Journal articles on the topic 'Interior decoration – Sociological aspects'

Illumination and well-being are important aspects of “Smart Living” today. Within the IraSME Network a consortium of four German and two Belgian partners therefore developed a low energy consuming light source integrated into home interior decoration

Colours are nothing but lights of different frequencies and wavelengths. Every colour is a kind of radiation and so, colours used for walls do have a profound influence on people living in the space. Important aspects such as decision-making, cheerfulness, calmness and vibrancy can be achieved by the right use of colors. Vastu, which is based on principles of energies and radiations, gives precise guidelines about use of colours depending on the directional aspect and usage pattern of the room.Colors according to Vaastu Shastra play an imperative role in bringing balance to our minds as well as bodies and to stimulate our energy. Therefore colors in a Home, Office, Factory, and Shop should be coordinated with the colors of respective planets and elements associated with different directions.Colors have a huge impact on our lives. Colors possess the power to lift our mood, raise our energy levels and increase our productivity. Vastu shastra prescribes certain floor and wall colors for the home to promote prosperity, good health and well-being. Colour scheme is an arrangement or pattern of colors or colored objects conceived of as forming an integrated whole or a combination of colours that has been chosen for a particular room

Textile, as a kind of universal significant material in the human history, becomes an increasing number of popular among the people. Besides, it has the double needs in the material in the interior decoration. With the rapid development of our domestic economy, people, in China, put forward to more higher standard for the demands of their indoor living, The soft decoration dominated by interior textiles has become the mainstream and main development trend of design field in our society. This article intends to analyze from the level of the texture feature, and from the four aspects to analyze the influence of textile texture in the indoor decoration: textile texture, the color of textile, pattern and cultural of textile, and the emotional of textile, meanwhile, around the texture features of the textile and extend the wide inspiration and thinking to the interior adornment.

<p>Creating green, energy-saving and environmentally friendly building products is the main theme of construction industry in order to achieve sustainable development. The study starts with innovations in energy-saving designs and energy-saving construction of a building’s interior decoration and other important aspects that use energy effectively, improve energy efficiency, as well as providing people with healthy, comfortable, natural and harmonious living and working environment, while realizing sustainable development of construction.</p>

<p>Creating green, energy-saving and environmentally friendly building products is the main theme of construction industry in order to achieve sustainable development. The study starts with innovations in energy-saving designs and energy-saving construction of a building’s interior decoration and other important aspects that use energy effectively, improve energy efficiency, as well as providing people with healthy, comfortable, natural and harmonious living and working environment, while realizing sustainable development of construction.</p>

Abstract In Rococo historiography, the first half of the eighteenth century is generally described as the golden age par excellence of decoration. The so-called major arts are often considered to have played a lesser role in its artistic development. The period is thus systematically associated with artefacts produced by artisans, hence belonging to a less dignified category in the artistic hierarchy. In order to investigate the ideological background of this assumption, the article focuses on the debates on art which emerged, mainly in France, in the 1740s. These highly biased discourses, targeting the so-called bad taste of contemporary French painting and interior decoration, shaped a vision of the first half of the eighteenth century of which many aspects were later inherited by Rococo historiography, especially in its relation to decoration.

Abstract In Rococo historiography, the first half of the eighteenth century is generally described as the golden age par excellence of decoration. The so-called major arts are often considered to have played a lesser role in its artistic development. The period is thus systematically associated with artefacts produced by artisans, hence belonging to a less dignified category in the artistic hierarchy. In order to investigate the ideological background of this assumption, the article focuses on the debates on art which emerged, mainly in France, in the 1740s. These highly biased discourses, targeting the so-called bad taste of contemporary French painting and interior decoration, shaped a vision of the first half of the eighteenth century of which many aspects were later inherited by Rococo historiography, especially in its relation to decoration.

This paper mainly elaborated the design concept of the humanized modern interior of EMU through the analysis of the ecological design of modern EMU. CRH2 type EMU was taken for example to discusses the important principles of ecological design from aspects of environment factors, modern humane ecological design, design methods and material technology. The requirement of recycling can be satisfied by the organic combination of the design concept of EMU, the overall layout, the decoration materials, the functional requirements and the manufacturing technology.

North Zhejiang residence is a typical Jiangnan dwellings. The indoor environment is an essential part to research north Zhejiang residential areas, it is not only close to people daily behavior, but also directly reflects relationship of people, architectural space and environment. Zhejiang characteristics of residential indoor environment base on five aspects was analyzed, such as geographic and climate, interior layout, decoration, color and furnishings. I also will clarify its internal evolution and development, and understand its rules to add a reference and thought to the construction of watery region culture in future

We believe that interior design has becoming more popular in this century nowadays. The purpose of this study is to design and develop multimedia application that can identify human behavior and preferences in interior design. Alessi and Trollip Instructional Design Model has been utilized as a methodology in this study which consist of planning, design and development. Heuristic Evaluation and User Acceptance Test has been applied in completing this experiment. Three multimedia experts selected randomly to identify usability problems that occur in the user interface (UI) design. After the refinement was made to the application, the User Acceptance Test was conducted to the user. A total of 60 participants at random selected from certain district of Perlis and Langkawi as a target user to participate in this study. The results demonstrate this multimedia application is effective in satisfying the user needs and demand of the decoration of their dream house. Thus, the researcher was able to identify user behavior and preferences in interior design. With three dimensional (3D) features that were applied in this multimedia application, it helps the user to feel more self-assured with their interior design. At the end of this research, the development of this application bring numerous benefits for both parties either the users or the developer in many aspects. Thus, the society will be disclosing to the use of technology in the interior design in this sophisticated era.

Indoors sound field distribution is important to Room Acoustics, but the field suffers numerous problems, for example, multipath propagation and scattering owing to sound absorption by furniture and other aspects of décor. Generally, an ideal interior space must have a sound field with clear quality. This provides both the speaker and the listener with a pleasant conversational environment. This investigation uses the Finite Element Method to assess the acoustic distribution based on the indoor space and chamber volume. In this situation, a fixed sound source at different frequencies is used to simulate the acoustic characteristics of the indoor space. This method considers the furniture and decoration sound absorbing material and thus different sound absorption coefficients and configurations. The preliminary numerical simulation provides a method that can forecast the distribution of sound in an indoor room in complex situations. Consequently, it is possible to arrange interior furnishings and appliances to optimize acoustic distribution and environmental friendliness. Additionally, the analytical results can also be used to calculate the Reverberation Time and speech intelligibility for specified indoor space.

The advent of Islam in Nusantara sparked new phenomena or changing not only in structure of building construction of religious places, residency and houses but also ornaments and decoration expressing value of beauty of that building. The result of this research tries to reveal how far Islamic influence is working without undermining local aspects of architecture and how Islamic architecture was influenced by other characters in ornament and decorative-ornament artwith various design and sense. Islamic nuances are substantially showed in traditional and contemporary mosque architecture, graveyard, residencies, palaces, historical building and soon and so forth. Although local elementsare clear, and so with Hinduism and Buddhism, animism, colonial influence and other foreign influences including Middle East, Africa, India and China, Islam shows its prominence in interior and exterior ornament as well as its tools.

Changes in the engineering technologies of concert halls and the choice of finishing materials are discussed in this article. The latest developments and technologies help to enhance the acoustic properties and create a creative, contemporary interior. The acoustics of the hall need to be regulated by the degree of diffuse reflection. Finishing materials are one of the main aspects of the formation of the interior space of a concert hall. In order to ensure optimal sound conditions, special attention should be paid to the decoration of the ceiling space and sidewalls of the room. Various types of mid-to-high frequency, low frequency and wide frequency absorbers are used for this purpose. This paper deals with the physical, mechanical and aesthetic characteristics of sound-absorbing materials and trademark designs that are presented in the Ukrainian market. The quality of sound and light equipment and its correct placement will ensure the maximum service life of the concert hall. Depending on the three-dimensional planning solution, as well as the technical and economic characteristics of the room, you can choose the scheme of air distribution: "bottom-up", "top-down" or multi-zone scheme. It is determined that it is advisable to use infrared heaters to heat the auditoriums. When choosing the furniture of concert halls, it is necessary to take into account the general style of the building and the color scheme of the selected finishing materials. For concert halls, it is advisable to select seats made using modern technologies: triplexing, fire barrier, options, mobility systems, sound absorption and more. The main artistic and aesthetic means of shaping the environment of the concert halls are soft and hard decorations, as well as small stuff. The use of innovative technologies and the use of modern finishing materials increases the attendance rate of these objects and provides comfort to the viewers. Keywords: concert hall, decoration materials, interior design, acoustics.

While it is widely known that the Jews of medieval Spain carried with them their language, literature and other traditions to the countries in which they settled following the Expulsion in 1492, little research has been conducted on the preservation of their material culture and the visual arts. In this article, these aspects are examined vis-à-vis the Judaic artistic production and visual realm of the Sephardi Jews in Morocco, who adhered to these traditions perhaps more staunchly than any other Sephardi community in modern times. The materials are divided into several categories which serve as an introduction to specific topics that each require further research. These include Hebrew book printing, Jewish marriage contracts (ketubbot), Hebrew manuscript decoration, clothing and jewellery relating to the world of the Sephardi-Moroccan woman and the interior of the home, and ceremonial objects for the synagogue.

Abstract The baroque church of Santa María Tonantzintla is located in the Valley of Cholula in Central Mexican Plateau and it was built during 16th-19th century. Its interior decoration shows interesting symbolic fusion of Christian elements with Mesoamerican religious aspects of Nahua origin. The scholars of Mexican colonial art interpreted the Catholic iconography of Santa María Tonantzintla church as Assumption of Virgin Mary up to celestial kingdom and her coronation by the holy Trinity. One of those scholars, Francisco de la Maza, proposed the idea that apart from that the ornaments of the church evoke Tlalocan, paradise of ancient deity of rain known as Tlaloc. Following this interpretation this study explore a relation between Virgin Mary and ancient Nahua deity of Earth and fertility called Tonatzin in order to show profound syncretic bonds which exist between Cristian and Mesoamerican traditions.

AbstractIn Samosir island traditional kampongs, stone mortar are often found. Mortars are ethnoarhaeological stuff considering thier material and technology refelct a sustainability from the past to the present. Stone mortars may have more than one hole and may function as a container to process various life needs. Mortars may also have certain decoration patterns. Such decorated mortars seem to have indicated not only their practical uses but also contained various sociological aspects. In order to reveal them, descriptive method with inductive reasoning is applied. Such method is expected to explain various cultural aspects contained such as religion, technology, environment, and social including Batak Toba life perspective.AbstrakDi perkampungan tradisional Pulau Samosir banyak ditemukan lesung batu. Lesung merupakan benda etnoarkeologi mengingat bahan dan teknologinya mencerminkan kesinambungan dari sejak masa lalu hingga kini. Lesung batu dapat memiliki sebuah atau lebih lubang dan difungsikan sebagai tempat untuk mengolah berbagai keperluan hidup. Lesung ada juga yang dipahat dengan pola hias tertentu. Bentuk lesung seperti itu tampaknya tidak hanya mengisyaratkan akan fungsi praktis semata akan tetapi juga memuat berbagai aspek yang berkaitan dengan masyarakatnya. Untuk mengungkapkannya, maka digunakan metode deskriptif dengan penalaran induktif. Metode dimaksud diharapkan dapat menjelaskan berbagai aspek yang dikandung benda budaya dimaksud diantaranya aspek teknologi, religi, lingkungannya dan sosial termasuk didalamnya penggambaran pandangan hidup masyarakat Batak Toba.

