Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics

The Flow of Selves

The Strange Time of Hard-Luck Stories

Casting the fallen soldiers of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) as ‘martyrs’ plays a crucial role in the legitimation discourse of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The government has succeeded in integrating many ‘martyr families’ into a state-revering political cult. This ethnographic study draws on theories of affect and atmosphere to investigate how practices around saintly dreams and their materialization in photographs and gravestones of martyrs have challenged the state narratives and discourses. I approach the veneration of martyrs through both affective and narrative sources and explore gravestones as new saintly localities. These localities are spaces of divinely intermediation with intimate connection to the transcendental realm. The multifaceted atmosphere of these sites offers nonconformist and heterogeneous entanglements in which dream-images of martyrs allow for the momentary subversion of the state’s political cult.

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Dream-Realities: Rematerializing Martyrs and the Missing Soldiers of the Iran-Iraq War

Taking inspiration from ethnographic methods, this study presents the experiences of young children and their families, as they interact with a display at the Workers Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark, analysing these through Ben Anderson's concept affective atmospheres. Adding to scholarship on emotion in leisure studies, the paper presents young visitor experiences as ongoing relational interactions between bodies, objects, and places, where atmospheres are central to the sensory leisure experience and deeply enmeshed with affectivity. With this perspective, we contribute to broadening the scholarship that challenges the division between positive and negative emotions, which continues to be foregrounded in leisure scholarship, arguing that such binary framework does not account for the granularity and complexity of emotional worlds. The research invites scholars and practitioners to attend to affective atmospheres in visitor experiences, while letting go of the notion that these can be controlled through careful curation. 

Affective atmospheres in children’s museum experiences

Hot Men on the Commute

zur Position Eco ubernimmt die Definition der Semiotik von Peirce: „ in einer Beziehung Stimulus – Respons stellt sich ein Verhaltnis zwischen zwei Polen, dem stimulierenden Pol und dem stimulierten Pol, ohne jede Vermittlung her. In einem Semiose Verhaltnis aber ist der Stimulus ein Zeichen, das, um eine Reaktion hervorbringen zu konnen, von einem dritten Element vermittelt werden muss (nennen wir es nun „Interpretans“, „Sinn“, „Signifikat“, „Verweis auf den Code“....), welches bewirkt, dass das Zeichen sein Objekt fur den Empfanger darstellt.“

Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics

Citations

The Flow of Selves

The Strange Time of Hard-Luck Stories

Dream-Realities: Rematerializing Martyrs and the Missing Soldiers of the Iran-Iraq War

Affective atmospheres in children’s museum experiences

Hot Men on the Commute

References

Einführung in die Semiotik.

Grundlegung der Wissenschaft vom Ausdruck

Maske und Gesicht

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