I have been enjoying the privilege of writing this blog entry from a place in Utrecht Museum Speelklok after having visited their extensive exhibition of musical automations. I came to the place in search of something being “lost in translation”, to quote the title of Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film, when musical performances were…

    The framing of music as writing, as fundamentally techical in the broadest sense, and the implicit inflation of technics and culture that seemed to underly the presentation, is perhaps a delayed response in the field of musicology to the questions about Modernism in visual art that arose in the middle of the last…

    The fifth session of the Transmission in Motion 2021-22 seminar series took place in an unusual setting: a Gather virtual town meeting set up to introduce the participants to an alternative “discursive space of connective and integrative dialogue” (Utrecht University 2022). Departing from the premise that “students with solid training in inter- and…

  In the fourth installment of Transmission in Motion 2021-22 seminar series “Dramaturgy for Devices”, Maaike Bleeker and Marco Rozendaal invited us to analyze four dramaturgical concepts of mise-en-scène, performativity, presence and address (Utrecht University 2022). Reflecting as a part of the discussion on the previous seminars in the series made me wonder about the…

This reflection stems directly from my previous one titled Plato’s Back, a consideration of how the theory of affect can be instrumental in understanding the historical context and consequences of translating Plato’s work into German in the first decades of the 20th century. The reason for linking these two pieces is that both are informed…

The second session of the Transmission in Motion 2021-22 series contextualized philosophical and cultural appropriation of Plato in German thought in the period leading to German industrialization and the rise of National-Socialism (Utrecht University 2021). Paul Ziche situated the translations and interpretation of Plato’s works against the backdrop of the publishing milieu of the time,…

Two central questions were left at the end of today’s seminar on Plato and the rise of German Nationalism. One participant questioned the uniqueness of the relationship between modernism and German fascism: can equal connections and parallels not be drawn between other instantiations of totalitarianism and modernism? Either by looking at the rise and fall…

It was difficult not to understand Zarzycka’s presentation in relation to Google’s decision to fire two of its top ethical AI researchers earlier this year. Zarzycka brought up this controversial decision herself in trying to elaborate on her own difficulties and feelings about becoming a Googler, but she is, understandably, not in a position to…

During the first session within the Transmission in Motion Seminar of 2021/2022, Marta Zarzycka spoke about her transition from academia to being a User Experience (UX) Researcher in the commercial tech industry, specifically at Google Cloud. There are some profound differences between academia and the tech industry, but what spoke most to me during this…

The Transmission in Motion 2021-22 seminar series opened with a presentation from Marta Zarzycka on translating academic research on affect to user experience research. During her academic career at Utrecht University Zarzycka researched the role of digital photography in shaping collective Western consciousness through the representation of trauma. Drawing on her current work at Google,…