Abstract The baroque church of Santa María Tonantzintla is located in the Valley of Cholula in the Central Mexican Plateau and it was built during 16th-19th century. Its interior decoration shows an interesting symbolic fusion of Christian elements with Mesoamerican religious aspects of Nahua origin. Scholars of Mexican colonial art interpreted the Catholic iconography of Santa María Tonantzintla church as the Assumption of the Virgin Mary up to the celestial kingdom and her coronation by the holy Trinity. One of those scholars, Francisco de la Maza, proposed the idea that apart from that, the ornaments of the church evoke Tlalocan, paradise of the ancient deity of rain known as Tlaloc. Following this interpretation this study explores the relation between the Virgin Mary and the ancient Nahua deity of Earth and fertility called Tonatzin in order to show the profound syncretic bonds which exist between Christian and Mesoamerican traditions.

The choice of furniture does not only affect the comfort of one’s life or work space. Materials utilized in furniture production may contribute to the quality of chemical microclimate in rooms and have an influence on the users’ health. Plenty of substances used in the furniture industry have negative effects on human health. These effects are usually of low intensity. However, they occur over a long period of time and as a result they may even lead directly to permanent health problems. Consumer lifestyle boosts frequent changes in interior decoration. The changes include mainly replacing furniture and household appliances. The furniture industry offers a wide range of products to satisfy the growing needs of buyers. Mass production results in a significant increase in the exploitation of natural resources and (often) leads to degradation of the natural environment. The downsides of mass furniture production are usually considered only in terms of utilizing various resources. Producers, however, implement measures to reduce the consumption of materials and energy. Their aim is to cut the production costs and lower the final price of manufactured goods. Worn out furniture, produced from highly processed materials is not biodegradable. Such waste is a heavy burden on the natural environment. The paper describes „the life cycle” of furniture items and presents a critical analysis of raw materials and intermediate products used in the furniture industry in the context of sustainable development (the impact on human health and on the condition of the natural environment). It may serve as a means to promote pro-health and pro-environmental awareness. A thorough assessment of the furniture available on the market may facilitate in making conscious decisions which will also take into consideration additional technical criteria. The choice of furniture neutral for people as well as for the environment is not an easy task and often involves higher spending.

Title: Space and Lighting Design to Support Contemplation Atmosphere in Regina Caeli Catholic Church, Jakarta The study examines how the light and space in the Church of Regina Caeli able to reinforce the presence of God?s impression and support contemplation?s atmosphere. The discussion reviewed by spatial elements (lobby/narthex, pulpit/nave, and sanctuary/chancel), enclosure elements (floors, walls, ceilings), and interior elements (furniture, decoration, and symbols). The lighting aspects explored are physical aspect (light source, technique, light distribution, colour, and level of light) and perception aspect (psychology of light). The study shows that the lighting support contemplation by emphasizing the sacred-secular space?s transition and strengthen the sacred space?s orientation. The contemplation is weakened due to the excessive number of liturgical symbols that blurring the people?s focus. As a pluriform church, Regina Caeli applying the combined effect of vertical and horizontal shape and space, but the lighting only emphasizes the horizontal effect that caused the impression of a church that is humane.

This article aims to characterise the positive and negative aspects of being a national minority, using the example of the German minority in the Opolskie Voivodeship and the category of social welfare in the sociological sense. In order to conceptualise and operationalise the idea of national identity, attention has been focused mainly on its cultural determinants, with particular emphasis on the role of language and organisational activity. The empirical exploration of the research questions was based on surveys, carried out by the authors of the article on behalf of the Social-Cultural Society of Germans in Opole Silesia (SCSG) in the summer of 2019, among members of the German minority organisation. [1] The research was carried out in the period from June to August 2019 as part of the SCSG's campaign entitled “The German minority has a value”, financed by the Polish Ministry of Interior and Administration.

The coffin of Nefer-renepet was donated to the National Museum in Belgrade by Ernest Brummer (born in Sombor in 1881) in 1921. The coffin is a fine example of the artistry of the funerary industry of ancient Akhmim. Previous publications have classified this object as belonging to the 22nd-25th Dynasty or Ptolemaic period. The present analysis indicates that it dates to the period of the mid-4th century B.C., i.e. 30th Dynasty, based on stylistic comparisons, orthography and genealogical information from similar coffins in other collections. This stylistic/chronological phase is not well-represented numerically, and this makes Nefer-renepet’s coffin all the more important. The design characteristics of the phase broadly emulate those of the 26th Dynasty, but they are clearly distinguishable as belonging to a later era. Among the many distinctive aspects of Nefer-renepet’s coffin is the interior decoration of its lid, published here for the first time, showing the ‘gliding Nut motif with upward streaming hair’ accompanied by abbreviated texts derived from the Book of Day and Book of Night. The goddess represented on the coffin trough is Imentet, with the maat-feather on her head as a reduction of the full hieroglyphic symbol for West.

The article analyzes the social practices of memorization and ethnicization in the process of post-Soviet transformation of the architectural landscape of the capitals of the Finno-Ugric republics, by the republican elites with the aim of constructing a stable regional identity of the capital’s population on the example of the Republic of Mordovia and the Udmurt Republic. The purpose of the study is to identify the basic social technologies for using the cultural and symbolic aspects of the urban architectural environment, including the historical and cultural heritage, and the newly created elements for the purpose of “memorial management” and to give ethnic flavor, the trends in their evolution and the main results of using such technologies in the post-Soviet period. Based on the data of standardized observation, the intensity of the concentration of ethnicization of the urban architectural environment is compared, the main places of concentration of signs of ethnicity and historical memory in the urban space of Izhevsk and Saransk, common features, strategic features, results and limitations in the research perspective of sociological concepts of identity politics, historical politics, city sociology, public spaces, “places” and “non-places” are identified. The main verbal (language of signs, slogans), monumental (sculpture, commemorative signs, architectural decoration of buildings, stairs, fountains, etc.), visual (social advertising, ethnic symbols in illuminations, holiday decoration of buildings) means of ethnicization of urban environment design are described, as well as architectural images that indicate alternative ethnic strategies for the formation of the capital’s identity. The general trends and problems associated with the redevelopment of the urban environment and the transformation of “arrogant” Soviet public spaces into places of recreation and communication are revealed. Among the limitations of the effectiveness of the historical policy and the policy of ethnicization of urban spaces, the author considers the conscious implementation of alternative strategies for the formation of urban identity by various social actors, the binding of iconic architectural objects to “empty” pseudo-public spaces or sports facilities that are not “anchor” objects, the creation of symbolic transit spaces in the status of “non-places”, the visual ethnic specificity of which is not available to those who use them.

This text consists of an interpretive essay about the meaning(s) of the “mirror” as an object in Mainland and Aegean Greece (in contrast to Western/Colonial Greece), based on iconography. I take into consideration two distinct repertoires of images: the paintings of Attic vases (late sixth – early fourth century B.C.) and the figurative decoration on the mirrors themselves, in relief or engraved (late fifth – early third century B.C.). The central focus of the analysis is the iconography registered on mirrors produced in the four main manufacturing centers of Greece (Athens, Corinth, Chalcis, Ionia). Greeks produced three types of mirrors between Late Archaic and Early Hellenistic times: hand-mirrors with handle, table mirrors with stand, and round box mirrors, the latter being the most important to this study. Box mirrors may bear iconography on their folding cover, in relief on the external surface (repoussé) or engraved on the interior surface. In contrast to the iconography of the vases of Magna Graecia, in which the mystic component stands out from the other symbolic aspects, in the case of the iconography of Greek mirrors erotic symbolism and the relation with the goddess Aphrodite predominate. This goddess protects all categories of women (hetaerae and "citizen-women", married or brides) and all modalities of eroticism. Under the auspices of love and desire, the symbolic power of the mirror can be related to an inclusive eroticism, which unites, that which society separates.

Egyptian universities had the most powerful buildings that encourage sustainable development. Sustaining university buildings had been the main concern, thus the development focused on different aspects (social, sociological, bio-life, physical, healthy surroundings, etc.). In recent times, the main problem facing university buildings has been the high consumption of energy despite the low performance. This problem affected the interior areas and spaces used by the majority of students. The issue hindered the learning environment—which should be designed to facilitate high academic performance—from achieving its purpose. Fixing the problem required finding the errors applied in the planning policy, in order to integrate low energy consumption with high performance. This paper analyzes the design strategy, low energy design strategy, and its analysis systems in order to integrate them with the analysis of four case studies in comparative methodology. This approach helps in achieving effective observation to implement principles, policy, criteria, and strategies. The method of the paper shall help with coming up with an efficient vision to create the integrated design strategy for constructing university buildings in Egypt. The solution is characterized by low-cost energy consumption that is applicable to the conditions in Egypt and is in synchronization with sustainability as a whole vision.

A direct titin-thick filament interaction in certain regions of the A band is suggested by results using four new monoclonal antibodies specific for titin in immunoelectron microscopy. Antibodies T30, T31 and T32 identify quasi-repeats in the titin molecule characterized by a 42–43 nm repeat spacing. These stripes seem to coincide with striations established by others on negatively stained cryosections of the A band. Antibodies T30 and T32 recognize epitopes matching five or two of the seven striations per half sacromere known to harbor both the myosin-associated C-protein and an 86K (K = 10(3) Mr) protein. Antibody T31 labels two stripes in the P zone, which correspond to the two positions where decoration is seen with 86K protein, but not with C-protein. The single titin epitope defined by antibody T33 is located 55 nm prior to the center of the M band. This position seems to coincide with the M7 striation defined by others on negatively stained A bands. The T33 epitope position proves that the titin molecule, which is known to be anchored at the Z line, also penetrates into the complex architecture of the M band. The titin epitopes described here enable us to begin to correlate known ultrastructural aspects of the interior part of the A band with the disposition of the titin molecule in the sarcomere. They raise the question of whether there is a regular interaction pattern between titin and the thick filaments.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Analyses of the synagogue discovered in the ancient town of Dura Europos commonly emphasize connections between the construction and decoration of the building and aspects of Jewish life along the Roman eastern frontier. By focusing on lesser-known data from the synagogue, including burial deposits found inside its doorways, as well as examples of non-monumental writings and art (graffiti) from its interior, this article offers distinct insights into the cultural horizons of those who used and visited the structure. Closer consideration of the locations and contents of associated finds and their comparisons with analogues discovered in Dura and throughout the Syro-Mesopotamian world collectively advance new hypotheses about how visitors to the synagogue behaved inside its varied spaces and used acts of object-burial and writing to manipulate and reshape its walls, doorways, thresholds, and floors. The impetus to reconsider deposits of writing and objects from the Dura synagogue from this vantage, in its Syro-Mesopotamian context, owes to the recent publication of additional finds from other parts of the town. These augmented local comparisons for the synagogue evidence particularly reveal dynamic and otherwise unidentified continuities between devotional behaviors and spatial practices conducted by local and regional Jews and Christians, neighboring Durenes, and other inhabitants of Syrian, Mesopotamian, and Persian cities. These similarities, at times, can overshadow connections traditionally emphasized between daily life in Dura and the provincial world of Rome. Working outwards from the synagogue evidence, this approach ultimately demonstrates that many Durenes, whether Jews or their neighbors, engaged in daily devotional acts, in distinctive locations, which reflected, transformed, and responded to their local Syrian, Mesopotamian, and Arsacid cultural orbits.

