Academic literature on the topic 'Master and commander, the far side of the world'

This paper is written to give some account of the part played by secret agents against foreign states. Only in the most incidental way will it mention secret agents who tried to detect internal dissent and conspiracy. Plato thought that all Greek states were in a permanent state of war, declared or undeclared. Even in modern times no two independent states have totally identical interests, and when negotiating about clashes of interests, in peacetime just as in war, any government will seek a position in which it can keep its own secrets and discern those of the opposing side. We know very little of Greek spying in time of peace. When diplomacy failed, Greek states could have recourse to war to attain their objectives. War requires some strategic plan of intended operations. In modern conditions many experts must have a hand in devising the plan, and it must be prepared well in advance. In the ancient world things were simpler. One wonders how many Carthaginians knew, or had to know, that Hannibal intended to march round the Mediterranean and attack Italy. Certainly he took the Romans by surprise. The execution of the plan is best entrusted so far as possible to a single commander, even in modern times. We know next to nothing about how military policy was determined in peacetime, but we have a little more information about conditions in times of war.

AbstractThe conventional view is that Malta has been on the ‘forgotten frontier’ of Christian maritime resistance to Islamic expansionism since the Islamic invasions of North Africa in the seventh century. The limited archival and archeological evidence suggests that, up to the arrival of the Order of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem in Malta in 1530, this picture is not accurate. The Islamic occupation of the Maltese archipelago in 870 created a cosmopolitan Muslim society which persisted until the mid-thirteenth century, despite the Norman conquest of the region in 1090. Indeed, the formal end of Muslim society in Malta only came in 1224, as a side-result of the Hohenstauffen suppression of a Muslim rebellion in Sicily.Even under the Order of St John contacts with the Muslim world were far closer than is conventionally supposed. The Grand Master of the Order maintained close contacts with the Qaramanlis in Tripoli and the Beys of Tunis during the eighteenth century, despite the continuation of the corso. In reality, contacts had always existed and had been recognised as essential by the Holy See because Malta could not sustain its population once it had exceeded 10,000 persons. Sicily, the obvious source of supply, often exerted undesirable political pressure and the Barbary coast was the only other alternative. The main legacy of the close contacts between Malta and the North African Muslim world, however, is to be found, even today, in the Maltese language, which is really a Medieval variant of North African Arabic.

On Grundtvig's View of ManBy William MichelsenIn this paper, read to the Annual Conference of the Grundtvig Society in January 1988, an answer is offered to the question: Did Grundtvig’s view of man remain unchanged from 1817 to his death? The answer is in the affirmative. The line of argument of the paper issues from Grundtvig’s essay “On Man in the World”, printed in the magazine “Danne-Virke” II, 1817, abstracting from it nine tenets, about which Grundtvig’s view remained the same, even after 1832, when he changed his attitude to the prevailing philosophy and theory of knowledge of the age, as far as he drew a distinction between faith and knowledge. As early as 1817 man is viewed both from a Christian and a non-Christian point of view. By virtue of his sensory organs man stands in a direct relationship with animals, and his historical development is a continuation of his separation from the animal kingdom. Nonetheless, man is created in God’s image, which means, that he is intended to develop towards increasing likeness with his Maker. And the archetypal likeness to God remains in man in spite of the Fall, which is confirmed both by the life of the individual and by history. As God is Truth, the Fall means a deviation from Truth provoked by Untruth, through which man is undone. Truth and Untruth are seen as spiritual verities to be found behind the physical reality of immediate perception and consequently behind life and death.What does Grundtvig mean by the word “spirit”? The essay offers two different answers to the question that are not in disagreement. In one place he says that the spirit consists of “mixed ideas perceived by the senses, but with a spiritual character,” that is they are exclusively manifest in the form of images. Elsewhere he holds that the Spirit is a living, forceful and active idea, which is solely perceived by consciousness, and consciousness is a product of man’s external and internal senses: feeling, vision and hearing. With the external senses we perceive the physical world and the physical part of ourselves. With the internal senses we become aware of the spiritual side to ourselves, our fellow-men and the world, in which we live.That man and the world were created, is to Grundtvig no matter of belief, but quite simply a question of recognition of reality: No man did create himself and even less the world in which we live. This epistemological realism is Grundtvig’s main proposition, which became clear to him in 1813 (as evidenced by the lecture ms. “On the Human Condition”). - Conversely the Fall presupposes the belief that man was created to become like God, and is consequently not his own master but under his Maker. That man should be able to work his own salvation when he has deviated from his divine purpose, is to Grundtvig quite plainly an impossibility.The only way in which man may be saved from complete annihilation is to Grundtvig by faith in the only human being who did not stray from his destiny to become like God. To choose this faith is to choose Truth rather than Untruth as one’s ideal, in one’s actions as well as in one’s external and internal perception of the world and oneself. But the heart of the matter is that man sees himself as an imperfect image of his Maker, a creature still far from having been fully developed.According to Grundtvig this view of man is only to be attained and developed through historical scholarship. There is no short-cut to this goal as for instance by way of a mystical experience, or what his contemporaries called a pure vision of Nature or an intellectual vision, even though this may be experienced in a fleeting moment. In this case one is deluded by illusions (“brilliant shades”). To make reason a starting-point for a view of man is also an error, since both the historical development and the development of the individual begin with feeling and ideation or imagination. The road to knowledge and understanding of man must, according to Grundtvig, be entirely different from the one followed sofar. It is understandable that Grundtvig holding such views was debarred from a university post, as they differed so much from contemporary thought. The definitive formulation of his view of man is, indeed, not to be found in the Danne-Virke of 1817, but in his introduction to “Mythology of the North” from 1832 where it is presented as the opposite of what his own day and posterity imagined a Christian view of man to be: “a divine experiment” with the aim of demonstrating how it was feasible for spirit and flesh to interpenetrate, in the process being clarified in a mutual consciousness, which Grundtvig called “divine”, because it is the superhuman Maker who intends to make an image of himself, but that “will require a thousand generations yet. ” According to Grundtvig, the main error of the view of man was that it made our descendants true copies of ourselves, consequently bringing evolution to a standstill.

Fra tugtemester til skolemester: Om forskelle mellem Luther og Grundtvig[From Castigator to Schoolmaster: On Differences between Luther and Grundtvig]By Ove KorsgaardIs Grundtvig’s thinking to be perceived as a genuine appropriation and continuation of Luther’s? Or is it rather to be perceived as a renegotiation of Luther’s thought? Regin Prenter, Christian Thodberg and Svend Bjerg maintain three different positions on the question of the relationship between Luther’s and Grundtvig’s theological thinking. With Prenter, a tight connection is tied. With Thodberg it is “both...and”. With Bjerg there is a marked distance between Luther’s and Grundtvig’s theology. In this article a more conceptual-historical viewpoint is adopted which demonstrates that they used the concepts “nation” and “folk” with differing significations.Luther does not use the word “nation” in its modem signification. According to Liah Greenfield: “he did not take the step that connected the separation from Rome to the definition of the polity as a people.The ‘German nation’, for Luther, had none but the conciliar meaning of the princes and nobility of the Empire, and in this sense he used it in An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation.” Grundtvig on the other hand used the word “nation” in its modem signification, that is to say, he made an inseparable connection between the concepts “nation” and “folk”. And he is surely the person who, in Denmark, has exercised the greatest influence in linking these two concepts.Before “nation” and “folk” became synonymous concepts, the word “folk” signified kinship and household. The societal whole was comprised, so to speak, of a certain number of households. Each household had as its supreme authority a householder who exercised English Summaries / danske resuméer power over his “folk”. The master tailor exercised power over the journeymen and apprentices who, together with children and other family members, belonged in the household. The combined households of a land were subordinate to a father of the land and belonged in his house, for example the Oldenburg House, the Habsburg House and so on. The supreme lord was the Lord God and all the houses within a society belonged in the final instance to his house. Individual freedom was no part of Luther’s political programme.His guardianship-society {formyndersamfund) was built not upon individual, responsible members of society but upon a fellowship between superiors and subordinates. The household constituted that social space within which a connection was forged between the individual and the Christian state. That Luther espoused political guardianship {formynderskab) as the best principle of governance is not remarkable. Everyone, more or less, did so at that time. The epochmaking and revolutionary thing about Luther was that he dispensed with the pope as religious guardian.But the sharp distinction which Luther drew between spiritual and secular governance is not, as is often alleged today, a distinction between State and Church but only between the State and “the Church Invisible”. In a continuation of Augustine, Luther in fact distinguished between two Churches, the invisible and the visible. The Church has both an outward, institutional and predominantly worldly side and an inward, invisible and predominantly spiritual side. As an incorporate member of the State one is obligated to be a member of the visible Church, that is to say the Church as an institution. Membership of the visible Church, however, grants no certainty of salvation. The visible Church cannot dispose over the relationship between the individual and God. Therefore membership of the visible Church is not enough to secure salvation. Faith is necessary. And faith is a personal and existential matter. With the doctrine of public polity, there is thus created a spiritual free-space. The formation of the individual’s morality and character, on the other hand, was placed under the aegis of secular government.Grundtvig grew up in a society whose world view was characterized by Luther’s thinking on calling and station. Lutherdom encompassed not only the obvious foundation in faith with respect to the Church but also the foundation in morality with respect to the State. However, Grundtvig himself was engaged in reassessing this foundation. After 1825 he began to distinguish himself with quite Luther-critical viewpoints, which is connected with the fact that he himself became one of the leading contemporary spokesmen for the new viewpoint that it was not the dispensations of Lutheranism but the dispensations of the folk which should comprise the moral foundation of State and school.The shift from Lutherdom to ‘folkdom’ meant that after 1825 Grundtvig again and again pointed to errors in Luther and his disciples. Thus he tackled three central dogmas in Lutherdom. The first was fundamentalism in respect of Scripture. The second was fundamentalism in respect of sin. The third was Lutherdom’s fundamentalism in respect of the State. For Grundtvig, the alliance which Constantine the Great established in 325 between State and Church was nothing less than a great lapse into sin in the history of the Church. And this lapse Luther had not tackled. The process of transformation from Christian principality to democratic nation-state demanded a clarification of the relationship between religion, State and polity. What form of connection should there be established between individual, State and religion in a democracy? Should Christianity, which was deeply integrated in the state-structure of the absolute monarchy, continue to comprise the foundation for the State’s educational polity? Grundtvig drew a clear boundary between citizenship and religion and, according to the ecclesiastical-political premises of his day, advocated religious freedom, freedom to preach, and dissolution of parochial ties. In simplified terms one can say that Luther’s horizon was a world divided into religions, and these were subdivided into nations, while Grundtvig’s horizon was a world divided into nations, and these could be subdivided into various religious societies.A conceptual-historical viewpoint reveals that Luther and Grundtvig not only used the concepts “nation” and “folk” with differing significations: theologically, they also thought differently upon crucial points. These differences can be put into perspective by looking at Luther’s categories “law and gospel”, “householder and household” and “parents and children” set off against Grundtvig’s use of “the knot” as metaphor.According to Grundtvig, Luther did not go far enough in his understanding of the relationship between law and gospel. He did not manage to untie the “tight knot” [Haardeknuden]. Instead of, like Luther, regarding the law as castigator, Grundtvig spoke of “Moses as ‘schoolmaster’ for the whole world, who guides those desiring it to Jesus”. This shift in the view of the law - from castigator to schoolmaster - is a key to understanding Grundtvig’s thought.Grundtvig regarded the law as an “enlightenment of which one freely makes use according as one can and will”. Understood in Grundtvig’s English Summaries / danske resuméer terms, the law thus becomes a medium for folk-enlightenment. In other words, it is possible to untie the knot between the law and the gospel.The opening of the Gospel of John - In the beginning was the Logos - forms the basis of the whole of Grundtvig’s programme of enlightenment and exposition. Grundtvig distinguishes, however, between logos and dia-logos. Humankind does not have direct access to the logos of the great word, but must make do with the little word, the verity of which must be proved through dia-logos, that is, dialogue.For Grundtvig, “enlightenment” [Oplysning] is not an absolute, but a relative concept. The world cannot be overseen from a panoptic viewpoint, but necessarily has to be viewed with various eyes. The truth always emerges from out of the interplay between truths. Using a modem concept, one may say that for Gmndtvig enlightenment is a discursive concept, a concept open to argument. No one can boast of being in possession of the absolute tmth. We understand fragmentarily and in part. And such a process of understanding demands, according to Grundtvig, faith.[Editorial note: Danish tugtemester, as used in this context to refer to the Law, is not readily translatable into English. A tugtemester is one who enforces discipline by chastisement and castigation, whether a gaoler, a slavemaster, a disciplinarian pedagogue addicted to flogging or a rigorous moral tutor.]

