Issue 1 http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/183763 2026-04-06T21:18:20Z 2026-04-06T21:18:20Z Rautenberg, Joachim http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/183940 2023-12-10T02:31:05Z 2023-03-15T00:00:00Z

Looking through Images: A Phenomenology of Visual Media by Emmanuel Alloa Rautenberg, Joachim A book review of Emmanuel Alloa, Looking through Images: A Phenomenology of Visual Media. Translated by Nils F. Schott. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021, xiv + 392 pp. ISBN 9780231187923.

2023-03-15T00:00:00Z Kiianlinna, Onerva http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/183939 2023-12-25T02:13:08Z 2023-03-15T00:00:00Z

What Is Evolutionary Aesthetics? Three Waves Kiianlinna, Onerva Evolutionary aesthetics (EA) is often associated with the rise of evolutionary psychology, from roughly the 1980s until the 2010s. Yet that was neither the beginning nor the end of the field but rather a middle wave after the first and before the third. How has the field evolved? What are the epistemic and methodological problems it has addressed, and how? What is the field heading towards in the current scholarly environment? A self-reflexive conception of the history of EA is still lacking, although EA research is acquiring more and more perspectives from different disciplinary viewpoints. I will present a bird’s-eye view of EA by identifying and positioning three of its major currents in relation to each other. This state-of-the-art article also serves as an up-to-date introduction to the field for the non-initiated.

2023-03-15T00:00:00Z Van de Mosselaer, Nele Gualeni, Stefano http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/183938 2023-12-29T02:15:11Z 2023-03-15T00:00:00Z

The Implied Designer of Digital Games Van de Mosselaer, Nele; Gualeni, Stefano As artefacts, the worlds of digital games are designed and developed to fulfil certain expressive, functional, and experiential objectives. During play, players infer these purposes and aspirations from various aspects of their engagement with the gameworld. Influenced by their sociocultural backgrounds, sensitivities, gameplay preferences, and familiarity with game conventions, players construct a subjective interpretation of the intentions with which they believe the digital game in question was created. By analogy with the narratological notion of the implied author, we call the figure to which players ascribe these intentions ‘the implied designer’. In this article, we introduce the notion of the implied designer and present an initial account of how appreciators ascribe meaning to interactive, fictional gameworlds and act within them based on what they perceive to be the designer’s intentions.

2023-03-15T00:00:00Z Brassey, Vanessa http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/183937 2024-01-11T02:27:11Z 2023-03-15T00:00:00Z

The Pictorial Narrator Brassey, Vanessa In our everyday discourse we make frequent reference to pictorial narratives. We exclaim on the hunt scene in the cave painting, the frenzy unfolding in the graffiti, the adventure of the baby in the book illustration, and the disintegration of a marriage in the oil painting. Yet a more precise question concerning narrators and their relation to these so-called pictorial narratives remains overlooked. Theoretical debates in narratology are still primarily focused on literary narratives and so pictures remain relatively neglected as a class. Kendall Walton is an exception. He argues that the literary narrator is necessary to provide access to the story as ‘he mediates the reader’s access to the rest of the fictional world’. He says that pictorial narratives cannot sustain narrators akin to literary counterparts. But this seems to be at odds with how we understand paintings such as Marriage A-la-Mode, where events are arguably recounted to the viewer with wicked humour. This paper has two main aims. The first is to set out what is meant by ‘pictorial narrators’ by providing a succinct and up-to-date guide to the discussions that have touched on this issue. The second is to explore the possibility that pictorial narratives imply pictorial narrators.

2023-03-15T00:00:00Z