Riassunto: Il Rococò si manifestò nella città di Valencia durante il trentennio centrale del Settecento e si espresse in tutte le forme dell’arte. Raggiunse l’apice della sua ricchezza nella decorazione degli interni, primi tra tutti quelli del palazzo de Dos Aguas e della vicina chiesa di San Andrés. Il suo successo cessò con l’avvento dell’Accademismo, che con l’istituzione della Reale Accademia di Belle Arti di San Carlos nel 1768, pretese il controllo delle arti sotto il segno del neoclassicismo. Si è sempre relegato il Rococò nelle ultime pagine dell’evoluzione del Barocco valenzano e manca uno studio indipendente del Rococò valenciano, delle sue fonti stilistiche, dei modelli che impiega, delle sue relazioni con gli stili precedenti, delle cause che determinano il suo trentennale successo. Questo articolo pretende iniziare a far luce su questi aspetti, confidando che approfondimenti futuri possano valorizzare le produzioni di uno dei periodi più ricchi della storia dell’arte valenciana. Parole chiave: rococò, Valencia, XVIII secolo, accademismo. Abstract: Rococo emerged in the city of Valencia in the central three decades of 18th century and it has been expressing itself in all forms of art. It reached the peak of its richness in interior decoration, first of all those of the palace de Dos Aguas and the nearby church of San Andrés. Its success ended because of arrival of Academism, with the establishment in 1768 of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos, which claims to control the arts under the sign of neoclassicism. The Rococo has been always relegated to the last pages of the evolution of the Valencian Baroque. Nowadays, an independent study of the Valencian Rococo and its stylistic sources, of the models it employs, of its relations with previous styles, of the reasons of its thirty-year success, is still missing. This article pretends to shed light on these aspects, trusting that further studies can enhance the products of one of the richest periods in the history of Valencian art.Keywords: rococo, Valencia, XVIII century, academicism.

The activity of Herbert Horne, an art collector, is regarded in the article due to his great significance as an italianist scolar. Hence, the emphasis is made on the Horne’s work starting from the 1880-s when he dedicated himself to studying different aspects of the Italien Renaissance art and culture. His role in the study of Trecento and Quatrocento art (his articles and his monograph on Sandro Botticelli) is shown, as well as his leadership in the art and antique sphere and his participation as an expert in the creation of new museums, while the stress is put on Horne’s figure as an outstanding art collector. The aim of the collecting was to acquire Renaissance art objects for interior decoration of the palazzo Quatrocento that he purchased in Florence and restored himself in the style of that epoch. Despite the fact that the palazzo Corsi-Horne shares common features with the Florence and Fiesole museums , founded in the same time period, the Horne Museum, that the great scholar designed and created , is particularly noted for its scientific forethought and highquality composition. В статье рассматривается деятельность коллекционера Герберта Хорна в контексте его высокой значимости как ученого-итальяниста. Поэтому акцент сделан на его работе начиная с конца 1880-х годов, когда он глубоко погрузился в исследование разных аспектов искусства и культуры итальянского Ренессанса. Показана его роль в изучении живописи Треченто и Кватроченто (статьи, монография о творчестве Сандро Боттичелли), дилерство в области искусства и антиквариата, участие в создании новых музеев в качестве эксперта, а главное внимание уделено Хорну как выдающемуся коллекционеру. Его собирание было направлено на приобретение ренессансных художественных предметов для оформления интерьера палаццо Кватроченто, который он приобрел во Флоренции и сам отреставрировал в стиле той эпохи. Несмотря на то, что палаццо Корси-Хорн имеет общие черты с музеями Флоренции и Фьезоле, образованными примерно в тот же период, Музей Хорна, целиком замысленный и осуществленный этим большим ученым, особо отмечен своей научной продуманностью и качественным составом.

Introduction. The article is devoted to the history of the formation and activity of the Pokrovsky monastery, situated in the old erzya-mordvinians village Drakino Torbeevsky district of the Republic of Mordovia. Formed in 1996, it is at the initiative of the local clergy and Archbishop of Saransk and Mordovia Varsonofy, dreamed that in all district of Mordovia was his monastery. Official opening monastery held in 1998. Monastery arose on the basis of Pokrovsky stone church built before the revolution, with a rich history. Methods. The article uses traditional methods of ethnographic science, such as field observation, questionnaires, survey and interview, a complex approach, quantitative analysis. The methods of historical science used comparative-historical, historical-genetic, problem-chronological, structural-system. Among the general scientific methods of research were involved descriptive-narrative, logical, generalization, typological, classification and systematization methods. Results. Drakinsky Pokrovsky monastery despite the small number of monks has been very active educational, missionary, economic and philanthropic activity. Now it and its main temple, all other constructions in its territory in its territory admires by its striking well-groomed. After all Pokrovsky church has completed its part of the altar, purchased over architectural appearance, its interior decoration different festive edge-cell and splendor than, of course, proud of all the villagers. In July, 2016 in village Drakino the ethnographic expedition of Mordovian State University worked by which the survey was conducted on a specially designed questionnaire devoted to the study of religious life Mordvinians, the results are also analyzed in this article. Conclusion. The conducted survey of residents village Drakino showed that despite its very positive results, indicating that in the sphere of their religious life there are no serious problems, contradictions, causes concern incompetence, passivity and indifference of many villagers to very important issues for the future of the Mordovian people, both in the field of ethnic and religious life, and in a number of other aspects, which testifies to the need to pay more attention to his enlightenment, to work towards the development and growth of ethnic identity.

ArgumentThis paper considers some aspects of the reception and development of contemporary mathematics in Spain during the first half of the twentieth century, more specifically between 1910 and 1950. It analyzes the possible influence of scientists’ mobility in the adoption of newer views or theories. A short overview of key points of the social and scientific background in nineteenth-century Spain locates the expounded facts in an appropriate context. Three leading threads are followed. First is the consideration of the mobility of some Spanish mathematicians during a period including World War I and World War II – when Spain was a theoretically neutral country – and the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Second, the emergence and socio-political behavior of a dominant mathematical group gathered around Julio Rey Pastor between 1915 and 1936 is also accounted for, as well as its continuity after the Civil War into the 1940s. Third, attention is paid to the migration or interior exile of a number of mathematicians as a consequence of the Civil War. The paper is organized around nine Tables containing information on mobility of mathematicians, doctorates awarded in the mathematical sciences, and mathematical production in Spain during this period, accompanied by statistical résumés and comments on interesting entries. The main conclusions drawn are: 1) a number of integrants of the Rey group, himself included, officially traveled to Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland – usually after having obtained doctorates and fixed positions – imported mathematical knowledge into Spain; 2) the group also managed to dominate the mathematical panorama from both the scientific and the sociological viewpoint; 3) social usages in Spanish mathematical affairs established in Spain in the years prior to the Civil War present a clear continuity under the Franco regime once the war was over.

Background. The article deals with the basic conceptual foundations of the "Ukrainian style" in the art of the late 19th – early 20th centuries, primarily in the field of searching for actual ways of adaptation and creative rethinking of Ukrainian folk ornament motifs. A special role in this process was played by the use of graphics, whose artistic language has evolved rapidly under the influence of contemporary European styles. However, in the graphic works of Ukrainian artists, the appeal to folk ornamentation was one of several ways of self-identification with the national artistic tradition, so the practice of integrating those ornamental motifs into the book and magazine illustration was a significant component of the creative work of many artists during that period. Objectives. This paper aims at defining the role and importance of Ukrainian folk ornament in the modern (art nouveau) graphic, based on consideration of theoretical and applied aspects of the use of ornamental motifs, their creative comprehension by graphic artists of different regions of Ukraine. Methods. In this article we rely on art historian methods and general scientific methods, such as analysis and synthesis, analogy and system analysis to outline the features of several variants of the "Ukrainian style", representing different regional differences. Comparative analysis, methods of systematization and typology were used to reveal the peculiarities of the transformation of ornamental motifs under the influence of the individual manner of each artist and to present the theoretical background of the folk ornament usage, including concepts of the development of "Ukrainian style" in the visual and decorative arts. Results. This article outlines several concepts of the use of Ukrainian folk ornament motives, elaborated by Ukrainian artists in the beginning of 20th century, period, which chronologically corresponds with the time of the paneuropean expansion of the art nouveau style. We can name an independent research of S. Vasylkivskyy, that allowed him to understand the artistic language of the Ukrainian ornament of different historical periods, and allowed the development of complex projects of interior design for new buildings. His projects demonstrate a harmonious synthesis of the traditions of folk art of the Dnieper Ukraine and Slobozhanshchyna (including specimens of paintings, carpets, ceramic tiles). Instead, V. Krychevs’kyy more often appealed to the ornamentation of Ukrainian weaving, while the main sources of decorative motifs for him were the ancient manuscripts, engravings and applied art of the Hetmanate. O. Slastion also addressed the study of the semantics of ornaments and their function in the system of folk art and culture in general. At first, he applied his own ideas in the projects of decoration of new buildings, constructed at the end of the XIX century in Poltava region, and later focused on the problem of updating the language of Ukrainian graphic art. The genre differentiation of graphic arts actually accelerated the separation of the Ukrainian voice from the general eclectic Russian-imperial culture. The area through which this process could gain more momentum was an art postcard, which at that time became one of the catalysts for the formation of new communication standards in cities and towns. Popular authors in this specialization were A. Zhdakha, O. Slastion, S. Vasylkivskyy, who gave impetus to the main line of development of Ukrainian graphic design of "small forms" at an early stage of its formation. It is interesting to compare different author's approaches to the practice of incorporation and stylizing ornamental motifs – for example, M. Sosenko uses a much more extensive range of primary sources, among which not only is available local material (Ukrainian Carpathians' applied art, handwriting book of the 16th–17th centuries), but also folk art crafts of the Dnieper Ukraine and Slobozhanshchyna and at the same time he modernizes them under the influence of the secessionist style. During the early stages of the art nouveau development in Halychyna (1897–1907), which researchers call ornamental, book and magazine graphics, architecture, and fine arts became the areas where new trends emerged very fast. This process was facilitated by the similarity of artistic language in the works of graphics, monumental and decorative arts, in particular the use of sections of local color, subordinated to a clear linear pattern, which is perceived as a kind of outline for the main elements of the image. The ornamental motifs in the art of secession were interpreted as peculiar symbols – in the Ukrainian version of this style the ornamentation of folk art, especially the local Hutsul tradition, becomes especially important. Conclusions. An important part of the strategy of national art revival of the late 19th – early 20th centuries was the introduction of ethnographic motifs to contemporary works of art. Architecture and graphics have undeniable advantages over other art genres in the sense of rapidly spreading the language of the new Ukrainian style to the widest audience possible. A special place was given to the printed postcards, the authors of which – both famous and anonymous artists, addressed primarily ethnographic topics. It is also important that, regardless of the specifics of regional variants of art nouveau, the practice of introducing ornamental motifs, plots and the images of Ukrainian folk art, re-imagined in more modern way, was a significant factor in asserting national identity, and was aimed at developing a universal artistic language.

