Kelli Wood

3The sacred did not travel or translate easily in early modernity.4 Sacrality relied on a communal agreement that was deemed holy, and such agreements inevitably engendered friction. Words, images, objects, and bodies that conveyed the sacred took on varied and sometimes unpredictable resonances as they were shared between people and as they moved across space, place, and time. Who and what, as in the case of the corporal remains of a saint’s relic, could authoritatively proffer the “voice of God,” and how, and in what form, the sacred should be expressed preoccupied artistic patrons, as did incommensurable modes of belief.5 The translation of scripture into new languages had already long concerned Catholics, from Jerome’s vulgate Bible to vernacular prayer books printed by Protestant Reformers, well before the papal institution of the Propaganda Fide in 1622 and its mandate to promulgate the faith universally through polyglot publications. Over the course of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, Jesuit, Mendicant, and Puritan evangelists founded orders and missionary companies across Africa, the Americas, and Asia that employed variegated strategies of religious conversion, using pedagogy as well as punishment to convince and coerce nonbelievers.6Such evangelism not only coincided with, but was often constitutive of, the colonial expansion of European empires.

This article explores the emergence and significance of printed game boards in Rome at the turn of the seventeenth century. These objects constitute an important and overlooked visual and material aspect of a pervasive culture of gaming that engrossed a huge range of the populace: both the rich and the poor, men and women, the educated and the illiterate. Printed game boards not only served to entertain, but also mirrored and reified deeper social and moral concerns about gambling and leisure, a tension between the prescribed morality of the legal sanctions, decrees, and censures associated with the Counter-Reformation, and the everyday games common both in courtly leisure and play on the street and in the tavern. Visually manifesting a dual understanding of games as both ludic and mimetic, printed game boards enacted the ontology of life’s journey for early modern players, from the courtly, to the religious, to the quotidian.

This article draws attention to the social and political import of balls games and acts of play in the urban space of Grand Ducal Florence. At the same time that the Medici were commissioning artworks that rhetorically promoted a unified identity of Florence and a spectre of control over the city space through the apparatus of public games like calcio in livrea, young men engaged in transitory activities of play in the street that contributed to community identity and belonging in space. Teasing out the transgressive and political potential of the ludic apart from and apart of the festal demonstrates how games in the city produced moments of community in an early modern public sphere- a sphere carved out through use of and performance in urban space, a sphere sometimes contending with and in contention with legislation, control, and authority by the Grand Duchy. Play shaped the production, use, and meaning of the urban environment both in daily life and during special events. In turn, the city's socially invested topography contributed to the construction of Florentine identity, within, between, and beyond factions.

Over the past half-century video games have become a significant part of our cultural environment, in part, by leading advances in both technology and artistic innovation. In recent years librarians and researchers have recognized these games as cultural objects that require collection and curation. Developing and maintaining collections of this fast moving and somewhat ephemeral media, however, poses challenges due to constantly advancing technology and a corresponding lack of consistent terminology. This article addresses the literature and critical issues surrounding collections of video games within libraries and presents a case study of the University of Michigan's Computer and Video Game Archive (CVGA), one of the largest academic archives of its kind. Moreover, video games are situated in a humanistic approach to the field of game studies as the article draws on the relevance of methods from art history and film studies.

This essay considers how a historical legacy of printed games dating back to the sixteenth century in Italy laid the foundation for modern board games like those produced by Milton Bradley. The technology of print and the broad publics it reached enabled the spread of a common gaming culture- one built upon shared visual structures in game boards. Modern board games, of course, relied upon similar rules and replicated the ludic functions of their Renaissance progenitors. But perhaps more importantly, they built upon and perpetuated entrenched narratives about how fortune and morality contributed to lived experiences, presenting their viewers and players with a familiar printed imagination of the game of life.