The general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. — Sun TzuWorld War II saw a proliferation of maps. From command posts to the pages of National Geographic to the pages of daily newspapers, they were everywhere (Schulten). The era also saw substantive developments in cartography, especially with respect to the topographical maps that feature in our selected films. This essay offers a preliminary examination of the battle-map as depicted in two films about the Second World War: Franklin J. Shaffner’s biopic Patton (1970) and Jack Smight’s epic Midway (1976). In these films, maps, charts, or tableaux (the three-dimensional models upon which are plotted the movements of battalions, fleets, and so on) emerge as an expression of both martial and cinematic strategy. As a rear-view representation of the relative movements of personnel and materiel in particular battle arenas, the map and its accessories (pins, tape, markers, and so forth) trace the broad military dispositions of Patton’s 2nd Corp (Africa), Seventh Army (Italy) and Third Army (Western Europe) and the relative position of American and Japanese fleets in the Pacific. In both Patton and Midway, the map also emerges as a simple mode of narrative plotting: as the various encounters in the two texts play out, the battle-map more or less contemporaneously traces the progress of forces. It also serves as a foreshadowing device, not just narratively, but cinematically: that which is plotted in advance comes to pass (even if as preliminary movements before catastrophe), but the audience is also cued for the cinematic chaos and disjuncture that almost inevitably ensues in the battle scenes proper.On one hand, then, this essay proposes that at the fundamental level of fabula (seen through either the lens of historical hindsight or through the eyes of the novice who knows nothing of World War II), the annotated map is engaged both strategically and cinematically: as a stage upon which commanders attempt to act out (either in anticipation, or retrospectively) the intricate, but grotesque, ballet of warfare — and as a reflection of the broad, sequential, sweeps of conflict. While, in War and Cinema, Paul Virilio offers the phrase ‘the logistics of perception’ (1), in this this essay we, on the other hand, consider that, for those in command, the battle-map is a representation of the perception of logistics: the big picture of war finds rough indexical representation on a map, but (as Clausewitz tells us) chance, the creative agency of individual commanders, and the fog of battle make it far less probable (than is the case in more specific mappings, such as, say, the wedding rehearsal) that what is planned will play out with any degree of close correspondence (On War 19, 21, 77-81). Such mapping is, of course, further problematised by the processes of abstraction themselves: indexicality is necessarily a reduction; a de-realisation or déterritorialisation. ‘For the military commander,’ writes Virilio, ‘every dimension is unstable and presents itself in isolation from its original context’ (War and Cinema 32). Yet rehearsal (on maps, charts, or tableaux) is a keying activity that seeks to presage particular real world patterns (Goffman 45). As suggested above, far from being a rhizomatic activity, the heavily plotted (as opposed to thematic) business of mapping is always out of joint: either a practice of imperfect anticipation or an equally imperfect (pared back and behind-the-times) rendition of activity in the field. As is argued by Tolstoj in War and Peace, the map then presents to the responder a series of tensions and ironies often lost on the masters of conflict themselves. War, as Tostoj proposes, is a stochastic phenomenon while the map is a relatively static, and naive, attempt to impose order upon it. Tolstoj, then, pillories Phull (in the novel, Pfuhl), the aptly-named Prussian general whose lock-stepped obedience to the science of war (of which the map is part) results in the abject humiliation of 1806:Pfuhl was one of those theoreticians who are so fond of their theory that they lose sight of the object of that theory - its application in practice. (Vol. 2, Part 1, Ch. 10, 53)In both Patton and Midway, then, the map unfolds not only as an epistemological tool (read, ‘battle plan’) or reflection (read, the near contemporaneous plotting of real world affray) of the war narrative, but as a device of foreshadowing and as an allegory of command and its profound limitations. So, in Deleuzian terms, while emerging as an image of both time and perception, for commanders and filmgoers alike, the map is also something of a seduction: a ‘crystal-image’ situated in the interstices between the virtual and the actual (Deleuze 95). To put it another way, in our films the map emerges as an isomorphism: a studied plotting in which inheres a counter-text (Goffman 26). As a simple device of narrative, and in the conventional terms of latitude and longitude, in both Patton and Midway, the map, chart, or tableau facilitate the plotting of the resources of war in relation to relief (including island land masses), roads, railways, settlements, rivers, and seas. On this syntagmatic plane, in Greimasian terms, the map is likewise received as a canonical sign of command: where there are maps, there are, after all, commanders (Culler 13). On the other hand, as suggested above, the battle-map (hereafter, we use the term to signify the conventional paper map, the maritime chart, or tableau) materialises as a sanitised image of the unknown and the grotesque: as apodictic object that reduces complexity and that incidentally banishes horror and affect. Thus, the map evolves, in the viewer’s perception, as an ironic sign of all that may not be commanded. This is because, as an emblem of the rational order, in Patton and Midway the map belies the ubiquity of battle’s friction: that defined by Clausewitz as ‘the only concept which...distinguishes real war from war on paper’ (73). ‘Friction’ writes Clausewitz, ‘makes that which appears easy in War difficult in reality’ (81).Our work here cannot ignore or side-step the work of others in identifying the core cycles, characteristics of the war film genre. Jeanine Basinger, for instance, offers nothing less than an annotated checklist of sixteen key characteristics for the World War II combat film. Beyond this taxonomy, though, Basinger identifies the crucial role this sub-type of film plays in the corpus of war cinema more broadly. The World War II combat film’s ‘position in the evolutionary process is established, as well as its overall relationship to history and reality. It demonstrates how a primary set of concepts solidifies into a story – and how they can be interpreted for a changing ideology’ (78). Stuart Bender builds on Basinger’s taxonomy and discussion of narrative tropes with a substantial quantitative analysis of the very building blocks of battle sequences. This is due to Bender’s contention that ‘when a critic’s focus [is] on the narrative or ideological components of a combat film [this may] lead them to make assumptions about the style which are untenable’ (8). We seek with this research to add to a rich and detailed body of knowledge by redressing a surprising omission therein: a conscious and focussed analysis of the use of battle-maps in war cinema. In Patton and in Midway — as in War and Peace — the map emerges as an emblem of an intergeneric dialogue: as a simple storytelling device and as a paradigmatic engine of understanding. To put it another way, as viewer-responders with a synoptic perspective we perceive what might be considered a ‘double exposure’: in the map we see what is obviously before us (the collision of represented forces), but an Archimedean positioning facilitates the production of far more revelatory textual isotopies along what Roman Jakobson calls the ‘axis of combination’ (Linguistics and Poetics 358). Here, otherwise unconnected signs (in our case various manifestations and configurations of the battle-map) are brought together in relation to particular settings, situations, and figures. Through this palimpsest of perspective, a crucial binary emerges: via the battle-map we see ‘command’ and the sequence of engagement — and, through Greimasian processes of axiological combination (belonging more to syuzhet than fabula), elucidated for us are the wrenching ironies of warfare (Culler 228). Thus, through the profound and bound motif of the map (Tomashevsky 69), are we empowered to pass judgement on the map bearers who, in both films, present as the larger-than-life heroes of old. Figure 1.While we have scope only to deal with the African theatre, Patton opens with a dramatic wide-shot of the American flag: a ‘map’, if you will, of a national history forged in war (Fig. 1). Against this potent sign of American hegemony, as he slowly climbs up to the stage before it, the general appears a diminutive figure -- until, via a series of matched cuts that culminate in extreme close-ups, he manifests as a giant about to play his part in a great American story (Fig. 2).Figure 2.Some nineteen minutes into a film, having surveyed the carnage of Kasserine Pass (in which, in February 1943, the Germans inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Americans) General Omar Bradley is reunited with his old friend and newly-nominated three-star general, George S. Patton Jr.. Against a backdrop of an indistinct topographical map (that nonetheless appears to show the front line) and the American flag that together denote the men’s authority, the two discuss the Kasserine catastrophe. Bradley’s response to Patton’s question ‘What happened at Kasserine?’ clearly illustrates the tension between strategy and real-world engagement. While the battle-plan was solid, the Americans were outgunned, their tanks were outclassed, and (most importantly) their troops were out-disciplined. Patton’s concludes that Rommel can only be beaten if the American soldiers are fearless and fight as a cohesive unit. Now that he is in command of the American 2nd Corp, the tide of American martial fortune is about to turn.The next time Patton appears in relation to the map is around half an hour into the two-and-three-quarter-hour feature. Here, in the American HQ, the map once more appears as a simple, canonical sign of command. Somewhat carelessly, the map of Europe seems to show post-1945 national divisions and so is ostensibly offered as a straightforward prop. In terms of martial specifics, screenplay writer Francis Ford Coppola apparently did not envisage much close scrutiny of the film’s maps. Highlighted, instead, are the tensions between strategy as a general principle and action on the ground. As British General Sir Arthur Coningham waxes lyrical about allied air supremacy, a German bomber drops its payload on the HQ, causing the map of Europe to (emblematically) collapse forward into the room. Following a few passes by the attacking aircraft, the film then cuts to a one second medium shot as a hail of bullets from a Heinkel He 111 strike a North African battle map (Fig. 3). Still prone, Patton remarks: ‘You were discussing air supremacy, Sir Arthur.’ Dramatising a scene that did take place (although Coningham was not present), Schaffner’s intention is to allow Patton to shoot holes in the British strategy (of which he is contemptuous) but a broader objective is the director’s exposé of the more general disjuncture between strategy and action. As the film progresses, and the battle-map’s allegorical significance is increasingly foregrounded, this critique becomes definitively sharper.Figure 3.Immediately following a scene in which an introspective Patton walks through a cemetery in which are interred the remains of those killed at Kasserine, to further the critique of Allied strategy the camera cuts to Berlin’s high command and a high-tech ensemble of tableaux, projected maps, and walls featuring lights, counters, and clocks. Tasked to research the newly appointed Patton, Captain Steiger walks through the bunker HQ with Hitler’s Chief of Staff, General Jodl, to meet with Rommel — who, suffering nasal diphtheria, is away from the African theatre. In a memorable exchange, Steiger reveals that Patton permanently attacks and never retreats. Rommel, who, following his easy victory at Kasserine, is on the verge of total tactical victory, in turn declares that he will ‘attack and annihilate’ Patton — before the poet-warrior does the same to him. As Clausewitz has argued, and as Schaffner is at pains to point out, it seems that, in part, the outcome of warfare has more to do with the individual consciousness of competing warriors than it does with even the most exquisite of battle-plans.Figure 4.So, even this early in the film’s runtime, as viewer-responders we start to reassess various manifestations of the battle-map. To put it as Michelle Langford does in her assessment of Schroeter’s cinema, ‘fragments of the familiar world [in our case, battle-maps] … become radically unfamiliar’ (Allegorical Images 57). Among the revelations is that from the flag (in the context of close battle, all sense of ‘the national’ dissolves), to the wall map, to the most detailed of tableau, the battle-plan is enveloped in the fog of war: thus, the extended deeply-focussed scenes of the Battle of El Guettar take us from strategic overview (Patton’s field glass perspectives over what will soon become a Valley of Death) to what Boris Eichenbaum has called ‘Stendhalian’ scale (The Young Tolstoi 105) in which, (in Patton) through more closely situated perspectives, we almost palpably experience the Germans’ disarray under heavy fire. As the camera pivots between the general and the particular (and between the omniscient and the nescient) the cinematographer highlights the tension between the strategic and the actual. Inasmuch as it works out (and, as Schaffner shows us, it never works out completely as planned) this is the outcome of modern martial strategy: chaos and unimaginable carnage on the ground that no cartographic representation might capture. As Patton observes the destruction unfold in the valley below and before him, he declares: ‘Hell of a waste of fine infantry.’ Figure 5.An important inclusion, then, is that following the protracted El Guettar battle scenes, Schaffner has the (symbolically flag-draped) casket of Patton’s aide, Captain Richard N. “Dick” Jenson, wheeled away on a horse-drawn cart — with the lonely figure of the mourning general marching behind, his ironic interior monologue audible to the audience: ‘I can't see the reason such fine young men get killed. There are so many battles yet to fight.’ Finally, in terms of this brief and partial assessment of the battle-map in Patton, less than an hour in, we may observe that the map is emerging as something far more than a casual prop; as something more than a plotting of battlelines; as something more than an emblem of command. Along a new and unexpected axis of semantic combination, it is now manifesting as a sign of that which cannot be represented nor commanded.Midway presents the lead-up to the eponymous naval battle of 1942. Smight’s work is of interest primarily because the battle itself plays a relatively small role in the film; what is most important is the prolonged strategising that comprises most of the film’s run time. In Midway, battle-tables and fleet markers become key players in the cinematic action, second almost to the commanders themselves. Two key sequences are discussed here: the moment in which Yamamoto outlines his strategy for the attack on Midway (by way of a decoy attack on the Aleutian Islands), and the scene some moments later where Admiral Nimitz and his assembled fleet commanders (Spruance, Blake, and company) survey their own plan to defend the atoll. In Midway, as is represented by the notion of a fleet-in-being, the oceanic battlefield is presented as a speculative plane on which commanders can test ideas. Here, a fleet in a certain position projects a radius of influence that will deter an enemy fleet from attacking: i.e. ‘a fleet which is able and willing to attack an enemy proposing a descent upon territory which that force has it in charge to protect’ (Colomb viii). The fleet-in-being, it is worth noting, is one that never leaves port and, while it is certainly true that the latter half of Midway is concerned with the execution of strategy, the first half is a prolonged cinematic game of chess, with neither player wanting to move lest the other has thought three moves ahead. Virilio opines that the fleet-in-being is ‘a new idea of violence that no longer comes from direct confrontation and bloodshed, but rather from the unequal properties of bodies, evaluation of the number of movements allowed them in a chosen element, permanent verification of their dynamic efficiency’ (Speed and Politics 62). Here, as in Patton, we begin to read the map as a sign of the subjective as well as the objective. This ‘game of chess’ (or, if you prefer, ‘Battleships’) is presented cinematically through the interaction of command teams with their battle-tables and fleet markers. To be sure, this is to show strategy being developed — but it is also to prepare viewers for the defamiliarised representation of the battle itself.The first sequence opens with a close-up of Admiral Yamamoto declaring: ‘This is how I expect the battle to develop.’ The plan to decoy the Americans with an attack on the Aleutians is shown via close-ups of the conveniently-labelled ‘Northern Force’ (Fig. 6). It is then explained that, twenty-four hours later, a second force will break off and strike south, on the Midway atoll. There is a cut from closeups of the pointer on the map to the wider shot of the Japanese commanders around their battle table (Fig. 7). Interestingly, apart from the opening of the film in the Japanese garden, and the later parts of the film in the operations room, the Japanese commanders are only ever shown in this battle-table area. This canonically positions the Japanese as pure strategists, little concerned with the enmeshing of war with political or social considerations. The sequence ends with Commander Yasimasa showing a photograph of Vice Admiral Halsey, who the Japanese mistakenly believe will be leading the carrier fleet. Despite some bickering among the commanders earlier in the film, this sequence shows the absolute confidence of the Japanese strategists in their plan. The shots are suitably languorous — averaging three to four seconds between cuts — and the body language of the commanders shows a calm determination. The battle-map here is presented as an index of perfect command and inevitable victory: each part of the plan is presented with narration suggesting the Japanese expect to encounter little resistance. While Yasimasa and his clique are confident, the other commanders suggest a reconnaissance flight over Pearl Harbor to ascertain the position of the American fleet; the fear of fleet-in-being is shown here firsthand and on the map, where the reconnaissance planes are placed alongside the ship markers. The battle-map is never shown in full: only sections of the naval landscape are presented. We suggest that this is done in order to prepare the audience for the later stages of the film: as in Patton (from time to time) the battle-map here is filmed abstractly, to prime the audience for the abstract montage of the battle itself in the film’s second half.Figure 6.Figure 7.Having established in the intervening running time that Halsey is out of action, his replacement, Rear Admiral Spruance, is introduced to the rest of the command team. As with all the important American command and strategy meetings in the film, this is done in the operations room. A transparent coordinates board is shown in the foreground as Nimitz, Spruance and Rear Admiral Fletcher move through to the battle table. Behind the men, as they lean over the table, is an enormous map of the world (Fig. 8). In this sequence, Nimitz freely admits that while he knows each Japanese battle group’s origin and heading, he is unsure of their target. He asks Spruance for his advice:‘Ray, assuming what you see here isn’t just an elaborate ruse — Washington thinks it is, but assuming they’re wrong — what kind of move do you suggest?’This querying is followed by Spruance glancing to a particular point on the map (Fig. 9), then a cut to a shot of models representing the aircraft carriers Hornet, Enterprise & Yorktown (Fig. 10). This is one of the few model/map shots unaccompanied by dialogue or exposition. In effect, this shot shows Spruance’s thought process before he responds: strategic thought presented via cinematography. Spruance then suggests situating the American carrier group just northeast of Midway, in case the Japanese target is actually the West Coast of the United States. It is, in effect, a hedging of bets. Spruance’s positioning of the carrier group also projects that group’s sphere of influence around Midway atoll and north to essentially cut off Japanese access to the US. The fleet-in-being is presented graphically — on the map — in order to, once again, cue the audience to match the later (edited) images of the battle to these strategic musings.In summary, in Midway, the map is an element of production design that works alongside cinematography, editing, and performance to present the notion of strategic thought to the audience. In addition, and crucially, it functions as an abstraction of strategy that prepares the audience for the cinematic disorientation that will occur through montage as the actual battle rages later in the film. Figure 8.Figure 9.Figure 10.This essay has argued that the battle-map is a simulacrum of the weakest kind: what Baudrillard would call ‘simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model’ (121). Just as cinema itself offers a distorted view of history (the war film, in particular, tends to hagiography), the battle-map is an over-simplification that fails to capture the physical and psychological realities of conflict. We have also argued that in both Patton and Midway, the map is not a ‘free’ motif (Tomashevsky 69). Rather, it is bound: a central thematic device. In the two films, the battle-map emerges as a crucial isomorphic element. On the one hand, it features as a prop to signify command and to relay otherwise complex strategic plottings. At this syntagmatic level, it functions alongside cinematography, editing, and performance to give audiences a glimpse into how military strategy is formed and tested: a traditional ‘reading’ of the map. But on the flip side of what emerges as a classic structuralist binary, is the map as a device of foreshadowing (especially in Midway) and as a depiction of command’s profound limitations. Here, at a paradigmatic level, along a new axis of combination, a new reading of the map in war cinema is proposed: the battle-map is as much a sign of the subjective as it is the objective.ReferencesBasinger, Jeanine. The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre. Middletown, CT: Columbia UP, 1986.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbour: U of Michigan Press, 1994.Bender, Stuart. Film Style and the World War II Combat Genre. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.Clausewitz, Carl. On War. Vol. 1. London: Kegan Paul, 1908.Colomb, Philip Howard. Naval Warfare: Its Ruling Principles and Practice Historically Treated. 3rd ed. London: W.H. Allen & Co, 1899.Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: Continuum, 2005.Eichenbaum, Boris. The Young Tolstoi. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1972.Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1976.Jakobson, Roman. "Linguistics and Poetics." Style in Language. Ed. T. Sebebeok. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1960. 350—77.Langford, Michelle. Allegorical Images: Tableau, Time and Gesture in the Cinema of Werner Schroeter. Bristol: Intellect, 2006.Midway. Jack Smight. Universal Pictures, 1976. Film.Patton. Franklin J. Schaffner. 20th Century Fox, 1970. Film.Schulten, Susan. World War II Led to a Revolution in Cartography. New Republic 21 May 2014. 16 June 2017 <https://newrepublic.com/article/117835/richard-edes-harrison-reinvented-mapmaking-world-war-2-americans>.Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. Vol. 2. London: Folio, 1997.Tomashevsky, Boris. "Thematics." Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Eds. L. Lemon and M. Reis, Lincoln: U. Nebraska Press, 2012. 61—95.Tzu, Sun. The Art of War. San Diego: Canterbury Classics, 2014.Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Paris: Semiotext(e), 2006.Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London: Verso, 1989.

