URBAN LIGHTING: MONOCHROMATIC AND DYNAMIC LIGHTING

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The night impression of a city, including both the feeling of security and attractiveness, is greatly influenced by lighting. Since the urban night image is created by a variety of illuminated urban elements (streets, buildings, bridges, parks, etc), coordination is necessary in order to achieve a harmonious urban nightscape. A lighting masterplan is a strategic document through which such coordination can be achieved. Even though lighting technology offers endless possibilities for creative illumination, the achievement of attractive light effects by applying monochromatic or dynamic lighting is not an easy task. An inadequate application of monochromatic lighting or aggressive dynamic lighting conspicuously degrades the illuminated buildings and their immediate (and sometimes wider) surroundings.

MUSEUM OF AFRICAN ART IN BELGRADE AND ITS ANTI/ COLONIAL DISCOURSE

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The Museum of African Art, Veda and Zdravko Pečar Collection (MAA), was always a specific space of representation, where two main discourses, largely in opposition, intertwined. The first one corresponded with the museum as authority: a Western institution that collects researches and represents cultural heritage. Although this model was openly criticized as colonial (particularly focused onto African collections in Western institutions as product of “colonial plunder”), to embrace it meant to establish the continuity of the MAA within Western representations. The second one that corresponded with the anti-colonial and non-aligned rhetoric of the time tended to shape this museum as an African cultural center, where dynamic exchange with colleagues from African countries would take place: artists in residence, curators, and theoreticians. In this sense, the MAA was supposed to create a unique approach to different topics from African arts and cultures, establishing a close collaboration with experts from Africa, who would take part in the realization and creation of its programmes. Historic circumstances have changed the position the Museum of African Art in Belgrade once held. Bearing in mind that every museum’s image relies upon a sum of different representations that had shaped museums as institutions, and had been shaped by them, it can be concluded that past elements of museum discourse inevitably make part of its current setup. This paper therefore suggests that the anti-colonial narrative in the MAA should be understood and researched as cultural memory in the present. Through contemporary curatorial and artistic interventions in/on the Museum space, of which some excellent examples could be found in the work of curator Dejan Sretenović and artists Zoran Naskovski and Barthélémy Toguo (in the period 2004-2006), an authentic and self-reflective approach both to museum content and its current purpose can be achieved.

THE MEDIA CULTURE OF ĐURČIĆI PEOPLE

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The study of the media culture of the Đurčići rural micro-community members on the Papuk Mountain in Slavonia from 1945 to 1991 indicates integration of this population which followed global developments in the Yugoslav socialist state and also integration in McLuhan’s global village, in accordance with their financial capacities. Reception of the press, film, radio and television takes place at a collective level, a form typical of ”folk” in general, which opens the possibility for creating a media culture habitat in the family and in the village. Acceptance of new media, according to the old patterns and certain generational variations, confirms Eric Hobsbawm’s thesis that rural traditional patriarchal communities are not encapsuled and fossilized, and that their survival is possible thanks to the occurring changes. The new media in this micro-community have the integrative function.

NARRATOLOGY OF PAUL KLEE – THE VISUAL BETWEEN LITERATURE AND MUSIC

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Paul Klee, had enriched his theoretical work and lectures with narratology in which the visual can be analyzed in close relation to literature and music. Klee expressed his narratology not only in his diaries and letters but also in his lectures where the specific aspects of the narrative where sought in between the textual and the visual. He built the narration by writing as well as reading, at the same time building his own self. In searching and seeking a narration that would be as precise as possible and expressed in adequate form, Klee reached for means offered by literature and music as the two fields that were familiar, and even to some degree, very close to him. As a matter of fact, Klee played the violin in his youth, read extensively and expressed a talent for writing, and being ambivalently inclined to both music and painting as his life calling, he could move between these two field freely, seeking in both of them expression of the visual. This movement resembles the movement of his lines which find adequate paths toward expression of his simultaneously liberated and precise nature.

FLOATING FABULOUSNESS – REPRESENTATION, PERFORMATIVITY AND IDENTITY IN MUSICAL RINGTONES

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In this paper, we consider musical ringtones of mobile phones to act as virtual, communicative and cultural performances. They appear unpredictably, they communicate signs which are interpreted by a variegated and dynamic audience, and establish stages upon which cultural meanings are portrayed. We will argue that the musical ringtone functions as a musical madeleine in Marcel Proust’s sense, an involuntary mnemonic trigger of a complex web of individual and collective memories. Having this quality, the ringtone lends itself perfectly to the performative manifestation and display of (sub)cultural identities in the public sphere.