Competition for the attention of consumers in the modern fashion industry makes the problem of finding new effective means of marketing communications a topical issue. Fashion designers are interested in creating conditions of high quality for a vivid demonstration of new collections, it enables to increase the popularity of the brand, to strengthen the prestige on the market, to attract the attention of potential customers to the products. Modern trends demonstrate how often designers prefer original and unusual locations for defile, which are oriented on maximally spectacular design planning of the presentation space, in order to stand out against the background of the general information flow in any way. Various studies were devoted to this problem directly or indirectly, its various aspects were studied in many papers, but the peculiarities of forming scenography for fashion defile in different types of locations were not brought together as one of the design planning problems, which determined the topic of the study. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate the significance of scenography in modern design planning of demonstration spaces, to reveal the peculiarities of the monumental and decorative design of fashion shows. The article deals with the main types of scenery for outdoor and indoor location: interior, landscape, special and project ones. It has been defined what kind of differences exist between the scenery for fashion shows and theatrical and cinematic scenery. It has been determined under which principles the decorative design of presentation spaces is formed. • The scenery on the demonstration site shall look flawless, since the audience often stands very close and interacts with objects, unlike theatrical stage or cinema, where it may look “conditional”. And there is, also, photo and video shooting. Thus, performance, use of materials and detalization of decoration require high quality. • Additional equipment, namely stage structures, illumination systems, sound equipment, is visually open to the audience on the fashion shows and it also requires a comprehensive approach with decorative design. In the cinema and theater, these things remain off screen, are not visually active. • Installation and disassembly of scenery in a short time frame, since it is installed only for the duration of the show, often in the leased spaces. It is usually one-time. • Scenery at the outdoor locations in the open air on fashion shows requires special decorative objects, scale observed towards space, and professional illumination, due to photo and video shooting. • Objective decorative filling shall provide ecological, functional and aesthetic comfortability, these factors determine the general comfort. Hence, the decorative design of the environment facilitates the disclosure of the main theme of the collection, the concept as a whole, provides performance with a certain form, enhances the impact of the show on the audience, determines the style of the performance. It is an indisputable fact that the decorative design, created by highly skilled experts for fashion shows, does not cease to astonish and captivate. Theatricalization of fashion shows and the development of modern technologies have led to the creative search and implementation of the most unexpected ideas of scenery, stage-properties and props. This article opens the following prospects in the study of the design of demonstration spaces: to study the specifics of use of new technologies in modern scenography and their influence on the formation of the artistic image of Ukrainian fashion defile.

Abstract The interior elements designed in a specific theme are aimed to shape the character, perception and space atmosphere. In Bandung, culinary facilities that carry the theme of the old-style interior design of Dutch East Indies are quite popular. This study aims to contribute guidance in creating the quality of space by applying the selection of decoration and furniture elements (moveableinterior elements) and the arrangement of walls, floors and ceilings (unmoveableinterior elements).This study applies case study research methods, discussion analysis uses descriptive analysis method and direct observation to Indischetafel café. The result of this study is to examine aspects of interior element arrangement in the Indischetafel café in bringing the atmosphere of Bandung Tempo Dulu.Keywords: thematic interior, interior elements, Bandung space atmosphere First Tempo

An assessment of historic buildings, its history and conditions are essential in the study of buildings conservation. Other than architecture history and building defects, the interior scheme of building, the decorations, the building's form and space interior layout are also some significant aspects that need to be analysed in building conservation study. In current practice, the change of use of any heritage building will need approval from the National Heritage Department (NHD). The report of history and building condition is the one of the main documents needed to be submitted for the approval process. The main objective of this research is to analyse the buildings based on the original materials, form, function, decoration, and layout. The methods used for this research include in depth building investigation, analysis, and interpretation; backed up by measured drawing and historical assessment. The analysis involved the mapping of original and existing spaces and then analysed the unique characters of the interior using a series of photos categorised based on time or dates of the photos. From this analysis, the authenticity of the space can be identified and recommendations on better usage of spaces of these historic buildings can be proposed to the National Heritage Department.

The art of designing decoration in terms of aesthetics and its expressive symbolic connotations is mainly related to interior designs and its values based on formal relationships expressing its intellectual peculiarity in employment, as each of the designs is a mirror of a need and its tastes is not individual in itself, but according to an interactive relationship between the designer and the recipient on the one hand and between society As a whole . Through the formal appearance and content of artistic taste and design philosophy and the extent of the influence and influence of each on the other, especially that the interior designs are clearly subject to and affected by the social and economic environment and the development in the technical field, which formed as motives that gave the designer the ability to devise and innovate new systems resulting from his self-sensitivity to the components From which it derives the design idea In addition to its cultural and philosophical level, which are components and motives that depend on it in the design application, whether in the formations of the foundations and elements and their decorative aspects, they are basically linked to the need for new designs ranging from functional necessity to aesthetic necessity based on constructive relationships of shapes and building systems that support Its objective properties. Based on the foregoing, and through the researcher's review of a set of designs, he found that there is a problem standing in front of the concept of relationships that is taken away and the other by approaching the design construction in terms of structural relations and linkage and the meaning of integration based on the aesthetic and expressive dimensions and the need for compatibility with the functional goal If we take into account the concept of the resulting relationships and the investigator of aesthetic, expressive and functional values in the overall design achievement, and through that, the problem

This article examines the symbolic meanings of colours, types of geometric lines and shapes, national ornaments and their influence on the psychological perception of a person, and pecularity of application in the creating the design of attributes. In this work, various types of attributes are systematically investigated by their colour, shape and design element. The study, the analysis of the types of attributes and their impact on the psychological perception of a person have been carried out. In so doing, special attention is paid to the form of the attributes themselves, their colour score, elements used in the interior decoration, types of materials used (jacquard, metallic, printed, etc.). Furthermore, the role of attributes used in special types of clothing and the essence of the use of colours, geometric lines and shapes, as well as the national ornament in the developmet of the design of attributes are stated. The results of the research conducted by the experts in a particular field are studied. In so doing, the symbolic meanings of colours, types of geometric lines and shapes, and national ornaments have been studied and disclosed. On the basis of the diagrams, the results of analyses of a sociological survey among specialists in the creation of design of recommended attributes of special type of clothing are presented. The idea of using the national ornament of the historical costume, which is new in this direction, is considered in detail. The main national ornaments are systematized, their symbolic meanings and expressions are examined. As a result of the conducted research, recommendations for colours, geometric lines and shapes as well as samples of national ornaments are given for creating attributes of special types of clothing.

Стаття присвячена особливостям розвитку сакральної архітектури Галицько-Волинського князівства, яка, перебуваючи у руслі східнохристиянської традиції, використовувала романську будівельну техніку і сформувала систему декоративного оздоблення споруд із застосуванням білокам’яного різьблення, що є типовим для центрально- і західноєвропейської мистецької традиції. Висвітлено окремі аспекти наукової дискусії стосовно взаємовпливів галицько-волинської та володимиро-суздальської мурованої архітектури ХІІ–ХІІІ ст. Виявлено, що, незважаючи на виразні ознаки західноєвропейських впливів, середньовічні церкви на території Західної Русі свідчать про особливість місцевої архітектурної традиції, виражену в технології будівництва, тенденціях облаштування інтер’єрів в унікальному внутрішньому просторові храмових споруд. Ключові слова: Середньовіччя, архітектура, романська стилістика, Галич, Холм, Володимиро-Суздальське князівство. The paper considers peculiar development of sacral architecture of the Kingdom of Galicia-Volhynia which, while being congruent with the Eastern Christian tradition, still applied Romanesque building techniques and created building decoration system involving white-stone carvings typical of Central and Western European artistic tradition. It also covers some aspects of scholarly discussion concerning mutual influence of Galicia-Volhynia and Vladimir-Suzdal stone architecture of the ХІІ–ХІІІ centuries.We find that, despite abundant signs of Western European influences, medieval churches on the territory of West Rus testify to the local architectural tradition peculiarity, expressed in the technology, design and arrangement trends and unique temple interior decoration.Key words: Middle Ages, architecture, Romanesque style, Halych, Chelm, Vladimir-Suzdal Principality