I remember the first time I saw a dead body. I spawned just before dawn; around me engines were clattering into life, the dim silhouettes of tanks beginning to move out in a steady grinding rumble. I could dimly make out a few other people, the anonymity of their shadowy outlines belied by the names hanging over their heads in a comforting blue. Suddenly, a stream of tracers arced across the sky; explosions sounded nearby, then closer still; a tank ahead of me stopped, turned sluggishly, and fired off a couple of rounds, rocking slightly against the recoil. The radio was filled with talk of Germans in the town, but I couldn’t even see the town. I ran toward what looked like the shattered hulk of a building and dived into what I hoped was a doorway. It was already occupied by another Tommy and together we waited for it to get lighter, listening to the rattle of machine guns, the sharp ping as shells ricocheted off steel, the sickening, indescribable, but immediately recognisable sound when they didn’t. Eventually, the other soldier moved out, but I waited for the sun to peek over the nearby hills. Once I was able to see where I was going, I made straight for the command post on the edge of town, and came across a group of allied soldiers standing in a circle. In the centre of the circle lay a dead German soldier, face up. “Well I’ll be damned,” I said aloud; no one else said anything, and the body abruptly faded. I remember the first time I killed someone. I had barely got the Spit V up to 4000 feet when out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of something below me. I dropped the left wing and saw a Stuka making a bee-line for the base. I made a hash of the turn, almost stalling, but he obviously had no idea I was there. I saddled-up on his six, dropping down low to avoid fire from his gunner, and opened up on him. I must have hit him at perfect convergence because he disintegrated, pieces of dismembered airframe raining down on the field below. I circled the field, putting all my concentration into making the landing that would make the kill count, then switched off the engine and sat in the cockpit for a moment, heart pounding. As you can tell, I’ve been in the wars lately. The first example is drawn from the launch of Cornered Rat Software’s WWII Online: Blitzkrieg (2001) while the second is based on a short stint playing Warbirds 3 (2002). Both games are examples of one of the most interesting recent developments in computer and video gaming: the increasing popularity and range of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs); other notable examples of historical combat simulation MMOGs include HiTech Creations Aces High (2002) and Jaleco Entertainment’s Fighter Ace 3.5 (2002). For a variety of technical reasons, most popular multiplayer games—particularly first-person shooter (FPS) games such as Doom, Quake, and more recently Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002) and Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001)—are played on player-organised servers that are usually limited to 32 or fewer players; terrain maps are small and rotated every couple of hours on average. MMOGs, by contrast, feature anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of players hosted on a handful of company-run servers. The shared virtual geography of these worlds is huge, extending across tens of thousands of square miles; these worlds are also persistent in that they respond dynamically to the actions of players and continue to do so while individual players are offline. As my opening anecdotes demonstrate, the experience of dealing and receiving virtual death is central to massively multiplayer simulations as it is to so many forms of computer games. Yet for an experience is that is so ubiquitous in computer games (and, some would say, even constitutes their experiential core) death is under-theorised. Mainstream culture tends to see computer and console game mayhem according to a rigid desensitisation argument: the experience of repeatedly killing other players online leads to a gradual erosion of the individual moral sense which makes players more likely to countenance killing people in the real world. Nowhere was this argument more in evidence that in the wake of the murder of fifteen students by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999. The discovery that the two boys were enthusiastic players of Id Software’s Doom and Quake resulted in an avalanche of hysterical news stories that charged computer games with a number of evils: eroding kids’ ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, encouraging them to imitate the actions represented in the games, and immuring them to the real-world consequences of violence. These claims were hardly new, and had in fact been directed at any number of violent popular entertainment genres over the years. What was new was the claim that the interactive nature of FPS games rendered them a form of simulated weapons training. What was also striking about the discourse surrounding the Littleton shooting was just how little the journalists covering the story knew about computer, console and arcade games. Nevertheless, their approach to the issue encouraged readers to see games as having real life analogs. Media discussion of the event also reinforced the notion of a connection with military training techniques, making extensive use of Lt. Col. (ret) David Grossman, a former Army ranger and psychologist who led the charge in claiming that games were “mass-murder simulators” (Gittrich, AA06). This controversy over the role of violent computer games in the Columbine murders is part of a larger cultural discourse that adopts the logical fallacy characteristic of moral panics: coincidence equals causation. Yet the impoverished discussion of online death and destruction is also due in no small measure to an entrenched hostility toward popular entertainment as a whole, a hostility that is evident even in the work of some academic critics who study popular culture. Andrew Darley, for example, argues that, never has the flattening of meaning or depth in the traditional aesthetic sense of these words been so pronounced as in the action-simulation genres of the computer game: here, aesthetic experience is tied directly to the purely sensational and allied to tests of physical dexterity (143). In this view, the repeated experience of death is merely a part of the overall texture of a form characterised not so much by narrative as by compulsive repetition. More generally, computer games are seen by many critics as the pernicious, paradigmatic instance of the colonisation of individual consciousness by cultural spectacle. According to this Frankfurt school-influenced critique (most frequently associated with the work of Guy Debord), spectacle serves both to mystify and pacify its audience: The more the technology opens up narrative possibilities, the less there is for the audience to do. [. . .]. When the spectacle conceals the practice of the artists who create it, it [announces]…itself as an expression of a universe beyond human volition and effort (Filewood 24). In supposedly sapping its audience’s critical faculties by bombarding them with a technological assault whose only purpose is to instantiate a deterministic worldview, spectacle is seen by its critics as exemplifying the work of capitalist ideology which teaches people not to question the world around them by establishing, in Althusser’s famous phrase, an “imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of their existence” (162). The desensitisation thesis is thus part of a larger discourse that considers computer games paradoxically to be both escapist and as having real-world effects. With regard to online death, neo-Marxism meets neo-Freudianism: players are seen as hooked on the thrill not only of destroying others but also of self-destruction. Death is thus considered the terminus of all narrative possibility, and the participation of individuals in fantasy-death and mayhem is seen to lead inevitably to several kinds of cultural death: the death of “family values,” the death of community, the death of individual responsibility, and—given the characterisation of FPS games in particular as lacking in plot and characterisation—the death of storytelling. However, it is less productive to approach computer, arcade and console games as vehicles for force-feeding content with pre-determined cultural effects than it is to understand them as venues within and around which players stage a variety of theatrical performances. Thus even the bêtes noire of the mainstream media, first-person shooters, serve as vehicles for a variety of interactions ranging from the design of new sounds, graphics and levels, new “skins” for player characters, the formation of “tribes” or “clans” that fight and socialise together, and the creation of elaborate fan fictions. This idea that narrative does not simply “happen” within the immediate experience of playing the game, but is in fact produced by a dynamic interplay of interactions for which the game serves as a focus, also suggests a very different way of looking at the role of death online. Far from being the logical endpoint, the inevitable terminus of all narrative possibility, death becomes the indispensable starting point for narrative. In single-player games, for example, the existence of the simple “save game” function—differing from simply putting the game board to one side in that the save function allows the preservation of the game world in multiple temporal states—generates much of the narrative and dramatic range of computer games. Generally a player saves the game because he or she is facing an obstacle that may result in death; saving the game at that point allows the player to investigate alternatives. Thus, the ever-present possibility of death in the game world becomes the origin of all narratives based on forward investigation. In multiplayer and MMOG environments, where the players have no control over the save game state, it is nevertheless the possibility of a mode of forward projection that gives the experience its dramatic intensity. Flight simulation games in particular are notoriously difficult to master; the experience of serial death, therefore, becomes the necessary condition for honing your flying skills, trying out different tactics in a variety of combat situations, trying similar tactics in different aircraft, and so on. The experience of online death creates a powerful narrative impulse, and not only in those situations where death is serialised and guaranteed. A sizable proportion of the flight sim communities of both Warbirds and Aces High participate in specially designed scenario events that replicate a specific historical air combat event (the Battle of Britain, the Coral Sea, USAAF bomber operations in Europe, etc.) as closely as possible. What makes these scenarios so compelling for many players is that they are generally “one life” events: once the player is dead, they are out for the rest of the event and this creates an intense experience that is completely unlike flying in the everyday free-for-all arenas. The desensitisation thesis notwithstanding, there is little evidence that this narrative investment in death produces a more casual attitude toward real-life death amongst MMOG players. For example, when real-world