INTERSECTIONS OF CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE

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This paper investigates the work of the architect Ranko Radović (1935- 2005) and his role in the architectural culture of Serbia and former Yugoslavia. As a professor of history and theory of modern and contemporary architecture and a prominent public and media figure of architectural culture, Radović was one of the key proponents of the critique of high modernism in the 1960s and 1970s, and of the articulation of postmodernist architectural discourse in the 1980s. He conveyed his ideas and concepts in academic and public lectures and through urban and architectural design, exhibitions of drawings, architectural essays, criticism and books, and in pioneering educational TV programs on architecture. These multiple practices, it is discussed, were effectively extending the modernist concept of architectural praxis to postmodernist concept of architecture as a discursive field. The paper argues the consequences of the intersections of academic work as part the university curriculum for the subject of Contemporary Architecture, early architectural investigations and active public participation in architectural culture. The text also looks into his relations with senior colleagues, professors Nikola Dobrović, Milorad Pantović, Oliver Minić and Bogdan Bogdanović, and the ways Radović extended their ideas. Central to the argument is the critique of modernism developed through architectural designs of the Memorial House in Tjentište (1964-1972) and the Small-Businesses Centre in Belgrade (1968-1971). The two projects are examined against the theory of postmodernism and the concept of critical regionalism. In conclusion, the paper looks at debates on contradictions and antinomies of the postmodern culture, and notes the current surge in study of its aesthetic practices to which this research aims to contribute.

NARATION AND FILM MUSIC

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In analyses of music and film interaction, the interpretative approach to film music has usually been given through the picture and music/sound relation. It has been considered predominantly through the prism of mimetic theories that take the act of visualization for their model. Such a simplification is mirrored in the classic distinction of source music and background music. We can note that the term source music refers solely to its representing function, not the narrative one. A turn in defining film music also in relation to narration and not only and specifically in relation to picture, was the merit of Claudia Gorbman, an American theorist. In her study Unheard melodies she re-systematizes the interpretative practice introducing the theory of narration into it. By using one of the key terms in film theory, diegesis, she constructed the terms diegetic and non-diegetic music, which refer to the sound/music scene: the first one would, approximately be equivalent to source music, and the second one to background score. Diegetic music is seen through the dialectic structure made of two planes, the narrative (film story) and narration (the process through which the narrative is conveyed to the viewer/listener), and whose constituents are music and picture, i.e. their fluctuating relation. Non-diegetic music is the one whose source is beyond the frame both explicitly and implicitly, but it has a meaningful relation to the film story. This text considers the ways in which music, diegetic or non-diegetic, participates in narration, i.e. performs not only the representative function but the narrative one as well, within a complex structure of a film system, based on examples from national and world cinematography.

HEROINES OF COLONIALISM IN SERBIA

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An article entitled “Why the Balkans Attract Women” appeared in the English magazine The Graphic (1912), struggling over the question of how “those rough, wild, semi-civilized and more than half-orientalised little countries, [could] appeal so strongly to some of our astutest feminine intelligence.” Now, a hundred years later, that title could be published again in some newspapers that follow the trends of famous Hollywood stars. In this paper we outline some key interpretive models in women’s narrative and travel literature of 19th century. The book Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe written by Georgina Muir Mackenzie and Adelina Paulina Irby and published in London in the 1866, was analyzed as an example of women’s narrative that tells about an exciting encounter of the colonial heroines and Serbia.

NARRATIVE MATRICES AND DISCURSIVE PRACTICES OF THE FILM MONTEVIDEO, TASTE OF A DREAM

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The aim of this study is to determine and explain the basic narrative matrices and discursive practices of the film “Montevideo, Taste of a Dream” that was first shown on 20th December 2010. The central topic of this film is success of the national football team at the First World Football Championship held in Montevideo in 1930. The theoretical framework is based on critical media studies and film studies. The paper focuses on the main narrative matrices of the socio-historical and geographical-cultural context that formed discursive practices. In this paper, methods of narrative analysis and critical discourse analysis were used. The analyses merged the internal structure of the text (the film), its external discursive field, details and widest approach. The work should demonstrate how selection of narrative elements affects success of the film.

READING AND LOVE – (RE)CONSTRUCTION OF A MEMORY

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The article examines validity of the analogy between the two empires of Imaginary: reading and love. Through analysis of a memory, two discourses are compared on personal and general levels by showing characteristic moments. Reading and love are observed as exceptional cases of „misreading/misunderstanding“, with common root in the Desire and deficiency. In a changing world possible changes in the experience of love and reading in the „new readers“ and a general importance of this analogy in the human world as the world of metaphor, are examined.