In a recent gaming anthology, Henry Jenkins cannot help contrasting his son's cramped, urban, media-saturated existence with his own idyllic, semi-rural childhood. After describing his own Huck Finn meanderings over "the spaces of my boyhood" including the imaginary kingdoms of Jungleoca and Freedonia, Jenkins relates his version of his son's experiences: My son, Henry, now 16 has never had a backyard He has grown up in various apartment complexes, surrounded by asphalt parking lots with, perhaps, a small grass buffer from the street… Once or twice, when I became exasperated by my son's constant presence around the house I would … tell him he should go out and play. He would look at me with confusion and ask, where? … Who wouldn't want to trade in the confinement of your room for the immersion promised by today's video games? … Perhaps my son finds in his video games what I found in the woods behind the school, on my bike whizzing down the hills of suburban backstreets, or settled into my treehouse with a good adventure novel intensity of experience, escape from adult regulation; in short, "complete freedom of movement". (Jenkins 1998, 263-265) Games here are connected with a shrinking availability of domestic and public space, and a highly mediated experience of the world. Despite his best intentions, creeping into Jenkins's piece is a sense that games act as a poor substitute for the natural spaces of a "healthy" childhood. Although "Video games did not make backyard play spaces disappear", they "offer children some way to respond to domestic confinement" (Jenkins 1998, 266). They emerge, then, as a palliation for the claustrophobic circumstances of contemporary urban life, though they offer only unreal spaces, replete with "lakes of fire … cities in the clouds … [and] dazzling neon-lit Asian marketplaces" (Jenkins 1998, 263), where the work of the childish imagination is already done. Despite Jenkins's assertion that games do offer "complete freedom of movement", it is hard to shake the feeling that he considers his own childhood far richer in exploratory and imaginative opportunities: Let me be clear I am not arguing that video games are as good for kids as the physical spaces of backyard play culture. As a father, I wish that my son would come home covered in mud or with scraped knees rather than carpet burns ... The psychological and social functions of playing outside are as significant as the impact of "sunshine and good exercise" upon our physical well-being. (Jenkins 1998, 266) Throughout the piece, games are framed by a romantic, anti-urban discourse: the expanding city is imagined as engulfing space and perhaps destroying childhood itself, such that "'sacred' places are now occupied by concrete, bricks or asphalt" (Jenkins 1998, 263). Games are complicit in this alienation of space and experience. If this is not quite Paul Virilio's recent dour contention that modern mass media forms work mainly to immobilise the body of the consumer--Virilio, luckily, has managed to escape the body-snatchers--games here are produced as a feeble response to an already-effected urban imprisonment of the young. Strikingly, Jenkins seems concerned about his son's "unhealthy" confinement to private, domestic space, and his inability to imaginatively possess a slice of the world outside. Jenkins's description of his son's confinement to the world of "carpet burns" rather than the great outdoors of "scraped knees" and "mud" implicitly leaves the distinction between domestic and public, internal and external, and even the imagined passivity of the domestic sphere as against the activity of the public intact. For those of us who see games as productive activities, which generate particular, unique kinds of pleasure in their own right, rather than as anaemic replacements for lost spaces, this seems to reduce a central cultural form. For those of us who have at least some sympathy with writers on the urban environment like Raban (1974) and Young (1990), who see the city's theatrical and erotic possibilities, Jenkins's fears might seem to erase the pleasures and opportunities that city life provides. Rather than seeing gamers and children (the two groups only partially overlap) as unwitting agents in their own confinement, we can arrive at a slightly more complex view of the relationship between games and urban space. By looking at the video games arcade as it is situated in urban retail space, we can see how gameplay simultaneously acts to regulate urban space, mediates a unique kind of urban performance, and allows sophisticated representations, manipulations and appropriations of differently conceived urban spaces. Despite being a long-standing feature of the urban and retail environment, and despite also being a key site for the "exhibition" of a by-now central media form, the video game arcade has a surprisingly small literature devoted to it. Its prehistory in pinball arcades and pachinko parlours has been noted (by, for example, Steven Poole 2000) but seldom deeply explored, and its relations with a wider urban space have been given no real attention at all. The arcade's complexity, both in terms of its positioning and functions, may contribute to this. The arcade is a space of conflicting, contradictory uses and tendencies, though this is precisely what makes it as important a space as the cinema or penny theatre before it. Let me explain why I think so. The arcade is always simultaneously a part of and apart from the retail centres to which it tends to attach itself.1 If it is part of a suburban shopping mall, it is often located on the ground floor near the entrance, or is semi-detached as cinema complexes often are, so that the player has to leave the mall's main building to get there, or never enter. If it is part of a city or high street shopping area, it is often in a side street or a street parallel to the main retail thoroughfare, or requires the player to mount a set of stairs into an off-street arcade. At other times the arcade is located in a space more strongly marked as liminal in relation to the city -- the seaside resort, sideshow alley or within the fences of a theme park. Despite this, the videogame arcade's interior is usually wholly or mostly visible from the street, arcade or thoroughfare that it faces, whether this visibility is effected by means of glass walls, a front window or a fully retractable sliding door. This slight distance from the mainstream of retail activity and the visibility of the arcade's interior are in part related to the economics of the arcade industry. Arcade machines involve relatively low margins -- witness the industry's recent feting and embrace of redemption (i.e. low-level gambling) games that offer slightly higher turnovers -- and are hungry for space. At the same time, arcades are dependent on street traffic, relentless technological novelty and their de facto use as gathering space to keep the coins rolling in. A balance must be found between affordability, access and visibility, hence their positioning at a slight remove from areas of high retail traffic. The story becomes more complicated, though, when we remember that arcades are heavily marked as deviant, disreputable spaces, whether in the media, government reports or in sociological and psychological literature. As a visible, public, urban space where young people are seen to mix with one another and unfamiliar and novel technologies, the arcade is bound to give rise to adult anxieties. As John Springhall (1998) puts it: More recent youth leisure… occupies visible public space, is seen as hedonistic and presents problems within the dominant discourse of 'enlightenment' … [T]he most popular forms of entertainment among the young at any given historical moment tend also to provide the focus of the most intense social concern. A new medium with mass appeal, and with a technology best understood by the young… almost invariably attracts a desire for adult or government control (160-161, emphasis mine) Where discourses of deviant youth have also been employed in extending the surveillance and policing of retail space, it is unsurprising that spaces seen as points for the concentration of such deviance will be forced away from the main retail thoroughfares, in the process effecting a particular kind of confinement, and opportunity for surveillance. Michel Foucault writes, in Discipline and Punish, about the classical age's refinements of methods for distributing and articulating bodies, and the replacement of spectacular punishment with the crafting of "docile bodies". Though historical circumstances have changed, we can see arcades as disciplinary spaces that reflect aspects of those that Foucault describes. The efficiency of arcade games in distributing bodies in rows, and side by side demonstrates that" even if the compartments it assigns become purely ideal, the disciplinary space is always, basically, cellular" (Foucault 1977, 143). The efficiency of games from Pong (Atari:1972) to Percussion Freaks (Konami: 1999) in articulating bodies in play, in demanding specific and often spectacular bodily movements and competencies means that "over the whole surface of contact between the body and the object it handles, power is introduced, fastening them to one another. It constitutes a body weapon, body-tool, body-machine complex" (Foucault 1977,153). What is extraordinary is the extent to which the articulation of bodies proceeds only through a direct engagement with the game. Pong's instructions famously read only "avoid missing ball for high score"--a whole economy of movement, arising from this effort, is condensed into six words. The distribution and articulation of bodies also entails a confinement in the space of the arcade, away from the main areas of retail trade, and renders occupants easily observable from the exterior. We can see that games keep kids off the streets. On the other hand, the same games mediate spectacular forms of urban performance and allow particular kinds of reoccupation of urban space. Games descended or spun off from Dance Dance Revolution (Konami: 1998) require players to dance, in time with thumping (if occasionally cheesy) techno, and in accordance with on-screen instructions, in more and more complex sequences on lit footpads. These games occupy a lot of space, and the newest instalment (DDR has just issued its "7th Mix") is often installed at the front of street level arcades. When played with flair, games such as these are apt to attract a crowd of onlookers to gather, not only inside, but also on the footpath outside. Indeed games such as these have given rise to websites like http://www.dancegames.com/au which tells fans not only when and where new games are arriving, but whether or not the positioning of arcades and games within them will enable a player to attract attention to their performance. This mediation of cyborg performance and display -- where success both achieves and exceeds perfect integration with a machine in urban space -- is particularly important to Asian-Australian youth subcultures, which are often marginalised in other forums for youthful display, like competitive sport. International dance gamer websites like Jason Ho's http://www.ddrstyle.com , which is emblazoned with the slogan "Asian Pride", explicitly make the connection between Asian youth subcultures and these new kinds of public performance. Games like those in the Time Crisis series, which may seem less innocuous, might be seen as effecting important inversions in the representation of urban space. Initially Time Crisis, which puts a gun in the player's hand and requires them to shoot at human figures on screen, might even be seen to live up to the dire claims made by figures like Dave Grossman that such games effectively train perpetrators of public violence (Grossman 1995). What we need to keep in mind, though, is that first, as "cops", players are asked to restore order to a representation of urban space, and second, that that they are reacting to images of criminality. When criminality and youth are so often closely linked in public discourse (not to mention criminality and Asian ethnicity) these games stage a reversal whereby the young player is responsible for performing a reordering of the unruly city. In a context where the ideology of privacy has progressively marked public space as risky and threatening,2 games like Time Crisis allow, within urban space, a performance aimed at the resolution of risk and danger in a representation of the urban which nevertheless involves and incorporates the material spaces that it is embedded in.This is a different kind of performance to DDR, involving different kinds of image and bodily attitude, that nevertheless articulates itself on the space of the arcade, a space which suddenly looks more complex and productive. The manifest complexity of the arcade as a site in relation to the urban environment -- both regulating space and allowing spectacular and sophisticated types of public performance -- means that we need to discard simplistic stories about games providing surrogate spaces. We reify game imagery wherever we see it as a space apart from the material spaces and bodies with which gaming is always involved. We also need to adopt a more complex attitude to urban space and its possibilities than any narrative of loss can encompass. The abandonment of such narratives will contribute to a position where we can recognise the difference between the older and younger Henrys' activities, and still see them as having a similar complexity and richness. With work and luck, we might also arrive at a material organisation of society where such differing spaces of play -- seen now by some as mutually exclusive -- are more easily available as choices for everyone. NOTES 1 Given the almost total absence of any spatial study of arcades, my observations here are based on my own experience of arcades in the urban environment. Many of my comments are derived from Brisbane, regional Queensland and urban-Australian arcades this is where I live but I have observed the same tendencies in many other urban environments. Even where the range of services and technologies in the arcades are different in Madrid and Lisbon they serve espresso and alcohol (!), in Saigon they often consist of a bank of TVs equipped with pirated PlayStation games which are hired by the hour their location (slightly to one side of major retail areas) and their openness to the street are maintained. 2 See Spigel, Lynn (2001) for an account of the effects and transformations of the ideology of privacy in relation to media forms. See Furedi, Frank (1997) and Douglas, Mary (1992) for accounts of the contemporary discourse of risk and its effects. References Douglas, M. (1992) Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. London ; New York : Routledge. Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin,. Furedi, F.(1997) Culture of Fear: Risk-taking and the Morality of Low Expectation. London ; Washington : Cassell. Grossman, D. (1995) On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Boston: Little, Brown. Jenkins, H. (1998) Complete freedom of movement: video games as gendered play spaces. In Jenkins, Henry and Justine Cassell (eds) From Barbie to Mortal Kombat : Gender and Computer Games. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Poole, S. (2000) Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames. London: Fourth Estate. Raban, J. (1974) Soft City. London: Hamilton. Spigel, L. (2001) Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and the Postwar Suburbs. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Springhall, J. (1998) Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics : Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-rap, 1830-1996. New York: St. Martin's Press. Young, I.M. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Websites http://www.yesterdayland.com/popopedia/s... (Time Crisis synopsis and shots) http://www.dancegames.com/au (Site for a network of fans revealing something about the culture around dancing games) http://www.ddrstyle.com (website of Jason Ho, who connects his dance game performances with pride in his Asian identity). http://www.pong-story.com (The story of Pong, the very first arcade game) Games Dance Dance Revolution, Konami: 1998. Percussion Freaks, Konami: 1999. Pong, Atari: 1972. Time Crisis, Namco: 1996. Links http://www.dancegames.com/au http://www.yesterdayland.com/popopedia/shows/arcade/ag1154.php http://www.pong-story.com http://www.ddrstyle.com Citation reference for this article MLA Style Wilson, Jason A.. "Performance, anxiety" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/performance.php>. Chicago Style Wilson, Jason A., "Performance, anxiety" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/performance.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Wilson, Jason A.. (2002) Performance, anxiety. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/performance.php> ([your date of access]).