death intrudes, simulation players often reach for the same rituals of comfort and acknowledgement that are employed offline. Recently, when an Aces High player died unexpectedly of heart failure at the age of 35, his squadron held an elaborate memorial event in his honor. Over a hundred players bailed out over an aerodrome—bailing out is the only way that a player in Aces High can acquire a virtual human body—and lined the edges of the runway as members of the dead player’s squad flew the missing man formation overhead (GrimmCAF). The insistence upon bodily presence in the context of a classic military ceremony marking irrecoverable absence suggests the way in which the connections between real and virtual worlds are experienced by players: as tensions, but also as points where identities are negotiated. This example does not seem to indicate that everyday familiarity with virtual death has dulled the players’ sensibilities to the sorrow and loss accompanying death in the real world. I began this article talking about death in simulation MMOGs for a number of reasons. In the first place, MMOGs are more commonly identified with their role-playing examples (MMORPGs) such as Ultima Online and Everquest, games that focus on virtual community-building and exploration in addition to violence and conquest. By contrast, simulation games tend to be seen as having more in common with first-person shooters like Quake, in the way in which they foreground the experience of serial death. Secondly, it is precisely the connection between simulation and death that makes games in general (as I demonstrated in relation to the media coverage of the Columbine murders) so problematic. In response, I would argue that one of the most interesting aspects of computer games recently has been the degree to which generic distinctions have been breaking down. MMORPGs, which had their roots in the Dungeons and Dragons gaming world, and the text-based world of MUDs and MOOs have since developed sophisticated third-person and even first-person representational styles to facilitate both peaceful character interactions and combat. Likewise, first-person shooters have begun to add role-playing elements (see, for example, Looking Glass Studios’ superb System Shock 2 (1999) or Lucasarts' Jedi Knight series). This trend has also been incorporated into simulation MMOGs: World War II Online includes a rudimentary set of character-tracking features, and Aces High has just announced a more ambitious expansion whose major focus will be the incorporation of role-playing elements. I feel that MMOGs in particular are all evolving towards a state that I would describe as “simulance:” simulations that, while they may be associated with a nominal representational reality, are increasingly about exploring the narrative possibilities, the mechanisms of theatrical engagement for self and community of simulation itself. Increasingly, none of the terms "simulation,” "role-playing" or indeed “game” quite captures the texture of these evolving experiences. In their complex engagement with both scripted and extemporaneous narrative, the players have more in common with period re-enactors; the immersive power of a well-designed flight simulator scenario produces a feeling in players akin to the “period rush” experienced by battlefield re-enactors, the frisson between awareness of playing a role and surrendering completely to the momentary power of its illusory reality. What troubles critics about simulations (and what also blinds them to the narrative complexity in other forms of computer games) is that they are indeed not simply examples of re-enactment —a re-staging of supposedly real events—but a generative form of narrative enactment. Computer games, particularly large-scale online games, provide a powerful set of theatrical tools with which players and player communities can help shape narratives and deepen their own narrative investment. Obviously, they are not isolated from real-world cultural factors that shape and constrain narrative possibility. However, we are starting to see the way in which the games use the idea of virtual death as the generative force for new storytelling frameworks based, in Filewood’s terms, on forward investigation. As games begin to move out of their incunabular state, they may contribute to the re-shaping of culture and consciousness, as other narrative platforms have done. Far from causing the downfall of civilisation, game-based narratives may bring with them a greater cultural awareness of simultaneous narrative possibility, of the past as sets of contingent phenomena, and a greater attention to practical, hands-on experimental problem-solving. It would be ironic, but no great surprise, if a form built around the creative possibilities inherent in serial death in fact made us more attentive to the rich alternative possibilities of living. Works Cited Aces High. HiTech Creations, 2002. http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. By Louis Althusser, trans. Ben Brewster. New York, 1971. 127-86. Barry, Ellen. “Games Feared as Youths’ Basic Training; Industry, Valued as Aid to Soldiers, on Defensive.” The Boston Globe 29 Apr 1999: A1. LexisNexis. Feb. 7, 2003. Cornered Rat Software. World War II Online: Blitzkrieg. Strategy First, 2001. http://www.wwiionline.com/ Darley, Andrew. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. London: Routledge, 2000. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994. 1967. Der Derian, James. “The Simulation Syndrome: From War Games to Game Wars.” Social Text 8.2 (1990): 187-92. Filewood, Alan. “C:\Games\Dramaturgy: The Cybertheatre of Computer Games.” Canadian Theatre Review 81 (Winter 1994): 24-28. Gittrich, Greg. “Expert Differs with Kids over Video Game Effects.” The Denver Post 27 Apr 1999: AA-06. LexisNexis. Feb. 7 2003. GrimmCAF. “MojoCAF’s Memorial Flight.” Aces High BB, 13 Dec. 2002. http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/sh... IEntertainment Network. Warbirds III. Simon and Schuster Interactive, 2002.http://www.totalsims.com/index.php?url=w... Jenkins, Henry, comp. “Voices from the Combat Zone: Game Grrlz Talk Back.” From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Ed. Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT P, 1998. 328-41. Lieberman, Joseph I. “The Social Impact of Music Violence.” Statement Before the Governmental Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Oversight, 1997. http://www.senate.gov/member/ct/lieberma... Feb. 7 2003. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free, 1997. Poole, Steven. Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000. Pyro. “AH2 FAQ.” Aces High BB, 29 Jan. 2003. Internet. http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/sh... Feb. 8 2003. Links http://www.wwiionline.com/ http://www.idsoftware.com/games/doom/ http://www.hitechcreations.com/ http://www.totalsims.com/index.php?url=wbiii/content_home.php http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;threadid=77265 http://www.senate.gov/member/ct/lieberman/releases/r110697c.html http://www.idsoftware.com/games/wolfenstein http://www.idsoftware.com/games/quake/ http://www.ea.com/eagames/official/moh_alliedassault/home.jsp http://www.jaleco.com/fighterace/index.html http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;threadid=72560 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Mullen, Mark. "It Was Not Death for I Stood Up…and Fragged the Dumb-Ass MoFo Who'd Wasted Me" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/03-itwasnotdeath.php>. APA Style Mullen, M., (2003, Feb 26). It Was Not Death for I Stood Up…and Fragged the Dumb-Ass MoFo Who'd Wasted Me. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/03-itwasnotdeath.html

Everyone thinks I named my cat Mango because of his orange eyes but that’s not the case. I named him Mango because the sounds of his purrs and his wheezes and his meows are all various shades of yellow-orange. (Mass 3) Synaesthesia, a condition where stimulus in one sense is perceived in that sense as well as in another, is thought to be a neurological fluke, marked by cross-sensory reactions. Mia, a character in the children’s book A Mango-Shaped Space, has audition colorée or coloured hearing, the most common form of synaesthesia where sounds create dynamic coloured photisms in the visual field. Others with the condition may taste shapes (Cytowic 5), feel colours (Duffy 52), taste sounds (Cytowic 118) or experience a myriad of other sensory combinations. Most non-synaesthetes have never heard of synaesthesia and many treat the condition with disbelief upon learning of it, while synaesthetes are often surprised to hear that others don’t have it. Although there has been a resurgence of interest in synaesthesia recently in psychology, neuroscience and philosophy (Ward and Mattingley 129), there is no widely accepted explanation for how or why synaesthetic perception occurs. However, if we investigate what meaning this particular condition may offer for rethinking not only what constitutes sensory normalcy, but also the ocular-centric bias in cultural studies, especially media studies, synaesthesia may present us with very productive coalitions indeed.Some theorists posit the ultimate role of media of all forms “to transfer sense experiences from one person to another” (Bolter and Grusin 3). Alongside this claim, many “have also maintained that the ultimate function of literature and the arts is to manifest this fusion of the senses” found in synaesthesia (Dann ix). If the most primary of media aims are to fuse and transfer sensory experiences, manifesting these goals would be akin to transferring synaesthetic experience to non-synaesthetes. In some cases, this synaesthetic transfer has been the explicit goal of media forms, from the invention of kaleidoscopes as colour symphonies in 1818 (Dann 66) to the 2002 launch of the video game Rez, the packaging for which reads “Discover a new world. A world of sound, visuals and vibrations. Release your instincts, open your senses and experience synaesthesia” (Rez). Recent innovations such as touch screen devices, advances in 3D film and television technologies and a range of motion-sensing video gaming consoles extend media experience far beyond the audio-visual and as such, present both serious challenges and important opportunities for media and culture scholars to reinvigorate ways of thinking about media experience, sensory embodiment and what might be learned from engaging with synaesthesia. Fleshing out the Field While acknowledging synaesthesia as a specific condition that enhances and complicates the lives of many individuals, I also suggest that synaesthesia is a useful mode of interference into our current ocular-centric notions of culture. Vision and visual phenomena hold a particularly powerful role in producing and negotiating meanings, values and relationships in the contemporary cultural arena and as a result, the eye has become privileged as the “master sense of the modern era” (Jay Scopic 3). Proponents of visual culture claim that the majority of modern life takes place through sight and that “human experience is now more visual and visualized than ever before ... in this swirl of imagery, seeing is much more than believing. It is not just a part of everyday life, it is everyday life” (Mirzoeff 1). In order to enjoy this privilege