted business, writers and poets held discussions, scientists demonstrated experiments, and philosophers deliberated ideas and reforms. For the price of a cup (or “dish” as it was then known) of coffee, a man could read the latest pamphlets and newsletters, chat with other patrons, strike business deals, keep up with the latest political gossip, find out what other people thought of a new book, or take part in literary or philosophical discussions. Like today’s Internet, Twitter, and Facebook, Europe’s coffee houses functioned as an information network where ideas circulated and spread from coffee house to coffee house. In this way, drinking coffee in the coffee house became a metaphor for people getting together to share ideas in a sober environment, a concept that remains today. According to Standage, this information network fuelled the Enlightenment (133), prompting an explosion of creativity. Coffee houses provided an entirely new environment for political, financial, scientific, and literary change, as people gathered, discussed, and debated issues within their walls. Entrepreneurs and scientists teamed up to form companies to exploit new inventions and discoveries in manufacturing and mining, paving the way for the Industrial Revolution (Standage 163). The stock market and insurance companies also had their birth in the coffee house. As a result, coffee was seen to be the epitome of modernity and progress and, as such, was the ideal beverage for the Age of Reason. By the 19th century, however, the era of coffee houses had passed. Most of them had evolved into exclusive men’s clubs, each geared towards a certain segment of society. Tea was now more affordable and fashionable, and teahouses, which drew clientele from both sexes, began to grow in popularity. Tea, however, had always been Australia’s most popular non-alcoholic drink. Tea (and coffee) along with other alien plants had been part of the cargo unloaded onto Australian shores with the First Fleet in 1788. Coffee, mainly from Brazil and Jamaica, remained a constant import but was taxed more heavily than tea and was, therefore, more expensive. Furthermore, tea was much easier to make than coffee. To brew tea, all that is needed is to add boiling water, coffee, in contrast, required roasting, grinding and brewing. According to Symons, until the 1930s, Australians were the largest consumers of tea in the world (19). In spite of this, and as coffee, since its introduction into Europe, was regarded as the antidote to alcohol, the temperance movement established coffee palaces. In the early 1870s in Britain, the temperance movement had revived the coffee house to provide an alternative to the gin taverns that were so attractive to the working classes of the Industrial Age (Clarke 5). Unlike the earlier coffee house, this revived incarnation provided accommodation and was open to men, women and children. “Cheap and wholesome food,” was available as well as reading rooms supplied with newspapers and periodicals, and games and smoking rooms (Clarke 20). In Australia, coffee palaces did not seek the working classes, as clientele: at least in the cities they were largely for the nouveau riche. Coffee Palaces The discovery of gold in 1851 changed the direction of the Australian economy. An investment boom followed, with an influx of foreign funds and English banks lending freely to colonial speculators. By the 1880s, the manufacturing and construction sectors of the economy boomed and land prices were highly inflated. Governments shared in the wealth and ploughed money into urban infrastructure, particularly railways. Spurred on by these positive economic conditions and the newly extended inter-colonial rail network, international exhibitions were held in both Sydney and Melbourne. To celebrate modern technology and design in an industrial age, international exhibitions were phenomena that had spread throughout Europe and much of the world from the mid-19th century. According to Davison, exhibitions were “integral to the culture of nineteenth century industrialising societies” (158). In particular, these exhibitions provided the colonies with an opportunity to demonstrate to the world their economic power and achievements in the sciences, the arts and education, as well as to promote their commerce and industry. Massive purpose-built buildings were constructed to house the exhibition halls. In Sydney, the Garden Palace was erected in the Botanic Gardens for the 1879 Exhibition (it burnt down in 1882). In Melbourne, the Royal Exhibition Building, now a World Heritage site, was built in the Carlton Gardens for the 1880 Exhibition and extended for the 1888 Centennial Exhibition. Accommodation was required for the some one million interstate and international visitors who were to pass through the gates of the Garden Palace in Sydney. To meet this need, the temperance movement, keen to provide alternative accommodation to licensed hotels, backed the establishment of Sydney’s coffee palaces. The Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company was formed in 1878 to operate and manage a number of coffee palaces constructed during the 1870s. These were designed to compete with hotels by “offering all the ordinary advantages of those establishments without the allurements of the drink” (Murdoch). Coffee palaces were much more than ordinary hotels—they were often multi-purpose or mixed-use buildings that included a large number of rooms for accommodation as well as ballrooms and other leisure facilities to attract people away from pubs. As the Australian Town and Country Journal reveals, their services included the supply of affordable, wholesome food, either in the form of regular meals or occasional refreshments, cooked in kitchens fitted with the latest in culinary accoutrements. These “culinary temples” also provided smoking rooms, chess and billiard rooms, and rooms where people could read books, periodicals and all the local and national papers for free (121). Similar to the coffee houses of the Enlightenment, the coffee palaces brought businessmen, artists, writers, engineers, and scientists attending the exhibitions together to eat and drink (non-alcoholic), socialise and conduct business. The Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace located in York Street in Sydney produced a practical guide for potential investors and businessmen titled International Exhibition Visitors Pocket Guide to Sydney. It included information on the location of government departments, educational institutions, hospitals, charitable organisations, and embassies, as well as a list of the tariffs on goods from food to opium (1–17). Women, particularly the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) were a formidable force in the temperance movement (intemperance was generally regarded as a male problem and, more specifically, a husband problem). Murdoch argues, however, that much of the success of the push to establish coffee palaces was due to male politicians with business interests, such as the one-time Victorian premiere James Munro. Considered a stern, moral church-going leader, Munro expanded the temperance movement into a fanatical force with extraordinary power, which is perhaps why the temperance movement had its greatest following in Victoria (Murdoch). Several prestigious hotels were constructed to provide accommodation for visitors to the international exhibitions in Melbourne. Munro was responsible for building many of the city’s coffee palaces, including the Victoria (1880) and the Federal Coffee Palace (1888) in Collins Street. After establishing the Grand Coffee Palace Company, Munro took over the Grand Hotel (now the Windsor) in 1886. Munro expanded the hotel to accommodate some of the two million visitors who were to attend the Centenary Exhibition, renamed it the Grand Coffee Palace, and ceremoniously burnt its liquor licence at the official opening (Murdoch). By 1888 there were more than 50 coffee palaces in the city of Melbourne alone and Munro held thousands of shares in coffee palaces, including those in Geelong and Broken Hill. With its opening planned to commemorate the centenary of the founding of Australia and the 1888 International Exhibition, the construction of the Federal Coffee Palace, one of the largest hotels in Australia, was perhaps the greatest monument to the temperance movement. Designed in the French Renaissance style, the façade was embellished with statues, griffins and Venus in a chariot drawn by four seahorses. The building was crowned with an iron-framed domed tower. New passenger elevators—first demonstrated at the Sydney Exhibition—allowed the building to soar to seven storeys. According to the Federal Coffee Palace Visitor’s Guide, which was presented to every visitor, there were three lifts for passengers and others for luggage. Bedrooms were located on the top five floors, while the stately ground and first floors contained majestic dining, lounge, sitting, smoking, writing, and billiard rooms. There were electric service bells, gaslights, and kitchens “fitted with the most approved inventions for aiding proficients [sic] in the culinary arts,” while the luxury brand Pears soap was used in the lavatories and bathrooms (16–17). In 1891, a spectacular financial crash brought the economic boom to an abrupt end. The British economy was in crisis and to meet the predicament, English banks withdrew their funds in Australia. There was a wholesale collapse of building companies, mortgage banks and other financial institutions during 1891 and 1892 and much of the banking system was halted during 1893 (Attard). Meanwhile, however, while the eastern States were in the economic doldrums, gold was discovered in 1892 at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie in Western Australia and, within two years, the west of the continent was transformed. As gold poured back to the capital city of Perth, the long dormant settlement hurriedly caught up and began to emulate the rest of Australia, including the construction of ornately detailed coffee palaces (Freeman 130). By 1904, Perth had 20 coffee palaces. When the No. 2 Coffee Palace opened in Pitt Street, Sydney, in 1880, the Australian Town and Country Journal reported that coffee palaces were “not only fashionable, but appear to have acquired a permanent footing in Sydney” (121). The coffee palace era, however, was relatively short-lived. Driven more by reformist and economic zeal than by good business sense, many were in financial trouble when the 1890’s Depression hit. Leading figures in the temperance movement were also involved in land speculation and building societies and when these schemes collapsed, many, including Munro, were financially ruined. Many of the palaces closed or were forced to apply for liquor licences in order to stay afloat. Others developed another life after the temperance movement’s influence waned and the coffee palace fad faded, and many were later demolished to make way for more modern buildings. The Federal was licensed in 1923 and traded as the Federal Hotel until its demolition in 1973. The Victoria, however, did not succumb to a liquor licence until 1967. The Sydney Coffee Palace in Woolloomooloo became the Sydney Eye Hospital and, more recently, smart apartments. Some fine examples still survive as reminders of Australia’s social and cultural heritage. The Windsor in Melbourne’s Spring Street and the Broken Hill Hotel, a massive three-story iconic pub in the outback now called simply “The Palace,” are some examples. Tea remained the beverage of choice in Australia until the 1950s when the lifting of government controls on the importation of coffee and the influence of American foodways coincided with the arrival of espresso-loving immigrants. As Australians were introduced to the espresso machine, the short black, the cappuccino, and the café latte and (reminiscent of the Enlightenment), the post-war malaise was shed in favour of the energy and vigour of modernist thought and creativity, fuelled in at least a small part by caffeine and the emergent café culture (Teffer). Although the temperance movement’s attempt to provide an alternative to the ubiquitous pubs failed, coffee has now outstripped the consumption of tea and today’s café culture ensures that wherever coffee is consumed, there is the possibility of a continuation of the Enlightenment’s lively discussions, exchange of news, and dissemination of ideas and information in a sober environment. References Attard, Bernard. “The Economic History of Australia from 1788: An Introduction.” EH.net Encyclopedia. 5 Feb. (2012) ‹http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/attard.australia›. Blainey, Anna. “The Prohibition and Total Abstinence Movement in Australia 1880–1910.” Food, Power and Community: Essays in the History of Food and Drink. Ed. Robert Dare. Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1999. 142–52. Boyce, Francis Bertie. “Shall I Vote for No License?” An address delivered at the Convention of the Parramatta Branch of New South Wales Alliance, 3 September 1906. 3rd ed. Parramatta: New South Wales Alliance, 1907. Clarke, James Freeman. Coffee Houses and Coffee Palaces in England. Boston: George H. Ellis, 1882. “Coffee Palace, No. 2.” Australian Town and Country Journal. 17 Jul. 1880: 121. Davison, Graeme. “Festivals of Nationhood: The International Exhibitions.” Australian Cultural History. Eds. S. L. Goldberg and F. B. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 158–77. Denby, Elaine. Grand Hotels: Reality and Illusion. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004. Federal Coffee Palace. The Federal Coffee Palace Visitors’ Guide to Melbourne, Its Suburbs, and Other Parts of the Colony of Victoria: Views of the Principal Public and Commercial Buildings in Melbourne, With a Bird’s Eye View of the City; and History of the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880, etc. Melbourne: Federal Coffee House Company, 1888. Fitzgerald, Ross, and Trevor Jordan. Under the Influence: A History of Alcohol in Australia. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2009. Freeland, John. The Australian Pub. Melbourne: Sun Books, 1977. Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace. International Exhibition Visitors Pocket Guide to Sydney, Restaurant and Temperance Hotel. Sydney: Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace, 1879. Mitchell, Ann M. “Munro, James (1832–1908).” Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National U, 2006-12. 5 Feb. 2012 ‹http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/munro-james-4271/text6905›. Murdoch, Sally. “Coffee Palaces.” Encyclopaedia of Melbourne. Eds. Andrew Brown-May and Shurlee Swain. 5 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.emelbourne.net.au/biogs/EM00371b.htm›. Muskett, Philip E. The Art of Living in Australia. New South Wales: Kangaroo Press, 1987. Standage, Tom. A History of the World in 6 Glasses. New York: Walker & Company, 2005. Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company Limited. Memorandum of Association of the Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company, Ltd. Sydney: Samuel Edward Lees, 1879. Symons, Michael. One Continuous Picnic: A Gastronomic History of Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Teffer, Nicola. Coffee Customs. Exhibition Catalogue. Sydney: Customs House, 2005.