For decades the bicoastal binary of LA and New York
positioned California as jejune within the art world,
superficial to the formidable genius emanating from
Empire City artists and as proclaimed by her equally eminent
critics. Yet since the 1950s Ed Ruscha has capitalized
on the urban contradictions and consumerist stereotypes
of Lotusland, garnering him international celebrity as an
artist synonymous with the city itself. Characteristically
Delphic, Ruscha once opined, “I’m dead serious about
being nonsensical.” His pithy vernacular paintings, photographs,
and prints have influenced pop, minimal, and
conceptual art movements worldwide, and his works
command considerable attention in the market today; In
November Ruscha’s citric Made in California litho (1971)
and liquid Ripe (1967) broke auction records selling for
$100,000 and $20 million.

Dr. Alexandra Schwartz has played the role of archivist,
historian, compiler, critic, and curator of Ruscha’s art for
over 20 years. The New Art Examiner spoke with her about
the concurrent journeys of Ruscha’s work and her writing.

“Are video games art?” The frequency with which that question has been posed over the past decade belies the wholly unsatisfactory nature of the responses. Although the classification of what we mean by video games has not remained categorically uncomplicated, the crux of the debate has largely lain, instead, with fairly banal epistemologies of art. At the extremes, art critics have derided video games as lacking the sophistication, depth, or even “soul” of works by such strawmen as Picasso and Van Gogh. Game designers and industry professionals, in turn, have accused such critics of being uninformed outsiders and Luddites unable to appreciate the ways technology has revolutionized art’s expressive potential on a popular level. (…) even though the institutional answer to this is question is patently unsatisfying, the conditions and rhetorics of the display of video games in exhibitions and museums have something important to tell us about ingrained understandings of art, science, culture, and industry, as well as those categories’ shifting hierarchies. In short, though exhibitions can only tell us that games are art in the least-interesting ways possible, they can tell us rather a lot about how they are art when encountered in “display mode.”

http://www.newartexaminer.org/in-tennessee-art-is-protest.html

(Physical copy in print, available early November)

Tragic losses of life and freedom motivated 15 artists to create works addressing the environment, the pandemic, and racism. A series of three colorful giclée prints by Marcus Maddox near the entrance offer a visual transition from a life now dominated by digital photography and screens into one possessed by objects and artworks. Straightaway however, Maddox’s Face Off (2020) boldly points outward again to sites where people have been demonstrating. In June, Maddox, a self-described fine art photographer who grew up in Tennessee, traveled to Philadelphia in solidarity with protests on the heels of the murder of George Floyd. An unknown man grips the ends of his durag as he takes a stance against injustice and brutality. With the uneasy stasis of photography, and a gaze from behind the man’s diagonally outstretched arms, Maddox’s art succinctly captures the inherent tension of protest and reorients us to the onerous political work of folks whose full personhood, bodies, and lives have been forever attacked in America. The discordance of the physical, visual, and metaphorical line leave no question. In 2020, the power of sight obligates us to stand for change. Acknowledging this is the price of entry into Red Arrow. It must become the price of entry into our social contract. Change.

The horizons of preserving, interpreting, and displaying art and history have expanded to meet an increasingly virtual present. Curators now map visitor flow and test light effects on scanned objects rendered
in 3D exhibition software. Galleries and artists rely upon chic design and seamless functionality for websites accompanying brick-and-mortar shows and sales. Collection managers wrangle the kraken’s weighty and ever-expanding tentacles of data. Museums engage visitors through digital interactives and apps aimed at both education and entertainment. For many, the closures and isolation of the pandemic have clarified and amplified the possibilities and pitfalls that technology brings to media, old and new. For others, sights have been long set on the nexus of tech and object.

Duke University’s Wired! Lab for Digital Art History & Visual Culture has interrogated the potential of new computational work in the realm of the arts for over a decade. A recent partnership with Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art resulted in a fully online, interactive exhibition that was
ready to debut in September 2020 despite the museum’s physical closure in the wake of the pandemic.