as the master sense, vision has been disentangled from the muscles and nerves of the eyeball and relocated to the “mind’s eye”, a metaphor that equates a kind of disembodied vision with knowledge. Vision becomes the most non-sensual of the senses, and made to appear “as a negative reference point for the other senses...on the side of detachment, separation” (Connor) or even “as the absence of sensuality” (Haraway). This creates a paradoxical “visual culture” in which the embodied eye is, along with the ear, skin, tongue and nose, strangely absent. If visual culture has been based on the separation of the senses, and in fact, a refutation of embodied senses altogether, what about that which we might encounter and know in the world that is not encompassed by the mind’s eye? By silencing the larger sensory context, what are we missing? What ocular-centric assumptions have we been making? What responsibilities have we ignored?This critique does not wish to do away with the eye, but instead to re-embrace and extend the field of vision to include an understanding of the eye and what it sees within the context of its embodied abilities and limitations. Although the mechanics of the eye make it an important and powerful sensory organ, able to perceive at a distance and provide a wealth of information about our surroundings, it is also prone to failures. Equipped as it is with eyelids and blind spots, reliant upon light and gullible to optical illusions (Jay, Downcast 4), the eye has its weaknesses and these must be addressed along with its abilities. Moreover, by focusing only on what is visual in culture, we are missing plenty of import. The study of visual culture is not unlike studying an electrical storm from afar. The visually impressive jagged flash seems the principal aspect of the storm and quite separate from the rumbling sound that rolls after it. We perceive them and name them as two distinct phenomena; thunder and lightning. However, this separation is a feature only of the distance between where we stand and the storm. Those who have found themselves in the eye of an electrical storm know that the sight of the bolt, the sound of the crash, the static tingling and vibration of the crack and the smell of ozone are mingled. At a remove, the bolt appears separate from the noise only artificially because of the safe distance. The closer we are to the phenomenon, the more completely it envelops us. Although getting up close and personal with an electrical storm may not be as comfortable as viewing it from afar, it does offer the opportunity to better understand the total experience and the thrill of intensities it can engage across the sensory palette. Similarly, the false separation of the visual from the rest of embodied experience may be convenient, but in order to flesh out this field, other embodied senses and sensory coalitions must be reclaimed for theorising practices. The senses as they are traditionally separated are simply put, false categories. Towards SynaestheoryAny inquiry inspired by synaesthesia must hold at its core the idea that the senses cannot be responsibly separated. This notion applies firstly to the separation of senses from one another. Synaesthetic experience and experiment both insist that there is rich cross-fertility between senses in synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes alike. The French verb sentir is instructive here, as it can mean “to smell”, “to taste” or “to feel”, depending on the context it is used in. It can also mean simply “to sense” or “to be aware of”. In fact, the origin of the phrase “common sense” meant exactly that, the point at which the senses meet. There also must be recognition that the senses cannot be separated from cognition or, in the Cartesian sense, that body and mind cannot be divided. An extensive and well-respected study of synaesthesia conducted in the 1920s by Raymond Wheeler and Thomas Cutsforth, non-synaesthetic and synaesthetic researchers respectively, revealed that the condition was not only a quirk of perception, but of conception. Synaesthetic activity, the team deduced “is an essential mechanism in the construction of meaning that functions in the same way as certain unattended processes in non-synaesthetes” (Dann 82). With their synaesthetic imagery impaired, synaesthetes are unable to do even a basic level of thinking or recalling (Dann, Cytowic). In fact, synaesthesia may be a universal process, but in synaesthetes, “a brain process that is normally unconscious becomes bared to consciousness so that synaesthetes know they are synaesthetic while the rest of us do not” (166). Maurice Merleau-Ponty agrees, claiming:Synaesthetic perception is the rule, and we are unaware of it only because scientific knowledge shifts the centre of gravity of experience, so that we unlearn how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel in order to deduce, from our bodily organisation and the world as the physicist conceives it, what we are to see, hear and feel. (229) With this in mind, neither the mind’s role nor the body’s role in synaesthesia can be isolated, since the condition itself maintains unequivocally that the two are one.The rich and rewarding correlations between senses in synaesthesia prompt us to consider sensory coalitions in other experiences and contexts as well. We are urged to consider flows of sensation seriously as experiences in and of themselves, with or without interpretation and explanation. As well, the debates around synaesthetic experience remind us that in order to speak to phenomena perceived and conceived it is necessary to recognise the specificities, ironies and responsibilities of any embodied experience. Ultimately, synaesthesia helps to highlight the importance of relationships and the complexity of concepts necessary in order to practice a more embodied and articulate theorising. We might call this more inclusive approach “synaestheory”.Synaestheorising MediaDystopia, a series of photographs by artists Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher suggests a contemporary take on Decartes’s declaration that “I will now close my eyes, I will stop my ears, I will turn away my senses from their objects” (86). These photographs consist of digitally altered faces where the subject’s skin has been stretched over the openings of eyes, nose, mouth and ears, creating an interesting image both in process and in product. The product of a media mix that incorporates photography and computer modification, this image suggests the effects of the separation from our senses that these media may imply. The popular notion that media allow us to surpass our bodies and meet without our “meat” tagging along is a trope that Aziz and Cucher expose here with their computer-generated cover-up. By sealing off the senses, they show us how little we now seem to value them in a seemingly virtual, post-embodied world. If “hybrid media require hybrid analyses” (Lunenfeld in Graham 158), in our multimedia, mixed media, “mongrel media” (Dovey 114) environment, we need mongrel theory, synaestheory, to begin to discuss the complexities at hand. The goal here is producing an understanding of both media and sensory intelligences as hybrid. Symptomatic of our simple sense of media is our tendency to refer to media experiences as “audio-visual”: stimuli for the ear, eye or both. However, even if media are engineered to be predominately audio and/or visual, we are not. Synaestheory examines embodied media use, including the sensory information that the media does not claim to concentrate on, but that is still engaged and present in every mediated experience. It also examines embodied media use by paying attention to the pops and clicks of the material human-media interface. It does not assume simple sensory engagement or smooth engagement with media. These bumps, blisters, misfirings and errors are just as crucial a part of embodied media practice as smooth and successful interactions. Most significantly, synaesthesia insists simply that sensation matters. Sensory experiences are material, rich, emotional, memorable and important to the one sensing them, synaesthete or not. This declaration contradicts a legacy of distrust of the sensory in academic discourse that privileges the more intellectual and abstract, usually in the form of the detached text. However, academic texts are sensory too, of course. Sound, feeling, movement and sight are all inseparable from reading and writing, speaking and listening. We might do well to remember these as root sensory situations and by extension, recognise the importance of other sensual forms.Indeed, we have witnessed a rise of media genres that appeal to our senses first with brilliant and detailed visual and audio information, and story or narrative second, if at all. These media are “direct and one-dimensional, about little, other than their ability to commandeer the sight and the senses” (Darley 76). Whereas any attention to the construction of the media product is a disastrous distraction in narrative-centred forms, spectacular media reveals and revels in artifice and encourages the spectator to enjoy the simulation as part of the work’s allure. It is “a pleasure of control, but also of being controlled” (MacTavish 46). Like viewing abstract art, the impact of the piece will be missed if we are obsessed with what the artwork “is about”. Instead, we can reflect on spectacular media’s ability, like that of an abstract artwork, to impact our senses and as such, “renew the present” (Cubitt 32).In this framework, participation in any medium can be enjoyed not only as an interpretative opportunity, but also as an experience of sensory dexterity and relevance with its own pleasures and intelligences; a “being-present”. By focusing our attention on sensory flows, we may be able to perceive aspects of the world or ourselves that we had previously missed. Every one of us–synaesthete or nonsynaesthete–has a unique blueprint of reality, a unique way of coding knowledge that is different from any other on earth [...] By quieting down the habitually louder parts of our mind and turning the dial of our attention to its darker, quieter places, we may hear our personal code’s unique and usually unheard “song”, needing the touch of our attention to turn up its volume. (Duffy 123)This type of presence to oneself has been termed a kind of “perfect immediacy” and is believed to be cultivated through meditation or other sensory-focused experiences such as sex (Bolter and Grusin 260), art (Cubitt 32), drugs (Dann 184) or even physical pain (Gromala 233). Immersive media could also be added to this list, if as Bolter and Grusin suggest, we now “define immediacy as being in the presence of media” (236). In this case, immediacy has become effectively “media-cy.”A related point is the recognition of sensation’s transitory nature. Synaesthetic experiences and sensory experiences are vivid and dynamic. They do not persist. Instead, they flow through us and disappear, despite any attempts to capture them. You cannot stop or relive pure sound, for example (Gross). If you stop it, you silence it. If you relive it, you are experiencing another rendition, different even if almost imperceptibly from the last time you heard it. Media themselves are increasingly transitory and shifting phenomena. As media forms emerge and fall into obsolescence, spawning