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September 2015 in Heidelberg, Heidelberg 2017, Heidelberg University Publishing, 338 S., € 54,90. (Elisabeth Lobenwein, Klagenfurt) Mallinckrodt, Rebekka von / Angela Schattner (Hrsg.), Sports and Physical Exercise in Early Modern Europe. New Perspectives on the History of Sports and Motion, London / New York 2016, Routledge, XII u. 272 S. / Abb., £ 110,00. (Michael Jucker, Luzern) Mulryne, James R. / Krista De Jonge / Pieter Martens / Richard L. M. Morris (Hrsg.), Architectures of Festival in Early Modern Europe. Fashioning and Re-fashioning Urban and Courtly Space (European Festival Studies: 1450 – 1700), London / New York 2018, Routledge, XXIV u. 335 S. / Abb., £ 105,00. (Jill Bepler, Wolfenbüttel) Adelman, Howard T., Women and Jewish Marriage Negotiations in Early Modern Italy. For Love and Money (Routledge Research in Early Modern History), London / New York 2018, Routledge, XIV u. 206 S., £ 120,00. 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(Karen Lambrecht, St. Gallen) Bongartz, Josef / Alexander Denzler / Ellen Franke / Britta Schneider / Stefan A. Stodolkowitz (Hrsg.), Was das Reich zusammenhielt. Deutungsansätze und integrative Elemente (Quellen und Forschungen zur höchsten Gerichtsbarkeit im Alten Reich, 71), Köln / Weimar / Wien 2017, Böhlau, 182 S., € 60,00. (Jonas Stephan, Bad Sassendorf) Stretz, Torben, Juden in Franken zwischen Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit. Die Grafschaften Castell und Wertheim im regionalen Kontext (Forschungen zur Geschichte der Juden. Abteilung A: Abhandlungen, 26), Wiesbaden 2017, Harrassowitz, X u. 598 S. / Abb., € 89,00. (Maja Andert, Würzburg) Schmölz-Häberlein, Michaela (Hrsg.), Jüdisches Leben in der Region. Herrschaft, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft im Süden des Alten Reiches (Stadt und Region in der Vormoderne, 7; Judentum – Christentum – Islam, 16), Baden-Baden 2018, Ergon, 377 S. / Abb., € 58,00. (Rotraud Ries, Würzburg) Stalljohann-Schemme, Marina, Stadt und Stadtbild in der Frühen Neuzeit. Frankfurt am Main als kulturelles Zentrum im publizistischen Diskurs (Bibliothek Altes Reich, 21), Berlin / Boston 2017, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, X u. 493 S. / Abb., € 89,95. (Johannes Arndt, Münster) Schmidt-Funke, Julia A. / Matthias Schnettger (Hrsg.), Neue Stadtgeschichte‍(n). Die Reichsstadt Frankfurt im Vergleich (Mainzer Historische Kulturwissenschaften, 31), Bielefeld 2018, transcript, 483 S. / Abb., € 49,99. (Holger Th. Gräf, Marburg) Huber, Vitus, Beute und Conquista. Die politische Ökonomie der Eroberung Neuspaniens (Campus Historische Studien, 76), Frankfurt a. M. 2018, Campus, 432 S. / Abb., € 39,95. (Laura Dierksmeier und Anna Weininger, Tübingen) Caravale, Giorgio, Preaching and Inquisition in Renaissance Italy. Words on Trial, übers. v. Frank Gordon (Catholic Christendom, 1300 – 1700), Leiden / Boston 2016, Brill, VIII u. 274 S., € 115,00. (Andreea Badea, Frankfurt a. M.) Mertens, Dieter, Humanismus und Landesgeschichte. Ausgewählte Aufsätze, 2 Teile, hrsg. v. Dieter Speck / Birgit Studt / Thomas Zotz (Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für geschichtliche Landeskunde in Baden-Württemberg. Reihe B: Forschungen, 218), Stuttgart 2018, Kohlhammer, XIV u. 1042 S. / Abb., € 88,00. (Ulrich Muhlack, Frankfurt a. M.) Grimmsmann, Damaris, Krieg mit dem Wort. Türkenpredigten des 16. Jahrhunderts im Alten Reich (Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte, 131), Berlin / Boston 2016, de Gruyter, XII u. 317 S., € 109,95 (Alexander Schunka, Berlin) Bauer, Joachim / Stefan Michel (Hrsg.), Der „Unterricht der Visitatoren“ und die Durchsetzung der Reformation in Kursachsen (Leucorea-Studien zur Geschichte der Reformation und der Lutherischen Orthodoxie, 29), Leipzig 2017, Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 278 S., € 58,00. (Thomas Fuchs, Leipzig) Stegmann, Andreas, Die Reformation in der Mark Brandenburg, Leipzig 2017, Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 279 S. / Abb., € 34,00. (Thomas Fuchs, Leipzig) Mariotte, Jean-Yves, Philipp der Großmütige von Hessen (1504 – 1567). Fürstlicher Reformator und Landgraf, übers. v. Sabine Albrecht (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Hessen, 24; Quellen und Darstellungen zur Geschichte des Landgrafen Philipp des Großmütigen, 10), Marburg 2018, Historische Kommission für Hessen, 301 S. / Abb., € 28,00. (Thomas Fuchs, Leipzig) Doll, Eberhard, Der Theologe und Schriftsteller Friedrich Dedekind (1524/25 – 1598). Eine Biographie. Mit einem Beitrag von Britta-Juliane Kruse zu Dedekinds geistlichen Spielen und der Erstedition der „Hochtzeit zu Cana in Galilea“ (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, 145), Wiesbaden 2018, Harrassowitz in Kommission, 623 S. / Abb., € 92,00. (Julia Zech, Sarstedt) Bullinger, Heinrich, Tigurinerchronik, 3 Teilbde., hrsg. v. Hans U. Bächtold (Werke. Vierte Abteilung: Historische Schriften, 1), Zürich 2018, Theologischer Verlag Zürich, XXVII u. 1388 S. (Teilbde. 1 u. 2); V u. 425 S. / Abb. (Teilbd. 3), € 450,00. (Volker Leppin, Tübingen) Francisco de Vitoria, De iustitia / Über die Gerechtigkeit, Teil 1 u. 2, hrsg., eingel. u. ins Deutsche übers. v. Joachim Stüben, mit Einleitungen v. Thomas Duve (Teil 1) bzw. Tilman Repgen (Teil 2) (Politische Philosophie und Rechtstheorie des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, Reihe I: Texte, 3 bzw. 4), Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 2013 bzw. 2017, Frommann-Holzboog, CXII u. 191 S. bzw. CIX u. 355 S., € 168,00 bzw. € 188,00. (Nils Jansen, Münster) Der Portulan-Atlas des Battista Agnese. Das Kasseler Prachtexemplar von 1542, hrsg., eingel. u. komm. v. Ingrid Baumgärtner, Darmstadt 2017, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 144 S. / Abb., € 99,95. (Christoph Mauntel, Tübingen) Brevaglieri, Sabina / Matthias Schnettger (Hrsg.), Transferprozesse zwischen dem Alten Reich und Italien im 17. Jahrhundert. Wissenskonfigurationen – Akteure – Netzwerke (Mainzer Historische Kulturwissenschaften, 29), Bielefeld 2018, transcript, 341 S. / Abb., € 39,99. (Christiane Liermann, Como) Asmussen, Tina, Scientia Kircheriana. Die Fabrikation von Wissen bei Athanasius Kircher (Kulturgeschichten, 2), Affalterbach 2016, Didymos-Verlag, 220 S. / Abb., € 39,00. (Mona Garloff, Stuttgart / Wien) Schlegelmilch, Sabine, Ärztliche Praxis und sozialer Raum im 17. Jahrhundert. Johannes Magirus (1615 – 1697), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2018, Böhlau, 352 S. / Abb., € 50,00. (Pierre Pfütsch, Stuttgart) Félicité, Indravati, Das Königreich Frankreich und die norddeutschen Hansestädte und Herzogtümer (1650 – 1730). Diplomatie zwischen ungleichen Partnern, übers. aus dem Französischen v. Markus Hiltl (Quellen und Darstellungen zur hansischen Geschichte. Neue Folge, 75), Köln / Weimar / Wien 2017, Böhlau, 439 S., € 60,00. (Guido Braun, Mulhouse) Renault, Rachel, La permanence de l’extraordinaire. Fiscalité, pouvoirs et monde social en Allemagne aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Histoire moderne, 57), Paris 2017, Éditions de la Sorbonne, 389 S. / Abb., € 25,00. (Claire Gantet, Fribourg) Godsey, William D., The Sinews of Habsburg Power. Lower Austria in a Fiscal-Military State 1650 – 1820, Oxford 2018, Oxford University Press, XX u. 460 S. / Abb., £ 90,00. (Simon Karstens, Trier) Riotte, Andrea, Diese so oft beseufzte Parität. Biberach 1649 – 1825: Politik – Konfession – Alltag (Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für geschichtliche Landeskunde in Baden-Württemberg. Reihe B: Forschungen, 213), Stuttgart 2017, Kohlhammer, LII u. 779 S., € 64,00. (Stephanie Armer, Nürnberg) Müller, Andreas, Die Ritterschaft im Herzogtum Westfalen 1651 – 1803. Aufschwörung, innere Struktur und Prosopographie (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Westfalen. Neue Folge, 34), Münster 2017, Aschendorff, 744 S. / Abb., € 69,00. (Nicolas Rügge, Hannover) Lange, Johan, Die Gefahren der akademischen Freiheit. Ratgeberliteratur für Studenten im Zeitalter der Aufklärung (1670 – 1820) (Beihefte der Francia, 84), Ostfildern 2017, Thorbecke, 339 S., € 45,00. (Andreas Erb, Dessau) Schwerhoff, Gerd, Köln im Ancien Régime. 1686 – 1794 (Geschichte der Stadt Köln, 7), Köln 2017, Greven, XIV u. 552 S. / Abb., € 60,00. (Patrick Schmidt, Rostock) James, Leonie, „This Great Firebrand“. William Laud and Scotland, 1617 – 1645 (Studies in Modern British Religious History, 36), Woodbridge / Rochester 2017, The Boydell Press, XIV u. 195 S., £ 60,00. (Martin Foerster, Hamburg) Campbell, Alexander D., The Life and Works of Robert Baillie (1602 – 1662). Politics, Religion and Record-Keeping in the British Civil Wars (St. Andrews Studies in Scottish History, 6), Woodbridge / Rochester 2017, The Boydell Press, IX u. 259 S., £ 75,00. (Ronald G. Asch, Freiburg i. Br.) Parrish, David, Jacobitism and Anti-Jacobitism in the British Atlantic World, 1688 – 1727 (Studies in History. New Series), Woodbridge / Rochester 2017, The Boydell Press, X u. 189 S., £ 50,00. (Ronald G. Asch, Freiburg i. Br.) Graham, Aaron / Patrick Walsh (Hrsg.), The British Fiscal-Military State, 1660 – c. 1783, London / New York 2016, Routledge, XI u. 290 S. / Abb., £ 80,00. (Torsten Riotte, Frankfurt a. M.) Hoppit, Julian, Britain’s Political Economies. Parliament and Economic Life, 1660 – 1800, Cambridge 2017, Cambridge University Press, XXII u. 391 S. / graph. Darst., £ 22,99. (Justus Nipperdey, Saarbrücken) Talbot, Michael, British-Ottoman Relations, 1661 – 1807. Commerce and Diplomatic Practice in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul, Woodbridge / Rochester 2017, The Boydell Press, XIII u. 256 S. / graph. Darst., £ 70,00. (Christine Vogel, Vechta) Niggemann, Ulrich, Revolutionserinnerung in der Frühen Neuzeit. Refigurationen der „Glorious Revolution“ in Großbritannien (1688 – 1760) (Veröffentlichungen des Deutsche Historischen Instituts London, 79), Berlin / Boston 2017, de Gruyter, XII u. 653 S. / Abb., € 64,95. (Georg Eckert, Wuppertal) Ducheyne, Steffen (Hrsg.), Reassessing the Radical Enlightenment, London / New York 2017, Routledge, XII u. 318 S., £ 32,99. (Bettina Dietz, Hongkong) Lehner, Ulrich (Hrsg.), Women, Enlightenment and Catholicism. A Transnational Biographical History, London / New York 2018, Routledge, XI u. 236 S. / Abb., £ 100,00. (Elisabeth Fischer, Hamburg) Möller, Horst / Claus Scharf / Wassili Dudarew / Maja Lawrinowitsch (Hrsg.), Deutschland – Russland. Stationen gemeinsamer Geschichte, Orte der Erinnerung, Bd. 1: Das 18. Jahrhundert, Berlin / Boston 2018, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 410 S. / Abb., € 29,95. (Martina Winkler, Kiel) Bittner, Anja, Eine königliche Mission. Der französisch-jakobitische Invasionsversuch von 1708 im europäischen Kontext (Schriften des Frühneuzeitzentrums Potsdam, 6), Göttingen 2017, V&amp;R unipress, 277 S., € 45,00. (Torsten Riotte, Frankfurt a.M.) Schmidt-Voges, Inken / Ana Crespo Solana (Hrsg.), New Worlds? Transformations in the Culture of International Relations around the Peace of Utrecht, London / New York 2017, Routledge, IX u. 232 S., £ 105,00. (Anuschka Tischer, Würzburg) Mager, Ria, Zwischen Legitimation und Inspektion. Die Rheinlandreise Napoleon Bonapartes im Jahre 1804 (Konsulat und Kaiserreich, 4), Frankfurt a. M. [u. a.] 2016, Lang, 330 S., € 61,95. (Josef Johannes Schmid, Mainz)

IntroductionWe five friends clinked glasses in our favourite wine and cocktail bar, and considered our next collaborative writing project. We had seen M/C Journal’s call for articles for a special issue on ‘regional’ and when one of us mentioned the television program, Escape from the City, we began our critique:“They haven’t featured Armidale yet, but wouldn’t it be great if they did?”“Really? I mean, some say any publicity is good publicity but the few early episodes I’ve viewed seem to give little or no screen time to the sorts of lifestyle features I most value in our town.”“Well, seeing as we all moved here from the city ages ago, let’s talk about what made us stay?”We had found our next project.A currently popular lifestyle television show (Escape from the City) on Australia’s national public service broadcaster, the ABC, highlights the limitations of popular cultural representations of life in a regional centre. The program is targeted at viewers interested in relocating to regional Australia. As Raymond Boyle and Lisa Kelly note, popular television is an important entry point into the construction of public knowledge as well as a launching point for viewers as they seek additional information (65). In their capacity to construct popular perceptions of ‘reality’, televisual texts offer a significant insight into our understandings and expectations of what is going on around us. Similar to the concerns raised by Esther Peeren and Irina Souch in their analysis of the popular TV show Farmer Wants a Wife (a version set in the Netherlands from 2004–present), we worry that these shows “prevent important aspects of contemporary rural life from being seen and understood” (37) by the viewers, and do a disservice to regional communities.For the purposes of this article, we interrogate the episodes of Escape from the City screened to date in terms of the impact they may have on promoting regional Australia and speculate on how satisfied (or otherwise) we would be should the producers direct their lens onto our regional community—Armidale, in northern NSW. We start with a brief précis of Escape from the City and then, applying an autoethnographic approach (Butz and Besio) focusing on our subjective experiences, we share our reflections on living in Armidale. We blend our academic knowledge and knowledge of everyday life (Klevan et al.) to argue there is greater cultural diversity, complexity, and value in being in the natural landscape in regional areas than is portrayed in these representations of country life that largely focus on cheaper real estate and a five-minute commute.We employ an autoethnographic approach because it emphasises the socially and politically constituted nature of knowledge claims and allows us to focus on our own lives as a way of understanding larger social phenomena. We recognise there is a vast literature on lifestyle programs and there are many different approaches scholars can take to these. Some focus on the intention of the program, for example “the promotion of neoliberal citizenship through home investment” (White 578), while others focus on the supposed effect on audiences (Tsay-Vogel and Krakowiak). Here we only assert the effects on ourselves. We have chosen to blend our voices (Gilmore et al.) in developing our arguments, highlighting our single voices where our individual experiences are drawn on, as we argue for an alternative representation of regional life than currently portrayed in the regional ‘escapes’ of this mainstream lifestyle television program.Lifestyle TelevisionEscape from the City is one of the ‘lifestyle’ series listed on the ABC iview website under the category of ‘Regional Australia’. Promotional details describe Escape from the City as a lifestyle series of 56-minute episodes in which home seekers are guided through “the trials and tribulations of their life-changing decision to escape the city” (iview).Escape from the City is an example of format television, a term used to describe programs that retain the structure and style of those produced in another country but change the circumstances to suit the new cultural context. The original BBC format is entitled Escape