Sugar pigs are traditional confections shaped like sugar mice with little legs and no tail. One might, therefore, nibble the trotters of a sugar pig or suck delicately upon the nose of a sugar pig, but one must never eat one’s sugary treats like a pig. As an imagined border between the private world inside the body and the public world outside, the mouth is an unstable limit of selfhood. Food can easily cause disgust as it passes through this hazardous terrain, and this disgust is produced less by the thought of incorporation than by socially constructed boundaries such as the division between human and animal. In order to guard against disgust and the moral judgement it incurs about the eater, the mouth is governed by myriad rules and, in the case of the juvenile mouth, subject to adult surveillance. This paper investigates children’s consumption of confectionery in relation to the mouth as a liminal border space. Children are “sugar pigs” in as much as they disregard the conventions of civilised eating that govern the mouth, preferring instead to slubber, gnaw, lick, and chew like animals, to reveal the contents of their mouths and examine the contents of others, to put lollies in and out of their mouths with dirty hands, and to share single lollies. Children’s lolly rituals resist civilised eating norms, but they hold important cultural meanings that parallel and subvert those of the adult world. Children’s mouths are communal spaces and the rituals that take place in them are acts of friendship, intimacy, and power. Eating norms instituted over thousands of years ensure that people do not eat like animals, and the pig, in particular, stands in opposition to civilised eating. In On Good Manners for Boys (1530), Erasmus of Rotterdam advises that a general guide to eating like a human being is to eat inconspicuously and self-consciously—to “lick a plate or dish to which some sugar or sweet substance has adhered is for cats, not people,” he explains, and to “gnaw bones is for a dog”—and he compares ill-mannered eating with that of pigs, observing how some people “slubber up their meat like swine” (qtd. in Kass 145). Unrefined table manners and uncontrolled appetite continue to elicit such expressions of disgust as “dirty pig” and “greedy pig.” Pigs grunt. Pigs snuffle among refuse. Pigs, as Bob Ashley et al. note, represent all that is uncivilised and exist only as a signifier of appetite (2). The pig and civilisation, however, do not exist simply in opposition. Cookery writer Jane Grigson argues that European civilisation has been founded upon the pig (qtd. in Ashley et al. 2). Also, because the pig’s body is pinkish, soft, and flabby like a human body and because pigs were usually housed near or even inside human dwellings, the pig confounds the human/animal binary: it is “a threshold animal” (Stallybrass and White qtd. in Ashley et al. 7). Furthermore, the steady evolution of eating practices suggests that humans would eat like animals if left in their natural state. Food rules are part of the “attempt to exclude piggishness” from human civilisation, which, according to Ashley et al., demonstrates “precisely the proximity of human and pig” (7). As physician Leon Kass observes, eating conventions “show us both how much we have taken instruction and how much we needed it” (139). Humans aspire to purity and perfection, but William Ian Miller explains that “fuelling no small part of those aspirations is disgust with what we are or with what we are likely to slide back into” (Anatomy xiv). Eating norms, therefore, do not emphasise the difference between human and the pig as much as they express the underlying anxiety that the human mouth and the act of eating are utterly animal. ‘Lollies’ is the Australian term for the confectionery that children mostly buy, and while the child with a lolly pouched in its cheek is such a familiar, even iconic, image that it features on the covers of two recent books about confectionery (Richardson, Whittaker), licking, gnawing, and slubbering—Erasmus’ wonderfully evocative and piggish word—aptly describe the consumption of lollies. Many lollies are large and hard, and eating them requires time, effort, concentration, and conspicuous mouth activity: the cheek bulges and speaking is difficult; a great deal of saliva is produced and the area around the mouth becomes smeared with coloured drool; and there is always the possibility of the lolly falling out. The smaller the child’s mouth, or the larger the lolly, the more impossible it is to eat inconspicuously and self-consciously. Endless chewing is similarly animal-like, and “the bovine look” of teenagers featured in public complaints when chewing gum was mass-produced in the twentieth century (Hendrickson 7). Humans must not eat like animals, but overly-stuffed cheeks, sucking and slubbering mouths, licking tongues, gnawing teeth, and mindlessly ruminating jaws are unashamedly animal-like. Other rules guard against disgust arising from the sight of half-chewed food. When food is in the process of becoming part of the body, it quickly acquires the quality of things with which disgust is more readily associated, things that are, according to Miller, moist rather than dry, viscid rather than free-flowing, pliable rather than hard, things that are “oozy, mucky, gooey, slimy, clammy, sticky, tacky, dank, squishy, or filmy” (“Darwin’s Disgust” 338). Soft lollies with their vividly-coloured and glossy or sugar-encrusted surfaces look magical, but once they go into the mouth are “magically transformed into the disgusting” (Anatomy Miller 96). Food in the process of “becoming” must, therefore, never be seen again. The process of transformation takes place in the private interior of the body, but, if the mouth is open, half-transformed food is visible, and chewed food, according to Miller, “has the capacity to be even more disgusting than feces [sic]” (Anatomy 96). Sometimes, the sight of half-consumed lollies inside children’s mouths is deliberate because children poke out their tongues and look into each other’s mouths to monitor the progress of lollies that change colour as they break down. Miller explains that the rules of disgust are suspended in sexual and non-sexual love: “Disgust marks the boundaries of the self; the relaxing of them marks privilege, intimacy, duty, and caring” (Anatomy xi). This principle applies to children’s lolly rituals. If children forget to note the colour of a Clinker as they bite it, or if they want to note the progress of a Cloud or gobstopper, they open their mouths and even poke out their tongues so a friend can inspect the colour of the lolly, or their tongue. Such acts are marks of friendship. It is not something children do with everyone. The mouth is a threshold of self that children relax as a marker of privilege. The clean/unclean binary exerts a powerful influence on food because, in addition to the way in which food is eaten, it determines the kind of food that is eaten. The mouth is a border between the self (the eater) and the other (the eaten), so what is eaten (the other) eventually becomes the eater (the self). Paradoxically, the reverse is also true; the eater becomes what is eaten—hence, “we are what we eat.” Little wonder then that food is a site of anxiety, surveillance, and control. The pig eats anything, but children’s consumption is strictly monitored. The clean food imperative means that food must be uncontaminated by the world outside the body, and lollies violate the clean food category in this regard. Large, hard lollies can fall out of the mouth, or children may be obliged to violently expel them if they are danger of choking. The young protagonists in Saturdee, Norman Lindsay’s bildungsroman set in country Victoria after WWI, arrange a secret tryst with some girls, and when their plan is discovered a horde of spectators assembles to watch the proceedings: [Snowey Critchet] had provided himself with a bull’s-eye; a comestible about the size of a cricket ball, which he stowed away in one cheek, as a monkey pouches an orange, where it distended his face in a most obnoxious manner. He was prepared, it seemed, to spend the entire afternoon inspecting a scandal, while sucking his bull’s-eye down to edible proportions. (147) Amid a subsequent volley of taunts and cow dung, Snowey lands in the gutter, a reprisal that “was like to be Snowey’s end through causing him to bolt his bull’s-eye whole. It was too large to swallow but large enough to block up his gullet and choke him. Frenziedly he fought his way out of the gutter and ran off black in the face to eject his windpipe obstruction” (147-8). Choking episodes are further aspects of children’s consumption that adults would deem dangerous as well as disgusting. If a child picks up a lolly from the ground, an adult is likely to slap it away and spit out the word “Dirty!” The child’s hands are potentially part of the contaminated outside world, hence, wash your hands before you eat, don’t eat with your fingers, don’t lick your fingers, don’t put your fingers into your mouth, don’t handle food if you aren’t going to eat it, don’t eat food that others have touched. Lolly-consumption breaches the clean/unclean divide when children put fingers into mouths to hook tacky lollies like Minties off the back teeth, remove lollies in order to observe their changing shape or colour, pull chewing gum from the mouth, or push bubble gum back in. The mouth is part of the clean world inside the body; adult disgust stems from concern about contamination through contact with the world outside the body, including the face and hands. The hands are also involved in playground rituals. Children often remove lollies from their mouths, play with them, and put them back in. Such invented rituals include sharpening musk sticks by twisting them in the mouth before jabbing friends with them and returning them to the mouth. Teenagers also bite the heads off jelly babies and rearrange the bodies in multicoloured versions before eating them. These rituals expose half-consumed lollies, and allow lollies to be contaminated by the outside world, but they are markers of friendship and ways of belonging to particular groups as well as sources of entertainment. The ultimate cause for disgust, apart from sharing with a pig perhaps, arises when children violate the boundary between one mouth and another by sharing a single lolly. “Can I have a lick o’ your lollipop?” is an expression that belongs to a time when germs were yet to consume the public imagination, and it demonstrates that children have long been disposed to sharing confectionery in this way. Allowing someone to share an all-day sucker indicates friendship because it involves sacrifice as well as intimacy. How many times the friend licks it indicates how important a friend they are. Chewing gum and hard lollies such as bull’s-eyes and all-day suckers are ideal for sharing because they last a long time. Snowey’s choking episode is punishment both for having such a lolly while others did not, and for not sharing it. When friends share a single lolly in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief it is a sign of their growing intimacy. Rudy and Liesel had only enough money for one lolly: “they unwrapped it and tried biting it in half, but the sugar was like glass. Far too tough, even for Rudy’s animal-like choppers. Instead, they had to trade sucks on it until it was finished. Ten sucks for Rudy. Ten for Liesel. Back and forth” (168). Rudy asks Liesel to kiss him on many occasions, but she never does. She regrets this after he is killed, so here the shared lolly stands in lieu of intimacy rather than friendship. Lollies are still shared in this way in Australian playgrounds, but often it is only hard lollies, and only with close friends. A hard lolly has a clearly defined boundary that can easily be washed, but even unwashed the only portion that is contaminated, and contaminable, is the visible surface of the lolly. This is not the case with a stick of chewing gum. In response to Tom Sawyer’s enquiry as to whether or not she likes rats, Becky Thatcher replies,“What I like, is chewing gum.” “O, I should say so! I wish I had some now.” “Do you? I’ve got some. I’ll let you chew it a while, but you must give it back to me.” That was agreeable, so they chewed it turn about, and dangled their legs against the bench in excess of contentment.” (58) Unlike the clearly defined boundary of a gobstopper, the boundary of chewing gum continually shifts and folds in on itself. The entire confection is contaminated through contact with the mouth of the other. The definition of clean food also includes that which is deemed appropriate for eating, and part of the appeal of lollies is their junk status. Some lollies are sugar versions of “good” foodstuffs: strawberries and cream, wildberries, milk bottles, pineapples, and bananas. Even more ironic, especially in light of the amount of junk food in many adult diets, others are sugar versions of junk food: fries, coke bottles, Pizzas, Hot Dogs, and Hamburgers, all of which are packaged like miniatures of actual products. Lollies, like their British equivalent, kets (which means rubbish), are absolutely distinct from the confectionery adults eat, and British sociologist Allison James shows that this is because they “stand in contrast to conventional adult sweets and adult eating generally” (298). Children use terms like junk and ket intentionally because there is a “power inherent in the conceptual gulf between the worlds of the adult and the child” (James, “Confections” 297). Parents place limits on children’s consumption because lollies are seen to interfere with the consumption of good food, but, as James explains, for children, “it is meals which disrupt the eating of sweets” (“Confections” 296). Some lollies metaphorically violate a different kind of food taboo by taking the form of “unclean” animals like rats, pythons, worms, cats, dinosaurs, blowflies, cane toads, and geckos. This highlights the arbitrary nature of food categories: snakes, lizards, and witchetty grubs do not feature on European menus, but indigenous Australians eat them. Neither do white Australians eat horses, frogs, cats, dogs, and insects, which are considered delicacies in other cultures, some even in other European cultures. Eating human beings is widely-considered taboo, but children enjoy eating lollies shaped like parts of the human body. A fundraiser at a Queensland school fete in 2009 epitomised the contemporary fascination with consuming body parts. Traditionally, the Guess-The-Number fundraiser involves guessing the number of jelly beans in a glass jar, but in this instance the jar held teeth, lips, noses, eyeballs, ears, hearts, and feet. Similarly, when children eat Tongue Pops—tangy tongue-shaped lollies on a stick—the irony of having two tongues, of licking your own tongue, is not lost on children. Other lollies represent tiny people, and even babies. In the ordinary world, children are small and powerless, but the magic of lollies enables them to be the man-eating giant, while Chicos and jelly babies represent the powerless child. Children welcome the opportunity to “bite someone else’s head off” for a change. These lollies are anonymous people, but Freddo Frog and Caramello Koala have names as well as bodies and facial features, while others, like Cadbury’s seven Magical Elves, even have personalities. One of these, Aquamarine, is depicted as a winking character dressed in blue, and described on the wrapper as “a talented musician who plays music to inspire the Elves to enjoy themselves and work harder, but is a bit of a farty pants.” Advertisements also commonly personify lollies by giving them faces, voices, and limbs, so that even something as un-humanlike as a red ball, in the case of the Jaffa, is represented as a cheeky character in the act of running away. And children happily eat them all. Cannibalism rates highly in the world of children’s confectionery (James 298). If lollies are “metaphoric rubbish,” as James explains, they can also be understood as metaphorically breaking food taboos (299). Not only do children’s rituals create a sense of friendship, belonging, even intimacy, but engaging in them is also an act of power because children know that these practices disgust adults. Lollies give children permission to transgress the rules of civilised eating and this carnivalesque subversion is part of the pleasure of eating lollies. James suggests that confectionery is neither raw nor cooked, but belongs to a third food category that helps to define “the disorderly and inverted world of children” (“Confections” 301). In James’ analysis, children and adults inhabit separate worlds, and she views children’s sweets as part of the “alternative system of meanings through which [children] can establish their own integrity” (“Confections” 301, 305). In the sense that they exist outside of officialdom, children have inherited the carnivalesque tradition of the festive life, which Bakhtin theorises as “a second world” organised on the basis of laughter (6, 8). In this topsy-turvy, carnivalesque realm, with its emphasis on the grotesque body, laughter, fun, exuberance, comic rituals, and other non-official values, children escape adult rule. Lollies may be rubbish in the adult world, but, like the carnival fool, they are “king” in the child’s second and festive life, where bodies bulge, feasting is a public and often grotesque event, and children are masters of their own destiny. Eating lollies, then, represents a “metaphoric chewing up of adult order” and a means of the child assuming control over at least one of its orifices (James 305-6). In this sense, the pig is not a symbol of the uncivilised but the un-adult. Children are pigs with sugar—slubbering around hard lollies, licking other children’s lollies, metaphorically cannibalising jelly babies—and if they disgust adults it is because they challenge the eating norms that guard against the ever-present reminder that eating is an animal act. Eating practices “civilize the human animal” (Kass 131), but eating is inherently an untidy experience, and any semblance of order, as anthropologist Mary Douglas explains, is only created by exaggerating difference (qtd. in Ashley et al. 3). The pig is commonly understood to be the antithesis of civilisation and, therefore, the means by which we understand ourselves as civilised beings. The child with a lolly, however, is evidence that the line between human and animal is a tenuous divide. References Ashley, Bob, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones and Ben Taylor. Food and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 2004. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans.Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge: M.I.T. P, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1968. Hendrickson, Robertson. The Great American Chewing Gum Book. Radnor, Pennsylvania: Chilton, 1976. James, Allison. “Confections, Concoctions and Conceptions.” Popular Culture: Past and Present. Eds Bernard Waites, Tony Bennett and Graham Martin. London: Routledge, 1986. 294-307. James, Allison. “The Good, the Bad and the Delicious: The Role of Confectionery in British Society.” Sociological Review 38, 1990: 666-88. Kass, Leon R. The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature. New York: Free Press, 1994. Lindsay, Norman. Saturdee. London: Angus & Robertson, 1981. Miller, William Ian. “Darwin’s Disgust.” Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Ed. David Howes. Oxford: Berg, 2005. Miller, William Ian. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1997. Mason, Laura. Sugar Plums and Sherbet: The Pre-history of Sweets. Devon: Prospect, 1998. Richardson, Tim. Sweets: A History of Temptation. London: Bantam Books, 2003. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. New York: Collier, 1962. Whittaker, Nicholas. Sweet Talk: The Secret History of Confectionery. London: Phoenix, 1999. Zusak, Markus. The Book Thief. Sydney: Picador, 2005.