Several painters (and one sculptor) in Mumbai formed the Bombay Progressive Artists’ group in 1947, the year India finally won its independence from British imperial rule. The “Progs,” as they called themselves, sought to pioneer an Indian modernism in line with European and American avant-garde movements—an intentional contrast to the nationalism of the then establishment Bengal School. The group’s most outspoken member, F. N. Souza, witnessed a second liberation in 1961 when his native state of Goa, which had been under Portuguese control, overthrew its colonial governors. Aggressive and expressive, Souza’s style was deeply influenced by Picasso, and his works in-corporated Goan landscapes and Catholic iconography. In 2015 the four-million-dollar hammer price of Souza’s Birth (1955), a canvas depicting his pregnant mistress Liselotte as a reclining nude, broke auction records as the most ex-pensive Indian painting ever sold.
“Posthumous Dialogues with F. N. Souza” celebrates the memory and continued impact of Souza’s legacy on con-temporary art in Goa and across India.

Play, in many ways, is fundamental to both the historical and historiographic foundations of medieval and Renaissance studies. Just as the sublimation of war into medieval tournament sports permeated chivalric romance, so too Jacob Burckhardt contrived a
Renaissance born from tumult and built upon the aesthetics of an Italian leisure class invested in play. Giocare tra Medioevo ed età moderna (Games and gaming from the Middle Ages to the modern age) treats this play both in form and content. Francesca Aceto and Francesco Lucioli curate a collection of eleven creative essays engaging with Italian scholarship on games and play in medieval and early modern Europe in history, language, literature, and art. As the subtitle suggests, rules circumscribe both ethics and aesthetics, and the editors’ introduction portrays a ludic world evolving into one codified by regulation. The rhetoric of virtuous play too structures the dialogue of the contributors’ essays.
Taken as a whole, the essays’ interdisciplinary conversation evokes the intermedial nature of games as structures of both form and formfulness to the attentive ludologist.

In Nashville, art is as new as it is old, and as old as it is new. These words of once Tennessean and immortal luminary W. E. B. Du Bois permeate the air as local artists aspire to create the Americana he imagined—of color, form, and reality, of music in the Southern South, and of dreams of a more splendid future. Avant-garde artists and activists are not only establishing a vibrant environment (and increasingly thriving market) in Nashville. Perhaps more importantly, they are helping to reframe the popular imagination of Music City for residents and visitors alike. Monolithic conceptions of a Southern history comprised of honky-tonks, hot chicken, and the Ryman Auditorium are giving way–sometimes enthusiastically and sometimes with tense reluctance–to stories of a city that is blacker, more aesthetically adventurous, and less enamored of traditional technologies than its conventional portrayal on the national stage often suggests. Such changes seem both inevitable and fitting at a moment when even the famously risk-averse record industry executives on 16th Avenue have had little choice but to embrace an expanding audience for the genre indelibly tied to Nashville’s very identity. Thus, Georgia rapper Lil Nas X’s viral country-hip hop hybrid Old Town Road–drawing on the seemingly irreconcilable talents of Trent Reznor, Billy Ray Cyrus, and Lil Nas X himself–topped the Billboard chart for 19 consecutive weeks.

Following the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851, the V&A created a space for applied arts centered on industry and design, a space that serves as a conscious foil to traditional fine arts museums. Curators Marie Foulston and Kristian Volsing carried the spirit of this mission forward into the twenty-first century with their exhibition Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt. The show revealed the innovative practices video game designers have developed over the past fifteen years, while simultaneously asserting the radical potential of the medium by focusing on politically motivated activist games. In addition to examining the sociopolitical impact of a pastime that diverts nearly a quarter of the world's population, the curators devoted specific attention to issues of design and craft. The exhibition was divided into four sections: New Designers, Disruptors, Players_Online, and Players_Offline. With its dim lighting, dark gray walls and permeable mesh dividers, fluorescent text, and video projections on LCD screens, the show's inventive design immersed viewers and guided them through a space that felt like a virtual world.