to the Country and has been running since 2002. The reach of lifestyle television is extensive, with the number of programs growing rapidly since 2000, not just in the United Kingdom, but internationally (Hill; Collins). In Australia, they have completed, but not yet screened, 60 episodes of Escape from the City. However, with such popularity comes great potential to influence audiences and we argue this program warrants critical attention.Like House Hunters, the United States lifestyle television show (running since 1997), Escape from the City follows “a strict formula” (Loof 168). Each episode uses the same narrative format, beginning with an introduction to the team of experts, then introducing the prospective house buyers, briefly characterising their reasons for leaving the city and what they are looking for in their new life. After this, we are shown a map of the region and the program follows the ‘escapees’ as they view four pre-selected houses. As we leave each property, the cost and features are reiterated in the written template on the screen. We, the audience, wait in anticipation for their final decision.The focus of Escape from the City is the buying of the house: the program’s team of experts is there to help the potential ‘escapees’ find the real estate gem. Real estate value for money emerges as the primary concern, while the promise of finding a ‘life less ordinary’ as highlighted in the opening credits of the program each week, seems to fall by the wayside. Indeed, the representation of regional centres is not nuanced but limited by the emphasis placed on economics over the social and cultural.The intended move of the ‘escapees’ is invariably portrayed as motivated by disenchantment with city life. Clearly a bigger house and a smaller mortgage also has its hedonistic side. In her study of Western society represented in lifestyle shows, Lyn Thomas lists some of the negative aspects of city life as “high speed, work-dominated, consumerist” (680), along with pollution and other associated health risks. While these are mentioned in Escape from the City, Thomas’s list of the pleasures afforded by a simpler country life including space for human connection and spirituality, is not explored to any satisfying extent. Further, as a launching point for viewers in the city (Boyle and Kelly), we fear the singular focus on the price of real estate reinforces a sense of the rural as devoid of creative arts and cultural diversity with a focus on the productive, rather than the natural, landscape. Such a focus does not encourage a desire to find out more and undersells the richness of our (regional) lives.As Australian regional centres strive to circumvent or halt the negative impacts of the drift in population to the cities (Chan), lifestyle programs are important ‘make or break’ narratives, shaping the appeal and bolstering—or not—a decision to relocate. With their focus on cheaper real estate prices and the freeing up of the assets of the ‘escapees’ that a move to the country may entail, the representation is so focused on the economics that it is almost placeless. While the format includes a map of the regional location, there is little sense of being in the place. Such a limited representation does not do justice to the richness of regional lives as we have experienced them.Our TownLike so many regional centres, Armidale has much to offer and is seeking to grow (Armidale Regional Council). The challenges regional communities face in sustaining their communities is well captured in Gabriele Chan’s account of the city-country divide (Chan) and Armidale, with its population of about 25,000, is no exception. Escape from the City fails to emphasise cultural diversity and richness, yet this is what characterises our experience of our regional city. As long-term and satisfied residents of Armidale, who are keenly aware of the persuasive power of popular cultural representations (O’Sullivan and Sheridan; Sheridan and O’Sullivan), we are concerned about the trivialising or reductive manner in which regional Australia is portrayed.While we acknowledge there has not been an episode of Escape from the City featuring Armidale, if the characterisation of another, although larger, regional centre, Toowoomba, is anything to go by, our worst fears may be realised if our town is to feature in the future. Toowoomba is depicted as rural landscapes, ‘elegant’ buildings, a garden festival (the “Carnival of the Flowers”) and the town’s history as home of the Southern Cross windmill and the iconic lamington sponge. The episode features an old shearing shed and a stock whip demonstration, but makes no mention of the arts, or of the University that has been there since 1967. Summing up Toowoomba, the voiceover describes it as “an understated and peaceful place to live,” and provides “an attractive alternative” to city life, substantiated by a favourable comparison of median real estate prices.Below we share our individual responses to the question raised in our opening conversation about the limitations of Escape from the City: What have we come to value about our own town since escaping from city life?Jane: The aspects of life in Armidale I most enjoy are, at least in part, associated with or influenced by the fact that this is a centre for education and a ‘university town’. As such, there is access to an academic library and an excellent town library. The presence of the University of New England, along with independent and public schools, and TAFE, makes education a major employer, attracting a significant student population, and is a major factor in Armidale being one of the first towns in the roll-out of the NBN/high-speed broadband. University staff and students may also account for the thriving cafe culture, along with designer breweries/bars, art house cinema screenings, and a lively classical and popular music scene. Surely the presence of a university and associated spin-offs would deserve coverage in a prospective episode about Armidale.Alison: Having grown up in the city, and now having lived more than half my life in an inner-regional country town, I don’t feel I am missing out ‘culturally’ from this decision. Within our town, there is a vibrant arts community, with the regional gallery and two local galleries holding regular art exhibitions, theatre at a range of venues, and book launches at our lively local book store. And when my children were younger, there was no shortage of sporting events they could be involved with. Encountering friends and familiar faces regularly at these events adds to my sense of belonging to my community. The richness of this life does not make it to the television screen in episodes of Escape from the City.Kerry: I greatly value the Armidale community’s strong social conscience. There are many examples of successful programs to support diverse groups. Armidale Sanctuary and Humanitarian Settlement sponsored South Sudanese refugees for many years and is currently assisting Ezidi refugees. In addition to the core Sanctuary committee, many in the local community help families with developing English skills, negotiating daily life, such as reading and responding to school notes and medical questionnaires. The Backtrack program assists troubled Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal youth. The program helps kids “to navigate their relationships, deal with personal trauma, take responsibility […] gain skills […] so they can eventually create a sustainable future for themselves.” The documentary film Backtrack Boys shows what can be achieved by individuals with the support of the community. Missing from Escape from the City is recognition of the indigenous experience and history in regional communities, unlike the BBC’s ‘original’ program in which medieval history and Vikings often get a ‘guernsey’. The 1838 Myall Creek massacre of 28 Wirrayaraay people, led to the first prosecution and conviction of a European for killing Aboriginals. Members of the Indigenous and non-Indigenous community in Armidale are now active in acknowledging the past wrongs and beginning the process of reconciliation.Josie: About 10am on a recent Saturday morning I was walking from the car park to the shopping complex. Coming down the escalator and in the vestibule, there were about thirty people and it occurred to me that there were at least six nationalities represented, with some of the people wearing traditional dress. It also struck me that this is not unusual—we are a diverse community as a result of our history and being a ‘university city’. The Armidale Aboriginal Cultural Centre and Keeping Place was established in 1988 and is being extended in 2019. Diversity is apparent in cultural activities such as an international film festival held annually and many of the regular musical events and stalls at the farmers’ market increasingly reflect the cultural mix of our town. As a long-term resident, I appreciate the lifestyle here.Wendy: It is early morning and I am walking in a forest of tall trees, with just the sounds of cattle and black cockatoos. I travel along winding pathways with mossy boulders and creeks dry with drought. My dog barks at rabbits and ‘roos, and noses through the nooks and crannies of the hillside. In this public park on the outskirts of town, I can walk for two hours without seeing another person, or I can be part of a dog-walking pack. The light is grey and misty now, the ranges blue and dark green, but I feel peaceful and content. I came here from the city 30 years ago and hated it at first! But now I relish the way I can be at home in 10 minutes after starting the day in the midst of nature and feeling part of the landscape, not just a tourist—never a possibility in the city. I can watch the seasons and the animals as they come and go and be part of a community which is part of the landscape too. For me, the first verse of South of My Days, written by a ‘local’ describing our New England environment, captures this well:South of my days’ circle, part of my blood’s country,rises that tableland, high delicate outlineof bony slopes wincing under the winter,low trees, blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite-clean, lean, hungry country. The creek’s leaf-silenced,willow choked, the slope a tangle of medlar and crabapplebranching over and under, blotched with a green lichen;and the old cottage lurches in for shelter. (Wright 20)Whilst our autoethnographic reflections may not reach the heady heights of Judith Wright, they nevertheless reflect the experience of living in, not just escaping to the country. We are disappointed that the breadth of cultural activities and the sense of diversity and community that our stories evoke are absent from the representations of regional communities in Escape from the City.Kate Oakley and Jonathon Ward argue that ‘visions of the good life’, in particular cultural life in the regions, need to be supported by policy which encourages a sustainable prosperity characterised by both economic and cultural development. Escape from the City, however, dwells on the material aspects of consumption—good house prices and the possibility of a private enterprise—almost to the exclusion of any coverage of the creative cultural features.We recognise that the lifestyle genre requires simplification for viewers to digest. What we are challenging is the sense that emerges from the repetitive format week after week whereby differences between places are lost (White 580). Instead what is conveyed in Escape from the City is that regions are homogenous and monocultural. We would like to see more screen time devoted to the social and cultural aspects of the individual locations.ConclusionWe believe coverage of a far richer and more complex nature of rural life would provide a more ‘realistic’ preview of what could be ahead for the ‘escapees’ and perhaps swing the decision to relocate. Certainly, there is some evidence that viewers gain information from lifestyle programs (Hill 106). We are concerned that a lifestyle television program that purports to provide expert advice on the benefits and possible pitfalls of a possible move to the country should be as accurate and all-encompassing as possible within the constraints of the length of the program and the genre.So, returning to what may appear to have been a light-hearted exchange between us at our local bar, and given the above discussion, we argue that television is a powerful medium. We conclude that a popular lifestyle television program such as Escape from the City has an impact on a large viewing audience. For those city-based viewers watching, the message is that moving to the country is an economic ‘no brainer’, whereas the social and cultural dimensions of regional communities, which we posit have sustained our lives, are overlooked. Such texts influence viewers’ perceptions and expectations of what escaping to the country may entail. Escape from the City exploits regional towns as subject matter for a lifestyle program but does not significantly challenge stereotypical representations of country life or does not fully flesh out what escaping to the country may achieve.ReferencesArmidale Regional Council. Community Strategic Plan 2017–2027. Armidale: Armidale Regional Council, 2017.“Backtrack Boys.” Dir. Catherine Scott. Sydney: Umbrella Entertainment, 2018.Boyle, Raymond, and Lisa W. Kelly. “Television, Business Entertainment and Civic Culture.” Television and New Media 14.1 (2013): 62–70.Butz, David, and Kathryn Besio. “Autoethnography.” Geography Compass 3.5 (2009): 1660–74.Chan, Gabrielle. Rusted Off: Why Country Australia Is Fed Up. Australia: Vintage, 2018.Collins, Megan. Classical and Contemporary Social Theory: The New Narcissus in the Age of Reality Television. Routledge, 2018.Gilmore, Sarah, Nancy Harding, Jenny Helin, and Alison Pullen. “Writing Differently.” Management Learning 50.1 (2019): 3–10.Hill, Annette. Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television. London: Routledge, 2004.iview. “Escape from the City.” Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2019.Klevan, Trude, Bengt Karlsson, Lydia Turner, Nigel Short, and Alec Grant. “‘Aha! ‘Take on Me’s’: Bridging the North Sea with Relational Autoethnography.” Qualitative Research Journal 18.4 (2018): 330–44.Loof, Travis. “A Narrative Criticism of Lifestyle Reality Programs.” Journal of Media Critiques 1.5 (2015): 167–78.O’Sullivan, Jane, and Alison Sheridan. “The King Is Dead, Long Live the King: Tall Tales of New Men and New Management in The Bill.” Gender, Work and Organization 12.4 (2005): 299–318.Oakley, Kate, and Jonathon Ward. “The Art of the Good Life: Culture and Sustainable Prosperity.” Cultural Trends 27.1 (2018): 4–17.Peeren, Esther, and Irina Souch. “Romance in the Cowshed: Challenging and Reaffirming the Rural Idyll in the Dutch Reality TV Show Farmer Wants a Wife.” Journal of Rural Studies 67.1 (2019): 37–45.Sheridan, Alison, and Jane O’Sullivan. “‘Fact’ and ‘Fiction’: Enlivening Health Care Education.” Journal of Health Orgnaization and Management 27.5 (2013): 561–76.Thomas, Lyn. “Alternative Realities: Downshifting Narratives in Contemporary Lifestyle Television.” Cultural Studies 22.5 (2008): 680–99.Tsay-Vogel, Mina, and K. Maja Krakowiak. “Exploring Viewers’ Responses to Nine Reality TV Subgenres.” Psychology of Popular Media Culture 6.4 (2017): 348–60.White, Mimi. “‘A House Divided’.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 20.5 (2017): 575–91.Wright, Judith. Collected Poems: 1942–1985. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994.