Introduction There is much to be said about house and home and about our media’s role in defining, enabling, as well as undermining it. […] For we can no longer think about home, any longer than we can live at home, without our media. (Silverstone, “Why Study the Media” 88) For lesbians, inhabiting the queer slant may be a matter of everyday negotiation. This is not about the romance of being off line or the joy of radical politics (though it can be), but rather the everyday work of dealing with the perception of others, with the “straightening devices” and the violence that might follow when such perceptions congeal into social forms. (Ahmed 107) Picture this. Once or twice a week a small, black, portable TV set goes on a journey; down from the lofty heights of the top shelf of the built in storage cupboard into the far corner of the living room. A few hours later, it is being stuffed back into the closet. Not far away across town, another small TV set sits firmly in the corner of a living room. Yet, it remains inanimate for days on end. What do you see? The techno-stories conveyed in this paper are presented through – and anchored to – the idea of the cultural biography of things (Kopytoff 1986), revealing how objects (more specifically media technologies) produce and become part of an articulation of particular and conflicting moral economies of households (Silverstone, “Domesticating Domestication”; Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley, “Information and Communication”; Green). In this context, the concept of the domestication of ICTs has been widely applied in Media Studies during the 1990s and, more recently, been updated to account for the changes in technology, household composition, media regulation, and in fact the dislocation of domesticity itself (Berker, Hartmann, Punie and Ward). Remarkable as these mainstream techno-stories are in their elucidation of contemporary techno-practices, what is still absent is the consideration of how gender and sexuality intersect and are being done through ICT consumption at home, work and during leisure practices in alternative or queer households and families. Do lesbians ‘make’ house and home and in what ways are media and ICTs implicated in the everyday work of queer home-making strategies? As writings on queer subjects and cyberspace have proliferated in recent years, we can now follow a move to contextualize queer virtualities across on and offline experiences, mapping ‘complex geographies of un/belonging’ (Bryson, MacIntosh, Jordan and Lin) and a return to consider online media as part of a bigger ICT package that constitutes our queer everyday life-worlds (Karl). At the same time, fresh perspectives are now being developed with regards to the reconfiguration of domestic values by gay men and lesbians, demonstrating the ongoing processes of probing and negotiation of ‘home’ and the questioning of domesticity itself (Gorman-Murray). By aligning ideas and concepts developed by media theorists in the field of media domestication and consumption as well as (sexual) geographers, this paper makes a contribution towards our understanding of a queer sense of home and domesticity through the technological and more specifically television. It is based on two case studies, part of a larger longitudinal ethnographic study of women-centred households in Brighton, UK. Gill Valentine has identified the home and workplaces as spaces, which are encoded as heterosexual. Sexual identities are being constrained by ‘regulatory regimes’, promoting the normalcy of heterosexuality (4). By recounting the techno-stories of lesbian women, we can re-examine notions of the home as a stable, safe, given entity; the home as a particular feminine sphere as well as the leaky boundaries between public and private. As media and ICTs are also part of a (hetero)sexual economy where they, in their materiality as well as textual significance become markers of sexual difference, we can to a certain extent perceive them as ‘straightening devices’, to borrow a phrase from Sara Ahmed. Here, we will find the articulation of a host of struggles to ‘fight the norms’, but not necessarily ‘step outside the system completely, full-time’ (Ben, personal interview [all the names of the interviewees have been changed to protect their anonymity]). In this sense, the struggle is not only to counter perceived heterosexual home-making and techno-practices, but also to question what kinds of practices to adopt and repeat as ‘fitting in’ mechanism. Significantly, these practices leave neither ‘homonormative’ nor ‘heteronormative’ imaginaries untouched and remind us that: In the case of sexual orientation, it is not simply that we have it. To become straight means that we not only have to turn towards the objects that are given to us by heterosexual culture, but also that we must “turn away” from objects that take us off this line. (Ahmed 21) In this sense then, we are all part of drawing and re-drawing the lines of belonging and un-belonging within the confines of a less than equal power-economy. Locating Dys-Location – Is There a Lesbian in the Home? In his effort to re-situate the perspective of media domestication in the 21st century, David Morley points us to ‘the process of the technologically mediated dislocation of domesticity itself’ (“What’s ‘home’” 22). He argues that ‘under the impact of new technologies and global cultural flows, the home nowadays is not so much a local, particular “self-enclosed” space, but rather, as Zygmunt Bauman puts it, more and more a “phantasmagoric” place, as electronic means of communication allow the radical intrusion of what he calls the “realm of the far” (traditionally, the realm of the strange and potentially troubling) into the “realm of the near” (the traditional “safe space” of ontological security) (23). The juxtaposition of home as a safe, ‘given’ place of ontological security vis a vis the more virtual and mediated realm of the far and potentially intrusive is itself called into question, if we re-consider the concepts of home and (dis)location in the light of lesbian geographies and ‘the production and regulation of heterosexual space’ (Valentine 1). The dislocation of home and domesticity experienced through consumption of (mobile) media technologies has always already been under-written by the potential feeling of dys-location and ‘trouble’ by lesbians on the grounds of sexual orientation. The lesbian experience disrupts the traditionally modern and notably western ideal of home as a safe haven and refuge by making visible the leaky boundaries between private seclusion and public surveillance, as much as it may (re)invest in the production of ideas and ideals of home-making and domesticity. This is illustrated for example by the way in which the heterosexuality of a parental home ‘can inscribe the lesbian body by restricting the performative aspects of a lesbian identity’, which may be subverted by covert acts of resistance (Johnston and Valentine 111; Elwood) as well as by the potentially greater freedoms of lesbian identity within a ‘lesbian home’, which may nevertheless come under scrutiny and ‘surveillance of others, especially close family, friends and neighbours’ (112). Nevertheless, more recently it has also been demonstrated how even overarching structures of familial heteronormativity are opportune to fissures and thereby queered, as Andrew Gorman-Murray illustrates in his study of Australian gay, lesbian and bisexual youth in supportive family homes. So what is, or rather, what can constitute a ‘lesbian home’ and how is it negotiated through everyday techno-practices? In and Out of the Closet – The Straight-Speaking ‘Telly’ As places go, the city of Brighton and Hove in the south-east of England fetches the prize for the highest ratio of LGBT people amongst its population in the UK, sitting at about 15%. In this sense, the home-making stories to which I will refer, of a white, lesbian single mother in her early 40s from a working-class background and a white lesbian/dyke couple in their 30s (from middle-/working-class backgrounds), are already engendered in the sense that Brighton (to them) represented in part a kind of ‘home-coming’ in itself. Helen and Ben, a lesbian butch-femme couple (‘when it takes our fancy’, Helen), had recently bought a terraced 1930s three-bedroom house with a sizeable garden in a soon to be up and coming residential area of Brighton. The neighbours are a mix of elderly, long-standing residents and ‘hetero’ families, or ‘breeders’, as Ben sometimes referred to them. Although they had lived together before, the new house constituted their first purchase together. This was significant especially for Helen, as it made their lives more ‘equal’ in terms of what goes where and the input on the overall interior decoration. Ben had shifted from London to Brighton a few years previously for a ‘quieter life’, but wished to remain connected to a queer community. Helen had made the move to Brighton from Germany – to study and enjoy the queer feel, and never left. Both full-time professionals, Helen worked in the publishing industry and Ben as a social worker. Already considering Brighton their ‘home’ town, the house purchase itself constituted another home-making challenge: as a lesbian/dyke couple on equal footing they were prepared to accept to live in a pre-dominantly straight neighbourhood, as it afforded them more space for money compared to the more visibly gay male living areas in the centre of town. The relative invisibility of queer women (and their neighbourhoods) compared to queer men in Brighton may, as it does elsewhere, be connected to issues of safety (Elwood) as well as the comparative lack of financial capacity (Bell and Valentine). Walking up to this house on the first night of my stay with them, I am struck by just how inconspicuous it appears – one of many in a long street, up a steep hill: ‘Most housing in contemporary western societies is “designed, built, financed and intended for nuclear families”’ (Bell in Bell and Valentine 7). I cannot help but think – more as a reflection on myself than of what I am about to experience – is this it? Is this the ‘domesticated lesbian’? What I see appears ‘familiar’, ‘tamed’, re-tracing the straight lines of heterosexual culture. Helen opens the door and orders me directly into the kitchen. She says ‘Ben is in the living room, watching television… Ben takes great pleasure in watching “You’ve been Framed”’. (Fieldnotes) In this context, it is appropriate to focus on the television and its place within their home-making strategies. Television, in its historical and symbolic significance, could be deemed the technological co-terminus to the ideal nuclear family home. Lynn Spigel has shown through her examination of the cultural history of TV’s formative years