This talk will explore the development and expression of the athletic arts in Renaissance Italy as they responded to intellectual, courtly, and civic revivals of antiquity as well as an unprecedented expansion of artisanal and
professional work related to leisure. Girolamo Cardano classified sport as requiring two separate abilities, “agility of body, as with a ball; or of strength, as with a discus and in wrestling,” and in the sixteenth-century exercises which emphasized agility over brute strength increasingly gained prominence as venues for the salubrious maintenance of physique and the performance of aristocratic masculine virtue during social and political conduct. A rhetorical slippage between sport and war frequently manifested itself in both artistic representations of and the performance of sport in order to ascribe the virtues of virility to aristocratic athletes. Yet the real or potential corporeal dominance of a brawny artisanal class, a “rivalry not of birth, but of strength and ability, wherein villagers are quite a match for
nobles,” in the words of Castiglione, also fundamentally influenced the regulation and representation of bodies through sport. The rising need for a professional class of athletes paid to perform on the street and as salaried
members of courts, experts who also wrote about and taught their athletic arts, alongside the rising need for craftsmen to produce and manage equipment and spaces, proved a complication to the maintenance and perception of social hierarchies. The codification of systems of rules and equipment, far from simply reflecting a growing interest in athletics, was a response in part to bodies on display, and thusly created structures of supervision that consolidated control for powerful operators in homosocial networks. Sports were a central tool in literally and imaginatively
shaping the bodies of early modern men and women within intersecting systems of bodily signification, political performance, and social decorum.

ART AND COURT CULTURES IN THE  IBERIAN WORLD  (1400-1650)

FOURTH INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP  REAL COLEGIO COMPLUTENSE  AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2020

16.00 Welcome, opening remarks and first panel.

Animal Sightings: Art, Hunting, and Court Culture in Early Modern Spain.  Jodi Cranston, Professor, Dept. of History of Art & Architecture, Boston University.

Consuming the Nude in Sculpture Collections at the Spanish Court.  Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio, Professor of Art History, University of Vermont. 

17.30 Second panel. 

Mirrors and Echoes: Reassessing Sofonisba Anguissola’s Interventions  in Early Modern Portraiture. 

Jorge Sebastián Lozano, Assistant Professor  of Art History, Universitat de València. 

The Material Moves of Courtly Crafts: Goan Game Boards in the Portuguese Empire. 

Kelli Wood, Assistant Professor of Renaissance Art, University of Tennessee.

Each panel will be followed by Q&A and discussion, moderated by Felipe Pereda, Fernando Zóbel de Ayala Professor of Spanish Art, Harvard University.
 
Organized by:  Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard University  Universitat de València

More information: rcc.harvard.edu Location: RCC Conference Room  26 Trowbridge St.  Cambridge, MA  Registration:  RSVP [email protected]

You are cordially invited to a discussion of

Ancient Greek Athletics

with Professor Gregory Nagy

Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University & Director of Harvard University's Center for Hellenic Studies (Washington, D.C.)

22nd January 2019, 8:30 am

Introduction & Welcome
Dr. Ahmed AbuShouk
Associate Dean for Research & Graduate Studies
College of Arts and Sciences
Qatar University

Presentation of the Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum
Mr. Ioannis Papaioannou
Curator, Olympic and Sports History
Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum

The Early History of Sport Collections at Qatar Museums
Dr. Kelli Wood
Consulting Curator, Sports History
Assistant Professor, University of Michigan
Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum

Lecture and Discussion of Ancient Greek Athletics
Professor Gregory Nagy
Discussant: Dr. Irene Theodoropoulou
Associate Professor of Sociolinguistics at Qatar University

The Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (DHCS) brings together researchers, scholars, librarians, and technologists in the humanities and computer science from across the country and around the world to examine the current state of digital humanities as a field of intellectual inquiry and to identify and explore new directions and perspectives for future research.

Panel 2: Video Game Art: Pedagogy and Research

Over the past decades video games have blossomed into one of the most prevalent forms of media in the world and remain at the forefront of not only technological, but also artistic, innovation. Universities and cultural institutions thus have the potential to play a crucial role in shaping emerging fields of pedagogy and research on video games in arts and humanities disciplines. This panel presents advances in teaching video games using digital humanities resources and methods in the fields of art, art history, and film and media studies.
Dr. Kelli Wood will open the discussion by situating video games in a longue durée history of game studies. Her paper examines the recent roles of libraries, museums, and classrooms in managing access to the intermedial state of video games as dually aesthetic and technological, and critically, how those institutions strive to achieve a prescient historical distance from the artefacts of video games that are ultimately enmeshed in an archeology of knowledge dictated by our own discourses. Chaz Evans, lecturer at Northwestern University, will turn the discussion toward studio-based approaches to game-making that decentralize the role of programmer in order to question agency in traditional design models of video game art. His talk will demonstrate how programming can be taught as one node in a non-hierarchical network of fundamental competencies in instruction, incorporating a creative code approach that opens programming to critical and creative thinking styles that push the boundaries of traditional computer science classrooms. To conclude, Dr. Tiffany Funk brings together concerns of both history and game making from the first two papers by discussing a pedagogical approach based largely on teaching cultural studies and social practice through both video game history and production. Her paper will focus on video games as a unique, innovative technology with the power to transform consumers into performers, designers, and artists through archiving, appropriating, remixing, and recirculating media content.