Introduction 2021 was the year that NFTs got big—not just in value but also in terms of the cultural consciousness. When digital artist Beeple sold the portfolio of his 5,000 daily images at Christie’s for US$69 million, the art world was left intrigued, confused, and outraged in equal measure. Depending on who you asked, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) seemed to be either a quick cash-grab or the future of the art market (Bowden and Jones; Smee). Following the Beeple sale, articles started to appear indicating that the film industry was abuzz for NFTs. Independent filmmaker Kevin Smith was quick to announce that he planned to release his horror film Killroy Was Here as an NFT (Alexander); in September 2021 the James Bond film No Time to Die also unveiled a series of collectibles to coincide with the film’s much-delayed theatrical release (Natalee); the distribution and collectible platforms Vuele, NFT Studios, and Mogul Productions all emerged, and the industry rumour mill suggests more start-ups are en route (CurrencyWorks; NFT Studios; NewsBTC). Blockchain disciples say that the technology will solve all the problems of the Internet (Tewari; Norton; European Business Review); critics say it will only perpetuate existing accessibility and equality issues (Davis and Flatow; Klein). Those more circumspect will doubtless sit back until the dust settles, waiting to see what parts of so-called web3 will be genuinely integrated into the architecture of the Internet. Pamela Hutchinson puts it neatly in terms of the arts sector: “the NFT may revolutionise the art market, film funding and distribution. Or it might be an ecological disaster and a financial bubble, in which few actual movies change hands, and fraudsters get rich from other people’s intellectual property” (Hutchinson). There is an uptick in the literature around NFTs and blockchain (see Quiniou; Gayvoronskaya & Meinel); however, the technology remains unregulated and unstandardised (Yeung 212-14; Dimitropoulos 112-13). Similarly, the sheer amount of funding being put into fundamental technical, data, and security-related issues speaks volumes to the nascency of the space (Ossinger; Livni; Gayvoronskaya & Meinel 52-6). Put very briefly, NFTs are part of a given blockchain system; think of them, like cryptocurrency coins, as “units of value” within that system (Roose). NFTs were initially rolled out on Ethereum, though several other blockchains have now implemented their own NFT frameworks. NFTs are usually not the artwork itself, but rather a unique, un-copyable (hence, non-fungible) piece of code that is attached, linked, or connected to another digital file, be that an image, video, text, or something else entirely. NFTs are often referred to as a digital artwork’s “certificate of authenticity” (Roose). At the time of writing, it remains to be seen how widely blockchain and NFT technology will be implemented across the entertainment industries. However, this article aims to outline the current state of implementation in the film trade specifically, and to attempt to sort true potential from the hype. Beginning with an overview of the core issues around blockchain and NFTs as they apply to film properties and adjacent products, current implementations of the technology are outlined, before finishing with a hesitant glimpse into the potential future applications. The Issues and Conversation At the core of current conversations around blockchain are three topics: intellectual property and ownership, concentrations of power and control, and environmental impact. To this I would like to add a consideration of social capital, which I begin with briefly here. Both the film industry and “crypto” — if we take the latter to encompass the various facets of so-called ‘web3’ — are engines of social capital. In the case of cinema, its products are commodified and passed through a model that begins with exclusivity (theatrical release) before progressing to mass availability (home media, streaming). The cinematic object, i.e., an individual copy of a film, is, by virtue of its origins as a mass product of the twentieth century, fungible. The film is captured, copied, stored, distributed, and shared. The film-industrial model has always relied on social phenomena, word of mouth, critical discourse, and latterly on buzz across digital social media platforms. This is perhaps as distinct from fine art, where — at least for dealers — the content of the piece does not necessarily matter so much as verification of ownership and provenance. Similarly, web3, with its decentralised and often-anonymised processes, relies on a kind of social activity, or at least a recorded interaction wherein the chain is stamped and each iteration is updated across the system. Even without the current hype, web3 still relies a great deal on discourse, sharing, and community, particularly as it flattens the existing hierarchies of the Internet that linger from Web 2.0. In terms of NFTs, blockchain systems attach scarcity and uniqueness to digital objects. For now, that scarcity and uniqueness is resulting in financial value, though as Jonathan Beller argues the notion of value could — or perhaps should — be reconsidered as blockchain technology, and especially cryptocurrencies, evolve (Beller 217). Regardless, NFT advocates maintain that this is the future of all online activity. To questions of copyright, the structures of blockchain do permit some level of certainty around where a given piece of intellectual property emerged. This is particularly useful where there are transnational differences in recognition of copyright law, such as in France, for instance (Quiniou 112-13). The Berne Convention stipulates that “the subsistence of copyright does not rest on the compliance with formal requirements: rights will exist if the work meets the requirements for protection set out by national law and treaties” (Guadamuz 1373). However, there are still no legal structures underpinning even the most transparent of transactions, when an originator goes out of their way to transfer rights to the buyer of the accompanying NFT. The minimum requirement — even courtesy — for the assignment of rights is the identification of the work itself; as Guadamuz notes, this is tricky for NFTs as they are written in code (1374). The blockchain’s openness and transparency are its key benefits, but until the code can explicitly include (or concretely and permanently reference) the ‘content’ of an NFT, its utility as a system of ownership is questionable. Decentralisation, too, is raised consistently as a key positive characteristic of blockchain technology. Despite the energy required for this decentralisation (addressed shortly), it is true that, at least in its base code, blockchain is a technology with no centralised source of truth or verification. Instead, such verification is performed by every node on the chain. On the surface, for the film industry, this might mean modes of financing, rights management, and distribution chains that are not beholden to multinational media conglomerates, streamers like Netflix, niche intermediaries, or legacy studios. The result here would be a flattening of the terrain: breaking down studio and corporate gatekeeping in favour of a more democratised creative landscape. Creators and creative teams would work peer-to-peer, paying, contracting, servicing, and distribution via the blockchain, with iron-clad, publicly accessible tracking of transactions and ownership. The alternative, though, is that the same imbalances persist, just in a different form: this is outlined in the next section. As Hunter Vaughan writes, the film industry’s environmental impact has long been under-examined. Its practices are diverse, distributed, and hard to quantify. Cinematic images, Vaughan writes, “do not come from nothing, and they do not vanish into the air: they have always been generated by the earth and sun, by fossil fuels and chemical reactions, and our enjoyment of them has material consequences” (3). We believe that by watching a “green” film like Avatar we are doing good, but it implicates us in the dirty secret, an issue of “ignorance and of voluntary psychosis” where “we do not see who we are harming or how these practices are affecting the environment, and we routinely agree to accept the virtual as real” (5). Beyond questions of implication and eco-material conceptualisation, however, there are stark facts. In the 1920s, the Kodak Park Plant in New York drew 12 million gallons of water from Lake Ontario each day to produce film stock. As the twentieth century came to a close, this amount — for a single film plant — had grown to 35-53 million gallons per day. The waste water was perfunctorily “cleaned” and then dumped into surrounding rivers (72-3). This was just one plant, and one part of the filmmaking process. With the shift to digital, this cost might now be calculated in the extraction of precious metals used to make contemporary cameras, computers, or storage devices. Regardless, extrapolate outwards to a global film industry and one quickly realises the impact is almost beyond comprehension. Considering — let alone calculating — the carbon footprint of blockchain requires outlining some fundamentals of the technology. The two primary architectures of blockchain are Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS), both of which denote methods of adding and verifying new blocks to a chain. PoW was the first model, employed by Bitcoin and the first iteration of Ethereum. In a PoW model, each new block has a specific cryptographic hash. To confirm the new block, crypto miners use their systems to generate a target hash that is less than or equal to that of the block. The systems process these calculations quickly, as the goal is to be “the first miner with the target hash because that miner is the one who can update the blockchain and receive crypto rewards” (Daly). The race for block confirmation necessitates huge amounts of processing power to make these quick calculations. The PoS model differs in that miners are replaced by validators (or staking services where participants pool validation power). Rather than investing in computer power, validators invest in the blockchain’s coins, staking those coins (tokens) in a smart contract (think of this contract like a bank account or vault). When a new block is proposed, an algorithm chooses a validator based on the size of their stake; if the block is verified, the validator receives further cryptocurrency as a reward (Castor). Given the ubiquity and exponential growth of blockchain technology and its users, an accurate quantification of its carbon footprint is difficult. For some precedent, though, one might consider the impact of the Bitcoin blockchain, which runs on a PoW model. As the New York Times so succinctly puts it: “the process of creating Bitcoin to spend or trade consumes around 91 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, more than is used by Finland, a nation of about 5.5 million” (Huang, O’Neill and Tabuchi). The current Ethereum system (at time of writing), where the majority of NFT transactions take place, also runs on PoW, and it is estimated that a single Ethereum transaction is equivalent to nearly nine days of power consumption by an average US household (Digiconomist). Ethereum always intended to operate on a PoS system, and the transition to this new model is currently underway (Castor). Proof of Stake transactions use significantly less energy — the new Ethereum will supposedly be approximately 2,000 times more energy efficient (Beekhuizen). However, newer systems such as Solana have been explicit about their efficiency goals, stating that a single Solana transaction uses less energy (1,837 Joules, to be precise) than keeping an LED light on for one hour (36,000 J); one Ethereum transaction, for comparison, uses over 692 million J (Solana). In addition to energy usage, however, there is also the question of e-waste as a result of mining and general blockchain operations which, at the time of writing, for Bitcoin sits at around 32 kilotons per year, around the same as the consumer IT wastage of the Netherlands (de Vries and Stoll). How the growth in NFT awareness and adoption amplifies this impact remains to be seen, but depending on which blockchain they use, they may be wasting energy and resources by design. If using a PoW model, the more valuable the cryptocurrency used to make the purchase, the more energy (“gas”) required to authenticate the purchase across the chain. Images abound online of jerry-rigged crypto data centres of varying quality (see also efficiency and safety). With each NFT minted, sold, or traded, these centres draw — and thus waste, for gas — more and more energy. With increased public attention and scrutiny, cryptocurrencies are slowly realising that things could be better. As sustainable alternatives become more desirable and mainstream, it is safe to predict that many NFT marketplaces may migrate to Cardano, Solana, or other more efficient blockchain bases. For now, though, this article considers the existing implementations of NFTs and blockchain technology within the film industry. Current Implementations The current applications of NFTs in film centre around financing and distribution. In terms of the former, NFTs are saleable items that can raise capital for production, distribution, or marketing. As previously mentioned, director Kevin Smith launched Jay & Silent Bob’s Crypto Studio in order to finish and release Killroy Was Here. Smith released over 600 limited edition tokens, including one of the film itself (Moore). In October 2021, renowned Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai sold an NFT with unreleased footage from his film In the Mood for Love at Sotheby’s for US$550,000 (Raybaud). Quentin Tarantino entered the arena in January 2022, auctioning uncut scenes from his 1994 film Pulp Fiction, despite the threat of legal action from the film’s original distributor Miramax (Dailey). In Australia, an early adopter of the technology is director Michael Beets, who works in virtual production and immersive experiences. His immersive 14-minute VR film Nezunoban (2020) was split into seven different chapters, and each chapter was sold as an NFT. Beets also works with artists to develop entry tickets that are their own piece of generative art; with these tickets and the chapters selling for hundreds of dollars at a time, Beets seems to have achieved the impossible: turning a profit on a short film (Fletcher). Another Australian writer-producer, Samuel Wilson, now based in Canada, suggests that the technology does encourage filmmakers to think differently about what they create: At the moment, I’m making NFTs from extra footage of my feature film Miles Away, which will be released early next year. In one way, it’s like a new age of behind-the-scenes/bonus features. I have 14 hours of DV tapes that I’m cutting into a short film which I will then sell in chapters over the coming months. One chapter will feature the dashing KJ Apa (Songbird, Riverdale) without his shirt on. So, hopefully that can turn some heads. (Wilson, in Fletcher) In addition to individual directors, a number of startup companies are also seeking to get in on the action. One of these is Vuele, which is best understood as a blockchain-based streaming service: an NFT Netflix, if you like. In addition to films themselves, the service will offer extra content as NFTs, including “behind the scenes content, bonus features, exclusive Q&As, and memorabilia” (CurrencyWorks). Vuele’s launch title is Zero Contact, directed by Rick Dugdale and starring Anthony Hopkins. The film is marketed as “the World’s First NFT Feature Film” (as at the time of writing, though, both Vuele and its flagship film have yet to launch). Also launching is NFT Studios, a blockchain-based production company that distributes the executive producer role to those buying into the project. NFT Studios is a decentralised administrative organisation (DAO), guided by tech experts, producers, and film industry intermediaries. NFT Studios is launching with A Wing and a Prayer, a biopic of aeronaut Brian Milton (NFT Studios), and will announce their full slate across festivals in 2022. In Australia, Culture Vault states that its aim is to demystify crypto and champion Australian artists’ rights and access to the space. Co-founder and CEO Michelle Grey is well aware of the aforementioned current social capital of NFTs, but is also acutely aware of the space’s opacity and the ubiquity of often machine-generated tat. “The early NFT space was in its infancy, there was a lot of crap around, but don’t forget there’s a lot of garbage in the traditional art world too,” she says (cited in Miller). Grey and her company effectively act like art dealers; intermediaries between the tech and art worlds. These new companies claim to be adhering to the principles of web3, often selling themselves as collectives, DAOs, or distributed administrative systems. But the entrenched tendencies of the film industry — particularly the persistent Hollywood system — are not so easily broken down. Vuele is a joint venture between CurrencyWorks and Enderby Entertainment. The former is a financial technology company