in post World War America how television became central to providing representations of family life, but also how the technology itself, as an object, informed material and symbolic transformations within the domestic sphere and beyond. Over the past fifty years as Morley points out, the TV has moved from its fixed place in the living room to become more personalised and encroach on other spaces in house and home and has now, in fact, re-entered the public realm (see airports and shopping malls) where it originated. At present, ‘the home itself can seen as having become … the “last vehicle”, where comfort, safety and stability can happily coexist with the possibility of instantaneous digitalised “flight” to elsewhere – and the instantaneous importation of desired elements of the “elsewhere” into the home’ (Morley, “Media, Modernity” 200). Importantly, as Morley confirms, today’s high-tech discourse is often still framed by a nostalgic vision of ‘family values’. There was only one TV set in Helen and Ben’s house: a black plastic cube with a 16” screen. It was decidedly ‘unglamorous’ as Helen pointed out. During the first round of ‘home-making’ efforts, it had found its way into a corner in the front room, with the sofa and armchair arranged in viewing distance. It was a very ‘traditional’ living room set-up. During my weeklong stay and for some weeks after, it was mostly Ben on her own ‘watching the telly’ in the early evenings ‘vegging out’ after work. Helen, meanwhile, was in the kitchen with the radio on or a CD playing, or in her ‘ICT free’ bedroom, reading. Then, suddenly, the TV had disappeared. During one of our ‘long conversations’ (Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley, “Listening”, 204) it transpired that it was now housed for most of the time on the top shelf of a storage cupboard and only ‘allowed out’ ever so often. As a material object, it had easily found its place as a small, but nevertheless quite central feature in the living room. Imbued with the cultural memory of their parents’ and that of many other living rooms, it was ‘tempting’ and easy for them to ‘accept’ it as part of a setting up home as a couple. Ben explained that they both fell into a habit, an everyday routine, to sit around it. However, settling into their new home with too much ‘ease’, they began to question their techno-practice around the TV. For Helen in particular, the aesthetics of the TV set did not fit in with her plans to re-decorate the house loosely in art deco style, tethered to her femme identity. They did not envisage creating a home that would potentially signal that a family with 2.4 children lives here. ‘The “normality” of [working] 9-5’ (Ben), was sufficient. Establishing a perceived visual difference in their living room, partly by removing the TV set, Helen and Ben aimed to ‘draw a line’ around their home and private sphere vis a vis the rest of the street and, metaphorically speaking, the straight world. The boundaries between the public and private are nevertheless porous, as it is exactly that the public perceptions of a mostly private, domesticated media technology prevent Helen and Ben from feeling entirely comfortable in its presence. It was not only the TV set’s symbolic function as a material object that made them restrict and consciously control the presence of the TV in their home space. One of Helen and Ben’s concerns in this context was that TV, as a broadcast medium, is utterly ‘conservative’ in its content and as such, very much ‘straight speaking’. To paraphrase Helen – you can only read so much between the lines and shout at the telly, it can get tiring. ‘I like watching nature programmes, but they somehow manage even here to make it sound like a hetero narrative’. Ben: ‘yeah – mind the lesbian swans’. The employment of the VCR and renting movies helps them to partly re-dress this perceived imbalance. At the same time, TV’s ‘water-cooler’ effect helps them to stay in tune with what is going on around them and enables them, for example, to participate and intervene in conversations at work. In this sense, watching TV can turn into home-work, which affords a kind of entry ticket to shared life-worlds outside the home and as such can be controlled, but not necessarily abandoned altogether. TV as a ‘straightening device’ may afford the (dis)comfort of a sense of participation in mainstream discourses and the (dis)comfort of serving as a reminder of difference at the same time. ‘It just sits there … apart from Sundays’ – and when the girls come round… Single-parent households are on the rise in the US (Russo Lemor) as well as in the UK. However, the attention given to single-parent families so far focuses pre-dominantly on single mothers and fathers after separation or divorce from a heterosexual marriage (Russo Lemor; Silverstone, “Beneath the Bottom Line”). As (queer) sociologists have began to map the field of ‘families of choice and other life experiments’ (Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan), a more concerted effort to bring together the literatures and to shed more light on the queer techno-practices of alternative families seems necessary. Liz and her young son Tim had moved to Brighton from London. As a lesbian working single mother, she raises Tim pre-dominantly on her own: ‘we are a small family, and that’s fine’. Liz’s home-making narrative is very much driven by her awareness of what she sees as her responsibilities as a mother, a lesbian mother. The move to Brighton was assessed by being able to keep her clients in London (she worked as a self-employed communication and PR person for various London councils) – ‘this is what feeds us’, and the fact that she did not want Tim to go to a ‘badly performing’ school in London. The terraced three-bedroom house she found was in a residential area, not too far from the station and in need of updating and re-decorating. The result of the combined efforts of builders, her dad (‘for some of the DIY’) and herself produced a ‘conventional’ set-up with a living room, a kitchen-diner, a small home-office (for tele-working) and Tim’s and her bedroom. Inconspicuous in its appearance, it was clearly child-oriented with a ‘real jelly bean arch’ in the hallway. The living room is relatively bare, with a big sofa, table and chairs, ‘an ancient stereo-system’ and a ‘battered TV and Video-recorder’ in the corner. ‘We hardly use it’, Liz exclaims. ‘We much rather spend time out and about if there is a chance … quality time, rather than watching TV … or I read him stories in bed. I hate the idea of TV as a baby sitter … I have very deliberately chosen to have Tim and I want to make the most of it’. For Liz, the living room with the TV set in it appears as a kind of gesture to what family homes ‘look like’. As such, the TV and furniture set-up function as a signal and symbol of ‘normality’ in a queer household – perhaps a form of ‘passing’ for visitors and guests. The concern for the welfare of her son in this context is a sign and reflection of a constant negotiation process within a pre-dominantly heterosexual system of cultural symbols and values, which he, of course, is already able to ‘compare’ and evaluate when he is out and about at school or visiting friends in their homes. Unlike in Helen and Ben’s home, the TV is therefore allowed to stay out of the closet. Still, Liz rarely watches TV at all, for reasons not dissimilar to those of Helen and Ben. Apart from this, she shares a lack of spare time with many other single parents. Significantly, the living room and TV do receive a queer ‘make-over’ now and then, when Tim is in bed or with his father on a weekend and ‘the girls’ come over for a drink, chat and video viewing (noticeably, the living room furniture and TV get pushed around and re-arranged to accommodate the crowd). In this sense, Liz, in her home-making practices, carefully manages and performs ‘object relationships’ that allow her and her son to ‘fit in’ as much as to advocate ‘difference’ within the construction of ‘normalcy’. The pressures of this negotiation process are clearly visible. Conclusion – Re-Engendering Home and Techno-Practices As women as much as lesbians, Helen, Ben and Liz are, like so many others, part of a historical and much wider struggle regarding visibility, equality and justice. If this article had been dedicated to gay/queer men and their techno- and home-making sensibilities, it would have read somewhat differently to be sure. Of course, questions of gender and sexual identities would have remained equally paramount, as they always should, enfolding questions of class, race and ethnicity (Pink 2004). The concept and practice of home have a deeply engendered history. Queer practices ‘at home’ are always already tied up with knowledges of gendered practices and spaces. As Morley has observed, ‘space is gendered on a variety of scales … the local is often associated with femininity and seen as the natural basis of home and community, into which an implicitly masculine realm intrudes’ (“Home Territories” 59). As the public and private realms have been gendered masculine and feminine respectively, so have media and ICTs. Although traditional ideas of home and gender relations are beginning to break down and the increasing personalization and mobilization of ICTs blur perceptions of the public and private, certain (idealized, heterosexualized and gendered) images of home, domesticity and family life seem to be recurring in popular discourse as well as mainstream academic writing. As feminist theorists have illustrated the ways in which gender needs to be seen as performative, feminist and queer theorists also ought to work further on finding vocabularies and discourses that capture and highlight diversity, without re-invoking the spectre of the nuclear family (home) itself (Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan). What I found was not the ‘domesticated’ lesbian ‘at home’ in a traditional feminine sphere. Rather, I experienced a complex set of re-negotiations and re-inscriptions of the domestic, of gender and sexual values and identities as well as techno-practices, leaving a trace, a mark on the system no matter how small (Helen: ‘I do wonder what the neighbours make of us’). The pressure and indeed desire to ‘fit in’ is often enormous and therefore affords the re-tracing of certain trodden paths of domesticity and ICT consumption. 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Citation reference for this article MLA Style Karl, Irmi. "Domesticating the Lesbian?: Queer Strategies and Technologies of Home-Making." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/06-karl.php>. APA Style Karl, I. (Aug. 2007) "Domesticating the Lesbian?: Queer Strategies and Technologies of Home-Making," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/06-karl.php>.