University of Montevallo
Wednesday, Nov. 7th, 2018
Time: 5 - 6 P M
Location: Merchants and Planters Bank Auditorium at Comer Hall

Sponsored by:
Art Department
Martha Allen Lecture Series
Games Studies and Design
University of Montevallo Concert & Lecture Series

This talk explores the emergence of printed gameboards in Rome in the last decades of the sixteenth century in the context of a multiplicity of audiences engaged with both a pervasive culture of gaming and the moralizing concerns of the Counter Reformation. Despite their quality of artistry, ubiquity, and production by printmakers also involved in other important artistic projects and book publications, these printed gameboards have been seldom considered by academic scholarship. By looking at these prints in their context as a whole-as aesthetic objects made by artists in conversation with one another, as commodities printed and sold by publishers, as systems for conveying and organizing information, and as games that were played with and used-we can better understand not only the significance of these objects themselves, but also how prints functioned and contributed to visual culture in Italy at the turn of the seventeenth century. The visual vocabulary of these games reveals a conversation between popular culture and court culture, a tension between the prescribed morality of the Counter-Reformation and the everyday games common both in courtly leisure and play on the street and in the tavern.

Play, in many ways, is fundamental to both the historical and historiographic foundations of medieval and Renaissance studies. Just as the sublimation of war into medieval tournament sports permeated chivalric romance, so too Jacob Burckhardt contrived a Renaissance born from tumult and built upon the aesthetics of an Italian leisure class invested in play. Giocare tra Medioevo ed età moderna (Games and gaming from the Middle Ages to the modern age) treats this play both in form and content. Francesca Aceto and Francesco Lucioli curate a collection of eleven creative essays engaging with Italian scholarship on games and play in medieval and early modern Europe in history, language, literature, and art. As the subtitle suggests, rules circumscribe both ethics and aesthetics, and the editors’ introduction portrays a ludic world evolving into one codified by regulation. The rhetoric of virtuous play too structures the dialogue of the contributors’ essays. Taken as a whole, the essays’ interdisciplinary conversation evokes the intermedial nature of games as structures of both form and formfulness to the attentive ludologist.

This essay considers how a historical legacy of printed games dating back to the sixteenth century in Italy laid the foundation for modern board games like those produced by Milton Bradley. The technology of print and the broad publics it reached enabled the spread of a common gaming cultureone built upon shared visual structures in game boards. Modern board games, of course, relied upon similar rules and replicated the ludic functions of their Renaissance progenitors. But perhaps more importantly, they built upon and perpetuated entrenched narratives about how fortune and morality contributed to lived experiences, presenting their viewers and players with a familiar printed imagination of the game of life.

This article draws attention to the social and political import of balls games and acts of play in the urban space of Grand Ducal Florence. At the same time that the Medici were commissioning artworks that rhetorically promoted a unified identity of Florence and a spectre of control over the city space through the apparatus of public games like calcio in livrea, young men engaged in transitory activities of play in the street that contributed to community identity and belonging in space. Teasing out the transgressive and political potential of the ludic apart from and apart of the festal demonstrates how games in the city produced moments of community in an early modern public sphere- a sphere carved out through use of and performance in urban space, a sphere sometimes contending with and in contention with legislation, control, and authority by the Grand Duchy. Play shaped the production, use, and meaning of the urban environment both in daily life and during special events. In turn, the city's socially invested topography contributed to the construction of Florentine identity, within, between, and beyond factions.