setting up blockchain systems for businesses, including the establishment of branded digital currencies such as the controversial FreedomCoin (Memoria); the latter, Enderby, is a production company founded by Canadian film producer (and former investor relations expert in the oil and uranium sectors) Rick Dugdale (Wiesner). Similarly, NFT Studios is partnered with consulting and marketing agencies and blockchain venture capitalists (NFT Investments PLC). Depending on how charitable or cynical one is feeling, these start-ups are either helpful intermediaries to facilitate legacy media moving into NFT technology, or the first bricks in the capitalist wall to bar access for entry to other players. The Future Is… Buffering Marketplaces like Mintable, OpenSea, and Rarible do indeed make the minting and selling of NFTs fairly straightforward — if you’ve ever listed an item for sale on eBay or Facebook, you can probably mint an NFT. Despite this, the current major barrier for average punters to the NFT space remains technical knowledge. The principles of blockchain remain fairly opaque — even this author, who has been on a deep dive for this article, remains sceptical that widespread adoption across multiple applications and industries is feasible. Even so, as Rennie notes, “the unknown is not what blockchain technology is, or even what it is for (there are countless ‘use cases’), but how it structures the actions of those who use it” (235). At the time of writing, a great many commentators and a small handful of scholars are speculating about the role of the metaverse in the creative space. If the endgame of the metaverse is realised, i.e., a virtual, interactive space where users can interact, trade, and consume entertainment, the role of creators, dealers, distributors, and other brokers and players will be up-ended, and have to re-settle once again. Film industry practitioners might look to the games space to see what the road might look like, but then again, in an industry that is — at its best — somewhat resistant to change, this may simply be a fad that blows over. Blockchain’s current employment as a get-rich-quick mechanism for the algorithmic literati and as a computational extension of existing power structures suggests nothing more than another techno-bubble primed to burst (Patrickson 591-2; Klein). Despite the aspirational commentary surrounding distributed administrative systems and organisations, the current implementations are restricted, for now, to startups like NFT Studios. In terms of cinema, it does remain to be seen whether the deployment of NFTs will move beyond a kind of “Netflix with tchotchkes” model, or a variant of crowdfunding with perks. Once Vuele and NFT Studios launch properly, we may have a sense of how this all will play out, particularly alongside less corporate-driven, more artistically-minded initiatives like that of Michael Beets and Culture Vault. It is possible, too, that blockchain technology may streamline the mechanics of the industry in terms of automating or simplifying parts of the production process, particularly around contracts, financing, licensing. This would obviously remove some of the associated labour and fees, but would also de-couple long-established parts and personnel of the industry — would Hollywood and similar industrial-entertainment complexes let this happen? 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What NFTs Mean for Film.” BFI, 22 July 2021. <https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/nfts-non-fungible-tokens-blockchain-film-funding-revolution-hype>. Klein, Ezra. “A Viral Case against Crypto, Explored.” The Ezra Klein Show, n.d. 7 Apr. 2022 <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/05/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-dan-olson.html>. Livni, Ephrat. “Venture Capital Funding for Crypto Companies Is Surging.” The New York Times, 1 Dec. 2021. <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/business/dealbook/crypto-venture-capital.html>. Memoria, Francisco. “Popular Firearms Marketplace GunBroker to Launch ‘FreedomCoin’ Stablecoin.” CryptoGlobe, 30 Jan. 2019. <https://www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2019/01/popular-firearm-marketplace-gunbroker-to-launch-freedomcoin-stablecoin/>. Miller, Nick. “Australian Start-Up Aims to Make the Weird World of NFT Art ‘Less Crap’.” Sydney Morning Herald, 19 Jan. 2022. <https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/australian-startup-aims-to-make-the-weird-world-of-nft-art-less-crap-20220119-p59pev.html>. Moore, Kevin. “Kevin Smith Drops an NFT Project Packed with Utility.” One37pm, 27 Apr. 2021. <https://www.one37pm.com/nft/art/kevin-smith-jay-and-silent-bob-nft-killroy-was-here>. Nano. “Press Kit.” 14 Feb. 2022 <https://content.nano.org/Nano-Press-Kit.pdf>. Natalee. “James Bond No Time to Die VeVe NFTs Launch.” NFT Culture, 22 Sep. 2021. <https://www.nftculture.com/nft-marketplaces/4147/>. NewsBTC. “Mogul Productions to Conduct the First Ever Blockchain-Based Voting for Film Financing.” NewsBTC, 22 July 2021. <https://www.newsbtc.com/news/company/mogul-productions-to-conduct-the-first-ever-blockchain-based-voting-for-film-financing/>. NFT Investments PLC. “Approach.” 21 Jan. 2022 <https://www.nftinvest.pro/approach>. NFT Studios. “Projects.” 9 Feb. 2022 <https://nftstudios.dev/projects>. Norton, Robert. “NFTs Have Changed the Art of the Possible.” Wired UK, 14 Feb. 2022. <https://www.wired.co.uk/article/nft-art-world>. Ossinger, Joanna. “Crypto World Hits $3 Trillion Market Cap as Ether, Bitcoin Gain.” Bloomberg.com, 8 Nov. 2021. <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-08/crypto-world-hits-3-trillion-market-cap-as-ether-bitcoin-gain>. Patrickson, Bronwin. “What Do Blockchain Technologies Imply for Digital Creative Industries?” Creativity and Innovation Management 30.3 (2021): 585–595. Quiniou, Matthieu. Blockchain: The Advent of Disintermediation, New York: John Wiley, 2019. Raybaud, Sebastien. “First Asian Film NFT Sold, Wong Kar-Wai’s ‘In the Mood for Love’ Fetches US$550k in Sotheby’s Evening Sale, Auctions News.” TheValue.Com, 10 Oct. 2021. <https://en.thevalue.com/articles/sothebys-auction-wong-kar-wai-in-the-mood-for-love-nft>. Rennie, Ellie. “The Challenges of Distributed Administrative Systems.” Australian Humanities Review 66 (2020): 233-239. Roose, Kevin. “What are NFTs?” The New York Times, 18 Mar. 2022. <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/18/technology/nft-guide.html>. Smee, Sebastian. “Will NFTs Transform the Art World? Are They Even Art?” Washington Post, 18 Dec. 2021. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/12/18/nft-art-faq/>. Solana. “Solana’s Energy Use Report: November 2021.” Solana, 24 Nov. 2021. <https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-2021>. Tewari, Hitesh. “Four Ways Blockchain Could Make the Internet Safer, Fairer and More Creative.” The Conversation, 12 July 2019. <http://theconversation.com/four-ways-blockchain-could-make-the-internet-safer-fairer-and-more-creative-118706>. Vaughan, Hunter. Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret: The Hidden Environmental Costs of the Movies. New York: Columbia UP, 2019. Vision and Value. “CurrencyWorks (CWRK): Under-the-Radar, Crypto-Agnostic, Blockchain Pick-and-Shovel Play.” Seeking Alpha, 1 Dec. 2021. <https://seekingalpha.com/article/4472715-currencyworks-under-the-radar-crypto-agnostic-blockchain-pick-and-shovel-play>. Wiesner, Darren. “Exclusive – BC Producer – Rick Dugdale Becomes a Heavyweight.” Hollywood North Magazine, 29 Aug. 2017. <https://hnmag.ca/interview/exclusive-bc-producer-rick-dugdale-becomes-a-heavyweight/>. Yeung, Karen. “Regulation by Blockchain: The Emerging Battle for Supremacy between the Code of Law and Code as Law.” The Modern Law Review 82.2 (2019): 207–239.

“We have made Italy, now we must make Italians,” in the (probably apocryphal) words of the Prime Minister, sometime after the unification of the nation in 1860. Perhaps in French, if it was said at all. (The quotation is typically attributed to Massimo D’Azeglio, the prime minister of Piedmont and predecessor of the first Italian prime minister Camillo Cavour. Many have suggested that the phrase was misquoted and misunderstood (see Doyle.) D’Azeglio spoke in Italian when he addressed the newly-formed Italian parliament, but my reference to French is meant to indicate the fragility of the national language in early Italy where much of the ruling class spoke French while the majority of the people in the peninsula still spoke regional dialects.) It was television – more than print media or even radio – that would have the biggest impact in terms of ‘making Italians.’ Writing about Italy in the 1950s, a well-known media critic suggested that television, a game show actually, “was able to succeed where The Divine Comedy failed … it gave Italy a national language” (qtd. in Foot). But these are yesterday’s problems. We have Italy and Italians. Moreover, the emergence of global ways of being and belonging are evidence of the ways in which the present transcends forms of belonging rooted in the old practices and older institutions of the nation-state. But, then again, maybe not. “A country that allows you to vote in its elections must be able to provide you with information about those elections” (Magliaro). This was 2002. The country is still Italy, but this time the Italians are anywhere but Italy. The speaker is referring to the extension of the vote to Italian citizens abroad, represented directly by 18 members of parliament, and the right to information guaranteed the newly enfranchised electorate. What, then, is the relationship between citizenship, the state and global television today? What are the modalities of involvement and participation involved in these transformations of the nation-state into a globally-articulated network of institutions? I want to think through these questions in relation to two ways that RAI International, the ‘global’ network of the Italian public broadcaster, has viewed Italians around the world at different moments in its history: mega-events and return information. Mega-Events Eighteen months after its creation in 1995, RAI International was re-launched. This decision was partially due to a change in government (which also meant a change in the executive and staff), but it was also a response to the perceived failure of RAI International to garner an adequate international audience (Morrione, Testimony [1997]). This re-launch involved a re-conceptualisation of the network’s mandate to include both information services for Italians abroad (the traditional ‘public service’ mandate for Italy’s international broadcasting) as well as programming that would increase the profile of Italian media in the global market. The mandate outlined for Roberto Morrione – appointed president as part of the re-launch – read: The necessity of strategic and operative certainties in the international positioning of the company, both with regard to programming for our co-nationals abroad and for other markets…are at the centre of the new role of RAI International. This involves bringing together in the best way the informative function of the public service, which is oriented to our community in the world in order to enrich its cultural patrimony and national identity, with an active presence in evolving markets. (Morrione, Testimony [1998]) The most significant change in the executive of the network was the appointment of Renzo Arbore, a well-known singer and bandleader, to the position of artistic director. At the time of Arbore’s appointment, the responsibilities of the artistic director at the network were ill defined, but he very quickly transformed the position into the ‘face’ of RAI International. In an interview from 1998, Arbore explained his role at the network as follows: “I’m the artistic director, which means I’m in charge of the programs that have any kind of artistic content. Also, I’m the so called “testimonial”, which is to say I do propaganda for the network, I’m the soul of RAI International” (Affatato). The most often discussed aspect of the programming on RAI International during Arbore’s tenure as artistic director was the energy and resources dedicated to events that put the spotlight on the global reach of the service itself and the possibilities that satellite distribution gave for simultaneous exchange between locations around the world. It was these ‘mega-events’ (Garofalo), in spite of constituting only a small portion of the programming schedule, that were often seen as defining RAI’s “new way” of creating international programming (Milana). La Giostra [The Merry Go Round], broadcast live on New Year’s Eve 1996, is often cited as the launch of the network’s new approach to its mission. Lasting 20 hours in total, the program was hosted by Arbore. As Morrione described it recently, The ‘mother of live shows’ was the Giostra of New Year’s ’97 where Arbore was live in the studio for 20 consecutive hours, with many guests and segments from the Pole, Peking, Moscow, Berlin, Jerusalem, San Paolo, Buenos Aires, New York and Los Angeles. It was a memorable enterprise without precedent and never to be duplicated. (Morrione, RAI International) The presentation of television as a global medium in La Giostra draws upon the relationship between live broadcasting, satellite television and conceptions of globality that has developed since the 1960s as part of what Lisa Parks describes as ‘global presence’ (Parks). However, in keeping with the dual mandate of RAI International, the audience that La Giostra is intended to constitute was not entirely homogenous in nature. The lines between the ‘national’ audience, which is to say Italians abroad, and the international audience involving a broader spectrum of viewers are often blurred, but still apparent. This can be seen in the locations to which La Giostra travelled, locations that might be seen as a mirror of the places to which the broadcast might be received. On the one hand, there are segments from a series of location that speak to a global audience, many of which are framed by the symbols of the cold war and the ensuing triumph of global capitalism. The South Pole, Moscow, Beijing and a reunified Berlin can be seen as representing this understanding of the globe. These cities highlighted the scope of the network, reaching cities previously cut off from Italy behind the iron curtain (or, in the case of the Pole, the extreme of geographic isolation.) The presence of Jerusalem contributed to this mapping of the planet with an ecclesiastical, but ecumenical accent to this theme. On the other hand, Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires, and Melbourne (not mentioned by Morrione, but the first international segment in the program) also mapped the world of Italian communities around the world. The map of the globe offered by La Giostra is similar to the description of the prospective audience for RAI International that Morrione gave in November 1996 upon his appointment as director. After having outlined the network’s reception in the Americas and Australia, where there are large communities of Italians who need to be served, he goes on to note the importance of Asia: “China, India, Japan, and Korea, where there aren’t large communities of Italians, but where “made in Italy,” the image of Italy, the culture and art that separate us from others, are highly respected resources” (Morrione, “Gli Italiani”). La Giostra served as a container that held together a vision of the globe that is centered around Italy (particularly Rome, caput mundi) through the presentation on screen of the various geopolitical alliances as well as the economic and migratory connections which link Italy to the world. These two mappings of the globe brought together within the frame of the 20-hour broadcast and statements about the network’s prospective audiences suggest that two different ways of watching RAI International were often overlaid over each other. On the one hand, the segments spanning the planet stood as a sign of RAI International’s ability to produce programs at a global scale. On the other hand, there was an attempt to speak directly to communities of Italians abroad. The first vision of the planet offered by the program suggests a mode of watching more common among disinterested, cosmopolitan viewers belonging to a relatively homogenous global media market. While the second vision of the planet was explicitly rooted in the international family of Italians constituted through the broadcast. La Giostra, like the ‘dual mandate’ of the network, can be seen as an attempt to bring together the national mission of network with its attempts to improve its position in global media markets. It was an attempt to unify what seemed two very different kinds of audiences: Italians abroad and non-Italians, those who spoke some Italian and those who speak no Italian at all. It was also an attempt to unify two very different ways of understanding global broadcasting: public service on the one hand and the profit-oriented goals of building a global brand. Given this orientation in the network’s programming philosophy, it is not surprising that Arbore, speaking of his activities as Artistic director, stated that his goals were to produce shows that would be accessible both to those that spoke very little Italian as well as those that were highly cultured (Arbore). In its attempt to bring these divergent practices and imagined audiences together, La Giostra can be seen as part of vision of globalisation rooted in the euphoria of the early nineties in which distance and cultural differences were reconciled through communications technology and “virtuous” transformation of ethnicity into niche markets. However, this approach to programming started to fracture and fail after a short period. The particular balance between the ethnic and the economically ecumenical mappings of the globe present in La Giostra proved to be as short lived as the ‘dual mandate’ at RAI International that underwrote its conception. Return Information The mega-events that Arbore organised came under increasing criticism from the parliamentary committees overseeing RAI’s activities as well as the RAI executive who saw them both extremely expensive to produce and of questionable value in the fulfillment of RAI’s mission as a public broadcaster (GRTV). They were sometimes described as misfatti televisivi [broadcasting misdeeds] (Arbore). The model of the televisual mega-event was increasingly targeted towards speaking to Italians abroad, dropping broader notions of the audience. This was not an overnight change, but part of a process through which the goals of the network were refocused towards ‘public service.’ Morrione, speaking before the parliamentary committee overseeing RAI’s activities, describes an evening dedicated to a celebration of the Italian flag which exemplifies this trend: The minister of Foreign Affairs asked us to prepare a Tricolore (the Italian flag) evening – that would go on air in the month of January – that we would call White, Red and Green (not the most imaginative name, but effective enough.) It would include international connections with Argentina, where there exists one of the oldest case d’italiani [Italian community centers], built shortly after the events of our Risorgimento and where they have an ancient Tricolore. We would also connect with Reggio Emilia, where the Tricolore was born and where they are celebrating the anniversary this year. Segments would also take us to the Vittoriano Museum in Rome for a series of testimonies. (Morrione, Testimony [1997]) Similar to La Giostra, the global reach of RAI International was used to create a sense of simultaneity among the dispersed communities of Italians around the world (including the population of Italy itself). The festival of the Italian flag was similarly deeply implicated in the rituals and patterns that bring together an audience and, at another level, a people. However, in the celebration of the Italian flag, the notion that such a spectacle might be of interest to those outside of a global “Italian” community has disappeared. Like La Giostra, programs of this kind are intended to be constitutive of an audience, a collectivity that would not exist were it not for the common space provided through television spectatorship. The celebration of the Italian flag is part of an attempt to produce a sense of global community organised by a shared sense of ethnic identity as expressed through the common temporality of a live broadcast. Italians around the world were part of the same Italian community not because of their shared history (even when this was the stated subject of the program as was the case with Red, White and Green), but because they co-existed by means of their experience of the mediated event. Through these events, the shared national history is produced out of the simultaneity of the common present and not, as the discourse around Italian identity presented in these programs would have it (for example, the narratives around the origin around the flag), the other way around. However, this connection between the global television event that was broadcast live and national belonging raised questions about the kind of participation they facilitated. This became a particularly salient issue with the election of the second Berlusconi government and the successful campaign to grant Italians citizens living abroad the vote, a campaign that was lead by formerly fascist (but centre-moving) Alleanza Nazionale. With the appoint of Massimo Magliaro, a longtime member of Alleanza Nazionale, to the head of the network in 2000, the concept of informazione di ritorno [return information] became increasingly prominent in descriptions of the service. The phrase was frequently used, along with tv di ritorno (Tremaglia), by the Minister for Italiani nel Mondo during the second Berlusconi administration, Mirko Tremaglia, and became a central theme in the projects envisioned for the service. (The concept had circulated previously, but it was not given the same emphasis that it would gain after Magliaro’s appointment. In an interview from 1996, Morrione is asked about his commitment to the policy of “so-called” return information. He answers the question by commenting in support of producing a ‘return image’ (immagine di ritorno), but never uses the phrase (Morrione, “Gli Italiani”). Similarly, Arbore, in an interview from 1998, is also asked about ‘so-called’ return information, but also never uses the term himself (Affatato). This suggests that its circulation was limited up until the late 1990s.) The concept of ‘return information’ – not quite a neologism in Italian, but certainly an uncommon expression – was a two-pronged, and never fully implemented, initiative. Primarily it was a policy that sought to further integrate RAI International into the system of RAI’s national television networks. This involved both improving the ability of RAI International to distribute information about Italy to communities of Italians abroad as well as developing strategies for the eventual use of programming produced by RAI International on the main national networks as a way of raising the awareness of Italians in Italy about the lives and beliefs of Italians abroad. (The programming produced by RAI International was never successfully integrated into the schedules of the other national networks. This issue remained an issue that had yet to be resolved as recently as the negotiations between the Prime Minister’s office and RAI to establish a new agreement governing RAI’s international service in 2007.) This is not to say that there was a dramatic shift in the kind of programming on the network. There had always been elements of these new goals in the programming produced exclusively for RAI International. The longest running program on the network, Sportello Italia [Information Desk Italy], provided information to Italians abroad about changes in Italian law that effected Italians abroad as well as changes in bureaucratic practice generally. It often focused on issues such as the voting rights of Italians abroad, questions about receiving pensions and similar issues. It was joined by a series of in-house productions that primarily consisted of news and information programming whose roots were in the new division in charge of radio and television broadcasts since the sixties. The primary change was the elimination of large-scale programs, aside from those relating to the Italian national soccer team and the Pope, due to budget restrictions. This was part of a larger shift in the way that the service was envisioned and its repositioning as the primary conduit between Italy and Italians abroad. Speaking in 2000, Magliaro explained this as a change in the network’s priorities from ‘entertainment’ to ‘information’: There will be a larger dose of information and less space for entertainment. Informational programming will be the privileged product in which we will invest the majority of our financial and human resources, both on radio and on television. Providing information means both telling Italians abroad about Italy and allowing public opinion in our country to find out about Italians around the world. (Morgia) Magliaro’s statement suggests that there is a direct connection between the changing way of conceiving of ‘global’ Italian television and the mandate of RAI International. The spectacles of the mid-nineties, implicitly characterised by Magliaro as ‘entertainment,’ were as much about gaining the attention of those who did not speak Italian or watch Italian television as speaking to Italians abroad. The kind of participation in the nation that these events solicited were limited in that they did not move beyond a relatively passive experience of that nation as community brought together through the diffuse and distracted experience of ‘entertainment’. The rise of informazione di ritorno was a discourse that offered a particular conception of Italians abroad who were more directly involved in the affairs of the nation. However, this was more than an increased interest in the participation of audiences. Return information as developed under Magliaro’s watch posited a different kind of viewer, a viewer whose actions were explicitly and intimately linked to their rights as citizens. It is not surprising that Magliaro prefaced his comments about the transformation of RAI’s mandate and programming priorities by acknowledging that the extension of the vote to Italians abroad demands a different kind of broadcaster. The new editorial policy of RAI International is motivated from the incontrovertible fact that Italians abroad will have the right to vote in a few months … . In terms of the product that we are developing, aimed at adequately responding to the new demands created by the vote… (Morgia) The granting of the vote to Italians abroad meant that the forms of symbolic communion that produced through the mega-events needed to be supplanted by a policy that allowed for a more direct link between the ritual aspects of global media to the institutions of the Italian state. The evolution of RAI International cannot be separated from the articulation of an increasingly ethno-centric conception of citizenship and the transformation of the Italian state over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s towards. The transition between these two approaches to global television in Italy is important for understanding the events that unfolded around RAI International’s role in the development of a global Italian citizenry. A development that should not be separated from the development of increasingly stern immigration policies whose effect is to identify and export undesirable outsiders. The electoral defeat of Berlusconi in 2006 and the ongoing political instability surrounding the centre-left government in power since then has meant that the future development of RAI International and the long-term effects of the right-wing government on the cultural and political fabric of Italy remain unclear at present. The current need for a reformed electoral system and talk about the need for greater efficiency from the new executive at RAI make the evolution of the global Italian citizenry an important context for understanding the role of media in the globalised nation-state in the years to come. References Affatato, M. “I ‘Segreti’ di RAI International.” GRTV.it, 17 Feb. 1998. Arbore, R. “‘Il mio sogno? Un Programma con gli italiani all’estero.’” GRTV.it, 18 June 1999. Foot, J. Milan since the Miracle: City, Culture, and Identity. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Garofalo, R. “Understanding Mega-Events: If We Are the World, Then How Do We Change It? In C. Penley and A. Ross, eds., Technoculture. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991. 247-270. Magliaro, M. “Speech to Second Annual Conference.” Comites Canada, 2002. Milana, A. RAI International: 40 anni, una storia. Rome: RAI, 2003. Morgia, G. La Rai del Duemila per gli italiani nel mondo: Intervista con Massimo Magliaro. 2001. Morrione, R. “Gli Italiani all’estero ‘azionisti di riferimento.’” Interview with Roberto Morrione. GRTV.it, 15 Nov. 1996. Morrione, R. Testimony of Roberto Morrione to Commitato Bicamerale per la Vigilanza RAI, 12 December 1997. Rome, 1997. 824-841. Morrione, R. Testimony of Roberto Morrione to Commitato Bicamerale per la Vigilanza RAI, 17 November 1998. Rome, 1998. 1307-1316. Morrione, R. “Tre anni memorabili.” RAI International: 40 anni, una storia. Rome: RAI, 2003. 129-137. Parks, L. Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005.

“We have made Italy, now we must make Italians,” in the (probably apocryphal) words of the Prime Minister, sometime after the unification of the nation in 1860. Perhaps in French, if it was said at all. (The quotation is typically attributed to Massimo D’Azeglio, the prime minister of Piedmont and predecessor of the first Italian prime minister Camillo Cavour. Many have suggested that the phrase was misquoted and misunderstood (see Doyle.) D’Azeglio spoke in Italian when he addressed the newly-formed Italian parliament, but my reference to French is meant to indicate the fragility of the national language in early Italy where much of the ruling class spoke French while the majority of the people in the peninsula still spoke regional dialects.) It was television – more than print media or even radio – that would have the biggest impact in terms of ‘making Italians.’ Writing about Italy in the 1950s, a well-known media critic suggested that television, a game show actually, “was able to succeed where The Divine Comedy failed … it gave Italy a national language” (qtd. in Foot). But these are yesterday’s problems. We have Italy and Italians. Moreover, the emergence of global ways of being and belonging are evidence of the ways in which the present transcends forms of belonging rooted in the old practices and older institutions of the nation-state. But, then again, maybe not. “A country that allows you to vote in its elections must be able to provide you with information about those elections” (Magliaro). This was 2002. The country is still Italy, but this time the Italians are anywhere but Italy. The speaker is referring to the extension of the vote to Italian citizens abroad, represented directly by 18 members of parliament, and the right to information guaranteed the newly enfranchised electorate. What, then, is the relationship between citizenship, the state and global television today? What are the modalities of involvement and participation involved in these transformations of the nation-state into a globally-articulated network of institutions? I want to think through these questions in relation to two ways that RAI International, the ‘global’ network of the Italian public broadcaster, has viewed Italians around the world at different moments in its history: mega-events and return information. Mega-Events Eighteen months after its creation in 1995, RAI International was re-launched. This decision was partially due to a change in government (which also meant a change in the executive and staff), but it was also a response to the perceived failure of RAI International to garner an adequate international audience (Morrione, Testimony [1997]). This re-launch involved a re-conceptualisation of the network’s mandate to include both information services for Italians abroad (the traditional ‘public service’ mandate for Italy’s international broadcasting) as well as programming that would increase the profile of Italian media in the global market. The mandate outlined for Roberto Morrione – appointed president as part of the re-launch – read: The necessity of strategic and operative certainties in the international positioning of the company, both with regard to programming for our co-nationals abroad and for other markets…are at the centre of the new role of RAI International. This involves bringing together in the best way the informative function of the public service, which is oriented to our community in the world in order to enrich its cultural patrimony and national identity, with an active presence in evolving markets. (Morrione, Testimony [1998]) The most significant change in the executive of the network was the appointment of Renzo Arbore, a well-known singer and bandleader, to the position of artistic director. At the time of Arbore’s appointment, the responsibilities of the artistic director at the network were ill defined, but he very quickly transformed the position into the ‘face’ of RAI International. In an interview from 1998, Arbore explained his role at the network as follows: “I’m the artistic director, which means I’m in charge of the programs that have any kind of artistic content. Also, I’m the so called “testimonial”, which is to say I do propaganda for the network, I’m the soul of RAI International” (Affatato). The most often discussed aspect of the programming on RAI International during Arbore’s tenure as artistic director was the energy and resources dedicated to events that put the spotlight on the global reach of the service itself and the possibilities that satellite distribution gave for simultaneous exchange between locations around the world. It was these ‘mega-events’ (Garofalo), in spite of constituting only a small portion of the programming schedule, that were often seen as defining RAI’s “new way” of creating international programming (Milana). La Giostra [The Merry Go Round], broadcast live