hybrid forms and spinoffs, the stories and memories safely fixed into any given media become outmoded and ultimately inaccessible very quickly. This trend towards flow over fixation is also informed by an embodied understanding of our own existence. Our sensations flow through us as we flow through the world. Synaesthesia reminds us that all sensation and indeed all sensory beings are dynamic. Despite our rampant lust for statis (Haraway), it is important to theorise with the recognition that bodies, media and sensations all flow through time and space, emerging and disintegrating. Finally, synaesthesia also encourages an always-embodied understanding of ourselves and our interactions with our environment. In media experiences that traditionally rely on vision the body is generally not only denied, but repressed (Balsamo 126). Claims to disembodiment flood the rhetoric around new media as an emancipatory element of mediated experience and somehow, seeing is superimposed on embodied being to negate it. However phenomena such as migraines, sensory release hallucinations, photo-memory, after-images, optical illusions and most importantly here, the “crosstalk” of synaesthesia (Cohen Kadosh et al. 489) all attest to the co-involvement of the body and brain in visual experience. Perhaps useful here for understanding media involvement in light of synaestheory is a philosophy of “mingled bodies” (Connor), where the world and its embodied agents intermingle. There are no discrete divisions, but plenty of translation and transfer. As Sean Cubitt puts it, “the world, after all, touches us at the same moment that we touch it” (37). We need to employ non-particulate metaphors that do away with the dichotomies of mind/body, interior/exterior and real/virtual. A complex embodied entity is not an object or even a series of objects, but embodiment work. “Each sense is in fact a nodal cluster, a clump, confection or bouquet of all the other senses, a mingling of the modalities of mingling [...] the skin encompasses, implies, pockets up all the other sense organs: but in doing so, it stands as a model for the way in which all the senses in their turn also invaginate all the others” (Connor). The danger here is of delving into a nostalgic discussion of a sort of “sensory unity before the fall” (Dann 94). The theory that we are all synaesthetes in some ways can lead to wistfulness for a perfect fusion of our senses, a kind of synaesthetic sublime that we had at one point, but lost. This loss occurs in childhood in some theories, (Maurer and Mondloch) and in our aboriginal histories in others (Dann 101). This longing for “original syn” is often done within a narrative that equates perfect sensory union with a kind of transcendence from the physical world. Dann explains that “during the modern upsurge in interest that has spanned the decades from McLuhan to McKenna, synaesthesia has continued to fulfil a popular longing for metaphors of transcendence” (180). This is problematic, since elevating the sensory to the sublime does no more service to understanding our engagements with the world than ignoring or degrading the sensory. Synaestheory does not tolerate a simplification of synaesthesia or any condition as a ticket to transcendence beyond the body and world that it is necessarily grounded in and responsible to. At the same time, it operates with a scheme of senses that are not a collection of separate parts, but blended; a field of intensities, a corporeal coalition of senses. It likewise refuses to participate in the false separation of body and mind, perception and cognition. More useful and interesting is to begin with metaphors that assume complexity without breaking phenomena into discrete pieces. This is the essence of a new anti-separatist synaestheory, a way of thinking through embodied humans in relationships with media and culture that promises to yield more creative, relevant and ethical theorising than the false isolation of one sense or the irresponsible disregard of the sensorium altogether.ReferencesAziz, Anthony, and Sammy Cucher. Dystopia. 1994. 15 Sep. 2010 ‹http://www.azizcucher.net/1994.php>. Balsamo, Anne. “The Virtual Body in Cyberspace.” Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. 116-32.Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.Cohen Kadosh, Roi, Avishai Henik, and Vincent Walsh. “Synaesthesia: Learned or Lost?” Developmental Science 12.3 (2009): 484-491.Connor, Steven. “Michel Serres’ Five Senses.” Michel Serres Conference. Birkbeck College, London. May 1999. 5 Oct. 2010 ‹http://www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/skc/5senses.htm>. Cubitt, Sean. “It’s Life, Jim, But Not as We Know It: Rolling Backwards into the Future.” Fractal Dreams: New Media in Social Context. Ed. Jon Dovey. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996. 31-58.Cytowic, Richard E. The Man Who Tasted Shapes: A Bizarre Medical Mystery Offers Revolutionary Insights into Emotions, Reasoning and Consciousness. New York: Putnam Books, 1993.Dann, Kevin T. Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.Darley, Andrew. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. London: Routledge, 2000.Descartes, Rene. Discourse on Method and the Meditations. Trans. Johnn Veitch. New York: Prometheus Books, 1989.Dovey, Jon. “The Revelation of Unguessed Worlds.” Fractal Dreams: New Media in Social Context. Ed. Jon Dovey. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996. 109-35. Duffy, Patricia Lynne. Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens: How Synesthetes Color Their Worlds. New York: Times Books, 2001.Graham, Beryl. “Playing with Yourself: Pleasure and Interactive Art.” Fractal Dreams: New Media in Social Context. Ed. Jon Dovey. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996. 154-81.Gromala, Diana. "Pain and Subjectivity in Virtual Reality." Clicking In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture. Ed. Lynn Hershman Leeson. Seattle: Bay Press, 1996. 222-37.Haraway, Donna. “At the Interface of Nature and Culture.” Seminar. European Graduate School. Saas-Fee, Switzerland, 17-19 Jun. 2003.Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California P, 1993.Jay, Martin. "Scopic Regimes of Modernity." Hal Foster, Ed. Vision and Visuality. New York: Dia Art Foundation, 1988. 2-23.MacTavish. Andrew. “Technological Pleasure: The Performance and Narrative of Technology in Half-Life and other High-Tech Computer Games.” ScreenPlay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces. Eds. Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska. London: Wallflower P, 2002. Mass, Wendy. A Mango-Shaped Space. Little, Brown and Co., 2003.Maurer, Daphne, and Catherine J. Mondloch. “Neonatal Synaesthesia: A Re-Evaluation.” Eds. Lynn C. Robertson and Noam Sagiv. Synaesthesia: Perspectives from Cognitive Neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1989.Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “What Is Visual Culture?” The Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. London: Routledge, 1998. 3-13.Rez. United Game Artists. Playstation 2. 2002.Stafford, Barbara Maria. Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.Ward, Jamie, and Jason B. Mattingley. “Synaesthesia: An Overview of Contemporary Findings and Controversies.” Cortex 42.2 (2006): 129-136.

碩士
臺南藝術學院
博物館學研究所
92
Museum displays are designed with the goal to achieve effective communication and provide a learning experience on a specific subject. If the fundamental attitude of display design can incorporate and consider the various elements of storytelling narrative, this can positively affect and bridge the distance between the exhibitions with its intended audience. Films, by its essential definition, are not the same as museum displays. However, the medium of film also exhibits the physical differentiations, narrative qualities and limitations through its screen dimensions within the real-world spatiality. This research paper aims to investigate and make a comparative analysis of the styles and characteristics between these two divergent forms of narrative foundations in the hopes of arriving at the median of between the fundamental spectatorships for museum displays and films. This research paper involves the examination of two individual sets of proposed questions. The first concerns with the rethinking of the modes of museum displays and film narratives respectively. The latter considers the possibility of aesthetic transition and exploration of their narrative forms. Aside from analyzing and providing related references to in order to understand the communicative and comprehensive qualities of narrative, as well as providing the narrative prototypes of museum displays and films, I also further analyze museum displays and film screening examples to articulate the inherent limitations and characteristics of museum displays in its narrative mode. This research project proposes the possibility of applying the aesthetic narrative strategies utilized in film in the design of a museum display. By incorporating methods such as utilizing scripts in the design of a museum displays, as well as the careful consideration of spatial and methods of display design, a more imaginative realization and dynamic experience could be possible.

The beautiful island of Mitylene, known also as Lesvos or Lesbos, serves only as a footnote in the biblical account of the journeys of the Apostle Paul, but its fine museums and splendid scenery make it well worth including in visits to the Greek islands. Noted since antiquity as a place of unusual warmth and sunshine, even in winter, this third largest of the Greek islands produces the finest olive oil in all of Greece. The interior of the island is mountainous and forested, and the northern side of the island, around picturesque Methymna, provides excellent beaches. Mitylene (also the name of the capital city) lies less than 10 miles off the Turkish coast. It can be reached by flights from Athens and Thessaloniki (approximately one hour); ferries also run from these ports, but the crossing time is 9–12 hours. There is a ferry that connects the island to Ayvalik, Turkey; Pergamum is only 35 miles inland. Until the 6th century B.C.E., when Pitticus, one of the Seven Sages of Greece, served as sole ruler of the island (r. 589–579 B.C.E.), the towns of Mitylene and Methymna struggled for dominance of the island. During this time Mitylene developed a strong maritime fleet, extended its commerce as far as Egypt, and achieved fame for its notable poets, Alcaeus and Sappho (6th century B.C.E.). The poetry of Sappho was greatly admired by both Solon and Plato, who called her the tenth Muse. An aristocrat who established a school for women at Mitylene, Sappho became world-famous, or infamous, because of her love poetry concerning women. Much of the ridicule directed toward her came from the Athenian comic poets, who lampooned the greater freedom given to women on Mitylene. In the 4th century B.C.E., the famous philosophers Aristotle and Epicurus both taught on Mitylene. Julius Caesar first won distinction as a military commander when the Romans invaded the island in the 1st century B.C.E. Over the following centuries the island suffered repeated invasions by one world power after another until 1462, when it was taken by the Turks, who retained possession of it until 1912.

