In the 1930s, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences implemented a technical standard—known as Academy Mono, or the Academy Curve—that dramatically impaired the sound quality of motion pictures. This article accounts for why the major studios agreed to this restrictive standard. I argue that they adopted Academy Mono to curtail the pow…[Read more]

This article corrects misconceptions regarding the history of film stereo. I show that the technical and aesthetic innovations regularly credited to Dolby Stereo, to sound designers like Walter Murch, and to films like Apocalypse Now (1979) were not revolutions but extensions of surround-sound practices that Hollywood codified in prior decades. I…[Read more]

In the 1930s, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences implemented a technical standard—known as Academy Mono, or the Academy Curve—that dramatically impaired the sound quality of motion pictures. This article accounts for why the major studios agreed to this restrictive standard. I argue that they adopted Academy Mono to curtail the pow…[Read more]

Esta disciplina da área de concentração em Cinema e Audiovisual, oferecida regularmente pela Faculdade de Comunicação para o Bacharelado Interdisciplinar em Artes (IHAC-UFBA), assim como para quaisquer outros cursos e estudantes que tenham interesse, tem como objetivo: mapear o campo das teorias do cinema e do audiovisual, seus principais mome…[Read more]

Through the example of Barry Jenkins’ choices for Moonlight (2016), this chapter argues that pre-existing musical cues can link a film’s themes to other minority filmmaking traditions. The song at the center of this chapter, “Cucurrucucú Paloma,” exemplifies the kinds of cultural translations common in transnational queer cinema. It was orig…[Read more]

I propose a new interpretation of Plato’s Parmenides. I avoid the assumption of Developmentalism, that Plato is criticising his own ‘middle’ theory of forms. Instead, I read the dialogue as Plato’s serious presentation of the Eleatic position. He shows that Eleatics’s counterintuitive thesis follows from the fundamental assumption of qualitati…[Read more]

The advancements made in generative AI over the last few years have been phenomenal. These systems can now generate content that is hard to distinguish from actual human output. In this paper I put forth a design for an augmented content generation system, which produces a story generated using OpenAI’s GPT system, before “musing” on, an revising…[Read more]

How do we know if animals can think? In extension of the previous debate on human-animal relations, this book analyzes the conditions and contexts of the scientific acquisition of our knowledge of animals. The current discussions within animal philosophy revolve around the three central questions of whether we can attribute a mind to animals, what…[Read more]

In current debates about the relationships between humans and nonhuman animals, knowledge about animals is often adopted from the sciences. However, this largely ignores the fact that relationships of this kind also exist in empirical animal research and that these constellations between researchers and the researched have both ethical and…[Read more]

I contend that the modern discipline of Sociology, as understood in the West, has evolved into a socio-philosophy from within an existential system of theology. Two systems of philosophy confront one another in the contemporary world, i.e., classical philosophy based on the authority of Hellenistic philosophy and an existential philosophy based on…[Read more]

This is a prologue to the Spanish translation of Joanna Zylinska’s The End of Man. A Feminist Counter-Apocalypse (2019).

Introduction to the poetry of Mohammad Zaman.