on New Year’s Eve 1996, is often cited as the launch of the network’s new approach to its mission. Lasting 20 hours in total, the program was hosted by Arbore. As Morrione described it recently, The ‘mother of live shows’ was the Giostra of New Year’s ’97 where Arbore was live in the studio for 20 consecutive hours, with many guests and segments from the Pole, Peking, Moscow, Berlin, Jerusalem, San Paolo, Buenos Aires, New York and Los Angeles. It was a memorable enterprise without precedent and never to be duplicated. (Morrione, RAI International) The presentation of television as a global medium in La Giostra draws upon the relationship between live broadcasting, satellite television and conceptions of globality that has developed since the 1960s as part of what Lisa Parks describes as ‘global presence’ (Parks). However, in keeping with the dual mandate of RAI International, the audience that La Giostra is intended to constitute was not entirely homogenous in nature. The lines between the ‘national’ audience, which is to say Italians abroad, and the international audience involving a broader spectrum of viewers are often blurred, but still apparent. This can be seen in the locations to which La Giostra travelled, locations that might be seen as a mirror of the places to which the broadcast might be received. On the one hand, there are segments from a series of location that speak to a global audience, many of which are framed by the symbols of the cold war and the ensuing triumph of global capitalism. The South Pole, Moscow, Beijing and a reunified Berlin can be seen as representing this understanding of the globe. These cities highlighted the scope of the network, reaching cities previously cut off from Italy behind the iron curtain (or, in the case of the Pole, the extreme of geographic isolation.) The presence of Jerusalem contributed to this mapping of the planet with an ecclesiastical, but ecumenical accent to this theme. On the other hand, Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires, and Melbourne (not mentioned by Morrione, but the first international segment in the program) also mapped the world of Italian communities around the world. The map of the globe offered by La Giostra is similar to the description of the prospective audience for RAI International that Morrione gave in November 1996 upon his appointment as director. After having outlined the network’s reception in the Americas and Australia, where there are large communities of Italians who need to be served, he goes on to note the importance of Asia: “China, India, Japan, and Korea, where there aren’t large communities of Italians, but where “made in Italy,” the image of Italy, the culture and art that separate us from others, are highly respected resources” (Morrione, “Gli Italiani”). La Giostra served as a container that held together a vision of the globe that is centered around Italy (particularly Rome, caput mundi) through the presentation on screen of the various geopolitical alliances as well as the economic and migratory connections which link Italy to the world. These two mappings of the globe brought together within the frame of the 20-hour broadcast and statements about the network’s prospective audiences suggest that two different ways of watching RAI International were often overlaid over each other. On the one hand, the segments spanning the planet stood as a sign of RAI International’s ability to produce programs at a global scale. On the other hand, there was an attempt to speak directly to communities of Italians abroad. The first vision of the planet offered by the program suggests a mode of watching more common among disinterested, cosmopolitan viewers belonging to a relatively homogenous global media market. While the second vision of the planet was explicitly rooted in the international family of Italians constituted through the broadcast. La Giostra, like the ‘dual mandate’ of the network, can be seen as an attempt to bring together the national mission of network with its attempts to improve its position in global media markets. It was an attempt to unify what seemed two very different kinds of audiences: Italians abroad and non-Italians, those who spoke some Italian and those who speak no Italian at all. It was also an attempt to unify two very different ways of understanding global broadcasting: public service on the one hand and the profit-oriented goals of building a global brand. Given this orientation in the network’s programming philosophy, it is not surprising that Arbore, speaking of his activities as Artistic director, stated that his goals were to produce shows that would be accessible both to those that spoke very little Italian as well as those that were highly cultured (Arbore). In its attempt to bring these divergent practices and imagined audiences together, La Giostra can be seen as part of vision of globalisation rooted in the euphoria of the early nineties in which distance and cultural differences were reconciled through communications technology and “virtuous” transformation of ethnicity into niche markets. However, this approach to programming started to fracture and fail after a short period. The particular balance between the ethnic and the economically ecumenical mappings of the globe present in La Giostra proved to be as short lived as the ‘dual mandate’ at RAI International that underwrote its conception. Return Information The mega-events that Arbore organised came under increasing criticism from the parliamentary committees overseeing RAI’s activities as well as the RAI executive who saw them both extremely expensive to produce and of questionable value in the fulfillment of RAI’s mission as a public broadcaster (GRTV). They were sometimes described as misfatti televisivi [broadcasting misdeeds] (Arbore). The model of the televisual mega-event was increasingly targeted towards speaking to Italians abroad, dropping broader notions of the audience. This was not an overnight change, but part of a process through which the goals of the network were refocused towards ‘public service.’ Morrione, speaking before the parliamentary committee overseeing RAI’s activities, describes an evening dedicated to a celebration of the Italian flag which exemplifies this trend: The minister of Foreign Affairs asked us to prepare a Tricolore (the Italian flag) evening – that would go on air in the month of January – that we would call White, Red and Green (not the most imaginative name, but effective enough.) It would include international connections with Argentina, where there exists one of the oldest case d’italiani [Italian community centers], built shortly after the events of our Risorgimento and where they have an ancient Tricolore. We would also connect with Reggio Emilia, where the Tricolore was born and where they are celebrating the anniversary this year. Segments would also take us to the Vittoriano Museum in Rome for a series of testimonies. (Morrione, Testimony [1997]) Similar to La Giostra, the global reach of RAI International was used to create a sense of simultaneity among the dispersed communities of Italians around the world (including the population of Italy itself). The festival of the Italian flag was similarly deeply implicated in the rituals and patterns that bring together an audience and, at another level, a people. However, in the celebration of the Italian flag, the notion that such a spectacle might be of interest to those outside of a global “Italian” community has disappeared. Like La Giostra, programs of this kind are intended to be constitutive of an audience, a collectivity that would not exist were it not for the common space provided through television spectatorship. The celebration of the Italian flag is part of an attempt to produce a sense of global community organised by a shared sense of ethnic identity as expressed through the common temporality of a live broadcast. Italians around the world were part of the same Italian community not because of their shared history (even when this was the stated subject of the program as was the case with Red, White and Green), but because they co-existed by means of their experience of the mediated event. Through these events, the shared national history is produced out of the simultaneity of the common present and not, as the discourse around Italian identity presented in these programs would have it (for example, the narratives around the origin around the flag), the other way around. However, this connection between the global television event that was broadcast live and national belonging raised questions about the kind of participation they facilitated. This became a particularly salient issue with the election of the second Berlusconi government and the successful campaign to grant Italians citizens living abroad the vote, a campaign that was lead by formerly fascist (but centre-moving) Alleanza Nazionale. With the appoint of Massimo Magliaro, a longtime member of Alleanza Nazionale, to the head of the network in 2000, the concept of informazione di ritorno [return information] became increasingly prominent in descriptions of the service. The phrase was frequently used, along with tv di ritorno (Tremaglia), by the Minister for Italiani nel Mondo during the second Berlusconi administration, Mirko Tremaglia, and became a central theme in the projects envisioned for the service. (The concept had circulated previously, but it was not given the same emphasis that it would gain after Magliaro’s appointment. In an interview from 1996, Morrione is asked about his commitment to the policy of “so-called” return information. He answers the question by commenting in support of producing a ‘return image’ (immagine di ritorno), but never uses the phrase (Morrione, “Gli Italiani”). Similarly, Arbore, in an interview from 1998, is also asked about ‘so-called’ return information, but also never uses the term himself (Affatato). This suggests that its circulation was limited up until the late 1990s.) The concept of ‘return information’ – not quite a neologism in Italian, but certainly an uncommon expression – was a two-pronged, and never fully implemented, initiative. Primarily it was a policy that sought to further integrate RAI International into the system of RAI’s national television networks. This involved both improving the ability of RAI International to distribute information about Italy to communities of Italians abroad as well as developing strategies for the eventual use of programming produced by RAI International on the main national networks as a way of raising the awareness of Italians in Italy about the lives and beliefs of Italians abroad. (The programming produced by RAI International was never successfully integrated into the schedules of the other national networks. This issue remained an issue that had yet to be resolved as recently as the negotiations between the Prime Minister’s office and RAI to establish a new agreement governing RAI’s international service in 2007.) This is not to say that there was a dramatic shift in the kind of programming on the network. There had always been elements of these new goals in the programming produced exclusively for RAI International. The longest running program on the network, Sportello Italia [Information Desk Italy], provided information to Italians abroad about changes in Italian law that effected Italians abroad as well as changes in bureaucratic practice generally. It often focused on issues such as the voting rights of Italians abroad, questions about receiving pensions and similar issues. It was joined by a series of in-house productions that primarily consisted of news and information programming whose roots were in the new division in charge of radio and television broadcasts since the sixties. The primary change was the elimination of large-scale programs, aside from those relating to the Italian national soccer team and the Pope, due to budget restrictions. This was part of a larger shift in the way that the service was envisioned and its repositioning as the primary conduit between Italy and Italians abroad. Speaking in 2000, Magliaro explained this as a change in the network’s priorities from ‘entertainment’ to ‘information’: There will be a larger dose of information and less space for entertainment. Informational programming will be the privileged product in which we will invest the majority of our financial and human resources, both on radio and on television. Providing information means both telling Italians abroad about Italy and allowing public opinion in our country to find out about Italians around the world. (Morgia) Magliaro’s statement suggests that there is a direct connection between the changing way of conceiving of ‘global’ Italian television and the mandate of RAI International. The spectacles of the mid-nineties, implicitly characterised by Magliaro as ‘entertainment,’ were as much about gaining the attention of those who did not speak Italian or watch Italian television as speaking to Italians abroad. The kind of participation in the nation that these events solicited were limited in that they did not move beyond a relatively passive experience of that nation as community brought together through the diffuse and distracted experience of ‘entertainment’. The rise of informazione di ritorno was a discourse that offered a particular conception of Italians abroad who were more directly involved in the affairs of the nation. However, this was more than an increased interest in the participation of audiences. Return information as developed under Magliaro’s watch posited a different kind of viewer, a viewer whose actions were explicitly and intimately linked to their rights as citizens. It is not surprising that Magliaro prefaced his comments about the transformation of RAI’s mandate and programming priorities by acknowledging that the extension of the vote to Italians abroad demands a different kind of broadcaster. The new editorial policy of RAI International is motivated from the incontrovertible fact that Italians abroad will have the right to vote in a few months … . In terms of the product that we are developing, aimed at adequately responding to the new demands created by the vote… (Morgia) The granting of the vote to Italians abroad meant that the forms of symbolic communion that produced through the mega-events needed to be supplanted by a policy that allowed for a more direct link between the ritual aspects of global media to the institutions of the Italian state. The evolution of RAI International cannot be separated from the articulation of an increasingly ethno-centric conception of citizenship and the transformation of the Italian state over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s towards. The transition between these two approaches to global television in Italy is important for understanding the events that unfolded around RAI International’s role in the development of a global Italian citizenry. A development that should not be separated from the development of increasingly stern immigration policies whose effect is to identify and export undesirable outsiders. The electoral defeat of Berlusconi in 2006 and the ongoing political instability surrounding the centre-left government in power since then has meant that the future development of RAI International and the long-term effects of the right-wing government on the cultural and political fabric of Italy remain unclear at present. The current need for a reformed electoral system and talk about the need for greater efficiency from the new executive at RAI make the evolution of the global Italian citizenry an important context for understanding the role of media in the globalised nation-state in the years to come. References Affatato, M. “I ‘Segreti’ di RAI International.” GRTV.it, 17 Feb. 1998. Arbore, R. “‘Il mio sogno? Un Programma con gli italiani all’estero.’” GRTV.it, 18 June 1999. Foot, J. Milan since the Miracle: City, Culture, and Identity. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Garofalo, R. “Understanding Mega-Events: If We Are the World, Then How Do We Change It? In C. Penley and A. Ross, eds., Technoculture. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991. 247-270. Magliaro, M. “Speech to Second Annual Conference.” Comites Canada, 2002. Milana, A. RAI International: 40 anni, una storia. Rome: RAI, 2003. Morgia, G. La Rai del Duemila per gli italiani nel mondo: Intervista con Massimo Magliaro. 2001. Morrione, R. “Gli Italiani all’estero ‘azionisti di riferimento.’” Interview with Roberto Morrione. GRTV.it, 15 Nov. 1996. Morrione, R. Testimony of Roberto Morrione to Commitato Bicamerale per la Vigilanza RAI, 12 December 1997. Rome, 1997. 824-841. Morrione, R. Testimony of Roberto Morrione to Commitato Bicamerale per la Vigilanza RAI, 17 November 1998. Rome, 1998. 1307-1316. Morrione, R. “Tre anni memorabili.” RAI International: 40 anni, una storia. Rome: RAI, 2003. 129-137. Parks, L. Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hayward, Mark. "Two Ways of Being Italian on Global Television." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/05-hayward.php>. APA Style Hayward, M. (Apr. 2008) "Two Ways of Being Italian on Global Television," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/05-hayward.php>.

