More and more artists from all over the world are engaging in the production of AI art. Because of this, art historians need to start thinking about how the histories of AI art should be articulated. This paper aims to take part in this conversation by addressing the problem of whether the AIs created by human artists should be considered as…[Read more]

The Spatiality of the Hispanic Avant-Garde: Ultraísmo & Estridentismo, 1918-1927 is a thorough exploration of the meanings and values Hispanic poets and artists assigned to four iconic locations of modernity: the city, the cafés, means of transportation, and the sea, during the first decades of the 20th century. Joining important studies on S…[Read more]

The study focuses on the position of female deputies of non-Russian descent in parliamentary debates of the Perestroika period in the Soviet Union. The key issues the author examines concern the grievances which these female deputies were pointing out, and the potential solutions they were proposing to mitigate or eliminate them. The most…[Read more]

This is a gut-reaction response to the recent article “The value of mass-digitised cultural heritage content in creative contexts” by Melissa Terras, et al, published in Big Data and Society on April 6, 2021, doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211006165. My main argument is that exploiting labor and appropriating cultural heritage are int…[Read more]

Andrew A. Anderson’s new study on the Ultraist movement is an instant classic.
Scholars of this Spanish avant-garde have long been relying on a couple of
texts to find historical context to their investigations. Among these texts are
Gloria Videla’s El ultraísmo: Estudios sobre movimientos poéticos de vanguardia
en España (Ultraism: Studie…[Read more]

Sketching Futurism: Güiraldes, Marinetti
and Buenos Aires (1926)

Parliaments are often seen as institutions peculiar to the Euro-American world. In contrast, their establishment elsewhere is frequently thought of as a derivative and mostly defective process. Such simplistic tales of unilateral and imperfect transfers of knowledge have led to a suboptimal understanding of non-Western experiences, as well as of…[Read more]

The chapter focuses on two new institutions, the State Duma (Gosudarstvennaia duma) and Political Consultative Council (Zizhengyuan), which were introduced in the Russian and Qing Empires, when the two imperial formations joined the global constitutional transformations. The names of the two bodies pointed to the statist (etatist) rather than…[Read more]

Focusing on the term zemskii sobor, this study explored the historiographies of the early modern Russian assemblies, which the term denoted, as well as the autocratic and democratic mythologies connected to it. Historians have debated whether the individual assemblies in the sixteenth and seventeenth century could be seen as a coherent…[Read more]

Parliaments are often seen as Western European and North American institutions and their establishment in other parts of the world as a derivative and mostly defective process. This book challenges such Eurocentric visions by retracing the evolution of modern institutions of collective decision-making in Eurasia. Breaching the divide between…[Read more]

The book is dedicated to the paradoxical era of the relationship between the Vainakhs and the Soviet state. The study opens with a description of the utopian attempts of the communist government to realize the old imperial dream: to evict the “restless” Chechens and Ingush outside the North Caucasus, to populate the liberated territories with…[Read more]

This book is about an unusual police investigation, in which a certain suicide, found in the bunker of the Imperial Chancellery, as it should be before the establishment of the truth, was called “victim”. This is a story about the work of Stalin’s special services in Germany, about palace intrigues and the hopes of people who imagined at the end…[Read more]

Two art exhibitions, “Training Humans” and “Making Faces,” and the accompanying essay “Excavating AI: The politics of images in machine learning training sets” by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, are making substantial impact on discourse taking place in the social and mass media networks, and some scholarly circles. Critical scrutiny reveals,…[Read more]

Art forms in Troy’s city walls, and Schliemann’s awareness thereof.

La gran empresa británica, James Valentine, productora y editora de imágenes, atesoró un inmenso fondo a lo largo de sus casi ciento cincuenta años de vida (1855-1995), entre las que destacan por su especial belleza algunas fotografías de las ciudades de Málaga y Granada.

In July 1944, the Red Army was advancing through Eastern Poland when they discovered the first traces of the camps. On reaching Lublin they found an enormous compound behind barbed wire in the city’s suburb of Majdanek. Embedded with the Soviet army were film crews, who made the first images of a Nazi camp, among them the “flight survivors” Olga a…[Read more]

This book aims to uncover and assess changes in the EU’s foreign policy towards Ukraine in the times of wide-scale social protests in Kyiv. To accomplish this task, this book enlists and analyses documents, agreements, and treaties which establish the frameworks for EU-Ukraine cooperation. It also identifies the interests of lobbying groups in…[Read more]

This article examines the link posited by Virilio and others between the camera shot and gun shot, arguing that this link operates differently in the context of Soviet vs. Western fantasies of agency, community and technology. Comparing THE LOST PATROL (USA 1934, John Ford) with TRINADTSAT (THIRTEEN, UdSSR 1936, Mikhail Romm), it asks what kind of…[Read more]

The political system of early socialist-era Mongolia, established by the first Constitution in 1924, can be interpreted as a vernacular version of the Soviet system, in which the formally supreme representative body, the State Great Khural (“assembly”), was sidelined by the standing Presidium of the Small Khural and the Cabinet and eclipsed by the…[Read more]