The rapid urban development in the Hurghada area since the 1980s has dramatically enhanced the potential impact of human activities. To inventory and monitor this urban development effectively, remote sensing provides a viable source of data from which updated land cover information can be extracted efficiently and cheaply. In this study, data from three satellite datasets, Landsat Thematic Mapper (Landsat 5 TM), Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (Landsat 7 ETM+) and Terra/Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER), acquired during 1987, 2000 and 2005, respectively, were used to detect and evaluate Hurghada's urban expansion. Five change detection techniques were tested to detect areas of change. The techniques considered were image differencing, image ratioing, image overlay, multidate principal component analysis (PCA) and post-classification comparison. The post-classification comparison was found to be the most accurate procedure and produced three land use/land cover (LULC) maps of the years 1987, 2000 and 2005 with overall accuracies of 87.8%, 88.9% and 92.0%, respectively. The urban expansion analysis revealed that the built-up area has expanded by 40 km2 in 18 years (1987–2005). In addition, 4.5 km2 of landfill/sedimentation was added to the sea as a result of the coastal urban development and tourist activities. The booming coastal tourism and population pressure were considered to be the main factors driving this expansion, and some natural and artificial constraints constrained the physical shape of the city. The expansion is represented by urban fringe development, linear, infill and isolated models. Topography, lithology and structures were also analysed as possible factors that influenced the expansion. The understanding of the spatial and temporal dynamics of Hurghada's urban expansion is the cornerstone for formulating a view about the future urban uses and for making the best use of the limited resources that are available [1]. A Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) image of 1987 and a Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) image of 2000 were used to examine changes in land use/land cover (LULC) around Hurghada, Egypt, and changes in the composition of coral reefs offshore. Prior to coral reef bottom type classification, the radiance values were transformed to depth invariant bottom indices to reduce the effect of the water column. Subsequently, a multi component change detection procedure was applied to these indices to define changes. Preliminary results showed significant changes in LULC during the period 1987–2000 as well as changes in coral reef composition. Direct impacts along the coastline were clearly shown, but it was more difficult to link offshore changes in coral reef composition to indirect impacts of the changing LULC. Further research is needed to explore the effects of the different image processing steps, and to discover possible links between indirect impacts of LULC changes and changes in the coral reef composition [2]. Knowledge and detecting impacts of human activities on the coastal ecosystem is an essential management requirement and also very important for future and proper planning of coastal areas. Moreover, documentation of these impacts can help in increasing public awareness about side effects of unsustainable practices. Analysis of multidate remote sensing data can be used as an effective tool in environmental impact assessment (EIA). Being synoptic and frequent in coverage, multidate data from Landsat and other satellites provide a reference record and bird’s eye viewing to the environmental situation of the coastal ecosystem and the associated habitats. Furthermore, integration of satellite data with field observations and background information can help in decision if a certain activity has caused deterioration to a specific habitat or not. The present paper is an attempt to utilize remote sensing data for assessment impacts of some human activities on the major sensitive habitats of the north western Egyptian Red Sea coastal zone, definitely between Ras Gemsha and Safaga. Through multidate change analysis of Landsat data (TM & ETM+ sensors), it was possible to depict some of the human infringements in the area and to provide, in some cases, exclusive evidences for the damaging effect of some developmental activities [3]. The coastline of Hurghada has experienced considerable environmental stress from tourist and residential recreational activities. Uncontrolled tourist development has already caused substantial damage to inshore reefs and imbalance in the hydrodynamic pattern of the coastal sediments. The objective of this paper is to investigate environmental changes using multitemporal, multispectral satellite data to identify changes at Hurghada caused by anthropogenic influences. Major detected changes include resort beaches, protection structures and landfill areas; these changes are mainly due to human intervention. Two Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) images acquired in 1984 and 1997 are used for this analysis. The landfill areas formed during this period are calculated at about 2.15 Km2 . Whilst landfill creates new inexpensive land and improves access to the sea for tourists, it is the cause of environmental problems. In addition, land-use/land-cover and beach changes are determined over the 13-year period [4]. The Red Sea coastal zone is characterized by its sensitive, fragile, unique natural resources and habitats. In the Hurghada coastal region, major changes in the tourism industry have taken place in the last few decades. The detection of environmental changes, in a selected site of the Red Sea coastal zone, will be helpful to protect and develop this coastal environment. A methodology for separating natural and man-made changes in satellite images was developed. It was based on the following assumptions: (1) slow changes, which occur within the range of the class reflectance, represent a natural change rather than an anthropogenic one; (2) natural changes tend to be in the same land-use/land-cover class in each date, i.e. slow changes in the reflectance, not leading to changes in the type of land-use/land-cover class from the master image to the destination one; and (3) rapid changes in the reflectance of the Earth's objects are usually related to anthropogenic activities. This technique is used to identify and assess changes along the coast of Hurghada and Ras Abu Soma, the Red Sea. Results indicate serious human impacts and the necessity for control measures and monitoring. Recommendations are presented [5]. The rapid urban development of the Hurghada area began in early 1980 to build villages and huge tourist resorts and this has continued urban development and subsequent land filling and dredging of the shoreline and the destruction of coral so far. These coastal developments have led to an increase in shoreline land filling and dredging. Despite all the environmental laws of the organization to reduce infringement on the shoreline, the abuses are still ongoing. Change detection analysis using remote sensing is a very good tool to monitor the changes condition in urban development and shoreline. Four sensors was used in this study, three of them are, Landsat Multispectral Scanner (Landsat 1 MSS), Landsat Thematic Mapper (Landsat 5 TM), Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (Landsat 7 ETM+) and the another one is SPOT XS 4 (Originally Système Probatoire de l’Observation de la Terre), acquired during 1972, 1984, 1992, 2004 and 2011, respectively, were used to detect and evaluate Hurghada’s urban expansion and shoreline changes. After the images have been geometrically, radio-metrically and atmospherically corrected using ENVI 5.0 software, the digital number was transformed to the reflectance values and the images were ready to change detection process with the integration of geographic information system using Arc GIS 10 software. The results show that changes during the 39 years of the shoreline is 6.29 km2, (5.65 km2 accretion and 0.64 km2 erosion) and urban development is 16.47 km2 the road network is the 8.738 km2.

The rapid urban development in the Hurghada area since the 1980s has dramatically enhanced the potential impact of human activities. To inventory and monitor this urban development effectively, remote sensing provides a viable source of data from which updated land cover information can be extracted efficiently and cheaply. In this study, data from three satellite datasets, Landsat Thematic Mapper (Landsat 5 TM), Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (Landsat 7 ETM+) and Terra/Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER), acquired during 1987, 2000 and 2005, respectively, were used to detect and evaluate Hurghada's urban expansion. Five change detection techniques were tested to detect areas of change. The techniques considered were image differencing, image ratioing, image overlay, multidate principal component analysis (PCA) and post-classification comparison. The post-classification comparison was found to be the most accurate procedure and produced three land use/land cover (LULC) maps of the years 1987, 2000 and 2005 with overall accuracies of 87.8%, 88.9% and 92.0%, respectively. The urban expansion analysis revealed that the built-up area has expanded by 40 km2 in 18 years (1987–2005). In addition, 4.5 km2 of landfill/sedimentation was added to the sea as a result of the coastal urban development and tourist activities. The booming coastal tourism and population pressure were considered to be the main factors driving this expansion, and some natural and artificial constraints constrained the physical shape of the city. The expansion is represented by urban fringe development, linear, infill and isolated models. Topography, lithology and structures were also analysed as possible factors that influenced the expansion. The understanding of the spatial and temporal dynamics of Hurghada's urban expansion is the cornerstone for formulating a view about the future urban uses and for making the best use of the limited resources that are available [1]. A Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) image of 1987 and a Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) image of 2000 were used to examine changes in land use/land cover (LULC) around Hurghada, Egypt, and changes in the composition of coral reefs offshore. Prior to coral reef bottom type classification, the radiance values were transformed to depth invariant bottom indices to reduce the effect of the water column. Subsequently, a multi component change detection procedure was applied to these indices to define changes. Preliminary results showed significant changes in LULC during the period 1987–2000 as well as changes in coral reef composition. Direct impacts along the coastline were clearly shown, but it was more difficult to link offshore changes in coral reef composition to indirect impacts of the changing LULC. Further research is needed to explore the effects of the different image processing steps, and to discover possible links between indirect impacts of LULC changes and changes in the coral reef composition [2]. Knowledge and detecting impacts of human activities on the coastal ecosystem is an essential management requirement and also very important for future and proper planning of coastal areas. Moreover, documentation of these impacts can help in increasing public awareness about side effects of unsustainable practices. Analysis of multidate remote sensing data can be used as an effective tool in environmental impact assessment (EIA). Being synoptic and frequent in coverage, multidate data from Landsat and other satellites provide a reference record and bird’s eye viewing to the environmental situation of the coastal ecosystem and the associated habitats. Furthermore, integration of satellite data with field observations and background information can help in decision if a certain activity has caused deterioration to a specific habitat or not. The present paper is an attempt to utilize remote sensing data for assessment impacts of some human activities on the major sensitive habitats of the north western Egyptian Red Sea coastal zone, definitely between Ras Gemsha and Safaga. Through multidate change analysis of Landsat data (TM & ETM+ sensors), it was possible to depict some of the human infringements in the area and to provide, in some cases, exclusive evidences for the damaging effect of some developmental activities [3]. The coastline of Hurghada has experienced considerable environmental stress from tourist and residential recreational activities. Uncontrolled tourist development has already caused substantial damage to inshore reefs and imbalance in the hydrodynamic pattern of the coastal sediments. The objective of this paper is to investigate environmental changes using multitemporal, multispectral satellite data to identify changes at Hurghada caused by anthropogenic influences. Major detected changes include resort beaches, protection structures and landfill areas; these changes are mainly due to human intervention. Two Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) images acquired in 1984 and 1997 are used for this analysis. The landfill areas formed during this period are calculated at about 2.15 Km2 . Whilst landfill creates new inexpensive land and improves access to the sea for tourists, it is the cause of environmental problems. In addition, land-use/land-cover and beach changes are determined over the 13-year period [4]. The Red Sea coastal zone is characterized by its sensitive, fragile, unique natural resources and habitats. In the Hurghada coastal region, major changes in the tourism industry have taken place in the last few decades. The detection of environmental changes, in a selected site of the Red Sea coastal zone, will be helpful to protect and develop this coastal environment. A methodology for separating natural and man-made changes in satellite images was developed. It was based on the following assumptions: (1) slow changes, which occur within the range of the class reflectance, represent a natural change rather than an anthropogenic one; (2) natural changes tend to be in the same land-use/land-cover class in each date, i.e. slow changes in the reflectance, not leading to changes in the type of land-use/land-cover class from the master image to the destination one; and (3) rapid changes in the reflectance of the Earth's objects are usually related to anthropogenic activities. This technique is used to identify and assess changes along the coast of Hurghada and Ras Abu Soma, the Red Sea. Results indicate serious human impacts and the necessity for control measures and monitoring. Recommendations are presented [5]. The rapid urban development of the Hurghada area began in early 1980 to build villages and huge tourist resorts and this has continued urban development and subsequent land filling and dredging of the shoreline and the destruction of coral so far. These coastal developments have led to an increase in shoreline land filling and dredging. Despite all the environmental laws of the organization to reduce infringement on the shoreline, the abuses are still ongoing. Change detection analysis using remote sensing is a very good tool to monitor the changes condition in urban development and shoreline. Four sensors was used in this study, three of them are, Landsat Multispectral Scanner (Landsat 1 MSS), Landsat Thematic Mapper (Landsat 5 TM), Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (Landsat 7 ETM+) and the another one is SPOT XS 4 (Originally Système Probatoire de l’Observation de la Terre), acquired during 1972, 1984, 1992, 2004 and 2011, respectively, were used to detect and evaluate Hurghada’s urban expansion and shoreline changes. After the images have been geometrically, radio-metrically and atmospherically corrected using ENVI 5.0 software, the digital number was transformed to the reflectance values and the images were ready to change detection process with the integration of geographic information system using Arc GIS 10 software. The results show that changes during the 39 years of the shoreline is 6.29 km2, (5.65 km2 accretion and 0.64 km2 erosion) and urban development is 16.47 km2 the road network is the 8.738 km2.