Introduction Children are not only born digital, they are fashioned toward a lifestyle that needs them to be digital all the time (Palfrey and Gasser). They click, tap, save, circulate, download, and upload the texts of their lives, their friends’ lives, and the anonymous lives of the people that surround them. They are socialised as Internet consumers ready to participate in digital services targeted to them as they age such as Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube. But they are also fashioned as producers, whereby their lives are sold as content on these same markets. As commodities, the minutiae of their lives become the fodder for online circulation. Paradoxically, we also celebrate these digital behaviours as a means to express identity. Personal profile-building for adults is considered agency-building (Beer and Burrows), and as a consequence, we praise children for mimicking these acts of adult lifestyle. This article reflects on the Kids, Creative Storyworlds, and Wearables project, which involved an ethnographic study with five young children (ages 4-7), who were asked to share their autobiographical stories, creative self-narrations, and predictions about their future mediated lives (Atkins et al.). For this case study, we focus on commercialised forms of children’s automedia, and we compare discussions we had with 6-year old Cayden, a child we met in the study who expresses the desire to make himself famous online, with videos of Jacob, a child vlogger on YouTube’s Kinder Playtime, who clearly influences children like Cayden. We argue that child social influencers need consideration both as autobiographical agents and as child subjects requiring a sheltered approach to their online lives.Automedia Automedia is an emergent genre of autobiography (Smith and Watson Reading 190; “Virtually Me” 78). Broadcasting one’s life online takes many forms (Kennedy “Vulnerability”). Ümit Kennedy argues “Vlogging on YouTube is a contemporary form of autobiography in which individuals engage in a process of documenting their life on a daily or weekly basis and, in doing so, construct[ing] their identity online” (“Exploring”). Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson write that “visual and digital modes are projecting and circulating not just new subjects but new notions of subjectivity through the effects of automediality” with the result that “the archive of the self in time, in space and in relation expands and is fundamentally reorganized” (Reading 190). Emma Maguire addresses what online texts “tell us about cultural understandings of selfhood and what it means to communicate ‘real’ life through media” naming one tool, “automedia”. Further, Julie Rak calls on scholars “to rethink ‘life’ and ‘writing’ as automedia” to further “characterize the enactment of a personal life story in a new media environment.” We define automedia as a genre that involves the practices of creating, performing, sharing, circulating, and (at times) preserving one’s digital life narrative meant for multiple publics. Automedia revises identity formation, embodiment, or corporealities in acts of self-creation (Brophy and Hladki 4). Automedia also emphasizes circulation. As shared digital life texts now circulate through the behaviours of other human subjects, and automatically via algorithms in data assemblages, we contend that automediality currently involves a measure of relinquishing control over perpetually evolving mediatised environments. One cannot control how a shared life narrative will meet a public in the future, which is a revised way of thinking about autobiography. For the sake of this paper, we argue that children’s automedia ought to be considered a creative, autobiographical act, in order to afford child authors who create them the consideration they deserve as agents, now and in the future. Automedial practices often begin when children receive access to a device. The need for a distraction activity is often the reason parents hand a young child a smartphone, iPad, or even a wearable camera (Nansen). Mirroring the lives of parents, children aspire to share representations of their own personal lives in pursuit of social capital. They are often encouraged to use technologies and apps as adults do–to track aspects of self, broadcast life stories and eventually “live share” them—effectively creating, performing, sharing, and at times, seeking to preserve a public life narrative. With this practice, society inculcates children into spheres of device ubiquity, “socializing them to a future digital lifestyle that will involve always carrying a computer in some form” (Atkins et al. 49). Consequently, their representations become inculcated in larger media assemblages. Writing about toddlers, Nansen describes how the “archiving, circulation and reception of these images speaks to larger assemblages of media in which software protocols and algorithms are increasingly embedded in and help to configure everyday life (e.g. Chun; Gillespie), including young children’s media lives (Ito)” (Nansen). Children, like adult citizens, are increasingly faced with choices “not structured by their own preferences but by the economic imperatives of the private corporations that have recently come to dominate the internet” (Andrejevic). Recent studies have shown that for children and youth in the digital age, Internet fame, often characterized by brand endorsements, is a major aspiration (Uhls and Greenfield, 2). However, despite the ambition to participate as celebrity digital selves, children are also mired in the calls to shield them from exposure to screens through institutions that label these activities detrimental. In many countries, digital “protections” are outlined by privacy commissioners and federal or provincial/state statutes, (e.g. Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada). Consequently, children are often caught in a paradox that defines them either as literate digital agents able to compose or participate with their online selves, or as subjectified wards caught up in commercial practices that exploit their lives for commercial gain.Kids, Creative Storyworlds and Wearables ProjectBoth academic and popular cultural critics continually discuss the future but rarely directly engage the people who will be empowered (or subjugated) by it as young adults in twenty years. To address children’s lack of agency in these discussions, we launched the Kids, Creative Storyworlds and Wearables project to bring children into a dialogue about their own digital futures. Much has been written on childhood agency and participation in culture and mediated culture from the discipline of sociology (James and James; Jenks; Jenkins). In previous work, we addressed the perspective of child autobiographical feature filmmakers to explore issues of creative agency and consent when adult gatekeepers facilitate children in film production (Pedersen and Aspevig “My Eyes”; Pedersen and Aspevig “Swept”). Drawing on that previous work, this project concentrates on children’s automediated lives and the many unique concerns that materialize with digital identity-building. Children are categorised as a vulnerable demographic group necessitating special policy and legislation, but the lives they project as children will eventually become subsumed in their own adult lives, which will almost certainly be treated and mediated in a much different manner in the future. We focused on this landscape, and sought to query the children on their futures, also considering the issues that arise when adult gatekeepers get involved with child social media influencers. In the Storyworlds ethnographic study, children were given a wearable toy, a Vtech smartwatch called Kidizoom, to use over a month’s timeframe to serve as a focal point for ethnographic conversations. The Kidizoom watch enables children to take photos and videos, which are uploaded to a web interface. Before we gave them the tech, we asked them questions about their lives, including What are machines going to be like in the future? Can you imagine yourself wearing a certain kind of computer? Can you tell/draw a story about that? If you could wear a computer that gave you a super power, what would it be? Can you use your imagination to think of a person in a story who would use technology? In answering, many of them drew autobiographical drawings of technical inventions, and cast themselves in the images. We were particularly struck by the comments made by one participant, Cayden (pseudonym), a 6-year-old boy, and the stories he told us about himself and his aspirations. He expressed the desire to host a YouTube channel about his life, his activities, and the wearable technologies his family already owned (e.g. a GroPro camera) and the one we gave him, the Kidizoom smartwatch. He talked about how he would be proud to publically broadcast his own videos on YouTube, and about the role he had been allowed to play in the making of videos about his life (that were not broadcast). To contextualize Cayden’s commentary and his automedial aspirations, we extended our study to explore child social media influencers who broadcast components of their personal lives for the deliberate purpose of popularity and the financial gain of their parents.We selected the videos of Jacob, a child vlogger because we judged them to be representative of the kinds that Cayden watched. Jacob reviews toys through “unboxing videos,” a genre in which a child tells an online audience her or his personal experiences using new toys in regular, short videos on a social media site. Jacob appears on a YouTube channel called Kinder Playtime, which appears to be a parent-run channel that states that, “We enjoy doing these things while playing with our kids: Jacob, Emily, and Chloe” (see Figure 1). In one particular video, Jacob reviews the Kidizoom watch, serving as a child influencer for the product. By understanding Jacob’s performance as agent-driven automedia, as well as being a commercialised, mediatised form of advertising, we get a clearer picture of how the children in the study are coming to terms with their own digital selfhood and the realisation that circulated, life-exposing videos are the expectation in this context.Children are implicated in a range of ways through “family” influencer and toy unboxing videos, which are emergent entertainment industries (Abidin 1; Nansen and Nicoll; Craig and Cunningham 77). In particular, unboxing videos do impact child viewers, especially when children host them. Jackie Marsh emphasizes the digital literacy practices at play here that co-construct viewers as “cyberflâneur[s]” and she states that “this mode of cultural transmission is a growing feature of online practices for this age group” (369). Her stress, however, is on how the child viewer enjoys “the vicarious pleasure he or she may get from viewing the playing of another child with the toy” (376). Marsh writes that her study subject, a child called “Gareth”, “was not interested in being made visible to EvanHD [a child celebrity social media influencer] or other online peers, but was content to consume” the unboxing videos. The concept of the cyberflâneur, then, is fitting as a mediatising co-constituting process of identity-building within discourses of consumerism. However, in our study, the children, and especially Cayden, also expressed the desire to create, host, and circulate their own videos that broadcast their lives, also demonstrating awareness that videos are valorised in their social circles. Child viewers watch famous children perform consumer-identities to create an aura of influence, but viewers simultaneously aspire to become influencers using automedial performances, in essence, becoming products, themselves. Jacob, Automedial Subjects and Social Media InfluencersJacob is a vlogger on YouTube whose videos can garner millions of views, suggesting that he is also an influencer. In one video, he appears to be around the age of six as he proudly sits with folded hands, bright eyes, and a beaming, but partly toothless smile (see Figure 2). He says, “Welcome to Kinder Playtime! Today we have the Kidi Zoom Smartwatch DX. It’s from VTech” (Kinder Playtime). We see the Kidi Zoom unboxed and then depicted in stylized animations amid snippets of Jacob’s smiling face. The voice and hands of a faceless parent guide Jacob as he uses his new wearable toy. We listen to both parent and child describe numerous features for recording and enhancing the wearer’s daily habits (e.g. calculator, calendar, fitness games), and his dad tells him it has a pedometer “which tracks your steps” (Kinder Playtime). But the watch is also used by Jacob to mediate himself and his world. We see that Jacob takes pictures of himself on the tiny watch screen as he acts silly for the camera. He also uses the watch to take personal videos of his mother and sister in his home. The video ends with his father mentioning bedtime, which prompts a “thank you” to VTech for giving him the watch, and a cheerful “Bye!” from Jacob (Kinder Playtime). Figure 1: Screenshot of Kinder Playtime YouTube channel, About page Figure 2: Screenshot of “Jacob,” a child vlogger at Kinder Playtime We chose Jacob for three reasons. First, he is the same age as the children in the Storyworlds study. Second, he reviews the smart watch artifact that we gave to the study children, so there was a common use of automedia technology. Third, Jacob’s parents were involved with his broadcasts, and we wanted to work within the boundaries of parent-sanctioned practices. However, we also felt that his playful approach was a good example of how social media influence overlaps with automediality. Jacob is a labourer trading his public self-representations in exchange for free products and revenue earned through the monetisation of his content on YouTube. It appears that much of what Jacob says is scripted, particularly the promotional statements, like, “Today we have the Kidizoom Smartwatch DX. It’s from VTech. It’s the smartest watch for kids” (Kinder Playtime). Importantly, as an automedial subject Jacob reveals aspects of his self and his identity, in the manner of many child vloggers on public social media sites. His product reviews are contextualised within a commoditised space that provides him a means for the public performance of his self, which, via YouTube, has the potential to reach an enormous audience. YouTube claims to have “over a billion users—almost one-third of all people on the Internet—and every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views” (YouTube). Significantly, he is not only filmed by others, Jacob is also a creative practitioner, as Cayden aspired to become. Jacob uses high-tech toys, in this case, a new wearable technology for self-compositions (the smart watch), to record himself, friends, family or simply the goings-on around him. Strapped to his wrist, the watch toy lets him play at being watched, at being quantified and at recording the life stories of others, or constructing automediated creations for himself, which he may upload to numerous social media sites. This is the start of his online automediated life, which will be increasingly under his ownership as he ages. To greater or lesser degrees, he will later be able to curate, add to, and remediate his body of automedia, including his digital past. Kennedy points out that “people are using YouTube as a transformative tool, and mirror, to document, construct, and present their identity online” (“Exploring”). Her focus is on adult vloggers who consent to their activities. Jacob’s automedia is constructed collaboratively with his parents, and it is unclear how much awareness he has of himself as an automedia creator. However, if we don’t afford Jacob the same consideration as we afford adult autobiographers, that the depiction of his life is his own, we will reduce his identity performance to pure artifice or advertisement. The questions Jacob’s videos raise around agency, consent, and creativity are important here. Sidonie Smith asks “Can there be a free, agentic space; and if so, where in the world can it be found?” (Manifesto 188). How much agency does Jacob have? Is there a liberating aspect in the act of putting personal technology into the hands of a child who can record his life, himself? And finally, how would an adult Jacob feel about his childhood self advertising these products online? Is this really automediality if Jacob does not fully understand what it means to publicly tell a mediated life story?These queries lead to concerns over child social media influence with regard to legal protection, marketing ethics, and user consent. The rise of “fan marketing” presents a nexus of stealth marketing to children by other children. Stealth marketing involves participants, in this case, fans, who do not know they are involved in an advertising scheme. For instance, the popular Minecon Minecraft conference event sessions have pushed their audience to develop the skills to become advocates and advertisers of their products, for example by showing audiences how to build a YouTube channel and sharing tips for growing a community. Targeting children in marketing ploys seems insidious. Marketing analyst Sandy Fleisher describes the value of outsourcing marketing to fan labourers:while Grand Theft Auto spent $120 million on marketing its latest release, Minecraft fans are being taught how to create and market promotional content themselves. One [example] is Minecraft YouTuber, SkydoesMinecraft. His nearly 7 million strong YouTube army, almost as big as Justin Bieber’s, means his daily videos enjoy a lot of views; 1,419,734,267 to be precise. While concerns about meaningful consent that practices like this raise have led some government bodies, and consumer and child protection groups to advocate restrictions for children, other critics have questioned the limits placed on children’s free expression by such restrictions. Tech commentator Larry Magid has written that, “In the interest of protecting children, we sometimes deny them the right to access material and express themselves.” Meghan M. Sweeney notes that “the surge in collaborative web models and the emphasis on interactivity—frequently termed Web 2.0—has meant that children are not merely targets of global media organizations” but have “multiple opportunities to be active, critical, and resistant producers”...and ”may be active agents in the production and dissemination of information” (68). Nevertheless, writes Sweeney, “corporate entities can have restrictive effects on consumers” (68), by for example, limiting imaginative play to the choices offered on a Disney website, or limiting imaginative topics to commercial products (toys, video games etc), as in YouTube review videos. Automedia is an important site from which to consider young children’s online practices in public spheres. Jacob’s performance is indeed meant to influence the choice to buy a toy, but it is also meant to influence others in knowing Jacob as an identity. He means to share and circulate his self. Julie Rak recalls Paul John Eakin’s claims about life-writing that the “process does not even occur at the level of writing, but at the level of living, so that identity formation is the result of narrative-building.” We view Jacob’s performance along these lines. Kinder Playtime offers him a constrained, parent-sanctioned (albeit commercialised) space for role-playing, a practice bound up with identity-formation in the life of most children. To think through the legality of recognising Jacob’s automedial content as his life, Rak is also useful: “In Eakin’s work in particular, we can see evidence of John Locke’s contention that identity is the expression of consciousness which is continuous over time, but that identity is also a product, one’s own property which is a legal entity”. We have argued that children are often caught in the paradox that defines them either as literate digital creators composing and circulating their online selves or as subjectified personas caught up in commercial advertising practices that use their lives for commercial gain. However, through close observation of individual children, one who we met and questioned in our study, Cayden, the other who we met through his mediated, commercialized, and circulated online persona, Jacob, we argue that child social influencers need consideration as autobiographical agents expressing themselves through automediality. As children create, edit, and grow digital traces of their lives and selves, how these texts are framed becomes increasingly important, in part because their future adult selves have such a stake in the matter: they are being formed through automedia. Moreover, these children’s coming of age may bring legal questions about the ownership of their automedial products such as YouTube videos, an enduring legacy they are leaving behind for their adult selves. 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